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.”

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

“How many of us said yes?” “None of you. Not a single fucking one of you.”

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