Once there was a woman named Madame de Pompadour, a lady of the French court and mistress to King Louis XV, the last of the Louises that were allowed to coast. She was called a major influence on French politics of the mid-eighteenth century, but her memory is felt more strongly in art, and design, and in the study of beauty. And somewhere, in Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, even more strongly felt than that. Immortal beings have undying memories, or else they would go crazy. Their hearts break further down than we can understand, and it's only some of them that test it.

As she felt herself dying, in April 1764, in that last tiny moment, Reinette called upon God Himself. "Wait a second!" she cried. And He did. And in that second, she applied her rouge quickly, and went to him, to the wings of Death, as beautiful as she had ever been. "Wait a second!" Can you fucking imagine? This is the sass of someone who had walked, who had danced, with a god. Someone who had an eerie understanding of time. Someone who had looked, and grasped, and heard, and listened to, and understood, and loved, and danced with time himself. Courtly, witty, clever, irreverent. Brilliant. Beautiful.

In the fifty-first century, home of so many friends and so much pain, and the home of a banana grove that was once a field of terror, there is a now truly deserted spaceship. It is a spaceship made of human parts, and it is a spaceship with wondrous clockwork servants, and windows into time, collecting the infinity of a life into one discrete location. It is a girl, which is also a spaceship, and you've guessed her name already, I surmise. They are the same. And somewhere in space and time both, there's a twin, a singular entity -- always special, now truly alone -- whose Companions and collections and victories comprise a history, an infinity of windows into time. Whose halls and memories and fears have been walked, much like hers, by a select few. But tonight we're not thinking about that blue angel: we're thinking about this spaceship, which is also a girl, which revolves slowly in space, still. To this day, alone. And on the outer hull is engraved her name: the S.S. Madame de Pompadour.

We are the same.