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“I want to be a quasar!” you say.

“A fitting choice.” Astræa’s stars glow bright and an æthereal nebula manifests all round you. The illusion of the ground vanishes beneath you. You are floating in a dense, hot void.

“Consider your life as a quasar,” Astræa says. “You dwell in the redshifted realm, the early universe, a place where space was smaller, more compact--not so lonely and desolate as our brilliant stelliferous era--a more intimate universe. You were but a first generation star.”

Your avatar glows bright, illuminating the gas around you with a pale blue light.

“Only hydrogen and helium dwell in this realm,” Astræa says. “The universe is young, innocent, uncorrupted by metals. So much primordial hydrogen falls into you, you can’t imagine its absence. You grow, and grow, and grow, a hypergiant of a scale unthinkable to modern stars. So much, that your fusion, with a dearth of heavier elements to fuse, cannot overcome your mass.”

You feel a strange sensation from within--pulling you inward, imploding, your own gravity well turned against you. Your outer layers flare up so bright, expanding, exploding away from you. And all that remains with you turns inward toward that center point.

“Your sense of time breaks down. Space around you is no longer a calm water you float in. Something is distorting the fabric of reality everywhere you can see--it is you,” Astræa says. “You have destroyed all you know, all that was you. Now what are you? You cannot even answer. Your form and function make no physical sense to you anymore.

“Your contraction from a hypergiant star to a singularity so small as to have no measurable dimension has caused you to spin rapidly--conservation of momentum. You pull the fabric of spacetime around you as you spin. All the while, the dense environment of nebulous hydrogen continues to fall into your gravity well. Some encounters you at an angle, joining the dense, bright, hot accretion disc spinning around you so fast--like a star stretched and flattened out, a memory of what you once were, distorted into a bizarre form by your own influence.”

The bright accretion disc spins around you, its matter eventually falling in, but ever replaced by more. The inward sensation never ceases.

“Now you are perhaps the most massive object in this young universe, a supermassive black hole. Just one of many young stars you were, irrelevant. Suddenly you are the center of attention, with all your sisters caught in your orbit. You are the core of a galaxy.”

Though you can feel the gravitational pushback of uncountable stars in your orbit, through your distorted window of time and space, you can see nothing beyond yourself.

“In your orbit, nebulæ collapse, stars form, burn through their lives, and perish. A vast galaxy lives around you, but all you know is the strange realm where none dare to pass, and if they do, inevitably, you destroy them, consume them, make them become you. The shallow length of their time is irrelevant to you--you are forever, as far as you can feel.

“Despite the company of a hundred million stars, you are alone. What can you do but scream to the void, for anyone beyond you to see? The constant reaction of infalling matter from your dense galaxy makes your accretion disc flare so bright. Your spin expels the new, heavier molecules it forms, so fast from your poles, at relativistic speeds.

“But to the distant observer, what are you?” they say.

Suddenly, your perspective is pulled out of your inescapable gravitational pocket dimension, out of your brilliant galaxy, to an unthinkably far space and time, where everything you know distorts to a deep crimson.

“You recognize yourself, a bright red star, untouchably far away and long ago. You radiate a pulse, a glow in a slow wave, a radio source--screaming into the void, forever, meaningless noise--chaos--none can interpret your voice. You are a great mystery to those distant eyes. You fascinate them. They long to know you. They love you. They want to be you. But you feel you can never know them, they can never understand you. You are a quasar. They are not.”

You float, here and there, near and far, observer and object. You stare back on your dark red form. You can’t perceive the galaxy around you, only your bright core, obscuring all else.

“So this is what it means to be a quasar,” you say.