LEAVING LAS VEGAS

"We're souls in orbit," she said again, and waited for him to respond. When it was clear he wouldn't, she continued. "Around the Event Horizon."

He laughed. He had come as a mathematician, only to learn the house had mathematicians of its own. They were better; they always were. There has always been somebody better, faster, than him, and the opportunities had fallen away, student loans becoming unpayable debt, the weight of them dragging him to this place with its promise of freedom. Still, he knew enough science to catch her meaning. The velocity of money was more than an abstraction, here — it moved fast enough to create its own mass, pulling the hopeless toward it.

"It's somewhere on the north side," she'd said, and he realized he was a mirror in the conversation. "That's where the gradient is steepest. It's easier to move towards it from here. Easier to move from here to there than from anywhere to here."

The north side was the wasteland of laundromats and duplexes that became the final destination of anyone not lucky enough to make it in the city, which was most everyone, eventually. It was what he was driving through now, the burn in his eyes telling him dawn was coming, though only fifteen more minutes had passed. The air in the car felt heavy, like stretching fabric that had been pulled tight. He stepped harder on the gas, but the needle barely moved. At the Schwarzchild Radius, the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light, and incident particles fall forever inward.

He remembered the look on her face, a mixture of fear and fascination as she drew graphs in her mind, a whirlpool of vectors and forces leading to a single inevitable point. She grabbed his arm. "Listen," she said, "how long have you been here?"

"Uh…" Startled, he glanced at his phone. "A few minutes…"

"No," she said in an urgent voice, "here, in town."

"A few days…"

"Really? What day?"

"I can't remember exactly right now…"

"Right." She released his arm, backing away. "It will go slower the closer you get to the Singularity. Try to escape. Try it!" She was nearly yelling as she left.

The murmur of the bar, momentarily eclipsed by the sound of the casino, rose again to white noise. He checked his phone once more. He was on his third drink, but he'd only been here an hour.

He put down the glass and took the last twenty from his wallet. He left the bar and blinked in the sudden glare of neon. There was another way out, he knew — through the eye of the storm, into the Singularity. The odds… the odds were astronomical.