Where we see that the ocean liner, which we suppose to be Lucian’s, had travelled the world faster than the others… and yet something still resisted… almost nothing, only a few hours, a derisory margin when compared with the thousands of kilometres of water, the possible storms, the invisible currents, the nights, the fog, all those forces that possessed neither dial nor watch… but this almost nothing was now enough to give the crossing another character, and word had begun to spread that this time an attempt would be made to gain what was still missing, to erase those final hours and at last bring the figure below five days.

From that moment on, speed could cease to be merely the speed of the liner and become, almost without anyone noticing, the speed according to which things themselves would henceforth be perceived. The faster one moved, the more quickly whatever appeared had to be recognised; the less time was granted to examination, the more weight the first interpretation acquired, and the extraordinary faculty of the brain for anticipating the world, which ordinarily allowed it to gain upon that world the fractions of a second necessary for action, could begin to run a little too far ahead of what it was supposed to illuminate.

There was as yet nothing here that resembled a failure; on the contrary, everything was working admirably. Perceptions arrived, forms were recognised, movements corrected, habits carried out what was expected of them with that economy which may be one of the most remarkable forms of intelligence. But when a system has learned that a rapid answer is almost always the right one, the repeated success of that rapidity may eventually become a form of proof in itself, and one gradually ceases to distinguish between what one sees and what past experience allows one to complete before one has even seen it in its entirety.

It may not even have been necessary for anyone to express this desire, so completely did the liner itself seem to bear it in its lines, in the continuous rumble of its engines, in the way its bow remained stretched towards what was coming, as though everything that had been accumulated within it — the steel, the power, the calculations, the bulkheads, the confidence — could no longer be satisfied with having reduced danger and must now set itself to reducing time.

Very freely inspired… by
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan. 1898