Space
The quiet vastness of space is a curious thing. When Jane first struck out on her own, piloting a tiny ship away from Thor, Loki, Ragnarok, and all the rest of the madness that had come to her since those ancient days in Puente Antiguo, she had assumed that pushing back against that living silence would be simple. Music, podcasts, TV...hell, she has the entire recorded history of humanity tucked away in a tiny corner of the ship's database. Plenty of distractions to keep her from feeling the silence, crouched like a panther beyond the thin hull of her cruiser.
Space is an animal that encompasses the universe. A simple animal, with animal needs. It breathes, moves, purrs around her. Dead planets, empty vessels, speeding comets drift through its vast belly, remnants of meals billions of years digested. Jane is defiantly alive; her ship's running lights poke tiny holes in the velvet dark of the universe, her engines generate heat and noise. Even her own pitiful warmth pushes back against annihilation.
Space doesn't like that. One day, Jane knows, she'll be a drifting hulk like so many others, cold and frozen and still. The thought doesn't frighten her; it's just a toll she has to pay. And until then, she's promised herself to see whatever it is she can see.
For space also nurtures life. Like neurons in a brain or bacteria in an intestinal tract, solar systems, rogue planets, and galaxies flourish despite the hostility of their host. And the shapes this life takes are breathtaking, beyond words. Almost even beyond emotion. Jane often only feels a swelling in her chest, a pressure like her ribs are about to burst, every time she sees a new nebula or stellar cluster. It's joy, sorrow, helplessness, gratitude...it's everything in different measures and Jane can't parse it.
She's approaching what the Aesir call a 'stellar womb'. A nebula in the process of collapse, its atoms fusing under intense gravitational pressure, hardening into stars and planets. A supernova remnant, its energy and matter in the process of recycling its staggering expenditure of energy and matter.
Dry, academic language. Understanding gleaned from telescopes and theories. It has nothing to do with what she sees before her.
"Amy, polarize the viewscreen."
"Polarized."
"Display at twenty times magnification."
"Acknowledged."
If someone had taken neon paint and splashed it across a length of black velvet, it would have made waves and splashes of color. But that could never have matched the intensity and vibrancy of what Jane saw now. Through the darkened screen, her eyes water and a tear trickles down the side of her nose. She sniffles.
It would be nice to have someone hold her hand. To join her in gasping as a filament of lightning—not lightning, it can't be lightning, but she's never seen anything like it before—arcs from one gaseous column to another, leaving crackles of red sparks showering through the green spread of the nebula. It would be nice to have someone wrap an arm around her shoulders, and to feel them tremble as she did at the overwhelming size of purple mountains of dust creeping towards the edge of the viewscreen.
It would be nice to share feelings that had no name in a silence that had no end and feel a little less frightened.
Her eyes can't parse the riot of colors; the sensors show a range of light waves far outside the human optic range. Amy is recording every bit of data, her artificial brain neatly cataloging every nuance of the phenomena, but she can't share Jane's wonder. She knows the symptoms of emotion, can go through the motions of sympathy, but she understands it as little as Jane understands the nebula.
Does it matter? Does she need someone to share this with her?
In a few months, the communication beacons Jane has strewn behind her like breadcrumbs will relay this sight to the rest of humanity. They will watch it on newsfeeds in the palms of their hands, and shiver at the glory and terror of space. They will love her and hate her for bringing this new knowledge to them.
But they will understand.
Jane won't be alone.