All those worlds will be lost, like tears in rain

“All those worlds will be lost, like tears in rain” is a recurring expression that compresses immense loss into an image of disappearance. Its first appearance follows a quiet exchange between Dagenskyoll and Bartek; its later return among isolated, aphoristic lines gives the phrase the force of a refrain rather than a one-off remark.

Image and Meaning

The phrase joins two different scales: “worlds” suggests the loss of entire places or histories, while “tears in rain” makes that loss seem to dissolve into something larger and passing. The simile does not explain what the worlds are or why they are lost. Instead, its starkness leaves the loss open-ended, with the image carrying more weight than any account of its cause.

First Context

The expression appears after Dagenskyoll emoted offering a cigarette and Bartek emoted taking a long draw, exhaling smoke, and sharing a companionable silence with him. The silence becomes so depressing that, after 194 seconds, Bartek turns Morpheus up to thirty percent. The phrase follows this small scene of companionship and attempted relief, placing its image of disappearance against the robots’ temporary closeness.

Mirages of ships and cities then pass across the plain, where Humanos and monkeys hurl stones and mummified axolotls at the two robots. In this surrounding sequence, the expression resonates with images of vanished or unreal worlds, but the text does not specify that it refers to any single mirage or to the projectiles. Its broad wording lets the scene’s unstable images sharpen the sense of loss without resolving it.

Recurrence

The phrase appears again in a later sequence of short, self-contained lines, alongside other aphoristic statements. Set apart in that list, it is no longer anchored to the immediate exchange between Dagenskyoll and Bartek. The recurrence preserves the image while changing its frame: what first followed an intimate pause returns as one fragment in a larger field of reflections.