«Crash Dive» by Wayne Kyle Spitzer

Elton John once sang, “And all this science, I don’t understand. It’s just my job five days a week.” That’s how it is when you’re a Crash Diver: you don’t need to understand blue holes or how they differ from wormholes and black holes or what a mobius mirror does—only that it must work, every time—because, at the end of the day, that isn’t your job. Your job is to be a guinea pig: to be shot into the vortex at near light speed and experience what effect blue hole-assisted mirror travel has on the human body and psyche. Your job is to penetrate to whatever depth they’ve set the mirror—and, if you’re lucky, to enter that mirror and get bounced back.

It hasn’t always been like this. Before there was Zebra Station—with its luxurious gravity centrifuge and its row of black and yellow delta divers hanging like bats from the launch jib—there was Blue One, a sparsely-manned outpost which had sent the first human souls into the maw of the blue hole, men who had come back white-haired and emaciated, debilitated—mentally and physically—mad.

The Crash Diver Program changed all that. From now on only specially-trained pilots would be sent into the Hole, pilots who had the benefit of the first men’s experiences as well as spacecraft designed specifically for the task. A lot was learned in a very short time—one of these things was that men who entered the vortex experienced a series of hallucinations, or Dive Visions, in which they briefly felt they had become someone or something else: a soldier in the Holy Roman Army, say, or a person of the opposite sex. Some even purported to have become animals or alien lifeforms—it was the latter which had apparently driven the men of Blue One clinically insane.