The tragic tale of Nito, the little cog runner.
There once was a very little man named Nito. In Nito's land, all machines were operated with cogs. Nito was a member of the Cog Runners, a secret organization of very little people whose duty was to keep these machines working. Nito's job was to get inside the cogs and run in them, turning the cogs and ensuring the safe operation of various machines. In his 20 years of work as a Cog Runner, Nito ventured inside machines of many kinds, from cheap, broken kettles sold at one-dollar stores to NASA's most advanced supercomputers.
There were two ground rules all Cog Runners had to obey. First, a Cog Runner must never rest in the middle of a job. Second, they must never, ever be discovered by the bigger people using the machines, or the lives of all Cog Runners would be put at risk. Nito's name was not his real one. It was simply a codename, and his true name was known only to a select few high-ranking Cog Runners. Not even his family was permitted to know it. Nito was able to keep his activities secret for 20 years. But one day, a foolish mistake led to his demise.
One day, Nito was tasked with running in a cog inside an old grandfather clock. The clock stood in the living room of the Johnson family, and on that day, little Jimmy Johnson was playing with his toys there while Mrs. Johnson was making dinner. Nito had been running for five hours straight and was getting tired. "There's no harm in taking a five-minute break," he told himself as he stepped out of the cog and opened a can of soda.
As soon as he stopped running, the clock ceased to tick. Little Jimmy heard the clock go silent and took a closer look. To his amazement, he noticed the tiny man resting and drinking soda.
Jimmy ran to the kitchen to tell his mother. Nito was mortified. Before he could get back into the cog, a small helicopter landed beside him. Out stepped two men in black suits who were huge relative to Nito's size. They grabbed him, loaded him into the helicopter, and flew away. When Jimmy and his mother returned to the living room, they saw no little man inside the clock. Jimmy's mother assumed her son had simply imagined the whole thing.
The helicopter landed outside the headquarters of the Cog Runners. Nito was brought inside and thrown by the guards before none other than the president of the Cog Runners, a man known simply as Cogboss.
"Agent Nito," Cogboss said in a surprisingly deep, reverberating voice for someone only two inches tall. "You broke not one, but both of the Cog Runners' sacred oaths. If my men had not quickly found you and brought you here, our operations would have been put at risk. You have brought shame upon the Cog Runners, and you shall be executed tomorrow."
Nito went pale. He had heard frightening stories about Cog Runners who had been executed in the past and never believed he would find himself in their position. The following morning, Nito tearfully said goodbye to his wife and their two children before being escorted to the execution site.
Nito found himself in a large arena before a cog hanging above a pool of lava. Cogboss was as cold as a cog, and his preferred method of execution was just as cruel. Nito had to get inside the cog and run. Doing so would activate a mechanism that slowly lowered the cog into the lava below. Nito stepped into the cog, took a deep breath, and ran and ran until he finally drowned in the pool of lava.
Nito was buried beneath a pile of cogs. No one knows what his true name was, but those who heard his tragic tale gave him an ironic title: >!Going-in-cog Nito!<
