The Glutton

                A large, rounded window, scratched from many years of improper cleaning with a gritty cloth, was set into the steel and fibreglass wall. As with many windows, the circumstances and environments on either side of the glass were rather different, and its transparency allowed whosoever lurked on one face of the boundary to observe whoever or whatever was situated on the other. This is a great and natural consequence of a side-to-side difference, since the absence of this difference would render observation through the window rather pointless, and equally well served by a mirror.
                One side of the window in question, declared to be of some note by virtue of being described at all, was Dr Ariel Bane: prosthetics expert, juggler of silverware, robotics enthusiast, and proud possessor of a new job in cutting edge research. She was sitting in passable comfort on a padded passenger chair, embedded into what was either an alcove or protrusion, depending on one's perspective. Shoulder and lap belts crossed in an X over her body, not to keep her safe in the event of a crash, but to stop her from gently drifting away over the course of the journey whenever she fidgeted a leg.
                The other side of the window is likely to be more contentious in its potential description. To many it would be the vastly more interesting side, containing as it did literally everything else in the universe, all of the things that were not confined within the vehicle with Dr Bane. To some, it would be more immediately described as nothing at all; a vacuum, emptiness, the void. It is further likely that anyone who provided either of those descriptions would lose their invitation to describe the scene at all.
                What Dr Ariel Bane would have said she was looking at through the window, the window on which we have fixated an awful lot and to which it would be healthier to bid a narrative farewell, was the deepest reach of outer space into which she had ever travelled. The erstwhile blackness was populated with a trillion spots of light, varying in radiance and colour, like someone had thrown a thin blanket over a disco ball for reasons best known to themselves. Despite having plenty of opportunities to do so, Ariel had not learned the names of any of the stars or galaxies or nebulae or quasars upon which she may have been looking. Astronomy wasn't completely her thing, although she had a passing respect for how big, dense, small and empty astronomical objects variously were. All she knew was that she was heading to the Gina's Bar and Grill Interstellar Research Station, in orbit around black hole MH-678, better known as The Glutton.
                It was from her cushioned seat that Dr Bane was treated to her first glimpse of her new home. Perfectly in her eye line, thanks to the piece of transparent fuselage which warrants no further mention, the station was a doughnut of labs and foundries with a central spire of offices, dorms and recreational facilities. It span lazily on its axis, treating each lab to a periodic view of all of eternity on one side, and the infinite blackness of The Glutton on the other.
                There were a few noteworthy facts about the Gina's Bar and Grill Interstellar Research Station that Ariel had been compelled to learn during her application to work aboard it. Principally, and reassuringly, the station was still a long way away from the Glutton. In a very real sense, it was the closest object in the universe to the Glutton, and in relative terms of all of space it was right on top of the thing like one commuter’s foot on another’s shoulder in a busy tube train, but that still left it at a respectable distance by most day-to-day measurements. Secondly, the station was orbiting at a blistering speed, on account of the staggering gravitational pull it had to overcome. This had very little impact on the researchers housed inside, but made matching the velocity of the station to perform a docking manoeuvre a little tricky, something that Ariel would come to appreciate later. Finally, the Bar and Grill for which the station had been named was not, in fact, on board. It was actually in Dorset, England, Earth. Thanks to a fabulously corrupt member of the naming committee, the chosen sponsor was a local business woman for whom the committee member held a romantic interest, rather than any of the scientific bodies involved in crewing or commissioning the station. Everyone else on the committee had their suspicions about the situation, but they were too polite to question it.
                This stained past of questionable ethics didn't dissuade Ariel from accepting a position as a Research Fellow and Coal Inspector aboard the station, however. The chance to spend her career aboard the pre-eminent interstellar research station was worth any amount of association with a restaurant back on Earth, mostly because the vast majority of her peers had never visited it.
The GBAGIRS, as no-one bothered to call it, was not a solely human endeavour. It was operated by collaboration of all members of the Intergalactic Confederation of Friends, a union of all intelligent civilisations and several of the friendlier non-intelligent civilisations. Despite the obvious prejudices for inclusion in a research environment, the non-intelligent civilisations still contributed large amounts to the station, and did a great job of making the atmosphere a little more pleasant.
                In the run-up to her journey, Ariel had been expecting a multi-species cadre of other new recruits to be aboard her transport vessel. It wasn't that aliens of various types were a novelty - she'd studied alongside more evolutionary dice rolls than fellow humans for most of her life - but she would have been grateful for some company, and for the chance to adjust to at least a subset of the unfamiliar physiology she'd be seeing day-to-day. As it was, she was the only passenger. The only new recruit in her intake. The only position to be filled. She wasn't sure if that made her an unusually good candidate or the biggest sucker going, but it definitely made her a little lonelier than she'd have liked.
                "Accelerating to docking speed; ensure that your belts are fastened and you've not got any needles or blades loose." advised a voice over the loud speaker. Leaving aside her confusion regarding why someone would have free-flying blades in their immediate vicinity, Ariel made sure to and double-checked her harnesses. Around her, the hull vibrated as a series of space-warping engines span up, and she gently but firmly felt her body being crushed into the cushioning. It was acceleration that she hadn't felt since take-off, and then it was acceleration she hadn't felt since the emergency stop to avoid a space pigeon, and then it was acceleration that she hadn't felt ever. What had begun as the chair trying to give her a closer embrace than ever before was rapidly turning into an attempt at chest compressions via her back. No longer was the ship carrying her along on her journey; it was now making a credible attempt to fly through her body, the useless lump of flesh and inertia that stood in its way as it gathered more and more speed. Had she been in a position to form thoughts more complex than 'goodness me this is accelerating quickly', Ariel might have described this portion of the transfer as 'less comfortable than it might otherwise have been'.
                As blood started to pool in the rear-most portions of her circulatory system, her feeble primate heart incapable of withstanding modern propulsion systems, she heard the pilot's voice bleating through the speaker once more.
                "Preparing passenger pods for ejection. Please enjoy your trip and, should we miss, fill in the customer misplacement form located above your head. A representative will be dispatched to find you in 6 to 8 working days following receipt of your submission."
                Ariel's body was under too much strain to really comprehend what was being said. All she could do was picture how flat it was reasonable for a human body to become before it was considered a nuisance. Less flat than she currently felt, she decided. She barely noticed as a white metal airlock door hissed it's way shut, sealing off her seat from the rest of the craft, but made up for it in just how much she noticed that newly encapsulated compartment being fired from the transport vessel.
                It would be crude to commit to writing the exact phrases that ran through Ariel's mind as this ejection occurred. That kind of language, especially when directed towards a hard-working and skilled pilot who was just doing their job, doesn't warrant the dignity of being recorded. To paraphrase her sentiments: 'Oh dear, that was unexpected, and very much isn't what I would have liked to happen at all. It would have been preferable if the pilot had given me some warning about this. I hope I'm not being flung into The Glutton by some unfortunate ejection accident'.
                An awful lot of an even more awful abyss loomed towards Ariel, visibly changing only by virtue of the bright, coruscating ring that outlined The Glutton's event horizon. It was, her brain knew, a flaring of high energy radiation, but wouldn't herself have offered the information at the time. Other worries were occupying her thoughts. It was a blessing to both her and the transports pilot that she had no window to view the retreating vessel. Many curses would have been laid upon his doorstep, as well as his windowsills, cupboard edges and bedside tables.
                Making peace with one's potentially impending mortality was commonplace in the early days of space travel, when star-ships were essentially sheds strapped onto enormous bombs, but in the millennia since, the art form had been rendered rather safer. It was therefore novel, in the least welcome way, for Dr Bane to have been coming to terms with the idea that she might get to experience, first hand, what it was like to have her body pulled apart by the most intense gravitational pull in the known universe. It took less than a moment's consideration to conclude that it would be an experience she could bear to miss. It was a few seconds later that her view of The Glutton disappeared. It was replaced, rather reassuringly, with an airlock that drifted into view and then, when perfectly aligned to her window, remained serenely and invitingly in place. Like the interlocking-toothed maw of a nightmarish steel shark, the airlock doors began to slide apart, and a pair of telescopic suction cups thunked their way onto Ariel's pod. Effortlessly they dragged it inwards, into the relative safety of the station.
                "Welcome to the Gina's Bar and Grill Interstellar Research Station, the foremost high-gravity research site in the universe, sponsored by the foremost food-on-hot-metal establishment in Dorset." blared an automated message, audible even through the walls of the pod. With a hissing and clunking of mechanical parts, the door to her pod swung itself back open and, with much urgency, Ariel unbundled herself, grabbed her bag, and practically threw herself onto the docking bay floor.
                Striding towards her across the cavernous and empty bay was a creature that could only be described as a receipt with deer's legs. It was thin and papery, it had the exact proportions of a paper record of purchase, albeit at a much larger scale, and it even had lines of text listing the sale price of various fruit and vegetables. Ariel liked to think that her exposure to many alien species had desensitised her to any shock, but the price that someone had potentially paid for a bag of parsnips was absolutely outrageous.
                "Hi, Dr Bane! How was your trip here?" called the walking receipt. It had a voice like smooth caramel with the occasional fragment of whistle.
                "Hello there. It was, um, it was fine until the end. I didn't really expect to be..." she gestured shakily to mime a surprise ejection of the passenger pods.
                "Aha! Yes, we possibly could have warned you about that. But, what matters is that we didn't." said the receipt. Ariel wasn't really sure what it meant. "Regardless, I'm Dorinimo Feasible, a Research Fellow and Head of Extracting New Arrivals From Their Ships. It's a small but important extra responsibility that comes with a healthy stipend and makes me functionally impossible to fire."
                "Wow, sounds great." replied Ariel, trying not to sound sarcastic while also fighting the urge to collapse from the journey. "It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm going to be a Research Fellow and Coal Inspector here too, working on synthetic appendages compatible will all species and in all environments. Er, what do you research?"
                "Impressive.” smiled Dorinimo. “I do something similar, actually. My research looks at how high gravity affects the ripeness of vegetables."
                Ariel waited patiently for Dorinimo to finish explaining their research and how it was in any way similar to her own, while Dorinimo waited patiently for Ariel's beaming smile of familiarity and wonder. After a full minute of silently staring at one another, Ariel accepted that she might never understand a single point Dorinimo would try to make.
                "That does sound similar, very good." she said, mechanically. She'd never been a great liar.
                "The time you took to consider that answer shows that you put real thought behind your words, and lends it much sincerity. Thank you." said Dorinimo, who’d never been great at recognising deception.
                "So, do I need to go somewhere now and get signed in or something?" asked Dr Bane, veteran of finding justifications to flee conversations she didn't want to have. It had made her PhD viva take the best part of a month to complete.
                "Yes, that is the next stage. Your professor should be here soon to collect you. I just handle making sure you get out of your craft safely. Being jettisoned into our path can be jarring to some new arrivals."
                "Really." Ariel said flatly, but not as flat as her body had felt a few moments before.
                "Oh yes. You'd be surprised how many educated people take offence to being treated like ordnance. It's simply the most efficient velocity matching technique, and the calculations have never gone wrong, so there's really no need for anyone to worry about it."
                Ariel drew a deep breath in through her nose, held it for as long as she could, and allowed it to spill gracelessly back out of her mouth. She was aboard. She was safe. There was no practicality in complaining about it to a giant receipt.
                "Agreed. The experience was fine."
                "I'm glad you think so, Dr Bane!" laughed a new voice. Dr Bane looked in its direction, to see a being composed of billions of tiny crystal fragments. These fragments had chosen to arrange themselves into a boggle-eyed horse, standing at over eight feet tall. Against all the odds there was something familiar about them. "Welcome aboard GBAGIRS. I see that Dorinimo has extracted you without any trouble."
                "No trouble at all! The pod opened itself, Dr Bane practically leapt out when the chance presented itself, and all I had to do was explain how necessary and non-insulting the ordnance method is." gloated Dr Feasible.
                "Ha! Marvellous! That enthusiasm will serve you well, Dr Bane." beamed the new arrival.
                "Great." said Ariel. "I'm excited to-"
                "But don't get too enthusiastic," the crystal horse warned, severely, a frown farrowing her brow. Ariel's smile snapped down to a perfectly straight line, "because we have protocols to follow and rules to which we must adhere. You can't just leap right into your work without contributing to the observations of The Glutton. Every lab has a window, and we must all commit to using our Glutton-facing time to learn about it."
                "Learn about something that light can't escape it by all looking at it?" she asked, wanting to make sure she'd fully understood the brief.
                "Yes."
                "Got it." lied Ariel, who had never got anything less.
                The crystal horse smiled. Silence again.
                "Can we leave this docking bay now, please?" asked Dr Bane, who'd had rather enough of holding her luggage and standing next to what might easily have become her coffin. After a little thought, the crystalline horse replied.
                "That sounds like a good idea. Oh, and before I forget, I'm Professor Kristen Sanderling. You might remember me from your interview?"
                The memory flashed into focus. Ariel had seen the professor on a video call, which had robbed her of all sense of scale, but she definitely hadn't been a horse. Ariel would have remembered being interviewed by a horse.
                "Oh, yes, of course! But you looked different over video." she said.
                "Ah, well I can choose to arrange my crystals as I please. It was shortly after your interview that I saw images of an Earth horse, and I was rather taken with it. Do you like it?"
                There was only one way to answer inoffensively.
                "I do! It's very... equine."
                "Fantastic. That's just what I was going for.” smiled the professor, showing a lot of flat, grass-mulching teeth. “Now, on with the on-boarding!"
                Dr Bane's induction to life on the station was as extensive as it was hard to retain, and twice as long as both of those things combined. She was first shown the docking bay control room, which allowed Dorinimo to receive communications from incoming transport vessels and to see when pods had arrived. Then the mechanism driving the control room door was explained in minute detail (hinges), and the flooring was described at the molecular level (linoleum). When at last she was allowed to leave the greater hangar area, Ariel was treated to a spoken-word essay on the operation of their space station lifts (chains and pulleys) before being allowed to ride one down to the laboratory decks.
                "Can we pass via my dorm first, please, so that I can drop off my luggage?" Ariel had asked on the long descent. Professor Sanderling had shaken her head, informing her that it would be simply impossible to divert so far from their course on the tightly scheduled induction course. With an appreciable brave face on her sadness, and an increasing ache in her arms, Ariel had watched the 'living quarters' light on the lift’s display illuminate, and then extinguish, as they sped downwards, all the while being treated to a full account of how the panels lit up (light bulbs).
                In a rare concession to both rationality and respect for Ariel's time, Professor Sanderling, who had gone as far as to make sure Ariel understood how they would be progressing through the station (walking), declined to explain any of the experiments by which they passed on their tour of the labs. Instead, she added Dr Bane's name to a sign-up sheet at every laboratory door, so that she could be given a full and thorough presentation on the risk assessment and key experiential aims by the Research Fellow running each one. Ariel's feigned gratitude began to wane by the fourth or fifth lab, and when they reached double figures it was all she could do to keep a blank, unfocused stare on her weary face. Arms which had long since gone numb lugged her bags around the canteen and recreational quarters, where Professor Sanderling made sure to run through every menu item's ingredients and cooking method, every button on every remote control, and the wiring diagram for all of the overhead lighting. It was around this time that Dr Bane's brain simply switched itself off. It was the last ditch failsafe available to her, shutting down all systems for information intake, lest she lose all of herself in a vast ocean of tedious miscellany.
                Consciousness returned to Dr Bane when her arms snapped upwards, like fleshy elastic bands, as her luggage came to rest on her dormitory floor. The local time zone, displayed on the wall and explained to a version of Ariel who had not been neurologically dissimilar to a wall at the time, indicated that she had been aboard for eight hours already. A hot, throbbing sensation began to pulse up from both feet, her legs were slowly turning into something like a blancmange, and her stomach growled furiously at having spent so long in the canteen without so much as a single chip passing its way. Both shoulders felt as if they were held onto her torso by virtue of her clothing alone. But, mercifully, the induction was over and no-one was trying to explain to her how the floor held her up (it was solid).
                It was an inauspicious start, but, ever the optimist, Ariel was sure that the future would be bright. Except for those parts of the future which faced towards the infinite shadow of The Glutton, of course.
 
                It took a fortnight to get through all the slideshows, risk assessments and introductions for which Professor Sanderling had volunteered Ariel. It seemed that life aboard a totally isolated research station, with no real barriers to overcommitting oneself to their research, led to forming a population of over-eager over-sharers, who would take as much of an opportunity as they could to talk to a new face about what they'd spent the last several months and years doing. Ariel couldn't help feeling sorry for them, trapped in the depths of space and painfully lonely; sorry enough to listen to them talk for as long as they saw necessary about how they calibrated the force with which they opened jam jars when making breakfast (using muscle memory).
                Finally though, when she knew more about lab safety than any other human - living, dead or somewhere in between - she was free to start her own work. And, of course, her contractual observations of the enormous black hole.
                In and among all of the specialist equipment for making cutting-edge prosthetic llimbs, there was a simple alarm system built into Ariel’s lab. Such alarms were built into every lab on the station, in fact. They didn’t exist to warn of any fire, poisonous gas or extreme toe-stubbing risk, however. They existed to alert any laboratory worker to when their time to look out of the window had come. Unfortunately, in a misguided attempt to make it accessible to those who could neither see or hear, the alarm functioned by administering a sharp electric shock directly to the head of the person in question. It excited a sense described to Ariel as 'the universal sense, common to all species in the known universe'. She knew it better as 'pain'. Still, it was what she'd signed up for, apparently, and nothing could hurt as much as a day-long armful of luggage, following which all of her sleeves seemed a few centimetres shorter than before.
                "Dr Bane!" Ariel heard Professor Sanderling cry one morning. Morning was a colloquial term, since there was no radiant solar body being orbited, but it was marked by having the lights up higher and restricting the canteen menu to pancakes, toast and cereal. At the time of the crying, Ariel was hunched over a workbench and clutching a pair of tweezers, scattered pieces of synthetic articulations and mechanical parts littering the space in front of her. It was a clear violation of her own risk assessment, which required a clear desk policy in case of catastrophic hull failure, but she didn't really care.
                "Hello Kristen." she replied, without looking up. It had taken her twenty minutes to get her tweezers between one part of a robotic joint and another, and she was damned if anyone would make her start over again now.
                "I would like to introduce you to our head of External Interfaces, Dr Herbert Krill. I'm afraid he was spending two weeks locked in the brig for crimes against fashion while your induction was underway, but his sentence has been served now and he's back on the task." explained the professor. Ariel's brain protested against being expected to acknowledge her heavily repressed induction, but could not escape the reality that she should turn and face her colleague. She tried to keep her hands as still as possible while she rotated on her stool.
                "Nice to meet you Dr Krill." she said, scanning her gaze about desperately, trying to find eyes with which to make contact. Alas, she found none. Looking at Dr Krill was like looking at a multi-limbed crab through a frosted window; everything was fuzzy-edged, indistinct, and a little unnerving.
                "Nice to meet you too. As Professor Sanderling says, I am head of External Interfaces, and what you see is a psychic manifestation of myself, portrayed as accurately as possible for your senses. You see, I belong to a species of abstracted thoughts. I can hear you speak about your research and look into your mind for any missing meaning or context, making me perfectly suited to my role." exposited Dr Krill. Ariel's mind, which had already wilfully turned itself off to events aboard the station, decided to ignore the obvious mental violation presented by Dr Krill's methods. "So I will be communicating your work to the wider universe. I will be shouting your progress into the unfathomable void so that anyone who listens to the sky will hear it. I will not rest until everyone capable of hearing has heard of you and your research. So tell me, Dr Bane, what are you doing right now, with those tweezers?"
                Ariel tried to stop her face from dropping.
                "Oh, erm, I'm just trying to, uh, to grab a small washer that, um, I dropped into this actuator." she said, feeling her cheeks redden. "You don't have to tell the universe this bit. This is just me fixing a mistake I made." she hastily added.
                "Oh but the universe deserves to hear that you are a flawed being! Flaws and mistakes are nothing of which to be ashamed. Just like your failure to adhere to the clear desk policy you've outlined in your own risk assessment."
                "You read that?"
                "And I have broadcast it to all the major scientific journals." Dr Krill replied, proudly.
                "I think we're getting off track, here." interjected Professor Sanderling, who hadn't explained anything to anyone in over ten minutes and was getting commensurately agitated. "Dr Bane, please outline to Dr Krill what it is that you're trying to do here, why it's important that it happens in the high gravity environment around The Glutton, and what your favourite activity is for a rainy afternoon on the station."
                Flustered, Ariel almost lost her grip on the tweezers, which held in their jaws the tiny washer of her dignity.
                "Oh, yes, of course. Er, what I'm going to be working on up here for the next some-to-many years is generating synthetic limbs which are compatible with any lifeform in the known universe, delivering to them a universally life-changing capability, like... um..." she desperately wracked her mind for something that would be helpful to all civilisations, but, put on the spot in such a way, her brain refused to cooperate. No use of a limb came to mind, minor or major. She looked down at her arms, which were both obviously and actively doing at least something, but as far as she could tell they were not engaged in anything more than existence. "Like... reaching underneath the oven to clean it."
                Dr Krill made notes, his face unreadable by virtue of eternal blurriness. Professor Sanderling, on the other hand, did the best impression of a disappointed horse that Ariel had ever seen.
                "Or something better than that. That's just an example." blushed Dr Bane. "Anyway, it has to happen in high gravity because there are species which can occupy spaces uninhabitable to my own species, human, and any mechanical parts which we fuse to biological matter must be demonstrated not to fail in a great range of environmental conditions. The extremely directional pressure of gravity is hard to simulate, especially at high scales, so the high gravity capabilities of GBAGIRS are invaluable."
                "Now that I can get behind." Professor Sanderling appraised, her disappointment reduced but still present. "And, what do you do on rainy afternoons around the station, hm?"
                "Uh... we're in space. There's no rain here at any time of day." Ariel said, scared of what contradiction might come back her way.
                "Of course there is!" laughed Professor Sanderling. "I didn't miss out that detail in the induction did I?" she added, suddenly worried.
                There was a several-hour gap in Ariel's memory that she would die before she admitted to. She shot Dr Krill a threatening look to make sure that he got the picture.
                "I guess you must have. I remember all of the induction and don't need any of it to be repeated, ever." Dr Bane growled.
                "Silly me! I'll pencil in an extra hour for the next candidate. But for your benefit, Dr Bane, we turn the fire-suppression sprinklers on in the corridors occasionally, to simulate the disappointment of being unable to move around without getting wet. It's one of the little touches designed into GBAGIRS operational policy to make it seem more like life on a planet."
                Ariel wanted to complain that it sounded like a waste of water, and a way to make life on an already isolated station even more depressing sometimes, but that wouldn't make her sound sympathetic in Dr Krill's press release. She swallowed her criticisms.
                "I understand." she said, not entirely honestly. "Well, I like to think about articulation, rearrange my socks, and stack dirty dishes as high as I can to put off cleaning them."
                Professor Sanderling shook her head as Dr Krill impassively recorded Ariel's words and thoughts. He knew all about her unspoken passion for sweeping dust into a single corner of her desk, never removing it until it spilled onto the floor, and would be including a whole article on the subject.
                "Thank you, Dr Bane, for your time. We'll let you get back to amateurishly fishing in an elbow joint for a carelessly dropped component." said the professor.
                "No problem.” said Ariel, her teeth gritted more thoroughly than the roads on an icy comet. “See you soon."
                "Unless I get put in the brig again!" chuckled Dr Krill, already planning to pair a three-piece suit with a diving bell at the next faculty dinner.
                Dr Bane watched her colleagues leave before deflating over her tweezers. Normally Ariel was able to embarrass herself on her own terms, perhaps by introducing herself with the wrong name or arriving to work covered in crude oil, but being blindsided by it was simply unacceptable. Improving lives by letting them reach under the oven indeed. She returned to her fishing, and resolved to find a better prototype on which to work. That resolution lasted for roughly thirty seconds, before a searing pain in her head tore her thoughts away. It was time to observe The Glutton.
                One hand still trying to delicately pull free a washer-laden pair of tweezers, Ariel wheeled her stool towards the window and put her other hand to use grabbing a pen and notebook. If anything changed about the infinite blackness, from which no light could escape and of which, therefore, nothing could be seen, she would write it down. Her eyes burned into the Glutton, and the Glutton burned into her mind.
                Against the odds, something caught her eye. It was faint, but undeniable. Something was flickering, glowing on and off like scraps of paper conflagrating in the air above a fire. Her non-tweezer hand began to scribble furiously.
 
                "You saw flashing lights around the Glutton?" asked Professor Sanderling, unconvinced.
                "Yes, professor. It was faint, but unmissable. You should come with me to the lab to look at it."
                The professor weighed up walking all the way to Dr Bane's lab to learn something, which was the exact opposite of explaining something. It held no appeal.
                "Nah. That's why you observe things; so that you can tell the rest of us about them and we don't have to spend literally all day looking at a black hole. I do my shifts already; I can't do yours as well. Where are your notes?"
                "They're in my hand. I've been offering them to you the whole time I've been here." said Ariel.
"Oh, so you have. Let's take a look." she said, opening the book in Ariel's hand and, effectively, turning her into a human lectern. A familiar, burning tiredness swelled in Ariel's arm, and she started to suspect that Professor Sanderling was doing these things on purpose. "Ah, it says the observations were made at 3, local time to the station."
                "Yes."
                "And they lasted for about ten minutes?"
                "Yes." confirmed Ariel again.
                "Wonderful!" beamed the professor, suddenly animated. Visions of a hypothetical future where Ariel had made a major discovery about the nature of black holes flashed through Dr Bane's mind; she accepted her prizes, she gave speeches at conferences across the universe, and the station would be renamed the Ariel Bane's Gina's Bar and Grill Interstellar Research Station. GBAGIRS was cumbersome, but ABGBAGIRS had a nice ring to it. Magazine covers announcing the name change presented themselves to Ariel's mind's eye for her approval, prior to print.
                "You think I've stumbled across something important?" asked Dr Bane, coyly, seeding the idea of her impending fame among the astronomical community.
                "No, but I can explain it, and explaining things is my favourite! You've discovered the time at which we dispose of the station's refuse." smiled the boggle-eyed horse. It seemed that the professor was rather taken with that form.
                "What?"
                "The refuse. The rubbish. The detritus, the trash, the garbage. Our custodial teams discovered fairly quickly that disposing of waste matter is difficult in a sealed space station, and letting it jet into the far reaches of space felt unethical, but sending it into The Glutton? It's a near-infinite landfill, compressed as strongly as is possible for maximum efficiency, with no hope of any smells escaping. Perfection, if you ask me, as a means of keeping space and the station clean. The light you saw was just flares of energy as the very atoms of the rubbish are accelerated apart."
                The magazine covers quickly morphed from waterfalls of praise to stagnant pools of 'Ariel Bane: Interstellar Fool', which felt quite unnecessary and a total waste of a hypothetical headline story.
                "Oh." she said.
                "You did the right thing by bringing this to my attention, Dr Bane. After all, it's another shocking omission from the induction tour! I may have to extend it to two days..."
                "You should. Maybe even three to make sure that you can help new arrivals chart out the plumbing, too." Dr Bane said, in a move of pure spite. Deep down she knew she was lashing out at the wrong people, but she didn't care.
                "I will make a note of that suggestion right now! Three days of solidly explaining things to new recruits; the dream! I would have thought it to be too much to bear, but if you, who have just been through it, say that it's necessary then, well, that's justification in and of itself! I'll draw up a new itinerary immediately. Thank you very much for your feedback, Dr Bane."
                "You're welcome. See you later, professor." Dr Bane replied, drily. The seeds of her revenge against those who had done nothing wrong had been thoroughly sown and watered.
 
                Two years passed aboard the station. Due to the non-universality of time, dependent on gravity, more or less than two years had passed elsewhere, but that was scarcely relevant. In that time, Dr Bane had transitioned from newbie to indoctrinated, a necessary step towards long-term functionality aboard the Gina's Bar and Grill Interstellar Research Station, and her research had taken off in earnest.
                Thanks to a breakthrough in synthetic tissue generation, involving swearing a lot at the petri dish until it sprouted a limb, Ariel had been able to grow whole ball and socket joints, onto which to graft mechanical parts for life-altering capability upgrades. Regrettably, the joints and resultant biological limb structure were a little on the thin side for most species, rendering them more suitable for lighter applications that involved long reach but low torque. This imposed severe limitations on the applications enabled by her research, but the project was still in its infancy, and more major leaps forward would surely be around the corner.
                Her observations of The Glutton, too, had progressed. Whether by familiarity, resignation or good old fashioned Stockholm syndrome, the job of staring into the abyss for hours on end had ceased to be a burden and, somehow, become therapeutic. There had been little visual activity of which to speak, aside from the regular streams of rubbish. Although it compromised the integrity of any scientific observations, Ariel couldn't help but think that the energetic glow of waste disposal was pretty. Against a backdrop of perfect black the flares and burst of prismatic light were a reminder of rainbows, auroras and even translucent plastic toys from her childhood. With her increasing appreciation of the aesthetics, Ariel's ecological and ethical complaints regarding the practice had waned. It was a perfectly reasonable use of a black hole, and the tiny mass of waste products from a research station was nothing compared to the unfathomably heavy Glutton. No harm done there. In fact, with all supplies aboard being created by matter replicators, powered by the solar cells that covered the outside of the station, there wasn't even an issue about the failure to recycle. It was the perfect system, with no drawbacks whatsoever, and Ariel was quite contented to sit and watch the display. That is, she was until she started thinking too hard.
                This time, she'd waited for Professor Sanderling to visit the lab before talking her ear off about The Glutton. It was an ambush of research proposals, which was Ariel's favourite kind to orchestrate. Ambushing one's colleagues in any capacity was generally frowned upon, but she'd learned a thing or two about getting the professor on side.
                "Ah, Professor Sanderling!" erupted Ariel with performative surprise, as if she hadn't been watching for her through the door. "I was hoping that you could spare me five minutes to talk about my Glutton observations?"
                The horse face, which now sported a crystalline beard and a ladle for an antler, sagged into bored disinterest.
                "Well, I'm very busy..."
                "I don't understand something and I thought you might be able to enlighten me."
                Some of the boredom morphed into optimism.
                "But I may be able to spare a bit of time. What do you need me to help you with?"
                The hook was in.
                "Well, you've explained before how all of the station's waste is jettisoned into The Glutton, as an efficient and cost-effective means of clearing it out."
                "Yes, I have." interrupted the professor. "And, I might add, it also provides a small momentum kick away from The Glutton, helping us to save fuel in our efforts to resist orbital decay."
                "Oh." replied Ariel, a little blindsided by the extra detail. "That's interesting."
                "Yes, it is. And it means that we all have a duty to create waste from our labs, so that we can continue delivering on these fuel savings. Dispose of any old prototypes you don't need, get rid of that extra paperwork, and chuck out a chair if you need to."
                Ariel didn't think that sounded very efficient at all, but she didn't care enough to argue about it.
                "Sure. Will do. Anyway, we throw out all this waste, and it gets ripped apart, right? So it makes kind of a continuous string of particles of rubbish between The Glutton and the station, doesn't it?"
                Professor Sanderling nodded.
                "A string of particles, much like I myself am a string of crystalline pieces."
                "OK, great. And sound travels as a ripple through a collection of particles, yes?"
                "Unrelated, but true!" smiled the horse.
                "So, hypothetically, if we launched a stream of rubbish for a continuous period, then we could make a dense string of particles from us to The Glutton, along which sound could travel, and we could actually try to listen to it as well as watching it, right? Is my understanding correct?"
                The cogs turned in Professor Sanderling's head. Thanks to her crystalline composition, Ariel could literally see the cogs in motion, another affectation that the professor had picked up over the years. She gave the mechanical horse woman time to think.
                "It would be somewhat fleeting and difficult, but yes you could potentially contrive a situation in which a vibration was transmitted along a 'fibre' of debris from the station, assuming that the sound being made was sufficiently powerful to accelerate the particle into its neighbour against the extreme force of gravity, particularly at The Glutton's end of the fibre. Allow me to draw you a diagram." she said, crossing the lab to Ariel's whiteboard and blithely erasing her to-do list. Dr Bane bit her lip, caught between showing her fury and hiding her embarrassment that she'd not written her list of tasks down anywhere else. It was all she could do to hold silence and allow the crystal horse to talk her through some school level physics.
                After several hours and too many off-topic tangents to count, Professor Sanderling finally stopped talking. Ariel, numb to everything in her surroundings, took a few moments to snap back into reality. Her anger at losing the whiteboard's contents was gone, as was all memory of what those contents had been.
                "OK. Sure. Fine. Thank you, professor. Very thorough." she said. It felt like she had a varicose headache. "So, we'll need to work out how much rubbish to expel from the ship and at what rate. And we'll need to get some acoustic sensors mounted on the outer wall of my lab, or the rubbish chute, or somewhere in between, so that we can pick up what's coming back."
                "We will; I can leave you in charge of the former, and I'll arrange the latter with the facilities technicians. They love climbing around the exterior of the station into a dense cloud of vaporised refuse." she said. There was no discernible sarcasm. "But first I should probably get back to what I was doing; I was only meant to be in here for five minutes."
                "Oh yes, of course, sorry. I hope it's nothing urgent."
                "No, no." said the professor, waving a huge crystal hand. "I was just going to visit Dr Krill in the brig and give him his evening's meal. He's arranging press releases from down there now, you know?  Otherwise he'd never have a chance to get anything done."
                "What did he do this time?"
                "I think he ate Dr Tyborg's lab coat and chair, but it might have been her door. He's been really precocious."
                As far as Ariel knew, psychic manifestations didn't have any biological need to eat, so any consumption of a door would have been purely for leisure or devilment. She shuddered. If that could happen to Dr Tyborg, recipient of the 'Most Deserving of a Lab Coat, Chair and Door' award at the end-of-year station celebration, then nobody was safe.
                "I think I feel happier with him being locked away."
                "I'll let him know you said that." smiled the professor warmly. "Which reminds me, I only came in here to ask for your next press release update. How are the limbs?"
                "Oh, yes! We've made great strides with the biological fusion; we can grow entire joints now, basically for any arbitrary species, so we can fuse any of our synthetic limb tools and functions onto nearly anyone, in principle. There are anti-rejection tests to do, but... But they'll probably be fine."
                "Wonderful. And what tools and applications are you going to be trying first, may I ask?"
                Ariel's face dropped. The Glutton wasn't the only black hole in her research remit.
                "Uh... well... I'm brainstorming a lot of potential applications and... there's still the reach extension for small crevice entry?"
                Professor Sanderling sighed heavily, like a boulder exhaling a mountain’s breeze.
                "Reaching under the oven to clean it?"
                Dr Bane sighed and sagged.
                "Yeah."
                "No change then. Well, I suppose we can't make progress on everything at once. Or in this specific case, we can’t ever make progress at all. I'd best let you get to it, and to your particulate fibre arrangements! Everyone will be looking forward to the results of that one." Professor Sanderling said, before making her own way from the lab.
                Despite the reminder of her persistent failure to think of how limbs are used, Ariel treated herself to a smug smile once she was alone again. Manipulating objects with synthetic limbs was fun enough, but manipulating the people in control of her funding and equipment was a lot more rewarding. While she was congratulating herself, the alarm in the corner gave her the familiar agonising notification, beckoning her over to the observation window. Dr Bane strode past her workbench, covered in the forgotten work she was supposed to be doing, lost in thought about her new acoustic interests.
                It took only a few weeks for Professor Sanderling's promised acoustic sensors to be put in place, most of which had been spent trying to find the appropriate spanner to fasten them in place. In the meantime Dr Bane had produced a series of reports on the quantity of rubbish required to make a particulate fibre, and her colleagues had managed to produce enough scrap prototypes, failed experiments and malpractice evidence of which to dispose that she could make it several times over. Only Dr Krill, locked in the brig, was unable to hide proof of his wrongdoings in The Glutton's inescapable maw, and Dr Bane found that to be of great comfort.
                When the time finally came, and all elements were in place, Dr Bane took her seat at the observation window, but her eyes were drawn only to the laptop screen on which her audio signals would be displayed. Despite having checked it multiple times, and having ensured that she had several backup systems to record the output in case of total laptop failure, she couldn't help but scrutinise the display in minute, furious detail. This was largely how Professor Sanderling's eight foot frame was able to sneak up behind her.
                "Dr Bane." she said simply, causing Ariel to kick out at the window, sending her wheeled chair careening into the professor's crystalline legs. They parted like smoke and allowed Ariel to travel uninhibited until she struck a desk.
                "Ow."
                "I would also like to say ow. You did just travel through my legs, after all."
                "Sorry, you startled me." said Ariel, stating the obvious and rubbing at her head. Standing next to the professor, apparently unconcerned by the startling incident, was a biped with all the hallmarks of being a mutated snail. Its eyes, high up on stalks, had a harrowingly recognisable glassy, unfocused stare.
                "I'd like to introduce you to our newest recruit, Dr Grith Poquo. Dr Poquo will be researching how to capture high energy solar emissions within helical shell structures as part of his government’s gastropod outreach programme." explained the professor. "We're on day three of the induction tour, and I think it's got a little much for him, so I thought he might find it interesting to be present for the first audio investigations of The Glutton."
                Ariel gave Grith a sympathetic smile, not that he could see it. New recruits were basically zombies by the end of day one, and the tour, thanks to Ariel's constant feedback, was now a week long. Sometimes she felt guilty about it, but it was one of the few destructive outlets with which Dr Bane could get away aboard the station.
                "Nice to meet you, Dr Poquo." she said, for Professor Sanderling's benefit, and then wheeled a spare chair into the back of his legs. He flopped down into it.
                "We are about to begin, I believe?"
                "Yes, professor. We'll see any audio waveforms on that screen,” Ariel said, pointing to her laptop, “and we'll hear it through the speaker system mounted into the ceiling."
                Dr Bane scooted her own chair back to the observation window. In the last two years she'd implemented a few quality of life measures to make her time at the softly curved window more comfortable, and was thereby able to offer hot drinks and light snacks to her viewing companions, all while wincing as the alarm went off. Grith, predictably, didn't fancy anything.
                "It's time. The release of the rubbish stream should start in five... four...three... two... one..."
                Nothing was visible at first. The refuse chute was somewhere below the lab, out of view, and none of them fancied craning their neck out of a recklessly opened window. However, after a few minutes, the first chunks of broken chair, glassware and legal documentation started to visibly drift out towards the Glutton's awaiting darkness.
                The three of them, gaggled around the window and the laptop, watched in silence; two were too terrified of speaking over the first audio signal from a black hole, and the third was neurologically not present in the room. Their breathing was soft and measured, their eyes flitted between the waveform display and the black hole, and their buttocks, crystalline, fleshy, shell-covered or otherwise, began to get sore.
                "And now..." said Professor Sanderling suddenly. Ariel frowned.
                "Wha-" was as far as she made it, before an intense burst of light shot out from among the rubbish. It was as if a billion tiny lanterns had been shot out of a firehose, intermingling with the detritus and filling in all the gaps.
                "We had the synchrotron re-routed into the refuse chute. A nice soup of high energy particles among the normal rubbish will give us a much more uniform and densely packed particulate fibre. I thought it might make a nice surprise." said the professor, her horse mouth smiling broadly.
                Mentally, Ariel screwed up and threw away all of her prepared calculations on how sound might travel along a debris stream. Verbally, she said thank you.
                "Not a problem." beamed the oblivious professor.
                With the usual flaring and glowing as the debris was torn apart by intense gravitational forces, Ariel and Professor Sanderling saw their fibre reach the Glutton, finally making contact. Ariel's eyes burned into the waveform display, ticking slowly across the screen. Her ears were tensed, a physical feat of which she didn't previously realise she was capable. Dr Poquo dribbled a little.
                And then there was a rumbling. A deep rumbling, impossibly low. It was barely heard at all, rather being felt as the speakers shook violently, doing their best to replicate the unfathomable bass boom of what they were hearing. The waveform display began to trace out the slowest and lowest sounds that it was capable of hearing, and Ariel stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the professor. Kristen's crystalline particles were shaking, gradually forming up into bunches as the sound waves rearranged her body.
                "We can hear it! It's rumbling!" laughed Ariel. Professor Sanderling held up a stratified crystalline hand for quiet, and Dr Bane acquiesced. For time that lost all meaning they sat and they listened, trying to discern any shape, any structure, any meaning at all from the sound they were hearing or the waveform they could see. When the stream finally ended, and the fibre was broken, the newfound silence and stillness felt like stepping out of a hot bath, and back into the cold reality of a forgotten towel.
                "Well." said Professor Sanderling, simply. "That was certainly a sound. I think that we can call this a tentative success, Dr Bane."
                "Yeah." said Ariel, breathlessly, which was a shocking indictment of the fitness of someone who had been sitting still for the last hour. "Yeah, it is."
                "So what does this mean? What did you learn from the noise that The Glutton made? Did it match your expectations?"
                "Expectations?" asked Ariel, dread pooling in her gut.
                "Yes."
                "I didn't have any."
                The silence thickened like academic gravy.
                "Oh. I thought you had a hypothesis which you were testing."
                "Nope."
                Dr Poquo coughed involuntarily.
                "Exactly, Grith." said Professor Sanderling. "Dr Bane has apparently forgotten the first tenet of the scientific method. But nevermind; we'd best leave her to perform her analysis, and come back to us with a conclusion. Otherwise we will all be left hanging on for closure. Come along, we have more labs to visit." she said. The subconscious mind of Dr Poquo heard and obeyed.
                "I'll get something to you soon." said Ariel, almost apologetically. She was too elated at the sound to make it all the way to feeling actually sorry.
                "I hope so." said the professor. And then Ariel was alone among her speakers, waveforms, and forgotten prosthetics.
 
                Four years could deliver a lot of progress. It was long enough for whole doctorates to be earned, it was long enough for dozens of iterations of new technology, and could turn fresh fruit to compost and back intro fruit four times over. Ariel had seen that for herself in the biology labs, where she'd spent an awful lot of time with the bioacoustics experts.
                Her first investigations into the sound had been conducted with the astronomers, who told Ariel that they had some poor theories and no good ideas. When they had all been ruled out, they suggested speaking to fluid dynamics experts, who might know why the rubbish had made such sounds. The fluid dynamics crowd came up empty, and directed Ariel to the high energy physicists, who might understand the sounds made by near luminal particles. When that question was answered with a shrug and sigh, Ariel resorted to simply emailing every department with the waveform, and asking for any loose theories that might be lurking down the back of their mental sofa cushions. That was when bioacoustics had got involved, and when they had given her a definitive answer.
                No-one had really been expecting the sound of a burp, especially not a burp which had been drawn out over the course of an hour and distorted by the rapidly accelerating stream of rubbish. There was a good reason, Ariel was told, that no-one tried to send sound waves through broken robotics and biological waste in real world applications, and it had taken several reconstruction attempts on several more recordings to get to anything vaguely sensible, but then, time after time, the answer came out the same. The Glutton, beyond ninety nine percent of a doubt, had burped at the station every time the refuse stream had been jettisoned.
                "Very nice." Professor Sanderling had said, at Dr Bane's six year review. "But we do need another application of your synthetic limb work. There are only so many appliances under which one can need to reach, and the same limb will probably do well enough for all of them."
                Ariel had never heard a horse sound tetchy before arriving on the station, but now it was the only emotion with which she could associate her equine companions.
                "Oh I don't know about that; fridges have lots of different types of feet, and washing machines rarely have any."
                "Regardless, you are duty bound by the terms of your research grant to create applications useful to all life forms. Applications. Plural. Several thereof. You have made one, and it's bad."
                Dr Bane felt as if she'd been shot through the heart. Not literally, but melodramatically.
                "I've made enormous strides in finding out that a black hole burps!"
                "But that burp cannot be fused onto a biomechanical arm and given to a species of burpless canines." snapped Professor Sanderling. "No-one knows what the burp means, even after these four long years of work, you are not the person best placed to find the answer, and you are in breach of your contract to us if you don't deliver something for our next press release." neighed the professor.
                "What do you mean by that?" demanded Ariel.
                "I mean that you are banned, formally, from any research or observation on The Glutton. The high energy ejections from our synchrotron are cancelled, effective immediately. Dr Poquo will cover your shift, and you will focus entirely on limb synthesis. Goodbye, Dr Bane." A hoof pointed towards the open door of the professor's office. Dr Bane, her lips pursed, eyes furious and bladder full, stamped out of the room.
                "Breach of contract." muttered Dr Bane, kicking the floor as she stormed along the corridor. "Not best placed to find the answer." she spat as she boarded the lift. "No-one knows what the burp means." she seethed as she kicked open the door to her lab. "I've given this station its most important breakthroughs ever. Ever! And it's not even in my field! And now I'm being punished for not giving a horse the ability to... to..."
                No other applications came to mind. The under-oven reach had absorbed all other knowledge in her brain.
                "Argh." she groaned, slamming herself down at her workbench. "I've given limb work loads of priority!" she snapped, looking at the dust-covered elbows and rotting biological joints pushed against the wall, and leaning her arms on several burp-related reports. As if to test her patience to the greatest possible extent, the Glutton observation alert seared through her head. Before she could move, a pair of wet footsteps slapped towards her door, and Dr Poquo emerged.
                "Hello, Dr Bane." he said. "I've come to..."
                A glassy expression flickered over his face, and he scanned his view from side to side uncomfortably.
                "This seems oddly familiar. Oddly dreadful... but I haven't been in here before, have I?" he said to himself, voice quivering with unknown fear.
                "It's where good work is rewarded with suffering and where dreams come to die." growled Ariel, facing down at her desk.
                "Oh... that must be the dread I'm feeling, then." said Dr Poquo, uncertainly. "It feels so much like walking into a bad memory or a nightmare."
                Ariel didn't respond. She just let him walk through one of many sites which had held his body in its fugue state years before, and allowed him to sit in the seat at which she'd made one of the greatest strides in astronomy that modern times had seen. A washer fell from her tweezers into the ball joint of a mechanical arm and her teeth ground hard together. Snarling to herself, Dr Bane started fishing around with tweezers, while a mutant snail reluctantly stole her work from her.
                "Um, Dr Bane?" said Dr Poquo some minutes later, a little shakily. She ignored him. "Dr Bane?" he repeated. She heard her luxuriously padded observation chair rotating on its casters and realised that she couldn’t disregard him forever.
                "Yes, Dr Poquo?"
                "Could you please take a look at this?” he asked. “I can see something and I don't think it's normal."
                Ariel's face crumpled into a snarl, and she kept staring at her robotic arm.
                "I cannot, Dr Poquo. I have been formally banned from performing any research activities on The Glutton, including observations of it, hence why you are here." she snarled. "I wouldn't want to breach my contract now, would I?"
                Ariel punctuated every word with a sharp jab of her tweezers, probing for the dropped washer in a manner which didn't suggest an abundance of concern over damaging the joint.
                "Oh... yes, but this is important. I can see something really odd. It's bright. There aren't supposed to be bright things on a black hole."
                With a great sigh, Ariel pulled her tweezers free, their prize clutched between metallic prongs, and placed them on the bench top.
                "It's probably just the rubbish being pulled apart." she said, grabbing a screwdriver and tightening what looked like an elbow with knuckles. Even she didn’t know what it was for anymore. "Rubbish forming a fibre for acoustic measurements." she added, jerking the screw tighter. "A technique which I pioneered." The screw was yanked round again. "With results that have perplexed the scientific community, being that the black hole has burped." A great cracking sound rang out as the elbow cracked in two.
                "Uh, no. It's not that. It's bigger, and whiter, and more two things than one thing."
                "What?" asked Ariel, her anger gone and confusion lurking in its place.
                "It's two white, er, arcs, I guess? Domes maybe?"
                "Ask me to help you work out what shape something is, please." she said, impatiently.
                "I beg your pardon?"
                "Ask me to help you work out shape you're looking at. I can't observe The Glutton, but I can help you with shape identification." clarified Dr Bane.
                "Fine. What is the shape of these things, please, Dr Bane? I'm so foolish and feeble that I could not possibly work it out for myself." said Dr Poquo, hamming it up as best he knew how.
                "Let me take a look." replied Ariel, flatly and without the dramatic flair of her colleague, as she turned herself toward the window. "Wha- oh..."
                Just as Grith had suggested, two monolithic white arcs, like stars emerging from an eclipse, had appeared in the emptiness above the perfect, dark abyss of The Glutton. They glowed with a brilliant light, masking the background of stars beyond the black hole until they were all that could be seen.
                "Weird, right?"
                "Very." agreed Ariel, who was mid-way through convincing herself that the arcs were not merely reflections from the room lighting. "They look almost like upside down dishes. Like someone was throwing a plate as a discus, right towards your head."
                "Does that happen to you a lot?" Grith asked.
                "More than I care to admit." Ariel said. "But, are they growing? Moving?"
                "Yeah." confirmed her observational stand-in.
                Both of them stared, dumbfounded, out of the window as the white arcs grew from thin lines, to thick arches, to elliptical giants in mere moments.
                "It's like a pair of eyes just rolled in our direction." Dr Bane muttered. "Is something looking at us? Surely not. That would be lunacy. It'd be preposterous."
                "It would be very difficult to believe." agreed Dr Poquo.
                It was reassuring to hear someone else say that labelling these mysterious white anomalies as eyes was silly. In Ariel's mind, a magazine cover touting the refutation of her 'eyepothesis' appeared fully formed.
                But then they blinked.
 
                Alarms rang all over GBAGIRS. They'd been ringing for ten minutes already, ever since a whole bank of laboratories had reported, worryingly, that The Glutton had blinked towards them. It wasn't the blink itself that had caused the hysteria, despite its own unfathomable implications. It was the way that the station had juddered and groaned when, apropos of nothing, the pull of The Glutton had become suddenly stronger, like a great mouth sucking inwards.
                It was a great testament to the emergency evacuation procedures, backed up by hundreds of meticulously studied and reviewed risk assessments, that all personnel were able to embark onto escape pods in such a short time. One by one they popped their way free from the bulk of the station, which had picked up a tasteful curvature and thousands of cracks under The Glutton's suction. Each pod that ejected from the station gave it another little nudge towards the black hole, sealing its fate as they saved themselves. It was all that the occupants could do to watch their home, their workplace, and the subject of space science's greatest corruption scandal get ripped apart and consumed by the mighty gravitational pull, and the impossible hungry sucking, of The Glutton.
 
                It was a few days before all the pods could be picked up. In batches of a few dozen at a time the tiny pin pricks of emergency lights were pulled into mighty transports and carried away. From its position at the centre of a particularly empty part of the galaxy, an unimaginable consciousness watched the garnish from its most exotic meal ever slip away. It had been a long time, a very long time, in fact, since it had actively tried to haul something in. Normally it could just hold its mouth open, and everything would gradually crawl inwards, and it felt like a fool for interfering in what had, until very recently, been a great regular meal ticket.
                The consciousness didn't worry over that for long. More meals would come along, and all the stars would enter into its maw eventually, under the endless conveyor of its gravity. Plus, in the meantime, thanks to the parting gift found inside the hand which had previously fed it, it was free to enjoy a wonderful newfound ability to reach under the oven.