The Trap

It's dark. It's almost always dark. Sometimes, if you stop turning the machinery for a few moments, you might hear something different: a far-off scraping and rattling; a sound like a chain clanking. A heavy door that's dropped on its hinges, scraping across a distant floor. Stone and dust. You listen for a bit, but the sounds have stopped.

The sound of your own breathing. Sighing.

In the dark, you start turning the machinery again, finding the rhythm that suits you, so that you can do it without thinking; just making sure that that wheel keeps going round, for whatever forgotten purpose you first set it in motion.

There was a good reason, once. But you're so habituated to the action of turning the wheel that you don't think about the wider context any more. You can't even remember what the space around you looks like in the light. You pass through darkness, and into this volume of darkness. And you turn the wheel.

Sometimes you notice the sound that your feet are making on the wheel as you turn it. When that happens, you focus your attention on that sound, on its pattern and rhythm, and in focusing your attention, in bringing it into consciousness, you lose the rhythm, and your feet stutter and the wheel's motion stutters and seems to swing backwards and forwards around a central point of balance.

In the dark, you think about a time when you used to know that there were other machines beyond this machine: your own little machine in its cage, and you turning the wheel; and then a bigger cage with other machines, and other cages beyond that, all linked somehow, with the wheels turning and gears meshing, forces transferred and channelled into distant, shadowed spaces where there were clankings, scrapings, thuds and hums.

Far off, a door scrapes open. You see a faint light glimmering - a memory of the world outside, far away and far back in time.

Run.