First came a supernova, dazzling the universe in brief, spendthrift glory before ebbing into twisty, multispectral clouds of new-forged atoms. Swirling eddies spiraled until one of them ignited—a newborn star.

The virgin sun wore whirling skirts of dust and electricity. Gas and rocks and bits of this and that fell into those pleats, gathering in dim lumps … planets …

One tiny worldlet circled at a middle distance. It had a modest set of properties:

mass—barely enough to draw in a passing asteroid or two;

moons—one, the remnant of a savage collision, but big enough to tug deep tides;

spin—to set winds churning through a fuming atmosphere;

density—a brew that mixed and separated, producing an unpromising surface slag;

temperature—heat was the planet’s only voice, a weak one, swamped by the blaring sun. Anyway, what can a planet tell the universe, in a reedy cry of infrared?

“This exists,” it repeated, over and over. “This is a condensed stone, radiating at about three hundred degrees, insignificant on the scale of stars.

“This speck, a mote, exists.”

A simple statement to an indifferent cosmos—the signature of a rocky world, tainted by salty, smoke-blown puddles.

But then something new stirred in those puddles. It was a triviality—a mere discoloration here and there. But from that moment the voice changed. Subtly, shifting in timbre, still faint and indistinct, it nevertheless seemed now to say,

“I … am …”