The End of the World Begins with a Black Hole

In 2444, the earth fell into a stellar black hole code-named "Terminator". There is no foreboding collapse of heaven and earth, no epic doomsday counterattack. When the Sky Survey Observation Network finally confirmed the orbit of this wandering black hole, its gravitational potential well had already wrapped around the outer edge of the solar system - all human interstellar engines and deflection plans were like a mantis's arms in the face of stellar mass. In the last three months, the space stations in low-Earth orbit lost contact one after another. The tidal force is like an invisible hand, crushing the metal hull into twisted scrap iron, dragging out slender traces of light along the direction of the accretion disk. On the ground, gravity abnormalities first appeared at the poles: glaciers collapsed, ocean currents poured in, and the earth's crust made dull cracking sounds along the gaps between the plates. The lights in the city went out one by one, communications were broken into fragments due to the disturbance in the ionosphere, and no one tried to broadcast the countdown to the doomsday. No one can say the exact moment of crossing the event horizon. Light is bent in the gravitational field, the sky is crumpled into a twisted band of light, and the sun, stars, and the Milky Way are all pulled into a luminous ring surrounding the black hole. The structure of the earth's surface began to disintegrate: the rock layers were peeled off layer by layer by tidal forces, the atmosphere turned into a hot plasma flow, and the debris wrapped in the ocean and land fell towards the singularity. The Earth is no longer a planet, but is being pulled into an elongated stream of material, slowly but surely sinking into absolute darkness. All traces of human civilization—buildings, books, signals, memories—collapsed along with the blue planet. The four-billion-year epic of life ended in a silence that even light could not escape.