To bridge the divide, perhaps, requires you to find where the gap lies. You turn to archives, to history, to understand their culture to know where it clashes up against your own. They offer it to you, let you leaf through River-climber past, a hundred different specks of who they used to be viewed at once; how everything is named for what is cherished and what brings that quality to light. Way-home, the journey itself valued and emphasised by it as the home of their people; Shine-close, the brightness made all the more precious through its proximity. You see your own system through their eyes — a different value picked and chosen, another to add to the patchwork.

And there, you find yourself, viewed through another lens. A constellation of ninety-nine stars, given a name hundreds of years ago, to guide them, long before they had come to know you as the machine you’ve become. They looked up to you, and saw you as Star-guide; stars made vital through the navigation, the direction, you provided. A thing of beauty, and of hope, in the depths of your pain.

Hope, even when we think there isn’t any.

(It is a legacy – but did you deserve it, when all you did was drown in static, alone? What does it say, that your greatest inspiration for those below you, was when you never did anything at all?)

Thress moves amongst Nassian bodies, provides advice and firm direction, growth and wisdom, and so much more, and–

Why can’t you be like that, now?