Binary Stars Quotes

they were binary stars, trapped in each other’s gravitational field and easily diminished without the other’s opposing force

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.

She and I really are binary stars, stuck in each other’s orbit, drawn together by forces we can’t see or understand—but that we can feel.

Let me peer out at the world through your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder, or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.) Let me see how your blue is my turquoise and my orange is your gold. Suddenly binary stars, we have startling gravity. Let's compare scintillation - let's share starlight.

They fought and disagreed, of course, but they always came back together like a binary star, dancing with each other through life.

We want a world where boys can feel, girls can lead, and the rest of us can not only exist but thrive. This is not about erasing men and women but rather acknowledging that man and woman are two of many—stars in a constellation that do not compete but amplify one another’s shine.

The stars winked through the beech leaves. She’d read that new stars tended to form in pairs. Binary stars, orbiting in close proximity, only becoming single stars when their partner was smashed off them by another pair of wildly spinning new stars. If she pretended hard enough, she could see the multitude of pairs clinging to each other in the destructive and creative gravity of their constellations.

In Reina’s mind, they were binary stars, trapped in each other’s gravitational field and easily diminished without the other’s opposing force. She wasn’t at all surprised when she discovered one was right-handed (Nico) and the other left (Libby).

man and woman are two of many—stars in a constellation that do not compete but amplify one another’s shine.

I live in a binary star system, my two suns being my two sons.

We were a binary star. We orbited around each other. When you decided not to tell me, you changed that, you weren’t orbiting around me anymore, you were circling someone else, something else.

All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another’s emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.

The longer I live in time, the less I believe in the future.

The way space-time curves around it: Love is a black hole. Undetectable except by the way it affects other bodies. Invisible but strong. Inescapable.

For three decades, Einstein sought a unified theory of physics, one that would interweave all of nature's forces and material constituents within a single theoretical tapestry. He failed. Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, proponents of string theory claim that the threads of this elusive unified tapestry finally have been revealed. String theory has the potential to show that all of the wondrous happenings in the universe—from the frantic dance of subatomic quarks to the stately waltz of orbiting binary stars, from the primordial fireball of the big bang to the majestic swirl of heavenly galaxies—are reflections of one grand physical principle, one master equation.

In our every cell, furled at the nucleus, there is a ribbon two yards long and just ten atoms wide. Over a hundred million miles of DNA in very human individual, enough to wrap five million times around our world and make the Midgard serpent blush for shame, make even the Ourobouros worm swallow hard in disbelief. This snake-god, nucleotide, twice twisted, scaled in adenine and cytosine, in thymine and in guanine, is a one-man show, will be the actors, props and setting, be the apple and the garden both. The player bides his time, awaits his entrance to a drum-roll of igniting binaries. This is the only dance in town, this anaconda tango, this slow spiral up through time from witless dirt to paramecium, from blind mechanic organism to awareness. There, below the birthing stars, Life sways and improvises. Every poignant gesture drips with slapstick; pathos; an unbearably affecting bravery. To dare this stage, this huge and overwhelming venue. Squinting through the stellar footlights, hoping there's an audience, that there's someone out there, but dancing anyway. But dancing anyway.

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic? We can carry this one step further - if you know the orbital period of one of Jupiter's bright moons, discovered by Galileo in 1609, and you know the distance between Jupiter and that moon, you can calculate the mass of Jupiter. Therefore, if you know the orbital period of the moon around the Earth (it's 27.32 days), and you know the mean distance between the Earth and the moon (it's about 200,039 miles), then you can calculate to a high degree of accuracy the mass of the Earth. … But Newton's laws reach far beyond our solar system. They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter. His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling. By bringing together the physics of motion, of interaction between objects and of planetary movements, Newton brought a new kind of order to astronomical measurements, showing how, what had been a jumble of confused observations made through the centuries were all interconnected.

binary star is created when two stars are drawn together. Once they come near enough, neither one can resist the other’s pull. They’re stuck together forever, destined to spend eternity revolving about each other, like . . . like dancers in a waltz, I suppose.” She scribbled a note in her notebook. “The fascinating thing is, a binary star’s center of gravity isn’t in one star or the other. It’s in the empty space between them.

Beauty can be tricked into being where it is not. It is naught. It is not the past. Because the longer I live in time, the less I believe in the past.

I am becoming in coming undone. I unbind. I rise like the morning: revolution.

Flowers grow far away on a planet they'll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we've shaped together.

People don’t like it when their beliefs are challenged, John. They’re fragile enough already.

They were binary stars, trapped in each other's gravitational field and easily diminished without the other's opposing force.

Blue stragglers are brighter, younger than they should be. Astronomers determine it a bunch of different ways, but these stars stand out because they’re anomalies. Do you know why they’re younger than they should be?” “They formed later than other stars.” “That’s a good guess, but there’s not much evidence for it. There are a lot of answers, actually, but only one that seems to have enough evidence to hold up: they feed on other stars. They’ve got all sorts of fanciful names for them. Cannibal stars. Vampire stars. But they’re pretty sure that’s what’s going on. They’re often binary stars, which means they’re part of a pair, and they steal fuel from their companion star.

Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,

Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.

I love your freckles,” he murmurs from behind me, the pad of his finger tracing lines across the expanse of my back. “They remind me of all the constellations. Like I could draw lines between them, and pictures would appear.” It’s such an oddly worshipful thing to say. I wiggle my toes, hum softly, and tip my cheek against the bed to gaze back at him. “Right here, there are two so close together they almost look like one.” “Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

When we originally went to the moon, our total focus was going to the moon. We weren't thinking about looking back at Earth. But now that we've done it, that may well have been the most important reason we went.

Astronomers using powerful telescopes have found that about two of every three stars we see in the night sky are actually binaries—systems in which two stars orbit each other in a dance about a common gravitational center.

A binary star is created when two stars are drawn together. Once they come near enough, neither one can resist the other’s pull. They’re stuck together forever, destined to spend eternity revolving about each other, like . . . like dancers in a waltz, I suppose.” She scribbled a note in her notebook. “The fascinating thing is, a binary star’s center of gravity isn’t in one star or the other. It’s in the empty space between them.” He was silent for a while. “I’ll be damned.

In the black-earth / red-earth binary of early Egyptian theology, it may be surprising to realize that the ancient Egyptians did not worship gods per se. They instead spoke of names, the netjeru, the word being depicted by an upright axe. Osiris, Isis, Horus (as the Greeks called them millennia later) were names of something, the same something, and not necessarily things unto themselves.

I gaze out, to the stars. I remember the first time I saw real stars, through the hatch window. They were beautiful then, but now, seeing them here, all around me, beautiful feels like an inadequate word. I see the stars as a part of the universe, and having spent my life behind walls, suddenly having none fills me with both awe and terror. Emotion courses through my veins, choking me. I feel so insignificant, a tiny speck surrounded by a million stars. A million suns. Centuries away is Sol. Circling around it is Sol-Earth, the planet Amy came from. And one of these other stars is the Centauri binary system, where the new planet spins, waiting for us. And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars. Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home. But all of them are out of reach.

I want to chase you, find you. I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious - I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they'll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we've shaped together.

All children in Madagascar were raised genderless and forbidden to choose a gender until reaching adulthood. Even then, many didn’t choose a single state of being. Some, like Jerico, found fluidity to be their nature. “I feel like a woman beneath the sun and the stars. I feel like a man under the cover of clouds,” Jerico had explained to the crew when assuming command. “A simple glance at the skies will let you know how to address me at any given time.” It wasn’t the fluidity that stymied the crew – that was common enough – but they had trouble getting used to the meteorological aspect of Jerico’s personal system. Having been raised in a place where such things were the norm rather than the exception, it never even occurred to Jerico that it could be an issue, until leaving home. Some things simply made a person feel feminine; other things made a person feel masculine. Wasn’t that true of everyone regardless of gender? Or did binaries deny themselves the things that didn’t fit the mold? Well, regardless, Jerico found the faux pas and overcompensations more humorous than anything else.

Furthermore, it is not the people or the citizens who decide on what to vote, on which political program, at what time, and so on. It is the oligarchs and the oligarchic system that decide on this and that submit their choice to the vote of the electorate (in certain very specific cases). One could legitimately wonder, for instance, why there are not more referendums, and in particular referendums of popular initiative, in “democracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis perfectly described this state of affairs when he wrote: “The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. They are told, ‘vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,’ for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It isn’t us.” It would thus be naive to believe that elections reflect public opinion or even the preferences of the electorate. For these oligarchic principles dominate our societies to such an extent that the nature of the choice is decided in advance. In the case of elections, it is the powerful media apparatus—financed in the United States by private interests, big business, and the bureaucratic machinery of party politics—that presents to the electorate the choices to be made, the viable candidates, the major themes to be debated, the range of possible positions, the questions to be raised and pondered, the statistical tendencies of “public opinion,” the viewpoint of experts, and the positions taken by the most prominent politicians. What we call political debate and public space (which is properly speaking a space of publicity) are formatted to such an extent that we are encouraged to make binary choices without ever asking ourselves genuine questions: we must be either for or against a particular political star, a specific publicity campaign, such or such “societal problem.” “One of the many reasons why it is laughable to speak of ‘democracy’ in Western societies today,” asserts Castoriadis, “is because the ‘public’ sphere is in fact private—be it in France, the United States, or England.”The market of ideas is saturated, and the political consumer is asked to passively choose a product that is already on the shelves. This is despite the fact that the contents of the products are often more or less identical, conjuring up in many ways the difference that exists between a brand-name product on the right, with the shiny packaging of the tried-and-true, and a generic product on the left, that aspires to be more amenable to the people. “Free elections do not necessarily express ‘the will of the people,’ ” Erich Fromm judiciously wrote. “If a highly advertised brand of toothpaste is used by the majority of the people because of some fantastic claims it makes in its propaganda, nobody with any sense would say that people have ‘made a decision’ in favor of the toothpaste. All that could be claimed is that the propaganda was sufficiently effective to coax millions of people into believing its claims.

I've never felt 100 percent like a girl, but I'm not a guy, either. And I don't see why I have to fit. Why should try to change myself to suit someone else's binary? It's like trying to fit a galaxy into a glass jar. I don't want to be poked and prodded into a glass jar. How am I supposed to breathe like that? right now, I'm poking holes in the lid, letting the light and air in and freeing pieces of me star by star. And one day, I'm just going to shatter it.

Waveforms from the early universe formed stars. Stars, in their tumultuous fusion of elements, roduce sounds like tones. They organize themselves into larger structures, such as binary systems or clusters-the equivalent of "musical" phrases. What's more, the millions of stars within galaxies organize themselves into self-similar, fractal structures, like the fractal structure found in Bach's and Ligetti' compositions. I was amazed at the degree to which the organization of cosmic structure mimicked music structure. When an analogy goes beyond your expectations, you can't help but wonder if the analogy is the truth.

Having a world unfold in one’s head is the fundamental SF experience. It’s a lot of what I read for. Delany has a long passage about how your brain expands while reading the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low”—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star. I think it goes beyond that, beyond the physical into the delight of reading about people who come from other societies and have different expectations.

Furthermore, it is not the people or the citizens who decide on what to vote, on which political program, at what time, and so on. It is the oligarchs and the oligarchic system that decide on this and that submit their choice to the vote of the electorate (in certain very specific cases). One could legitimately wonder, for instance, why there are not more referendums, and in particular referendums of popular initiative, in “democracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis perfectly described this state of affairs when he wrote: “The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. They are told, ‘vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,’ for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It isn’t us.”127 It would thus be naive to believe that elections reflect public opinion or even the preferences of the electorate. For these oligarchic principles dominate our societies to such an extent that the nature of the choice is decided in advance. In the case of elections, it is the powerful media apparatus—financed in the United States by private interests, big business, and the bureaucratic machinery of party politics—that presents to the electorate the choices to be made, the viable candidates, the major themes to be debated, the range of possible positions, the questions to be raised and pondered, the statistical tendencies of “public opinion,” the viewpoint of experts, and the positions taken by the most prominent politicians. What we call political debate and public space (which is properly speaking a space of publicity) are formatted to such an extent that we are encouraged to make binary choices without ever asking ourselves genuine questions: we must be either for or against a particular political star, a specific publicity campaign, such or such “societal problem.” “One of the many reasons why it is laughable to speak of ‘democracy’ in Western societies today,” asserts Castoriadis, “is because the ‘public’ sphere is in fact private—be it in France, the United States, or England.”The market of ideas is saturated, and the political consumer is asked to passively choose a product that is already on the shelves. This is despite the fact that the contents of the products are often more or less identical, conjuring up in many ways the difference that exists between a brand-name product on the right, with the shiny packaging of the tried-and-true, and a generic product on the left, that aspires to be more amenable to the people. “Free elections do not necessarily express ‘the will of the people,’ ” Erich Fromm judiciously wrote. “If a highly advertised brand of toothpaste is used by the majority of the people because of some fantastic claims it makes in its propaganda, nobody with any sense would say that people have ‘made a decision’ in favor of the toothpaste. All that could be claimed is that the propaganda was sufficiently effective to coax millions of people into believing its claims.

I love your freckles,” he murmurs from behind me, the pad of his finger tracing lines across the expanse of my back. “They remind me of all the constellations. Like I could draw lines between them, and pictures would appear...” “Right here, there are two so close together they almost look like one.” “Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

However, in other circumstances, such as with PSR 1913 + 16, the situation is very different, and gravitational radiation from the system indeed has a significant role to play. Here, Einstein's theory provides a firm prediction of the detailed nature of the gravitational radiation that the system ought to be emitting, and of the energy that should be carried away. This loss of energy should result in a slow spiralling inwards of the two neutron stars, and a corresponding speeding up of their orbital rotation period. Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse first observed this binary pulsar at the enormous Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974. Since that time, the rotation period has been closely monitored by Taylor and his colleagues, and the speed-up is in precise agreement with the expectations of general relativity (cf. Fig. 4.11). For this work, Hulse and Taylor were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics. In fact, as the years have rolled by, the accumulation of data from this system has provided a stronger and stronger confirmation of Einstein's theory. Indeed, if we now take the system as a whole and compare it with the behaviour that is computed from Einstein's theory as a whole-from the Newtonian aspects of the orbits, through the corrections to these orbits from standard general relativity effects, right up to the effects on the orbits due to loss of energy in gravitational radiation-we find that the theory is confirmed overall to an error of no more than about 10^-14. This makes Einstein's general relativity, in this particular sense, the most accurately tested theory known to science!

The metavirus is everywhere. Anywhere life exists, the metavirus is there, too, propagating through it. Originally, it was spread around on comets. That's probably how life first came to the Earth, and that's probably how the metavirus came here also. But comets are slow, whereas radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe at the speed of light. It infects a civilized planet, gets into its computers, reproduces, and inevitably gets broadcast on television or radio or whatever. Those transmissions don't stop at the edge of the atmosphere -- they radiate out into space, forever. And if they hit a planet with another civilized culture, where people are listening to the stars the way Rife was doing, then that planet gets infected, too. I think that was Rife's plan, and I think it worked. Except that Rife was smart -- he caught it in a controlled manner. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for him to use at his discretion. When it is placed into a computer, it snow-crashes the computer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses. But it is much more devastating when it goes into the mind of a hacker, a person who has an understanding of binary code built into the deep structures of his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy the mind of a hacker.

You’re wearing a leather belt. I had this before I went vegan. It would be disrespectful to the cow if I threw it away.

Dear Rebecca— You may have picked up on my growing disappointment with you this afternoon as our first meeting progressed. I have to say that though you seem quite personable in your electronic communications, in person your behavior is a little lacking in some of the traits that would let you get from a first to a second date with regularity. If Lovability had a rating system, I would award you 2.5 out of 5 stars; however, if it used a scale that only allowed for integral values, I would unfortunately be forced to round down to two. Here are some suggestions for what you could do to improve the initial impression you make. I am speaking here as a veteran of the online dating scene in LA, which is MUCH more intense than New Jersey’s—there, you are competing with aspiring actors and actresses, and a professionally produced headshot and a warm demeanor are the bare minimum necessary to get in the game. By the end of my first year in LA my askback rate (the rate at which my first dates with women led to second dates) was a remarkable 68%. So I know what I’m talking about. I hope you take this constructive criticism in the manner in which it is intended. 1. Vary your responses to inquiries. When our conversation began, you seemed quite cheerful and animated, but as it progressed you became much less so. I asked you a series of questions that were intended to give you opportunities to reveal more about yourself, but you offered only binary answers, and then, troublingly, no answers at all. If you want your date to go well, you need to display more interest. 2. Direct the flow of conversation. Dialogue is collaborative! One consequence of your reticence was that I was forced to propose all of the topics of discussion, both before and after the transition to more personal subjects. If you contribute topics of your own then it will make you appear more engaged: you should aim to bring up one new subject for every one introduced by your date. 3. Take control of the path of the date. If you want the initial meeting to extend beyond the planned drinks, there are many ways you can go about doing this. You can directly say, for instance, “So I wasn’t thinking about this when you showed up, but…do you have any plans for dinner? I’m starving, and I could really go for some pad thai.” Or you can make a vaguer, more general statement such as “After this, I’m up for whatever,” or “Hey, I don’t really want to go home yet, Bradley: I’m having a lot of fun.” Again, this comes down to a general lack of engagement on your part. Without your feedback I was left to offer a game of Scrabble, which was not the best way to end the meeting. 4. Don’t lie about your ability in Scrabble. I won’t go into an analysis of your strategic and tactical errors here, in the interest of brevity, but your amateurish playing style was quite evident. Now, despite my reservations as expressed above, I really do feel that we had some chemistry. So I would like to give things another chance. Would you respond to this message within the next three days, with a suggestion of a place you’d like us to visit together, or an activity that you believe we would both enjoy? I would be forced to construe a delay of more than three days as an unfortunate sign of indifference. I hope to hear from you soon. Best, Bradley

We were like the Binary stars that were gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other; and from the earth seemed like a single star in the night sky but in reality, the distances between them were unreachable.

I could do nothing but kiss Lucky until the end of time, and I would be content. I’d swirl with him in the sky until we were one, binary stars gravitationally bound to one another.

In 1983, Pioneer 10 became the first artificial object from Earth to pass Pluto and leave our solar system. It was last heard from on January 22, 2003, when the sensors of the Deep Space Network picked up the final faint signal as the tiny craft hurtled deep into interstellar space. Although its power source has weakened over the last 35 years, scientists believe that Pioneer 10 is still intact and on course, heading toward the star Aldebaran, where it should arrive in about two million years. When it does, it will be carrying a calling card from Earth in the universal language of binary numbers.

almost look like one.” “Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) program referred to as Operation Crystal Knight, or what has since been called Project Serpo, in which it is claimed that 12 astronauts left Earth in July 1965 and were taken aboard an alien spaceship to the planet Serpo in the binary star system Zeta Reticuli, as part of an exchange program.

Nebulae are clouds of stardust floating in space. Star clusters are just as they sound. Stars appear so close together in the sky, they’re sometimes mistaken for one object. My favorite smudge, however, isn’t a nebula or cluster. It’s Messier’s number 40. A double star. Perhaps even a binary star.” “Oh, truly.” And with that, he was back to the earlobe. She bent to peer through the eyepiece. “A binary star is created when two stars are drawn together. Once they come near enough, neither one can resist the other’s pull. They’re stuck together forever, destined to spend eternity revolving about each other, like . . . like dancers in a waltz, I suppose.” She scribbled a note in her notebook. “The fascinating thing is, a binary star’s center of gravity isn’t in one star or the other. It’s in the empty space between them.

I'd call us a binary star. We're orbiting around each other.

What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

Right here, there are two so close together they almost look like one.” “Like binary stars,” I murmur. “What are binary stars?” His finger tenderly swipes across the spot he’s talking about. “It’s two stars that look like one to us when we see them in the sky. But really, they’re two. Stuck together by a gravitational pull, always orbiting one another.” “Kind of like the two of us, stuck together,” he muses.

We both were sitting on the bench in front of the church. My hand gently ran through her hair as she rested her head on my lap, both of us lost in the moment when she suddenly said, “Khizar, do you remember Prof Sexena’s lecture about binary stars? “Yes, I vaguely remember” I replied while politely pinching her nose. “Binary stars are a set of two stars, a nova, and a supernova. They keep on circling around each other for centuries like mad lovers. However, there is a difference. The nova star explosively sheds its light but never dies while the supernova will ultimately die in a huge explosion" She took my hand in her hands, pressed it softly and said, "Khizar , I do not know why but sometimes I feel you are the nova who will keep on shedding its light but I am the unfortunate supernova who is destined to end in a huge explosion no one would ever see.

It seemed we were drawn to each other like binary stars.

Laurence’s book was gone. The one he’d been reading on the bus. He had put it on the table near his muffin, and now it was gone. No, wait—it was in the hands of a woman in her twenties, with long brown braids, a wide face, and a red sweater that was so fuzzy it practically had hair. She had callused hands and work boots. She was turning Laurence’s book over and over in her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “I remember this book. I read it like three times in high school. This is the one with the binary star system that goes to war with the AIs who live in the asteroid belt. Right?

Her skill was the force that pulled them. There were just so few cryptologists of her ability, or William’s. They were like a binary star system in a void, twin suns rotating around each other, drawing lesser bodies by their light.

R2-D2 had accessed the ship’s blueprints almost as soon as they came on board, and Padmé didn’t need to understand binary to understand his low opinion of the layout. It was nice not to be crammed in on top of one another—even the Naboo ship felt that way sometimes—but the ship presented itself as a target to anyone who got close enough to scan them.