Science desk

There's a Black Hole in West Point

Light can't escape it. Neither can you.

By the Rebel News county desk. West Point, Monday 24 January 1994. 1 min read.

Night on a snowy small-town square: a black hole hangs over the red-brick town hall, its glowing accretion disk made of jackets, ammo boxes, eggs, banknotes and frying pans spiralling in, junk streaming up out of the windows, and survivors in puffer jackets being dragged in off the square, glitching like a broken video game: smeared into scanlines, split into red, green and blue copies, dissolving into pixel blocks. — Town hall, from the last safe distance anybody could find. Rebel News picture desk

The mass

WEST POINT. Something on the town square got too heavy for this world. Every jacket, every box of nails, every egg anybody ever carried home got dropped on the floor of town hall and left there. Somewhere around the five thousandth thing, it stopped being a mess and started being a star. A collapsing one.

The pull

You feel it before you see it. Your feet go heavy. The world stutters. Then everything stops: mid-stride, mouth open, one boot in the air, until the universe spits you out somewhere else entirely. Some of you got spat out and walked straight back in for more.

Weighing the hole

3,196Weight, if you had to carry it all
5,223Things on one building's floors
2,170On one square of the front hall

A mayor's office at night: a heap of ammo boxes, paperwork, banknotes, eggs, trash bags and jackets rises to the ceiling and bends the room toward it, the desk sliding in, the flag leaning, papers floating, and a small survivor with a flashlight looks up at it. — The mayor's office. The mayor is in there somewhere. Rebel News picture desk

The weight

Here's the science. The world is cut into chunks, eight paces a side, and every one of them gets saved, loaded and hauled around by everybody nearby. A normal chunk of West Point weighs about three kilobytes. The heaviest one under town hall weighs three hundred and seventy-one. That's not a building. That's a dwarf star.

An ink map of West Point's town square: building footprints, a scatter of small black dots for items lying on floors around town, and one enormous black mass of overlapping dots over town hall, ringed by dashed circles. — Every dot is items on the floor. Rebel News picture desk

What one chunk of West Point weighskilobytes

A normal chunk2.8Half the town is lighter
A busy chunk10.5Heavier than nine in ten
Town hall, the heaviest371131 times normal

Our advice

Live inside the event horizon? Shelves, crates, lockers, anything with a lid. Everything you drop makes the hole hungrier. Just passing through? Give town hall a wide berth and don't look at the mayor's window.

And whatever you do, don't drop anything.

The mass

The pull

Weighing the hole

3,196Weight, if you had to carry it all
5,223Things on one building's floors
2,170On one square of the front hall

The mayor's office. The mayor is in there somewhere. Rebel News picture desk

The weight

Every dot is items on the floor. Rebel News picture desk

What one chunk of West Point weighskilobytes

A normal chunk2.8Half the town is lighter
A busy chunk10.5Heavier than nine in ten
Town hall, the heaviest371131 times normal