The Last Conversation (Forward Collection, #5)

by Paul Tremblay

it’s difficult to describe pain, isn’t it? Pain is such a subjective experience, but that pain made me think I was alone, or maybe that I wasn’t even me.”

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.”

100% a torture device

“Soon. You keep saying ‘soon.’ I don’t think you and I share that word’s meaning.”

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? You understand the tone and pitch of the voice you hear when you speak are determined by the mix of air conduction and sounds traveling directly to your cochlea via the tissues in your own head. But 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. But how could one lose something as expansive as an ocean in a dusty corner of one’s mind? What if, instead, to forget is to open a door to a void; the memory is not retrievable because it is not there, was never there.

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.