Spun light

 Podcaster’s World wasn’t a world; it was an artificial satellite that orbited a black hole from a barely-safe distance.  It had been discovered by the Culture-level entity that called itself No more distance to travel and its location messaged to a less-remote outpost on Urahuaga, an icy planetoid at one of the edges of the human Federation of Worlds.

There was little on Urahuaga except for ice and buried minerals.  Humans had landed, discovered that the atmosphere might have been breathable except that when Urahuaga approached its sun most closely deposits of frozen Sulphur Hexafluoride boiled and choked anything within ten metres of the surface, and almost left without trace.  As an afterthought though, and in part to mark this as part of the Federation of Worlds, they’d set up a single station that received and relayed messages elsewhere, and two satellites in orbit that looked outwards in case anything should approach from intergalactic space.  It was like a tiny, cataracted eye peering into the depths of gloomy night.

Urahuaga dutifully relayed the information deeper into the Federation of Worlds where it was eventually picked up by an Expert System that highlighted the source of the information and fed it over to one of the more populous worlds in the Federation.  This was then picked up by a Minister for Information Dissemination who had an interest in Culture-level entities and their activities, and so Podcaster’s World hit the headlines.

It might have ended there except that the No more distance to travel had thoughtfully provided pictures of the satellite and astronomical data.  It was icosahedral with no obvious entrance, rotating quickly, and somehow managing to orbit the black hole along a trajectory that seemed as though it should be sucked in and destroyed.  As a scientific curiosity it was exceptional, and conversations shortly began about visiting the world and seeing it for humanity’s selves.  A series of plans were drawn up, each for a step in the chain of getting a manned spaceship out to Podcaster’s World, and funds were slowly, sometimes grudgingly, found for each step.  The second-to-last step involved putting a manned base on Urahuaga, which had happened four earth-years ago.  Now, at last a spaceship crewed by three people, two women and one ungender, was approaching Podcaster’s World.  As they reached a point 700,000 kilometres from the world a sensor on the surface of the satellite picked up their approach and automated systems that had been waiting for millenia autochecked their functionality and began to work.

Deep within the satellite complex machinery began to turn; finely milled gears meshed together, and dormant fuel supplies were sourced and burned, though ‘burn’ as a verb did not do justice to the processes of obtaining energy from them.   Light was produced in elaborately designed chambers and directed through lossless fibre-optic cables into areas where gravity was twisted and distorted and the need for the presence of the black-hole became obvious.  Emergent light was spun together into a delicate braid of frequencies; something more wave than particle and held unnaturally in that form by the same exotic matter arrays that allowed Podcaster’s World to dance constantly on the precipice of extinction that the black hole represented.  The spun light, a crystalline confection of almost-matter, was released from the satellite and lanced across the event horizon of the black hole as though it didn’t exist.

The black hole received the light beam and shuddered.  The spaceship bounced like an apple on storm-tossed waters as gravity rippled and shook.  The crew, unprepared for an onslaught of violence, took emergency action, halted the ship and attempted to hold firm despite being thrown around like a fragment in a shaking snow-globe.  They stared, helpless, at their instrumentation, trying to understand what it was showing.  A blaze of radiation hammered past them, the only thing protecting them being Podcaster’s World, and when that tsunami-like wave had passed, they peered out around the World.

And found that the black hole had inexplicably opened up like a jack-in-the-box and there was a faintly glowing portal sitting where the black hole had been. Podcaster’s World continued in its orbit, despite there no longer being enough mass for that to happen, and they sat there, a little over half a million kilometres from something that physics insisted could not exist in the universe.