Zenith Aftermath (eBook)

Scott Overton (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
440 Seiten
No Walls Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-0695569-3-6 (ISBN)

Infos

A second chance for humanity? Or time to pass the torch.
The Zenith Train is primed to break a world speed record. But when the promotional stunt goes horribly wrong, billionaire philanthropist Griffin St. Clair and a group of VIPs find themselves in a world where the human race may be extinct. An apocalypse has spared them. What now?
They are not alone. In an uncanny forest devoid of other life, they encounter seemingly benevolent spectres and psychic predators who may be the next step in evolution.
Simply surviving will take everything they've got. Do they have a duty to do more?
Are the Zenith passengers a second chance for humanity on Earth? Or is the human era truly over?

Textauszug

 

3

Griffin St. Clair

(H

ey, Scheherazade, I’ve listened back to the first part of this journal, and it sounds like crap. Can you clean it up?)

[Request not understood.—Sch.]

(I don’t finish sentences. I use poor grammar. I ramble. It comes across like some clown talking to himself. Can you process it into story form when you transcribe it?)

[Requested results are beyond the parameters of my transcription software.—Sch.]

(You’re right. Wait, though. Try processing the transcription through Walter Singh’s DjinnEdit app. That’s what he used to write all those Scientific Global articles for him. He even coded a setting called “Flamboyant” that uses more creative attributions and stuff. DjinnEdit includes a self-learning algorithm, so it’ll improve as it goes. The damn thing wrote better than Walter ever did on his own.)

[DjinnEdit processing confirmed. I welcome the opportunity to experiment with simile, metaphor, and occasional mild hyperbole.—Sch.]

(Knock yourself out.)

[Yes. Popular idiom as well. I will retain such examples in their original form. Should the processing apply from this point forward, or from the beginning of the journal?—Sch.]

(From the beginning, please.)

[As you wish.—Sch.]

(Good one! Singh programmed that into you too, didn’t he? The nerd.)

I said that the Zenith Train hadn’t hit anything physical, and I believe that’s true. But when I recovered full awareness after the event, the aftermath certainly looked like an accident scene. I was lying on my back on the floor of the salon car with Lauren sprawled across my body. Almost everyone was in a similar state, although Vaughn Kinsella had managed to get to his knees, and Glenn Marshfield straightened up from where he’d slumped in a lounge chair.

After seeing her eyes flutter open, I gently lifted Lauren off me and got to my feet—where I nearly passed out again. A strong hand gripped my wrist. Danny, the bartender, was using the white-oak bar for support, and I thanked him for his help.

A woman screamed. It was Lena, frantically trying to slide out from under Laird Grady. The shriek didn’t wake him—nothing would. Dr. Kinsella knelt at the Secretary’s side. It was like a scene from TV, with the doctor checking for a pulse, listening for breathing, rolling the patient over, giving forceful thrusts of CPR. None of it did any good. Grady was gone.

My first victim.

That sounds melodramatic, but I was responsible. A man was dead, and it was my train and my promotional stunt. My fault.

We were all still just waking up. We hadn’t even got around to wondering why the train was stopped and the emergency lights were on.

I’ll try to relate what was said, the best I can remember it. (Sher, can you correct my dialogue from your memory?)

[Voice-activated recording was not initiated until the passengers had left the train.—Sch.]

OK. Well, I’m pretty sure the first one to speak was Leah Sanders, the caterer, who gasped and said, “Oh my God! What happened to him?” I suppose she instantly feared there was something wrong with the food, but I was glad someone else had asked the question. Especially after the dismissive look Kinsella gave her.

“I won’t know that until after an autopsy,” he snapped, then reached under Grady’s shoulders. Conlon Balfour, the science writer, grabbed the dead man’s feet and together they lifted Grady onto the lounger that Marshfield quickly vacated. It struck me that the only chair in use at that moment held a man who could no longer care about comfort.

“He’d had a couple of heart attacks,” Lauren said softly from just behind my shoulder.

“What happened to Laird can wait,” Marshfield rumbled. “What’s happened to us? Are these emergency lights? Why is the train stopped?”

“I have no idea,” I answered. “It’s never happened before.”

I was just turning toward the front of the car when Ben Matthews stepped unsteadily out of his driver’s booth. His navy-and-gold uniform wasn’t crisp anymore, and his balding forehead had rejected its comb-over. Matthews was the first train engineer I’d hired for the Zenith Train, so it was natural for him to come on this anniversary trip, even though human “drivers” don’t normally do anything but monitor readouts. I desperately hoped he’d have an answer for us, but he gave a quick shake of his head.

“The computer doesn’t say what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Computer doesn’t say anything. Instruments don’t say anything. Everything’s back to default settings. The system automatically rebooted, but I’d say it’s lost contact with the network.” He jerked a thumb toward the window. “No lights in the tunnel. You ask me, the power’s gone out.”

“Geez, Griff. A guy with your money should be able to pay his hydro bill.” Robbie’s attempt to cut the tension didn’t work.

“But a power outage wouldn’t cause a reboot. The system would switch over to internal power instantly. And the car’s own magnets should have come on to hold it in place. I don’t hear them.”

“Nope. We’re sitting on the tunnel floor.”

“That shouldn’t happen for two or three hours.”

Matthews nodded.

I felt a chill. The idea that we’d all been unconscious for that long was not welcome. What would cause that?

Had we been gassed? Or had somebody drugged the drinks?

And sabotaged the train, too? For what? A hostage-taking?

Marshfield jumped to the same conclusion.

“Have you got any security people on this train, St. Clair?”

“Didn’t need any. It’s just us in a sealed tunnel thousands of kilometers long. A vacuum-filled tunnel. And we do have security at every possible entrance. The train was thoroughly checked over by two separate teams, the best money can buy.”

He made a sour face then looked past me at Matthews.

“That’s one indicator that is functioning, sir,” Matthews said. “The vacuum integrity alarm.” He puffed breath through his lips. “We’ve got air outside.”

“Shit.” I looked at a room of worried faces, every one aimed at me. “Well, the good thing is that we can open the doors and take a look around. See if there’s any obvious cause for this.”

“Excuse me, Mr. St. Clair.” It was Balfour. “A loss of vacuum means this train isn’t going anywhere in a hurry, right?”

“Not at speed, no.”

“So how far is it to the next station?”

That question stirred things up like a stick in an ant hill as people realized that they might have to walk to safety in a tunnel that made a metropolitan subway system look like a neighbourhood shopping concourse. I won’t try to repeat everything that was said. Mostly they don’t bear repeating.

I reluctantly admitted that I had no idea where we were. “The last node I can remember passing was Salt Lake City. Matthews?”

“Same for me, Sir. But who knows how long we were unconscious?”

Our answers weren’t what anyone wanted to hear.

Matthews and I prepared to go out into the tunnel for an inspection as soon as Dr. Kinsella had checked everyone over for injuries.

There were none. If you don’t count Laird Grady.

No injuries to my train, either, except that the salon car’s levitating magnets were dead, their batteries drained as I’d expected. The car wouldn’t be going anywhere without a tow.

“Did I just imagine it, or were the tunnel magnets hyper-producing?” I asked Matthews.

“Nearly one hundred and thirty percent of rated capacity, sir. It happened quite suddenly, without warning. Naturally, we got a huge boost of speed.”

“I felt that. We hit a much higher speed than planned, didn’t we?”

“That’s just it, sir. It wasn’t what we’d discussed; but since all of that is pre-programmed, I couldn’t be sure why. I was just about to come back to see you when … whatever it is happened.”

And we’d all blacked out. Long enough for the train to coast to a stop and the main batteries to drain flatter than a punctured tire.

Matthews and I spoke at the same time.

“The Pod!”

All my trains have an emergency pod at the rear, like a caboose—and this junket was no exception. We never expected a train to be stranded; but, just in case, the pods have magnets of their own with a self-contained power source that can float them through the tunnel for six hundred kilometers, plus air, water, and food for ten people. Since five hundred kilometers was the maximum distance between exits, the safety margin was good. But there were two big problems in our case.

The first was air.

Air would create heating problems for a train moving at speed in a tunnel, and would also create electrical issues from humidity. The tunnel should never have filled with air—only one helluva big leak could do that in just a few hours.

Second, there wasn’t room for the pod to get past the salon car. The pod would have to go back the way we’d come.

There were just as many exits behind us as forward; but psychologically, people connect forward motion with progress. More troubling was the possibility that, going back, they might encounter whatever had caused our situation. It wasn’t likely to be anything good.

When Matthews and I returned inside the car, I reported most of this to everyone, then showed our guests to the pod.

“We’ll never fit into this thing,” Franklin Grant snarled. “What do you...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• Schlagworte: Digital Intelligence • exciting • Intelligent • Post-humanism • Second Chance • Singularity • thrilling
• ISBN-10: 1-0695569-3-9 / 1069556939
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0695569-3-6 / 9781069556936