by Neil Bullock
Emma said, who’s to say doors cannot cease to exist? Or walls? Was that a hint?
Lara trots over to examine them with me. Two have obvious meanings, though it’s not clear what they affect. They are miniature versions of the Open and Close buttons on all the doors. The third has no discernible meaning, having only a single solid white circle rendered above it.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“I think you should press the Open button. I’m sick of this fucking place and if there’s a door we haven’t found yet, one that will open for us, I want to see what’s on the other side of it.”
I press the button, and the whole front wall of the carriage ceases to exist. I gasp.
We can see into the locomotive.
Together, we step forward.
Finally, somewhere that makes sense on this damn train. At long last!
Everywhere else is completely, disconcertingly silent. In the locomotive, it sounds like the inside of an airplane cabin in flight, like we’re actually doing the thing we’re doing: flying through a swirling gray hell. The more I think about this, the more alarming it becomes. Am I hearing those twisting, churning shapes outside as the train carves a path through them?
“This is…” Lara begins, then trails off.
“Yeah,” I say. There’s a tone of wonder to my voice that I’d rather wasn’t there. I still want to get off, but I have to admit, this is fascinating. The interior is poorly lit. Most of the light here comes from some kind of display panel on the left, but there are pinpricks of light of differing colors from a bunch of other instruments. None of it looks modern, though it doesn’t exactly look dated, either. If the train is as old as Emma said, that’s potentially interesting. Maybe there have been upgrades along the way, or maybe this thing was just way ahead of its time. Moving closer to the instruments, I can see that many of the buttons and dials are roughly hewn from what looks like metal. A few even appear to be made of stone. There’s nothing obviously made of plastic in here.
I glance over my shoulder. “I wonder if we can put the vestibule back the way we found it without the door closing.”
Lara turns to face the same direction. “I don’t know.” She walks to what used to be the back wall of the locomotive and bends down. “There are the same buttons on this side,” she says, indicating a small recess at ground level containing an open and close button, plus whatever the third one is. “I’ll go and do it.”
“Wait. No. I don’t want you trapped on that side if Mitch comes for us. I’ll tidy up. You keep the way open, okay? But lock it up if Mitch shows up.”
She nods reluctantly and I step over the threshold and start putting things back as they were. The carpet is the hardest part, and upon closer inspection it looks like this ritual has been done over and over again. There are layers upon layers of glue, and some of it looks much older and yellower than the most recent layers.
“Is there any glue in there?” I ask Lara, and she heads off to look, returning a moment later with an enormous squeezy metal tube which is half empty. I return to my task while Lara gazes around the interior of the locomotive. When I’m done, the vestibule doesn’t look half bad and the way through to the locomotive didn’t close. I step back through and press the close button. Immediately, we lose sight of the carriage as the wall rematerializes. There’s a screen on it which displays an image of the vestibule. I guess we get some advance warning if someone’s trying to get to us. I imagine Mitch in here, doing whatever it is he does. Maybe he watched me board the train from right where I now stand. He’d have the perfect vantage point, and I’d have been none the wiser. Or maybe it was Rona.
I shudder at that.
“You okay?” Lara asks.
“I’m good. How are you doing?” Given the magnitude of this discovery, it would be easy to forget she just watched her dad die.
She nods slowly. “I’ll be fine. It’s just… I keep thinking of the happy memories I have before… you know.”
“He wasn’t that person anymore,” I say, remembering Lara once saying something similar about Kyle. I suppress another shudder.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
She shakes her head, then starts inspecting the locomotive’s controls. I turn to do the same. I should try to prioritize, but I have a lot of priorities, and no clue where to start. I want to fix Kyle, if that’s even possible. I want to make the crew visible again, and hopefully disable the ability to make them invisible. I want to find somewhere to go with Kyle and Lara where we can start new lives. I want to learn more about the train and its purpose and its abilities.
“Look at this,” Lara says, and I walk over to find her tracing a finger over a huge dim screen showing a diagram containing thousands of different blobs of color, all of them slightly bleeding into each other. Hovering half an inch above the display is a white dot. It’s in the middle of a sea of dark blue and is slowly heading up and to the left. Down and to the right is a blob of bright orange.
I put my finger on it. “Bright orange. That was the color of the line on the train when we stopped. That’s where you came from originally.” My eyes dart around the diagram looking for a white blob, and I find it near the bottom left of the display. “That was me. This is the route map.”
“Weird route map.”
“Yeah. What do you think each of these blobs is? A different timeline? A different universe?”
“Maybe something like that. Do you know what color Kyle’s home was?”
I wrack my brains. “Brown, I think.” We locate the blob near the top in the center. I study the display further and note that there’s only one white, only one orange and only one brown. There are hundreds of shades of blue, green, yellow and red.
“Doesn’t matter, I guess. None of us wants to go back to where we’re from, do we? We need to find somewhere new.”
The display seems to be full of possibilities, if only we can figure out a way to make the train go to one of the colored blobs.
“Yeah. Any indication of how you set a route?” I ask. Lara’s closer to the console under the diagram, and she seems to have a knack for this stuff.
“I guess it’s one of these buttons or dials, but there’s no way of knowing what each one does. It’s not like the matter generator, these icons make no sense.”
I nod. “Let’s see what else we can find. Who knows how long we have in here.”
twenty-seven
The Controls
The most obvious thing here is that we can never hope to learn even a tiny bit of how this works, let alone all of it. Not with the ever-present threat of Mitch looming over us. The controls are so archaic, defying even basic understanding. There are some cubes of rock stacked under a metal bench on one side of the… what? Cockpit? Is that the right word? Anyway, these rocks could just be rocks, but they appear to serve some actual purpose. How can I tell? It’s because they subtly change color in sync with other more traditional instruments. Rocks. Where I come from, rocks just sit there.
The whole cockpit is like that. Everywhere I look is another thing that defies explanation. The whole ceiling looks like some great electronic spider has made its home up there. Seeing the tangle of cables of varying colors makes me feel far less secure than I did before coming in here. Then again, if the train has lasted millions or billions of years, maybe the state of the locomotive doesn’t matter. Maybe the whole thing is a construct designed to be familiar, wrapped around some even more inexplicable entity.
“What’s this?” Lara asks from the very front of the cockpit. She’s holding up a pale green object, about the size of a paperback book.
“Looks like oxidized copper.”
“Hmm.” Lara turns back to whatever lies in front of her. “There are others in different colors about the same size.”
I walk over and we discover dozens of materials under a bench, stacked haphazardly on top of one another, or shoved in the gap
s between other things. Some are easy to identify. I can tell which is iron because I decide licking it is a good idea. The block of charcoal – carbon – is obvious. There are some other smaller blocks of material sealed in cubes of clear resin. One of these has the letter K etched roughly into it, and I suppose that’s probably potassium. When we’re done looking through, we’ve counted about forty different materials.
“Chemical elements?” Lara asks.
“Looks like. I’m not sure why, though. I thought Emma said this train could create matter.”
“Maybe whoever created the train used these to tell it how.”
I find that concept a hard one to wrap my head around, so I don’t even try. “Maybe,” I say, then I leave Lara to her explorations. There’s a dark gray sphere almost the size of my head in front of the large display on the left side and I’ve been thinking it looks like something I could try to use. I approach and tentatively put my right hand on the sphere. It’s cold to the touch and rough like stone. It glows faintly when my hand makes contact and I fight the urge to pull back.
Sure enough, the screen in front of me brightens, then an interface of sorts appears. Like the other screens we’ve seen, the display is rendered half an inch or so above the actual surface. What’s there is mostly pictographs, and I struggle to decipher any of them. One looks like a planet with a ring around it, but the ring has a small arrow pointing to the left. One is simply a white rectangle. There are two more that I do recognize: open and close. In a different color at the bottom of the display there are five smaller icons which, after some staring, I decide represent the numbers one through five. The first has a single vertical line, the second has two, then three, then four. The fifth has one line and a dot and seems to be dimmer than the rest. There are maybe ten others I can’t make any sense of.
“What do you think these might mean?” I ask Lara, and she comes over to look. “I think the ones along the bottom might be numbers. There’s open and close.”
“Looks like it might be the main control panel. If such a thing exists.”
I nod my agreement. I’m taken by the rectangle icon. It could be just about anything, but I’m wondering if it simply represents matter. Maybe that’s the key to creating new objects from scratch rather than whatever’s already in the system in carriage seven. Or maybe not. I’m reluctant to try anything without understanding it first, but I don’t think we’re ever going to be in that position. If we want to get off, we have to use trial and error. If one of these buttons inexplicably vaporizes whoever is operating the control panel, then so be it.
Lara points at an icon which depicts a bunch of haphazard white dots. “Stars?”
“You might be right. What about the planet?” I ask, indicating the circle with the ring around it, and the arrow.
“Hmm. Could it be… time? Emma said they had to measure the passage of time by rock erosion. Maybe the spin, or position, of a planet might serve a similar purpose, at least in terms of describing concepts with icons.”
“Huh. Has anyone ever told you that you’re pretty smart?”
“Everyone usually clamors to tell me the opposite,” she says with a wry grin.
“Assholes.”
She laughs. It’s a nice sound. I’ve missed her laugh. I’ve missed being in a situation where laughing feels more appropriate than screaming. I gaze at the icon that may or may not relate to time in some way. Emma said the train can’t time travel, but she might be wrong. If it can, it might make more sense for there to be two of these icons, one with the arrow pointing left and one pointing right. But there’s only one, so I think it must be something else.
“Press it,” Lara says.
“I… what if something bad happens?”
“Plenty of bad stuff has already happened. What’s one more thing?”
“What if we die, Lara?”
“Then we die.”
I hesitate for several seconds, then I move my hand on the sphere. It works like a giant trackball except I realize it’s not tethered to anything. It’s just hovering in midair. A red outline gradually jumps from icon to icon until it’s on the planet-like one. I don’t know how to select it, so I try pressing on the sphere. It moves forward a little, then rebounds as the screen changes. This time, all the icons are the same: stars, and next to them are sequences of the numerals.
“What are these?” I ask, but I’m mainly just filling the silence. Neither of us knows.
“One… three… three… uh, zero, I guess… one… one,” Lara says, reading the numerals that accompany the first icon. Under that is one, three, two, three, two, one. There are more, hundreds more. They extend off the bottom of the screen and I figure out the sphere also doubles as a method of scrolling through the information.
“Select one,” Lara says. “We won’t figure anything out if we don’t try things.”
“Okay, okay.” I scroll back to the top and select the first entry.
The icons on the screen fade away and we’re left with a black display. This persists for a few seconds until several numerals appear at the top left. They change rapidly and we’re not fast enough to decipher them, so we don’t try.
Gradually, a sphere appears in the center of the display. It’s gray, featureless and static.
Slowly, it starts to spin.
“What is this?” Lara asks.
I’m silent as I watch cracks appear in the surface of the sphere on the screen. An icon appears in the top left with some other pictographs under it, but I have no idea what they mean. The icons fade away once all the cracks have been rendered in detail on the sphere.
“It looks like a planet,” I say.
We watch transfixed as other things happen. Each time the planet changes, an icon at the top of the screen appears with some characters we don’t understand under it. The planet is hit by another object and gains a moon. A short time later, volcanoes sprout from the surface. It becomes obvious where this is going after a while, but Lara and I both watch in mute astonishment as the Earth is formed before us. Water appears and continents move gradually into the configuration Lara and I are both familiar with. It looks like a satellite photo.
“I have a really terrible feeling about this,” Lara groans.
“I don’t know what to think,” I confess. My mind is swirling with ideas. If Emma is right, The Creator made the train to travel around the universe tending to things as if all of creation were nothing more than an enormous garden. Was Earth one of his creations? Is the list of things a record of creation for each planet, or star, or galaxy? Why would Earth be at the top? It’s pretty old.
“Go back,” Lara says. “I want to see the next item down.”
We figure out how to go back to the list and select the next item in it. The same thing happens again, Earth is formed before our eyes.
“Do you have a theory?” I ask her.
“I have a wild notion.”
“Do I want to hear it?”
“I’d be very interested to!” We both spin around at the sound of Mitch’s voice. We must have been too engrossed to notice him entering. Kyle is behind him, standing in the now open vestibule. Shit. We’re no match for both of them. If Kyle has joined Mitch, willingly or otherwise, we’re screwed. We might as well just give up now.
I glance at Lara who is glaring at Mitch. She takes a deep breath, then says, “You made us, right? All three of us.”
Mitch inclines his head, and his eyes widen with surprise. He nods approvingly. “I’m impressed.”
“Wait, what?” I say, astonished.
“Your little friend here is correct. Mostly. I can’t take credit for figuring out how this all works, that was Rona’s doing. Once she showed me, once she explained… well, it was easy after that.”
“You made us?” I ask. “What does that even mean?”
Mitch grins as if he’s humoring a foolish child. “Not just you, your entire worlds. Granted, it’s not a true creation.
They’re modeled on the real Earth, but I changed certain parameters once I figured out how. Then I looked for people to bring aboard. You three seemed perfect, though you’re still not quite what I’d hoped for. Maybe my criteria were too subtle.”
“Wait, wait… this is insane!”
Mitch looks at me as if he’s expecting me to say more. When I don’t, he asks, “What’s so insane about it?”
“What isn’t?”
He sighs. “When it became clear that I was staying on this train forever, I started to crave company. Rona… she suffered an unfortunate incident, though she was once brilliant. A more stimulating conversation you would never find. Sadly, she’s not what she once was. I talked to the staff — a tiresome bunch, I hear you’ve met them — and they told me about The Creator. It gave me an idea. Maybe I could create some company. People came and went from time to time, of course, but it was often decades between seeing anyone new.”
“So, you manufactured friends?”
“No, no, not at all. I manufactured worlds. I chose people from those worlds to board the train. It started off simply enough. I would pick people at random, follow their lives, watch as they grew and developed, then pick the most interesting ones.”
I rub my forehead. “That’s why our ages don’t make any sense. We’re all from Earth, but… different ones.”
“Yes, indeed.”
Lara interrupts. “And when did you decide that wasn’t enough?”
Mitch’s sneer makes my skin crawl. “Right around the time of the first murder on board. It was wonderful theater; I have to say. So much emotion, so much drama. I was conflicted at first, but these were people I created, they weren’t real. None of this is real, why should I care if these unreal people kill each other? I began to get a taste for it, to look for ways to make it happen again. Don’t look at me like that, I won’t apologize for it. You wouldn’t exist if not for me!”
“Why create new planets, though? Why not just pick people from the real Earth?” The moment I voice the question, I realize that my Earth isn’t the real one. Not the original. Mitch created it. That leaves me feeling a little like my tether to reality has finally snapped.