Four billion years, and the relay ends here: in a dark room, on a bicycle bolted to the floor, going nowhere.
We are the lungfish who gulped raw air when the pool went to mud. We are the shrew who ran flat-out from the thing with teeth and lived by half a second. We are the woman who walked her people across the ice with a child on her back and did not stop, could not stop, because stopping was the cold getting in.
We know legs. We know what legs are for. Legs are for closing the distance to the herd or opening the distance from the wolf. Every stride any of us ever took, we took because something depended on arriving.
And now you. Look at you go. Standing on the pedals, streaming, a rag of light sweat under a colored bulb, chasing a number on a screen while a human at the front shouts encouragement into your ears like a drumbeat before a hunt. You are running the hardest run of your whole soft life and you will end exactly where you began.
On purpose. You paid for this. There is a shelf of water bottles behind you that no one had to carry from a river.
We do not fully believe it. That a body can burn like this and no famine follows. That you can spend everything and lose nothing. That the running is the point and the arriving was never real.
The shrew is trying to understand. The grandmother has stopped explaining and is simply watching.
Look. The lights come up. You are breathing hard, alive, unhunted, laughing at something the person beside you said.
That was the whole errand. Every one of us. So you could laugh in a warm room after a hard run to nowhere.
Go get water. You earned it.
You've earned everything.