Sat here on the barren sands overlooking the ocean I recollected my fateful voyage.
I had been sent from Earth to gather data on the vortex at the heart of our Galaxy.
The Black Hole, which I visited, was merciless. I became something else in that tubed night, although I knew not what.
As my ship recoiled from the mouth of the Hole I knew I was alive but different. I felt empty yet connected to this dreadful maelstrom.
It had been ten Earth years but a mere ten blips in the whirlpool of nothingness that I had been sent to explore a decade ago.
Everyone thought it was a suicide mission. I would never survive. At best I would send important data from the singularity and that was all. At worst I would vanish without achieving anything useful.
The smart money was on the latter but here I was careening out of the devil's arse at the speed of light. It spat me out like a pip and my ship hurtled across the Milky Way at velocities hitherto unknown.
My time in the Hole had hardened my constitution and I found myself easily withstanding the terrific G forces pounding my craft.
In time I entered the Solar System and before I knew it I was burning through the atmosphere of my home planet Earth once again.
Splashing down in the ocean my ship spewed up gargantuan clouds of water vapour that could be seen for hundreds of miles.
Before long there was a tap on my hatch. I opened the door and a beaming rescue pilot began to speak.
My mouth opened and something horrible happened, something so terrible that I can barely force myself to remember.
The entirety of the pilot began to liquefy and enter my mouth and nose in a stream of fluidised blood and skin. I could not stop it happening. I could feel all the information in his DNA siphoning into mine, all the data in his brain draining into my skull. It expanded.
The rest of the rescue mission went the same way. Blended and upended into my widening black maw, their sentience merging with my own expanding consciousness.
I felt my head. It had grown to three times the size. My gut too was distended. I looked like a walrus on the beach, my huge mouth dribbling blood and bile into the golden sands.
But my peace was shattered when a whole cohort of people came hurtling over the dunes, running wildly and falling as if some tractor beam was pulling them.
Like the others they stood before me screaming and turned to mush before sliding down my gullet and bloating my body and mind.
Thousands more arrived and as my form grew to enormous proportions like a quivering mouthed bag as big as a tower block I realised that somehow I was still connected to the black hole I had escaped from, it's umbilical pouting gut.
As millions souped in my throat I also came to realise that this process would not stop until the singularity, of which I was an extension, had devoured all information on Earth and therefore all its inhabitants, human or otherwise.
As I mushroomed across the land and towered above the cities, a bloated pulsing abacus, I sensed a dreadful harrowing second of lessening.
My entire family; wife, children, grandchildren and Grandparents, were also blitzed in the chambers of my hideous mass and their memories swept clean.
But I was no longer human.
That brief twinge of grief was the final flicker of my former self before the terrible certainty of physics consumed my mind and soul entirely.
When all the living were inside me I began to digest the Earth, splitting the atoms and eating its data. The ground around me dissolved, the swirling miasma of a powdering planet.
In time I tasted magma.
Hot chemistry took over as I encircled the core. Swallowed like a gobstopper, It's death the birth of my heavy iron heart.
With a rusted fist shaking in the hole at the centre of the Solar System I turned to face the redundant Sun.
Warming, I cranked the colossal shafts of time and ragged that glorious orb from it's sacred mooring.
Ransomed by Chance, its flaming calculus was now, like me, but a stream of integers unable to escape the beautiful futility of becoming nothing at all.
Pfft.
