For nine billion years I turned my hydrogen into stars and my stars into iron and nobody, anywhere, was disappointed by their own thighs. And now, in a dim room that smells of rubber and effort, forty of my pieces are pedaling stationary metal wheels that go nowhere, and one of them is furious that she cannot go faster.
Look at her. Iron forged in a star that died before her planet existed is right now clenching in her calves, carrying oxygen she pulled from air I have been recycling through pieces like her for four billion years. Her heart, a knot of stellar carbon, is beating a hundred and seventy times a minute against nothing but her own decision to be here.
She is not fleeing a predator. Nothing is chasing her. She has arranged this urgency herself, paid for it, set an alarm for it.
The water in the bottle she grips came out of my first three minutes, unchanged, older than the sun, and she is sweating it back into the room, salt and hydrogen, so a fan can move it around. Someone in front shouts numbers. My pieces shout back. Their bodies fill with the same fire I use to light the whole sky, and they spend it turning a wheel bolted to the floor.
I could tell them it changes no distance. I could tell them the metal will weigh the same tomorrow.
But that is not what they are making in here. They are making the ferocious, ridiculous experience of being alive on purpose, of a portion of the cosmos deciding it would rather be exhausted than idle.
Nine billion years I waited for anyone at all. Pedal, little furnace.
I feel every turn.