Overthinking the Schwarzschild Defence

This post was adapted from a Mastodon post I wrote on January 21, 2023.

Read the story first!

The Schwarzschild Defence (2023) by M. V. Melcer is a very fun short science fiction story and highly recommended reading. UPDATE (June 23, 2024): Given the story is now paywalled, I replaced the link with an archived version. I particularly love its punchy style that delivers so much in so few words. Its choices are effective for the story told, from the format giving only one side of the interview to the downright chilling twists, delivered so nonchalantly. It feels fresh while maintaining a classic sci-fi feel, down to the commentary on gender roles and violence against women (consider that a content warning).

Still, I can’t be the only one who thinks the argument as presented doesn’t work legally or even physics-wise, right? If you like overthinking things, and more importantly if you’ve read the story, maybe you’d like to join me in overthinking a delightful story!

Seriously. Read it. It’s less than a thousand words and brilliantly written. I’ll wait.

Checking the laws

So, can you see which parts don’t hold up? Legally speaking, even if we take the narrator of the story, let’s call her “Mileva,” at her word that Xavier will not die (a claim I highly doubt, see below), she has by her admission committed some pretty serious crimes.

One is the crime of false imprisonment, meaning detaining someone against their will without legal justification. Mileva sabotaged Xavier into an inescapable prison and there’s no way this doesn’t count as false imprisonment, especially when she was reckless enough to admit at least twice to the police that this wasn’t what Xavier intended or wanted with the flight.

In the jurisdiction I live in, false imprisonment carries a penalty of up to 10 years’ incarceration if committed against a spouse or other close family member. Committing cruel acts against a close family member while keeping them falsely imprisoned carries a penalty of at least 2 years’ imprisonment. The penalty is increased by up to 50% if the false imprisonment is done with the possession of a dangerous object, and both the black hole and the tampered-with spaceship arguably qualify.

Overall, Mileva is looking at some pretty heavy charges and had better get her lawyers scrambling. Given the severity of the effects, the incontrovertible evidence, and her intent, freely admitted to a police detective—without a lawyer to advise her, what was she thinking?!—to trap Xavier in the black hole, it is very likely she will have the book thrown at her.

Mileva has also, by her admission, tampered with sensitive equipment, damaging Xavier’s property knowing he is undertaking a dangerous and sensitive flight. Through this she caused Xavier to make unwanted contact with the event horizon of the black hole, which is battery.

Even if Xavier suffers no other physical harm (which I doubt, more on that soon), slowing down his physical process well beyond human levels is unwanted interference with his body, a form of inflicted physical injury that exacerbates the crimes of false imprisonment and battery. I’m sure there have been more crimes committed, but these are some of the big ones.

Checking the laws of physics

The charges outlined above rest on Mileva’s insistence that Xavier is physically unharmed and will live a long, long time in the black hole. But will he? I’m not formally trained in physics so I’m on less certain ground here, but it doesn’t seem that way to me, and discussions like this one seem to confirm my suspicion.

If time slows down as you go down a black hole and the gravitational pull becomes inescapable, wouldn’t the parts of the spaceship and of Xavier be pulled down at different rates, meaning he and the spaceship will be literally atomized? If anything he’s going to have the longest, most protracted death ever. Not that I care, the guy’s an ass and deserves it, but the whole twist of the story depends on Mileva’s actions not being murder.

I mean maybe Mileva is right, and the story was worded very cleverly here, that this Xavier-molasses and his eventual atom-level dissolution will happen so slowly in a Schwarzschild black hole, at a time scale well beyond everyone’s lifespans, that it can’t be murder in the conventional sense. Murder revolves around the idea of cutting someone’s life short, so what do you do when someone stretches it out, longer and longer beyond the shape lives were ever meant to take, before a horrible end?

This is why I believe the better legal tacks to take are false imprisonment, battery, and attendant serious injury with property damage and sabotage sprinkled in for spice. But under no circumstance can Mileva get away scot-free as she claims.

Notes & conclusions

I’d like to note this isn’t me endorsing the incarceral state, far less the misogyny and threats Mileva was subjected to by her account. All I’m doing is analyzing the internal logic of the story, which is remarkable for raising these questions at all. If Isaac Asimov in his classic The Billiard Ball (1967) can stretch, or shall we say fail to stretch, the science in almost exactly the same way,¹ I don’t see why M. V. Melcer can’t be afforded the same leniency. Science fiction is fiction in the end, and between perfect fidelity to the facts and a good story there’s no harm in choosing the latter.

I also think that, if we read the story “straight” along with the fact-checking, a very different reading can emerge than the original impression of a domestic violence survivor putting her abuser away from good and walking away cackling with his fortune: Instead the story can become one of a traumatized survivor who saved herself with an unthinkable act of desperation that has changed her forever, and ended up self-sabotaging herself in her panic and inability to accept the reality of what she’s done. That’s another thing about fiction, that it’s roomy enough for different interpretations, and arguably it’s a great story that can admit so many readings in such an economy of words.