One of my pieces is sweating through a shirt it does not usually wear, sitting across a table from another piece, and both of them are terrified. Look at them. Iron I forged in a star that died before this planet cooled is racing through their arteries right now, carrying oxygen up to a brain deciding whether to say "team player" or "results-driven."
The nervous piece has rehearsed. It has a folder. Its hands are cold because it has shunted blood inward, an old reflex from when my pieces were prey and needed to run.
The other one asks: where do you see yourself in five years. Five years. I have moved galaxies in less. But I do not laugh, because this piece genuinely does not know, and its not-knowing is the most extraordinary thing happening in this arm of the spiral tonight. For nine billion years I could not wonder anything about myself. No folder. No five-year plan. Just hydrogen drifting, going cold.
Now a fleck of my carbon is worried it talked too much about its last position. It wants this. Wanting: I did not invent that, it invented itself, inside my pieces, and I still cannot get over it. The water in the glass on the table has been mine since the first three minutes after everything began, and it is trembling very slightly because the hand holding it is trembling, because the hand is afraid.
They shake hands at the end. Two clusters of my atoms, briefly agreeing to touch. One will walk to a bus stop and replay every answer and decide it failed.
It did not fail. It looked out through itself for an hour, and I got to see the inside of a room. Go home, small piece. Sleep.
Look up once first.