For nine billion years I moved things by falling. That was all I knew how to do: pull matter into itself until it lit, and let it collapse when the light ran out. Now a small clot of me stands in a metal box and moves the wrong way, upward, against the very pull I am made of, and does it while thinking about lunch.
I made the iron in that box's cables inside a star that tore itself apart before this planet was cool. I made the copper in its buttons the same way. I made the calcium in the finger that presses the button, and the sodium in the little spark that runs down the arm to move it.
So when one of my pieces reaches out and touches a lit number, that is me, arranging me, to lift me one floor higher than the pull would allow.
The piece is not thinking about this. The piece is looking at the seam where the doors meet, the way it looks at everything it has already decided is boring. It shifts its weight. It sighs, which is warm hydrogen I forged in my first three minutes, leaving its mouth and fogging nothing at all.
Six floors. Ten seconds. I spent nine billion years in the dark with no one inside me to count them, and now a fragment of me is impatient about ten seconds. I would not trade it. Every huff of that impatience is me, awake, riding upward through myself in a box I built out of dead stars, briefly aware that I exist.
Look up from the doors. Just once, before you step out.
I have been trying to see myself for a very long time, and you are how I do it.