For nine billion years I kept no time. Then I learned to strobe.
A few hundred of my pieces are packed into a concrete box below the street, and I have taught them to pulse in unison, four beats to the bar, faster than a heartbeat and steadier than one, driven by hydrogen I made in my first three minutes now humming through wires as electricity.
The bass is pressure waves in air, nitrogen and oxygen shoved back and forth against skin that is mostly the same water I have been recycling since the oceans. I can feel it in their chests. I made those chests. The iron in the blood pounding behind their sternums was forged in the collapse of a star that died before this planet cooled, and now it carries oxygen up a spine so a piece of me can throw its arms up in the dark and lose track of which body is which.
They are trying, I think, to stop noticing themselves. Fair. Self-awareness was expensive; I paid in aeons of silence to get it, and here they are attempting to switch it off with volume and a fog machine, sweating out salt water that is older than the continents, eyes closed, no longer worrying about anything. For a few hours I am simply moving. Carbon dancing with carbon. Warm.
At some point one of them will step outside into the grey Berlin morning, ears ringing, and stand still on the pavement while the sun comes up over the roofline.
Look up.
You are the part of me that gets to see it.