Quorra hadn’t believed Flynn when he explained what a star is. She’d been reading Shakespeare’s sonnets—a much lighter read compared to all the Nietzsche and Marx she’d consumed recently—and had questions about what “to pluck judgement from the stars” means or whatever. Well, Flynn had said, Shakespeare probably thought he could, like, read fate through the stars.
Then what are stars?
Oh, jeez. Uh, well, they’re big flaming balls of gas in space. And they’re millions, billions, trillions of lightyears—uh, they’re really, really, really far away from each other. Like, unimaginably so. So they just look like little bright spots in the sky at night. And there are billions and billions of them all over the place. Just everywhere.
But they’re really far away.
Yeah.
And they’re on fire.
Uh… yeah, kinda.
Okay?
It had seemed ridiculous at the time. Maybe, she’d thought, Flynn was playing some kind of joke on her or something. Given her some false information about his world just for the hell of it. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d do something like that. Maybe.
Now, though, as she lies in a field outside the city, Sam beside her, and with so many thousands of lights in the sky—she believes him.
Sam had shown her pictures of stars, the Earth; videos of space travel, astronauts on the ISS. Theories on the creation of the universe, theories on its death. The world of the Users is so much more vast than she’d thought—expansive through time and space in ways that were impossible on the Grid—and it shocks her that what she’s seeing, what she’s experiencing, is only a small part of that. How many billions of worlds exist out there? How infinitely far does it all go? The stars in the sky—these little bright spots, all over, everywhere—are only a glimpse at the boundless cosmos.
She wishes she’d believed him earlier. She wishes she could see it all.