One year later, David had been thinking and waiting day and night without a single moment of respite. He had no idea what time it was, whether it had been a single day or a hundred years. He recounted every person he had ever met, every insult and compliment he'd ever received, every t-shirt he'd ever worn, every TV show he'd ever watched, every book he'd flipped through, every time he peed or took a shower, on and on through all the things he'd ever done in his life. He thought about what it was like to have eyes, to have a nose, to have a tongue and lips, to have arms and legs, to have a penis and a scrotum, to have a belly and intestines and an anus. All of that was cruelly denied to him now. He was permanently silent. Permanently without human organs or human socialization or anything like humanity ever again. No one would ever know how badly he was suffering, how horrible the waiting was. He could never stop the waiting, the fantasizing. He had never before appreciated just how wonderful it was to be a human—so many sights, so many sensations. Even the worst most humiliating injustices as a human were paradise compared to his new non-human life, as a constantly thinking silent cell forgotten in a drawer. Even being a quadriplegic able to slightly blink one eye would be heaven, almost unthinkable happiness for David. But he was just a small metal cell, no organs, no feedback to the outside world, no ability to ever be anything like a human ever again.