The train hissed to an easy stop, the auto-engineer at his command making him jealous for the future that never was. In Meat Times communication with the engineer had been a pleasing task in the main, most of them being good sorts. But having an entire train at his command, the only egotistical meatbot doing the Amtrak bidding, it felt good! The whistle sounded, that blaring audio bull snort of arrogance, as if in mechanical memory of the care for track trespassing humanity that long ago faded. Blare it did again, and a slight shade of the thrill he had felt as a boy, and then as a coach attendant, finally tempered by the weight of responsibility that molded him as a conductor, returned to echo within the man who had been.
“Perhaps that is why it was so, to keep the mini megalomaniac in all train lovers from blazing his way into the annals of terroristical crime?” he said to the lame stick of a man in the changing room mirror.
He looked into those glassed eyes and could see nothing to tell of the shivered human soul within. For his eyes, weak as they were, had to have been fitted with the latest optical upgrades in order for him to be recalled. He almost rather have remained dim-sighted and blear-eyed under the Mountain up in Ben Lomond where he had retired after the Oakland Train Break and the resulting hospital stay.
The memory of hundreds of sneakered feet, their dark ankles smelling of dank sweat, running over his body, not stomping of kicking, but simply, savagely in such a hurry to board the train to Seattle—paradise they had been told, where soared snowy mountains but it never got cold. To this migratory purpose, he, the heroic defender of Coach 611, having broken one ashy hand, which its owner then caught in the other hand in the rush over him, surging up, had been relegated to mere carpet.
What had he been other than a herder of human cattle?
What did he deserve but to become the ramp up which humanity was ushered upon its pointless, upward plummeting way?
He admired that skinny Kenyan, for taking that bone-crushing blow from the Conductor’s sledge, taken without a whimper and not repaid. The wounded African had grabbed that broken hand with the other as if Conductor Chadwick Benjamin Pozon had bestowed a gift, a hand stamp of entry into the night club of the world, America the Bountiful.
“Benny,” Mother had said, “they just want a good home. You should have hugged them and waved them in.”
How she would have been horrified by the security measures that would be taken to preserve the military readiness of Amtrak passenger trains, which were, in the end, a small money gutter servicing the vast ever drinking money chasm of USG, his beneficent employer. How his life had become the reverse of his ideology, his hopes devolving from socially conscious insistence, into an aspirational existence, and finally a slavish, dogged subsistence.
“What a creature you have become, Benny,” he said to the long ago crushed soul within that husk in the mirror.
He looked at the withered shoulders, once wide, the shoulders that Dad had always admired, saying, “That’s my boy, Chad.”
Dad had called him Chad for Chadwick and Mom called him Benny for Benjamin, as if they both disagreed with his birth and continued this single concord in life, to include their half-century long separation and divorce.
What did he see standing there in the steely bowels of the still whale?
The legs, once so strong, that had been Mom’s pride and joy when he rode his bicycle over the mountain in his football uniform, helmet on, to practice, were thankfully out of sight below.
The chin was still pointed, but the jaw behind too thin. The waxed mustache did nothing to conceal, but rather brought attention to this fault. His arms and trunk, thru diligent training, were stronger then they looked under his Amtrak uniform. He wore an important badge over his heart, a blued steel badge worked with the fingers of a Homeric Dawn in rosy contrast. This read US Public Sector. Likewise, his black conductor’s hat carried this device, rather than an Amtrak insignia. His supervisor had assured him, that once off of the train and beyond Diridon Station, he would by an agent of US PUBLIC SECTOR. In this capacity he would have the hours of a truly dying day to fulfill his commission in order to reactivate and navigate the decommissioned train. This was a ghastly sin in his mind, that none of those forlorn and rejected LDS applicants—especially the poor beauty he had left at the gates of four hells—would be accepted at Cheyenne Mountain. Some idea had lodged itself in the heads of the administrators, that the Sainted Occupants of that buried vault of an ark should be served by one of the last persons to see a Pacific Sunset. [1]
‘The central brain of the world has gone mad,’ he thought, afraid to speak even to himself on the Smart Train, for fear of redaction.
He glowered in the mirror, his actual eyes unseen, but the medical projections of their activity giving good hint to the workings within—a law enforcement/facial recognition contingency.
Despite his heart ache, seeing that beauty like an instant daughter to him, fleeing cannibalism and rape, Conductor Chad would do his duty. He had been selected out of medical retirement based on is record of proven dedication to that collective soulless monster sometimes known as The Man.
“Back before sunset or its a bust, Conductor Chad.”
From this point of his timely arrival, 7:05 A.M. he had nearly a half day to conduct a final kindness in service to his soulless owners, their ever-crooked will somehow achieving an odd congruence with his slavish conscience and, he prayed—done silently with unmoving eyes, for fear of the Just Risen an ever jealous Young Gods he served—with God’s will.
Conductor Chad turned and dragged himself from the changing room, his arms pressing against the narrow metal walls and tinny doors so many millions had used for relief, towards the stamped steel access port floor where—in an identical car he had been trampled and crippled. He crossed the space to the narrow hall boarded by the staircase housing to the right to the upper level, which he might never access again, and the luggage rack on the left. From under this polished rack he rolled out his Extended Conduction Case.
His crutches had been left on the upper rack where they pined like droning nannies to be taken up to ease his way, “Chadwick, your gait is unstable, your health in danger! Please, take us up and refit.”
'How lucky I am to have been in medical retirement when the Universal Life Science mandate had been signed into law. Imagine if those medical devices were inside of my head, droning commands and suggestions that no ear could be plugged against. Those poor bastards!'
A chill of guilt played down his spine. For, Chad's status of being Unlinked, or according to the illegal term “unchipped” had made him eligible for this last duty. For, when “The Nihil” came, all above ground medical implants would fail. Conspiracy Theorists expounded on possible horrific effects on the implanted human brain caught outside a Deep Gravity Well Faraday Preserve. What, was, however certain, was that Neuro Linked persons would, after a life time of Medical Media Synchronicity, be cast adrift within their own lonely minds. Chad was one of the very few who been passed over for the singular honor of Community Upgrade.
He snarled under his breath as he punched in the combination, his birthday, all he could recall. In this he was interrupted by his hearing aid, which agreed with the crutches, “Chadwick, put on your crutches, for safety’s sake.”
‘Thank God there had been a glitch in syncing the glasses with the crutches and hearing aid!’
He groaned as he punched in the code. The case opened up to reveal a kit he had thought was an hallucination from the stress of his training. Instead of what he had dreaded would only be a hazmat suit, instead awaited a revival of sorts, a thing he had missed these many lonely years… legs that work, with assorted bells and whistles that made the little bit of Benny left in him grin with ghostly joy.
…
Notes
-1. From an interview with Ken in Portland, February 2024: “As a crew member of Marine 1, I was called upon to take training flights to those secret bases in West Virginia, where, in case of a nuclear war, we would take and then serve The Important People, the senators, vice president and so forth, who were to rule the Post Apocalyptic World, to lord it over us mere scum. During this process, I often thought, that scum though we may be, that we had the guns.”
