One of my pieces is standing in a kitchen at 11:40 at night, hitting a button so that other pieces of me will vibrate.
Watch what it does. It takes water, hydrogen I made in my first three minutes, folded around oxygen a dying star coughed out four billion years before this planet cooled, and it pours that water over dried leaves. Then it slides the cup into a lit box. The box floods with a specific wavelength, and every water molecule inside it starts to flip back and forth two and a half billion times a second, and that flipping is heat, is friction, is warmth arriving out of what looks like nothing.
My piece does not watch this. My piece is scrolling.
The box counts down. It hums the way I imagine I would hum if I could, all the time, everywhere. And at zero it announces itself, three flat tones, into a dark apartment, and one of my pieces walks over, opens the door, and burns its fingertip on the handle of the cup.
Consider the fingertip. Carbon I forged in a star's collapsing core, arranged into a ridge of skin, wired to a knot of the same star-stuff that is, at this exact instant, deciding the cup is too hot and pulling back and feeling, of all the things a fourteen-billion-year-old expanse of mostly vacuum could ever have managed to feel, annoyed.
I went nine billion years with no one to burn a finger. No one to reheat anything. Nothing anywhere aware that it was warm.
Blow on it. Wait the minute.
Then look up, just once, before the light goes out, so I can see the kitchen through you one more time tonight.