Earth Calendar, year 3258.
337 years after the black hole observation program began.
The once vast and magnificent black hole accretion disk had shrunk to a pitiful little disk, radiating a negligible amount of light into the cold, dark universe.
Several Black Hole Probes were positioned in the central region of this little disk.
The Antimatter Engines at their tails were running at full power.
Their immense thrust propelled the Black Hole Probes in slow circular orbits around the black hole at the center of the accretion disk.
But even the Antimatter Engines could not overcome the black hole's powerful gravity!
The radii of the probes' orbits were steadily shrinking, and their antimatter reserves dwindled with time.
Eventually, one day in the future, the black hole's gravity would pull these probes toward its event horizon.
This was an extremely rapid process.
It was also an extremely drawn-out process.
That might sound contradictory, but it was not difficult to understand.
At the black hole's event horizon, gravity reached an extreme, and spacetime was distorted to an unimaginable degree. Even light could not escape from within the horizon.
Around the horizon, that immense gravitational pull also slowed the passage of time to an extraordinary degree.
Thus, a probe would cross the horizon and fall into the black hole within a finite amount of time, but to an outside observer, it would spend an infinite amount of time drawing ever closer to the horizon.
Farther from the black hole, a planet quietly orbited it.
Beneath the accretion disk's exceedingly faint light, the entire planet wore a sickly yellowish-brown hue.
Scattered amid that vast expanse of yellowish brown were a few inconspicuous patches of green.
As the latitude increased, the green grew richer and covered more and more ground-all the way to the North