Static Mayhem

by Edward Aubry

  Harrison waited for Glimmer to comment, congratulate, or criticize him, but all she did was look at the screens. He couldn't tell if she was actually paying attention to what they said, or if she was just trying to avoid talking to him. She didn't seem at all pleased with his discoveries. He had no idea why. He had been feeling pretty proud of himself for figuring out as much as he had and for taking the initiative to map out a route for them. He was finally starting to believe that he had some control over his immediate future, and he had expected her to be impressed.

  "What if there's an obstruction in the tube?" she suddenly asked. "What if something, I don't know, materialized in there? Or what if the tube was cut off by a huge wall of rock? Isn't it possible that the tunnels are still impassable?"

  "Yes, it is. Which is why all Worms are equipped with obstacle detectors, which operate at a range of over 200 miles. If they spot anything in the tunnels, they automatically return the train to the last station and divert it to a different route. That's a redundancy, since under normal circumstances nothing could get into the tunnels, but the designers included it, anyway. I'm telling you, Glimmer, this thing is foolproof and chimp simple!" He waited again, but when there was no immediate response, he started to feel defensive. "I thought you would be thrilled about this. Is there a problem?"

  She mulled the question over. "What would you say," she asked, "if I told you that I had found a lovely pumpkin and eight mice, and that it would be child's play to turn them into a carriage that would hustle us all to Chicago in no time at all?"

  He thought about that for a moment. It seemed an unfair comparison. Magic made little sense to him, and still seemed dangerous. "I guess I'd say I'd rather walk."

  "That's right. I'd rather walk than ride your Worm."

  "What? Why?"

  "Because it's tech, Harry! I don't understand any of what you just said! What the hell is a magnetic field? What do you mean by air pressure? How am I supposed to trust this thing if it doesn't make any sense to me?"

  Harrison didn't know what to make of this. She seemed uncharacteristically afraid, sincerely afraid. He had assumed she would understand at least some of what he was talking about. He wasn't sure how far back he would have to go to explain it all to her, and he was too excited about his new discovery to play that game, anyway. The way she redirected his comments, it could take days, and he wanted to leave right away.

  "I know what a magnet is," Mitchell offered. "They stick to metal. You can use them to pick things up, like paper clips, and they stick to refrigerators, too. Which is weird, because refrigerators aren't really metal, but magnets work on them anyway. So, they stick to metal and refrigerators. Oh! And chalkboards."

  "Refrigerators are made out of metal," Harrison said.

  "They are?" This was a paradigm shift for him.

  Harrison nodded. "And so is the train," he continued, still talking to Mitchell, but drawing Glimmer in, too. "That's how the magnets in the ceiling make the train move. The magnets in the train are trying to stick to them, so it moves toward them." He hoped the context of a little science lesson might break the tension. Glimmer still looked uncertain.

  "Hey, don't compasses use magnets, too?" the boy asked trying to score points with the teacher.

  Glimmer seized the opening. "Oh, sweet! Why don't we all just get our compasses out, and then …" She paused, feigning alarm. "Oh, my! I just remembered! Those don't work right anymore, do they?"

  "Okay," Harrison whispered to Mitchell, "now you're not helping."

  "Sorry."

  "So now what?" asked Glimmer. She sounded confrontational. "What makes you think this will work?"

  Harrison was exasperated. He had not expected this to turn into a battle. "Come," he said. He got up and marched into the building. They followed him into a room with several long tables and a wall of snack machines and drink dispensers. In one corner of the room were a sink, a counter, and two vaguely rectangular objects. They were both boxy, yet somehow sleek, and although they looked nothing like appliances from his own time, Harrison had identified their functions during his earlier sweep through the building. One was something like a microwave oven, the other, a refrigerator. Affixed to the refrigerator were several small labels, one bearing the GLTW logo, others advertising shops outside. He peeled one label off and handed it to Mitchell, peeled another off and handed it to Glimmer. "Magnets," he said. "They work just fine. The problem with the compasses isn't magnetism. It's magic."

  Glimmer said nothing.

  Harrison pulled up a chair and flopped into it. Mitchell did likewise. "Okay," he said to the pixie, "I get that this thing makes you uncomfortable. I guess I'd feel the same way, like you said about the pumpkin. But the thing is, I'm ready to be done walking. We're in Buffalo, New York, right now, which means we've come halfway, and we've been on the move for over two months. That stinks. If this thing works, we'll be there today. Not two months from now, not next week, today." He paused, thinking how to address the other issue in front of a child. "Also, if we're looking for a way to travel surreptitiously, we'd have a hard time finding a better method."

  "I already thought of that," she said.

  "And you'd still rather take your chances up on the surface?"

  She looked down. "No, not really." She looked up again. "This better not be my chance to say I told you so."

  * * *

  Harrison was able to program the entire route into the train from the station. He was also able to clear the tubes remotely by depressurizing and opening an airlock in every station along the way. Every time he cleared a path, a light on the monitor for that station changed from red to green. The system allowed for such manipulation to accommodate express routes. The entire process took him about twenty minutes.

  Mitchell explained, several times, that he had been down the tunnels marked WORM, and that every single one ended with a gate he could not open. Cursory examination of boarding procedures revealed that these gates were essentially turnstiles, designed to be opened when a fare card was detected. Harrison forged fare cards for himself and Mitchell with more than enough credit on them to cover the trip they had planned. When they got to the gates, Harrison insisted on going first and that Glimmer stay back with Mitchell. It was a double gate, allowing only one passenger at a time to go through. Harrison readied his card. He approached the first gate, and rested his fingers on it, almost absent-mindedly. It buzzed lightly and opened for him. This confused him, as he had expected to have to actually run his card through a detector, and indeed he could see one on the wall next to the gate. There must, he reasoned, be an even more sophisticated, and invisible, detector. Perhaps the one on the wall was a backup. Mitchell and Glimmer hung back until Harrison was through both gates, and then Mitchell moved forward, Glimmer on his shoulder. The boy imitated Harrison and waited for the gate to open. It did not.

  "Try swiping the card through the slot on the wall," Harrison called back through the gates. When Mitchell did this, it worked, and he walked through with the pixie in tow. From there, they proceeded down another escalator, which took them to the platform.

  Seen close-up, the train was even more exciting than it had looked on the screen. Covered entirely in a substance that looked like chrome (and, Harrison mused, might have been chrome), it projected the very idea of sleekness. Its skin was almost completely smooth, with the exception of the series of tear-shaped windows that ran its whole length. All of this design was far more for style than function, however, for traveling through a vacuum made aerodynamics irrelevant, and there would not be much to see out a window moving over 600 miles per hour through a sealed tunnel. Apart from the brilliant metallic shine, the only color on the train was the blue GLTW logo, worked tastefully into a racing stripe applied under the row of windows. The train was hovering behind an enormous curved wall made of glass with huge metal ribs. Harrison presumed that the ribs were part of the network of magnets, there to keep the train from repelling off the far wall and crashing through the
glass. There were small openings at several points in the wall, with boarding ramps leading to doors in segments of the train. All the doors were open.

  They boarded. Harrison was giddy, Glimmer reserved, Mitchell somewhere in between. They made their way to the front of the train. The last passenger car they passed through on their way to the bullet-shaped lead car was apparently the Transit Worm's equivalent of first class. Mitchell picked a voluminous couch and stretched out on it. "I need to do some stuff up front," Harrison said. "Are you okay here?" Mitchell nodded, having already found the controls to the TV screen. He was scrolling through prerecorded programs, most of which were ads, information about the train, or news programs. Harrison's gaze lingered for a moment on a story about a war happening somewhere in Europe, but he couldn't truly bring himself to take interest in events that had not yet come to pass and likely never would. When Mitchell changed the channel, the story vanished. "Stay with him for a minute, would you?" he asked Glimmer. "Try to see that he finds something, I don't know, wholesome to watch."

  "Sure," she said. She sat down on the couch next to him and started asking questions about the remote control. Harrison passed through the doorway into what he imagined to be the locomotive, or the cockpit.

  There was almost nothing there. He found a number of seats, two of which faced the very front and were situated behind a small panel of controls. Apart from those two, none of the seats appeared to be associated with any sort of operations having to do with making the train go. Some of the seats were situated near tables that folded out from the walls. It struck him that the atmosphere in this compartment was more like a break room than a control room. The control panel was several orders of magnitude less complex than he expected. He already knew that it was possible to program the train remotely, but now he was beginning to think that was the only way to run it. There were some gauges to indicate speed, location, air pressure, and the like, and as in the station office, also a touch screen and a bank of smaller monitors. That was it. He had imagined that the control room would look like the cockpit of a jumbo jet, or maybe some futuristic spaceship. Instead, it looked like a room that had nothing whatsoever to do with the operation of the train, and for a second he was afraid he had come to the wrong compartment. When he sat in one of the foremost seats, however, he discovered that this was indeed the command center. The touch screen clearly and helpfully read, "Course Downloaded. Proceed?" This was followed by the same two YES/NO buttons he had seen when he had restarted the system back in the station. "Chimp simple," he said again. He reached forward and held his finger poised over the YES option.

  He hesitated.

  Somehow, he thought, this should be a bigger moment. It was almost anticlimactic that, after all he had been through, he could now zip over to Chicago at the touch of a button, and only a virtual button at that. He felt like he should say something, or that Glimmer and Mitchell should be here when he did it, or something, but when he turned around to go get them, he found Glimmer already hovering just behind him.

  "Do it before I change my mind," she said.

  He did.

  The message on the screen changed to "Course Accepted," then showed a graphic of the doors retracting and sealing and the boarding ramps folding back into the tunnel wall, which also sealed. "Station Lock Depressurizing," the screen read now. It had begun. They were less than two hours from the end of their journey.

  "Did you find Mitchell a good cartoon?" Harrison asked.

  "I guess it was good," she answered. "It put him to sleep."

  "Wow. That was fast."

  She shrugged. "He's had a big day. Besides, it's almost midnight."

  Harrison was surprised by that. They had been underground since early morning, and he had paid no attention to the time. "Man," he said, suddenly aware of his own fatigue, I had a big day, too." He rubbed his eyes. "If I'd slowed down long enough to think about it, I probably would've said we should get a fresh start in the morning. It's going to be stupid late by the time we get there."

  "Yeah, well, carpe noctem," said the pixie, dryly.

  "Hmm. I wonder if I can score some coffee on this boat." As he said this, the screen changed again, showing the message, "Lock Depressurized. Hatch Opening." He expected to hear some dramatic rumbling or clanking sound to mark the grand event of the tunnel door opening, then remembered that the hard vacuum between the door and the hovering train would not convey any such noise. He felt the acceleration as his seat was pulled back from him and the station receded, quickly, from the window in front of him.

  "Whoa," he said. "We're in the caboose! I sure didn't see that coming." He watched the light of the station fade to a speck, then vanish. In addition to being soundless, the motion aboard the train was extremely smooth. Apart from the occasional light pull to one side or another as they rounded curves, it was difficult to tell they were even moving. Harrison felt the same mild sense of vertigo he had felt on an ocean liner once, and he expected that people prone to seasickness must have opted out of this particular mode of transportation. "Well," he said. "This is it. I can't believe we're almost there."

  "Given any thought as to what we should do when we get there?" Glimmer asked. It was the first time either of them had considered the question out loud.

  "No clue," he said honestly. "I expect that somebody out there has discovered the station. Still, they haven't got it running yet, which means more than likely they can't even get down to the tunnel." He thought for a moment. "We should probably take a quick look around once we arrive at Chicago Station. If there's nobody there, we should seal up the train and get a decent night's sleep. Time enough to get acquainted tomorrow, I should think."

  "Aren't you eager to meet your Claudia?"

  "She's not mine, and yes, I am," he replied, not rising to the bait, "but I don't think I'm going to win any friends trying to track her down at two in the morning."

  "Of course." Glimmer smiled. "The moment must be perfect in every detail, right?" As Harrison rolled his eyes at her, she giggled. Then she pointed to the bank of monitors behind him. "One of your lights just went red."

  "What? Where?" Harrison turned around and scanned the panel. "That's weird. Milwaukee Station is showing a closed airlock. I had them all open. Did you actually see the light turn red?"

  "Yep," she said. "It was green. Now it's red."

  "Well, that's right, at least. Hmm." He tapped the main screen, brought up a menu, tapped again for a status report on that station. "Says the station's on lock-down. That doesn't make sense. I just opened it when we were upstairs. Why would it seal itself?" He double-checked the other stations on his route and found them all exactly as he left them. "This is screwed up," he said. "I can't get the lock back open."

  "Is that one we can go around?"

  "No. In fact, it's about the only station we can't get around somehow. It's also the only station that connects to Chicago, so if we want to take the Worm the whole way, we need to take it through Milwaukee." He tried to reopen the lock the same way he had opened it the first time. "It's not responding. I wonder if it's just gone idle. This would be the worst time for it to do that. Damn, this sucks."

  Glimmer had apparently not expected bad news so early into the ride. "Now what?" She sounded nervous.

  "Now we stop the train," he said. "If we can't ride this thing to Chicago, it's not worth taking it up and around the lakes." He looked at his map. "We'll stop in Toledo. That's going to mean going on foot again, but I don't see an alternative. Because of the route I marked out, that's where we turn around and start going way out of our way." He slapped the Milwaukee monitor with his palm. "Dammit! This sucks!"

  "Well at least we'll get as far as Toledo, right?" said Glimmer. He could hear relief in her voice.

  "Yeah," he conceded. "Yeah, and that alone will take weeks off the trip. I guess I should be thankful that I got anywhere in this thing at all."

  "That's the spirit. How soon until we get off?"

  "You could sound ju
st a little more disappointed, you know."

  "Yes."

  Harrison tried several more times to get the locks in the Milwaukee Station back open. He was also stymied in his attempts to learn why the locks were closed in the first place. The only normal operating reason to close them would be to pressurize the chamber in order to load or unload a train. He had already established that the Milwaukee Station was not harboring a train, and all the other trains he had discovered were still accounted for. It wasn't actually necessary to leave all the locks on the route open. He could have opened them as he went along, but he felt more comfortable taking the extra precaution. Now he was glad he had. He had not considered the possibility that they might become stranded by a malfunctioning airlock.

  Finally, reluctantly, he gave up. There was no way he was going to be able to get to Chicago through Milwaukee Station, and if they overshot Toledo, every stop after that would take them farther away from their goal. He brought up the main menu on the screen and found an option for course revision. He canceled every part of the route after Toledo, and ordered the locks at that station to seal and pressurize once they were there. He kept reminding himself how lucky they were to have cut such a huge corner off their journey in so short a time, but he really wasn't buying that. It galled him that they had come so close. The worst part was the hateful irony. This was the first thing he had found that didn't work perfectly, and it was the first thing that he desperately needed to work. He submitted the final revisions and tapped a button that said, "Confirm Changes."

  Immediately, the system responded, "Unable To Proceed. Course Revision Not Accepted."

  Harrison felt his stomach drop down to the track. "Oh," he said, his voice distant. "That's not what I want."

  He tried again, giving the same exact commands as the first time, and got the same exact result. Then he tried to program the train to stop in Erie. Again, the system would not comply. He tried to program the train to stop in Detroit. This also didn't work.