After the blast killed four of my coworkers, the Wheeling Hubcap Factory brought in another one like me. Paid top dollar, from what I heard. Someone who could work just as hard, just as feverishly. Someone just as insane as I was. Meet Kate.
Kate was always smarter than I was, in a way. I was more instrumentally intelligent. Slap a book in front of the two of us, I’d be done learning a day before she was. She was more reflective, though. I’d be done and back at work and she’d walk in and say, "Science has to stand alone." I mumbled a question. Her answer didn’t matter to me then, but it matters to me now. "You can’t justify it, except using it, and you can’t avoid it. It stands alone in the mind. Like faith, like reason, and like God." Running for three days straight gives you plenty of time to think about things like that, and even more time to wonder why you didn’t listen more closely before.
During light discussion over meal breaks I would mumble about code and neurons. Kate would talk about the nature of man and the machine. I thought she was crazy. She thought I was an idiot. We got along great. "Technology renders the memory obsolete," she’d say. "The R-71 is conducting poorly," I’d say. "You’re an idiot," she’d say. "I got the Valeron assembled," I’d say.
After you’ve been running for three straight days you being to wonder if the world passing by you is real. The lab wasn’t real. The work wasn’t real. It was all just a form of running away. "You know why you don’t think?" Kate said to me. "Because thought is painful. If you stop to think you’ll kill yourself." Then there was the moment I finally stopped to think. The three men in dark coats were staring at me from the opposite side of a big black desk. Kate was standing by their side. "Give us the formula," the middle one demanded. Why was it that moment I decided to stop? Continuing would have been so much easier. It’s not motion or the lack of motion, it’s change that is so painful.
