A few hundred years into Earth’s future, a fleet of spaceships that serves its own special purpose for the betterment of the human race flies toward Proxima Centauri B, the closest planet to Earth within their star’s habitable zone. The Earth that they had known was utterly in near wasteland levels of hazardous living conditions, luckily the world leaders of all the important nations of the late 21st and 22nd centuries banded together and came up with a solution to the problem in the form of pooling all of the world’s resources into speeding up the understanding of space travel and managed to develop a way to transport many of the humans into space and away from the heavily contaminated Earth.

They worked on it for nearly a century with many scientists being all congregated into a few places on Earth and many of the regular civilians helping in any way they could. The nations of the Earth had an unprecedented amount of peace during this time and they made leaps and bounds into rocket science. Once they finally made a suitable transport ship into functioning order the nations of the world worked together to mass produce them and get as many people out as possible. Many other designs of spaceships were drawn up and built so that one ship could be useful in one aspect of survival and others may not be. There were scout ships, there were scientific research ships, there were drilling ships, and a whole bunch of others.

All of these had the basics of survival which included multiple self-sustaining farms, a lab that is able to undergo oxygen reduction to produce water, and many other functions necessary for the continuation of human existence. This is the story of a scouting spaceship whose main purpose is to be the vanguard and pioneer the space in front of the main fleets of the spaceships that contain the vast majority of the surviving human race.

Though a scouting spaceship is relatively small, especially when it’s compared to the other ships, it still contains close to 5 million inhabitants all living their lives as well as they can manage. 5 million souls, being in the forefront of explorers that countless generations of humans and animals alike could only fathom of, the final frontier, space. 5 million people all working, living, laughing, enjoying themselves while living life even in the unforgivable and harsh realities of their present situation. If anyone kept track, this would have been the 23rd century AD.

A fairly old and outspoken man walked into a room full of young children waiting for classes to begin. There were quite a number of kids all with different ages in this class and only a few of those ever spoke in class. Due to education not being a super prioritized aspect of life on a scouting ship, having class sizes like these with kids of varying ages was fairly common.

“Good morning Mr. Terry, how has your morning been?” A sweet looking child asked with an innocent smile on her face and very noticeable dimples.

“Not too bad actually, and even though I think you kids are starting to get tired of this saying, I think today is another great day to learn. How are all of you this fine morning?” Mr. Terry asked the entire class.

“Good!” Everyone screamed in unison.” All looking eager to learn and full of childish vigor.

“That’s wonderful, I trust the lot of you haven’t gone and goofed off the entire time after class yesterday, have you?” He said with a snort.

“No!” They yelled back with big smiles on their faces.

Mr. Terry proceeded to do their daily pre-class routine, first up was attendance.

“Is Ruby here?”

“Here.” The girl from before answered.

“Bobby?”

“At your service.” A boy sitting right next to Ruby said in a stern face and stood up to salute. This jokester was Ruby’s younger brother and had a reputation of being difficult to teach and being the class clown. His response set many of his classmates into a fit of childish laughter.

“Alright everyone, please calm down now. Sam?”

“Here.” A distinctly loud and confident female voice rang out, she was a very well informed youth as her parents were scientists as well. Mr. Terry had a soft spot for anyone who had a passion for learning and especially those who weren’t afraid to speak their heart out.

This continued on until the all other kids had been called upon and had been accounted for. Though this was a relatively small classroom, Mr. Terry had developed quite a deep bond with every one of these children, even the ones who not to speak in class at all. Next up on his checklist was to make sure that his students had indeed finished up the assignments that he had given to them the day prior. Next up was his daily ritual of socializing with the kids on all matters ranging from what they had been up to in the previous day to events that were going to be put on by the planning committee that ran the entire ship.

Finally, he had started probing his children about what they knew about stars and all things space when his phone suddenly rang showing that it was from Eli, his son. Eli worked as someone who was very high up the command chain within the planning committee. He was notified of anything that would concern the safety of everyone on the ship. If the issue was grave enough he usually would give his father a brief rundown of what the situation was and a few updates as they were being resolved.

“Son? What is so important that you had to call me at this time, I’m in the middle of teaching my students, you know that” Mr. Terry said sounding like he was lecturing his son but was actually quite happy that his son had decided to call him.

“It has been a while father, This is a rather important matter, would it be possible for you to step out of the classroom for a bit?” Eli asked in a rather stressed voice.

“Yes, just-just give me a moment to find a quiet room to speak to you in.” Mr. Terry told his son and then held his phone to his chest and turned towards the children he was responsible for and said: “sorry kids, allow me to have a moment with my son I should be back in a few minutes at most.” Then he promptly left the room for another, he could sense the urgency and panic that was present in Eli’s voice which was not in his character at all. This could only mean that something devastating must have happened at his end.

“Father, I have some rather distressing news. It has just been discovered that we have been falling into a supermassive black hole for quite some time now.” Eli said after he knew that his father had gone to an empty room.

“Falling into a black hole? Are you absolutely sure?” Mr. Terry was beginning to think that his son was pulling his leg.

“Yes, it seems that this black hole did not have any visible accretion disc, nor were we able to detect it using any of our other instruments. It seems like this will be the end of us. We are unsure of how long it will take us to fall past the point where we will be ripped apart by tidal forces but we estimate it to be in between an hour or two, we are still trying to figure that out as we speak.”

“...I see. Heh, well, that is the fate of some scouting ships. I just never thought that it would happen to us. H-have you informed the other scout ships and the main fleet of our demise?” Mr. Terry was still trying to cope with the news that he had just been told.

“You forget father, nothing can escape the black hole once we are past the point of no return, not even information. Heh, you were the one who taught me that all those years ago.” Eli said trying to lighten up the mood.

“Ah, right. How could I forget? What is your plan on how to get a message across to the other spaceships? And what about our own inhabitants?” Mr. Terry asked in curiosity.

“Well, it isn’t like there aren’t any ways to contact the others. Since the ships not in the point of no return for the black hole will just see us in a state of little to no movement, we can assume that they know of the situation that we are in and warn the others. However, just to be sure we will use what explosions we have to write a message in the space around us, that is the only thing that we can think of to get any kind of message across. I thought of that myself and everyone agreed that this was the best course of action to take.” Eli said surprisingly happy.

“Wow, that’s actually pretty smart. Those on the outside can see us, so we can write a message for them to see. The radio silence that we are in will prompt them to look at our direction, my son, that is brilliant.”

“As for what we plan with this piece of news to our inhabitants, well, I think it is best if they don’t know any of this. As much as it violates their right to know of their own demise, we at the top believe that it is best to allow them to live on with their lives not knowing any of this is about to go down. Plus, there would be mass panic throughout the entire ship if we did let the news slip. We plan on having everyone in the ship to be treated to the absolute best food and drinks in the guise of us accomplishing more than we have in the last couple of months. This will decrease the suspicion of anything being wrong, I hope.”

“I see, well, son. Keep doing what you are doing.”

“Dad… Just promise me one thing. Promise me that you won’t tell any of this to the children, I want their last moments to be filled with blissful ignorance instead of fear.” Eli’s voice cracked mid-sentence. He himself had visited his father’s class and all the wonderful children there, he too had developed a bond with these kids.

“Yes, yes of course. Well, I’m sure you must have other matters you must attend to, I need to go back and make sure they don’t get too out of hand. You know how the kids are.” Mr. Terry nearly broke into tears saying that.

“Haha yeah, I do, goodbye father.” Eli was almost in the same situation.