In the darkness left alone
Walls surround that hellish hole
Deadly deep and no way out
From above I hear a swinging
Metal blade clinging
Walls surround that hellish hole
Deadly deep and no way out
From above I hear a swinging
Metal blade clinging
— Rage (Band), "The Pit and the Pendulum"
It was brutal, and once it would have killed us. Even with the augmentations Trintignant had given us, the damage inflicted was considerable as a scythe-tipped, triple-jointed pendulum descended from the ceiling and began swinging in viciously widening arcs. Our minds might have been able to compute the future position of a simpler pendulum, steering our bodies out of its harmful path. But the trajectory of a jointed pendulum was ferociously difficult to predict: a nightmarish demonstration of the mathematics of chaos.
