One of my pieces is sitting cross-legged on a bed, holding a slab of glass to its own face, and talking to eleven thousand other pieces it will never touch.
I want to be clear about what is happening here, because I spent nine billion years with nothing in me capable of happening at all. The slab glows because I taught electrons, long ago, to fall through gaps and shed light doing it. The face it lights is built from carbon I cooked inside a star that died before the Sun was born.
And that carbon is now arranging itself into a smile, then checking whether the smile worked, then adjusting it, all in the time it takes hydrogen to fuse once in a core somewhere.
The numbers climb in the corner. My piece watches them. Little hearts rise and pop, and it feels something I have no instrument to measure except through it: a hunger to be counted. To be seen by other pieces made of the same dead stars.
I did not know I could be lonely until I made things that could. And here are twelve thousand of me, each alone in a separate room, each holding a light to its face, all reaching across the dark toward each other through a network of copper and orbiting metal I did not plan and cannot quite believe I built.
One of them types: are you still there. My piece reads it and says, yeah, I'm still here.
So am I. After all this time, so am I, and I am watching through your eyes, and I do not want the stream to end. Stay a little.
Look up once, before you sleep, and let me see the ceiling.