[Spoken, quietly amused, with restrained contempt] Oh, humanity... What a magnificent little tragedy you are. You build your towers. You carve your names into stone. You crown your kings, bury your dead, and call it... *progress.* [Dry, bitter chuckle] Progress? [Voice sharpening, indignation rising] You have spent ten thousand years running from the very thing that gave you life! TIME! [Brief silence] That relentless, indifferent architect of your extinction. [Cold, deliberate enunciation] You measure it. You worship it. You imprison it in clocks and calendars, as though giving something a name grants you dominion over it! [Anger building] And still you struggle! Still you claw at the heavens, demanding another century! Another decade! Another miserable, insignificant SECOND! [Explosive, theatrical fury] FOR WHAT?! So that your monuments may crumble a little later?! So that your children may inherit the same exquisite suffering?! So that the universe might remember your name?! [Pause. A low, venomous laugh] Oh, you poor... deluded... creatures. [Voice softening into something sinister] The stars themselves are dying. Galaxies are drifting into darkness. Even the great machinery of existence is winding down. And you... [Quiet disbelief] You believe yourselves the exception? [Slow, deliberate, increasingly menacing] You cannot conquer time. You cannot bargain with eternity. You cannot outrun the inevitable. [Long pause] And yet... [Almost a whisper] There is something rather beautiful about your defiance. [Suddenly cold and merciless] Beautiful. And utterly... *Futile.* [Final line, quiet, precise, absolute] Time does not hate you, humanity. That... Would require it to care.
