Four billion years of not being eaten, and here we are, watching the runner set a small machine to frighten itself awake.
We felt it, all of us, in the dark before the shriek: the body loose, the breath slow, the heart at its low and easy pace. The lungfish knew that stillness in the drying mud. The shrew knew it, curled in the burrow while the great feet passed overhead. Rest was the rarest treasure we ever held, snatched in fragments, one eye always half-open for the shape moving in the grass.
We would have wept to sleep this deep. This safe. This long.
And then the little box on the shelf begins to scream, and our heir, our precious final link, groans and swings a hand at it like it is a wasp.
We do not understand. The woman who tended the fire woke because the cold woke her, or the child cried, or the light came. She never once had to invent a danger to pull herself from sleep. But there is no lion here. No frost creeping under the hide. The runner has built a predator out of numbers and told it exactly when to pounce, so that the body will do the one thing we spent four billion years teaching it to do: leap up, alert, alive, ready.
The eyes that once found the leopard in the shadow now squint at glowing digits. The hand that buried the seed corn and did not eat it, that hand now slaps a button marked snooze, and buys nine more minutes.
Take the nine minutes. Take them, heir of the shrew and the fire-keeper and the woman who crossed the ice.
We ran so far so that someone could, at last, be allowed to be late.