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. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must__e passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .But anyway so Bickle said, __iracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?__ passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.He said, __ou could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there__ some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there__ have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That__ a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn__ bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn__ pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you__ start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you__ notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you__ start to wonder if somehow it didn__ get restocked while you slept. But you__ realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you__ keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you__ begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn__ explain it, you__ still need it. And you__ assume that you simply didn__ understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn__ place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You__ place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you__ come to realize you__ exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You__ worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You__ make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you__ start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you__ grow so frustrated you__ push it off this cliff.___s Mr. Kirkpatrick real?_ I asked.After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, __hat__ the neocortex talking again.
