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Interstellar
He had decided that he had had enough; he would break free and find someone else. She had warmed his hemispheres and cooled his polar caps for all of his life but what had she done for him lately? He took a few orbits to think about it and how he would explain it to her but then remembered that she had eight other planets who would continue to spin around her and she would be fine without him, besides in the last eighteen million years at least two other masses had started to circle her that would eventually form full planets.
Shifts in his internal structure, massive tectonic upheaval provided him with the momentum to break free. Using her own gravitational pull against her he knocked his center of gravity off kilter and shifted his orbit until it was too unstable. With a wrenching shift that sheared one of his largest land masses free and clear of his atmosphere he broke free and careened out of her solar system, leaving behind a ragged asteroid belt of fragments from his surface drifting in the path he had once occupied.
Magma flowed into the gap left by his lost continent, plugging the gap and leaving him with a painful reminder of the split, but he soon forgot about it when he spied deep in the cosmic noise a twinkling star in his path ahead. His surface cooled and all life on it died off quickly enough, he focused all his efforts on the now constant burst of light from the far off star.
Through a prolonged ice age where all but his inner core fell inert and lifeless he travelled through the depths of space, through nebula and cosmic clouds, along the outer spiral and onwards, towards the new star he had chosen to woo. She might not welcome him immediately; she might need time and space to become accustomed to his presence but she would warm to him eventually when he had established a firm orbit around her and realised that he wouldn't be going anywhere.
Eventually even the core froze solid and he hibernated for the longest time, his surface giving rise for a few million years to an intelligent silica-based race that unfortunately never achieved anything beyond rudimentary sentience before dying out.
Slumbering and slowly he began to awaken, was this warmth the embrace of his new impending star he could feel warming his surface? His core began to bubble and froth and he sought throughout the skies for the teasing presence of that once-distant star. But all he could see was endless void, a curtain of black, nowhere was there the glowing beacon of light he had journeyed so far to meet.
Had he been knocked off course by some asteroid strike? Surely he would have felt that. Had he perhaps bypassed the star altogether? Caught in a slingshot and propelled away from her in some cruel twist of fate, oversleeping and missing her? No, it finally dawned on him as he approached the area darker than anywhere else, she had expired long ago like a broken dream perhaps even before he had left his last star far behind. What welcomed him now was the gaping maw of a black hole, willing to accept all the time and space he had to offer, and all the matter he was composed of.
Oct.23.2007