The Last Conversation (Forward Collection, #5)

by Paul Tremblay

the first treadmill was invented by a man in nineteenth-century England. Its purpose was to punish and break its prisoners. You quoted a prison guard named James Hardie, who once wrote of the treadmill: “monotonous steadiness, and not its severity, which constitutes its terror.”

What does the knowing imply about your person, your interests prior to your being here?

You wonder if time is a phantom because it feels like you walked for longer than thirty minutes. You wonder if she is lying to you.

While you can’t know if these images are actual memories or embellishments, or a little of both, it doesn’t matter. They are yours. They belong to you and they branch away into an infinite network of new ones. These memories are proof of you,

You are aware that everyone experiences some form of auditory dissociation upon hearing their own voice, the feeling of Do I really sound like that?

should your recorded voice sound so different as to be unrecognizable? Shouldn’t there be an underlying cadence or rhythm, one that identifies you as the speaker?

To forget is to lose something that was once yours, that was once of yourself.

What if, instead, to forget is to open a door to a void;

Maybe your memories are creating themselves; like the solar array and wind turbines, your memories are becoming self-sufficient.

You consider the origin of this time during which you’ve been awake and not-awake and conclude it is, for the moment, unknowable.