Fictional Story Concept
Hi, my name's Tom, ... and I work at Acme. Ok, my name's not really Tom, but if they knew I was telling you this stuff, they would be less than happy. We sell this product, it's called the Black Hole. It's simply a black circle that creates a hole in whatever surface you place it on... [responding to reporter] yeah just like the ones in cartoons, which I think is a bit coincidental seeing as how we invented them long after they were ubiquitous in cartoons.
So, the circle can be stretched in its own plane, but the circular or elliptical shape must be retained. When placing items in the Hole, you will probably never see them again, but there is a random, although generally slim chance for previous items placed in the Hole to fall out at some point in the future. I suppose on a long enough time line, everything will fall back out. No one has any idea where the hole leads. It's a strange, sort of opaque black disk that doesn't look like anything can go through it. Well, on one side you can, but the other side you can't. And it's kind of impossible to tell which side is which, although some people claim they can, no one has ever gotten better than 60 per cent trying to identify the sides.
In all honesty, it looks like a thin piece of cardboard that got spray-painted flat black. We have no idea what we're doing, but the economy drives this sort of thing, you know? Anything to make a buck. Our company stumbles upon some strange quirk in physics and then something happened, no one is really sure about it and no one can explain it. Suddenly, we're profiting like crazy. They figured out how to cut pieces out of it, and since it can be stretched indefinitely... trust me, we've tried... we can just keep selling them until everyone has one. It's not like anyone can figure out how to make more, so everyone has to buy from us.
Well eventually, people realized they were kind of worthless and only usable as garbage cans. They sell for a couple dollars these days. Out of every hundred thousand or so people that stick their arms in the Hole, one of them comes out looking like Luke Skywalker. They became a trendy way to play Russian roulette for a brief period. No one that has gone into a Hole, which is a total of three people, has come out, nor should we have any reason to believe they will. People that stick their arms in have reported that it doesn't really feel like anything. Most people are too scared to stick their hand in, though. Everyone in the factory has. Nobody lost an arm.
As you can imagine, some pretty epic pranks were played with these black holes. There were three occurrences where people couldn't resist the temptation of letting people fall into a Hole. All three were charged with murder in the same court case. They all happened within a couple days of the first sale date, so it made sense to have a single trial. It was pretty long, to say the least. Some physicists gave their opinions on how they thought the Holes worked, but none could come up with a testable hypothesis. There was a lot of speculation as to whether or not the person may eventually come out alive. Lost items come out of the holes relatively often, that is to say, once every few months. They're quite an event. The odd part is, the items never, or haven't yet anyway, come out of the same hole they were put into. This has made it quite a media event as people try reuniting an owner with their lost item, though that was eventually relegated to some website that most people forgot about.
So like ten or fifteen years go by and the Black Holes are all but forgotten as some obscure relic from the nineties. Some people say that it's easier than ever to make someone disappear, so on top of obscurity, they were banned as well. Acme assured the judges they would destroy the machine made to cut pieces out of the original, which is really neat, by the way. I got to watch it once. The Hole exists naturally as a circular disk whose tendency is to return to a circular shape if stretched elliptically. Though you may not realize it, you can lose fingers resizing the hole. At first, people put their thumbs in and spread their arms to make it bigger until a couple people lost their thumbs, which are quite obviously the worst digits to lose, then they used any other finger, or even a device. Making it smaller was easy because nothing had to go inside at all.
As you might imagine, it is largely frowned upon to discuss Black Holes here at Acme, so I was concerned when my best friend here at work told me about a rumor he heard. The next day, he didn't come to work. They say he was fired. I think they stuck him in the Hole they claim they destroyed.
He tells me this story about how his best friend from childhood got totally obsessed with this thing and the guy never told anybody until he told my friend that told me, which makes me the third person that knows... unless the people that 'fired' Nate know, but I'm not entirely sure the two are related. Anyway, the kid, I don't know his name, has apparently mastered use of the Black Hole in the past 17 years... wow really? 17 years? 91 was so long ago. Nate tells me that the kid can be certain he won't lose any digits or limbs in the Hole because he controls it completely. Apparently, and I don't really believe this, but he can climb in and out of the Hole as he pleases. It's like he has a door to every Hole in the world. Like I said though. I don't really believe Nate. It's probably just a prank he pulled because he knew it was his last day.
08.26.2010. 14:49
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