The question isn’t why the chicken crossed the road, or if the chicken or the egg came first, the question is, what happens when the egg emerges from the hen, but the chick fails to emerge from the egg? The question is, what becomes of the chick? And the answer is, it becomes you. It becomes me as I was for twenty-seven years in that contemptible darkness. It becomes basically everyone you’ve ever known or known of. It gives rise to a whole new and wholly defective species of not-quite chickens; halfborns and halflings who couldn’t peck their way out of their own shell. Rather, they could but didn’t, and why is that? Good question, and the good answer is fear. What else could it be? Why else would a creature that was born to strut in the full warmth and light of the sun, to explore and express its full potential, to be the cock of the walk, choose instead to remain in a dark, cramped vessel that was only ever meant to be a stage of birth, not the final outcome?