Four billion years, and the last of us stands before a lit box at 2 a.m., feeding it paper for a bag of salted air with seven chips inside.
We remember hunger. Oh, we remember. The lungfish gulping mud in a drying pond. The shrew who did not eat for three days and lived on the fourth by finding one beetle. The woman who kept the fire through a winter that took her sisters, who rationed the dried meat in strips so thin you could see the flame through them.
We buried the seed corn while our bellies screamed at us to eat it, because next spring mattered more than tonight. That was the whole art of us: wanting food and waiting anyway.
And here you are. You want a thing, and you press a number, and a metal coil turns, and the thing simply falls. No hunt. No frost. No calculation about whether the family survives the choice. You did not even sit down. You are annoyed the coil paused. You are gently shaking the box.
We do not fully understand it. A machine, standing awake in an empty hall, holding more food than a shrew saw in its whole life, guarding it for anyone with a coin. We keep waiting for the catch. The famine behind the glass. There is no famine behind the glass.
Look at those hands. Those are fire-tending hands, seed-burying hands, and they are peeling open a snack for no reason but that you felt like it, at an hour when nothing threatens you at all.
We went quiet just now. All of us. The whole long line, watching you chew in the blue light, safe, bored, unhurried.
This.
This is what it was for.