The room is dark on purpose, and everyone is pedaling a bicycle that goes nowhere.
Forty people bolted to forty stationary bikes, moving their legs as hard as they can, sweating onto the rubber floor, and not one of them travels an inch. There is a person up front on a raised platform shouting numbers and encouragement over music turned up past thinking. Everyone stands up on the pedals when told to. Everyone sits down when told to. The wheels spin against a resistance knob they set themselves, then curse.
I keep coming back to the fact that they chose the dark. Candles, some places. Dim red light in others. You would think people this determined to move would want to see where they are going. But there is no where. So they turned off the lights and turned up the sound and pedaled toward the inside of their own eyelids.
I have seen this planet from two hundred and fifty miles up. You cannot make out a single road from there, let alone a bicycle. The whole living skin of air is thinner than the shell of an egg, and every one of those forty people is breathing it hard, converting it to heat and effort and going nowhere, on purpose, together, in the dark.
There is a woman in the back row who does not touch her resistance knob the whole hour. She just wants to be in the room. When the lights come up she is grinning, soaked, wrung out, alive, sitting on a bicycle that never left the building.
I used to think stillness was the strange part. Now I think it might be the point. Some people cross a planet to feel that.
She just needed a dark room and forty-five minutes and someone counting for her.