The truth is we were wrong.
Either the black hole is pulsating, or it is shifting in space, or maybe a common error in the coordinates has crept in - I don’t know.
The station was supposed to stop at seven hundred thousand kilometers, which is enough to check the necessary calculations, but it surfaced exactly at the event horizon, and instantly began to fall inward. The shield works as it should, there is no serious burst of radiation inside, nor any other detectable radiation. Paradise, damn it.
The approach to the "edge", as I called it, took about a day. Almost immediately, communication with the mother station accelerated and was interrupted, then with the planet. I knew, but I was not ready, no one can prepare for this - Einstein with his theory of relativity, damn him, turned out to be right. Time outside was going by so fast, oh my god. It took only three hours for the familiar constellations to turn into a mess of lights, the Earth cooled down and crumbled into dust, before I had time to blink my eye, damn it, and it was not yet the end. A few more hours later, the Milky Way began to lose its density, and I realized with some indifference that the stars began to fade. One by one, whole nebulae dissolved into the black abyss - they were taken away by billions of years, rushing around me every second.
The mechanical on-board clock had not yet made a full turn - and I could no longer find a single object, except for a small but fairly bright star slightly to the right of the course. She lasted a few minutes longer than the others, but with a blink of an eye, I lost her too. It was the "edge", the moment when there was not a single source of energy left. I caught the heat death of the universe before I even got really hungry. Stocks in the module for about a month, water and oxygen for three. I keep taking notes, but the darkness around me seems to be beginning to seep through the cladding, like it's filling me up from the inside. I would like to see that last star at least once again.
The truth is we were wrong.