There really was nothing that could have prepared her for this. While there were trees nearby, they were spread far enough apart that she was allowed a full view of the sky above. There weren't even any clouds to obscure her view and the sky opened to her in a wide expanse that took her breath away.
The sky was a deep, deep blue and acted as a dark backdrop to the pinpoints of light that filled inky canvas to cover it from edge to edge on the horizon. She had thought the most beautiful thing she would ever see was the sunset, but she had been utterly, completely wrong.
As she continued to gaze, utterly entranced, she realized there were patterns there. One in particular—a hazy band of white light that stretched across the whole of the sky—was the most beautiful.
Jessica13 lowered to sit on the shoulder of the mech. Hot tears began to run down her cheeks and she fumbled in her pocket to retrieve what was left of the picture of her parents. She couldn't stop the tears but she wiped them away quickly because she couldn’t bear to not see the sky.
"Are you all right, Jessica13?" Mini asked and broke the silence that had fallen.
"I'm…yeah, I'm fine," she said and tried to laugh the tears away. It didn't work but she wasn't feeling sad.
Well, not only sad. There were too many emotions rushing through her that were difficult to describe.
"Are you sure?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I’m a little overwhelmed, is all. I never thought it would be this…amazing. I only… I… You know, my friends at Sanctuary used to call me Jessie because the I and the E look like they might be the 13 at the end of my name."
"Are we friends?" the AI asked.
"I…think we are," Jessica13 said. "After all, we've been through more than I've been through with any of my friends."
"I've never had a human friend," Mini said and sounded pensive. "I shall endeavor to be worthy of that designation."
"You already are." She smiled and her gaze traced the different patterns in the stars. "I… Well, I don't…do your data banks have anything on what those…stars do?"
"I'm not sure I understand what stars do. A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity. The star nearest to the Earth is the Sun."
"Wait, the sun is a star?" That caught her attention. "But it's so big. And…well, it shines when none of the others do."
"The reason why you can't see any other stars when the sun is out is that it outshines all the others," he explained. "And it's not necessarily large, merely much closer, relatively speaking. The sun is large enough to fit one-point-three million Earths inside it and is actually not that large when compared to some of the larger stars we know of. It is almost a hundred and fifty million kilometers away and is still the closest star."
"Holy fuck, that's far away," she said. "How…how long would it take for us to get there in the Minato?"
"Well, we could start running now and not stop once and it would still take longer than your natural life to get there. Similarly, to reach the nearest star, we could keep running for a thousand years and not get significantly closer to the second closest one. It's so far away that it takes the light from the star over four years to get to us."
"Wait, what? How… Wait, how long does it take the light from the sun to reach us, then?"
"A little over eight minutes," Mini said.
"Wow. Light must travel fast," Jessica13 shook her head to try to restore order to her suddenly rampant thoughts. "But if the light in those stars takes so long to get to us, how does it…you know, get to us? How do we see the stars?"
"The light travels and so the image travels," the AI explained. "It can be assumed that a great many of the stars have since died and all we see is the light they gave off before they died."
"How do stars die?" There seemed to be no end to the hunger for new information.
"You're full of questions, aren't you, Jessie?" Mini said although he paused before he used the nickname.
She shrugged. "I…well, yeah. Machines always made sense to me. I could look at the coding or the build and they kinda spoke to me. Even when I was a child, I could understand what they were saying. Most of the other subjects of study were difficult. But machines and computers came naturally to me. It’s the Athena genes, they said, and I didn't really know what they meant. But that never kept me from being curious about it. The fact that I had a harder time understanding them meant I was much more curious about it. So…I understand if you don't like the questions. But like the machines, they come naturally to me."
The silence lingered for a moment.
"Well, stars don't die like humans do," the AI said after a few seconds had passed. "Dying is more of a human alliteration to what they do. Eventually, once the fuel that powers the stars burns out, the core shrinks and the star expands. It becomes larger and less bright until it collapses in on itself. If the mass of the star is small, it becomes a white dwarf, barely visible in the night sky as it expands and then cools off over billions of years. If its mass is large enough, it collapses in on itself and becomes what they call a black hole. It's so massive and so dense that everything that passes close enough is sucked in, even light. We don't know what one looks like since no light escapes.
