Seat A10 (Part 1)

The young man’s eyes shot open. He sucked in air like a vacuum after having just been unkinked.

*Hfffffff*

As he tried to get his bearings, the sensations of really existing returned to his body. His nervous system acknowledged the stiff plastic of the seat he found himself in, sending electrical signals up his spinal column to suggest it was rigid, but reasonably comfortable and supportive. His olfactory senses kicked in and he could smell the slightly musty, re-circulated air gushing down at him out of the vent above his face. He realized that while the air from the vent was providing a light breeze, the temperature in the train-car felt atypically warm. The air hitting his face now was hardly cooling him down. If anything, it was actually making him start to feel sweaty and uneasy.

There must be a way…. There must be a way……..

A young woman paced back and forth mumbling this to herself, causing the young man to blink away the fog from his eyes and take a look at her. As she came into focus he noticed that she was quirky-looking, and probably somewhere around his age. Her small frame was swimming in paint covered overalls, and that, coupled with her oversized glasses, suggested that she was “the creative type.” The young man decided that her unusual behaviour was, well, not-all-that-unusual after all.

What was unusual to him however, was that the walls of the train seemed to lean inwards. It was almost as though they were warping, like so many objects passing through immense gravity wells in science fiction movies he had watched. No matter how many times he blinked, rubbed his eyes, and tried to force them to refocus, the walls continued to maintain an ever-so-slightly warped appearance. It was only after telling himself that this distorted perception would just be temporary, and assigning it to being over-tired, that he also glanced through one of the windows and noticed the exterior of the train. It was simply blackness, with random streaks of colour. Reds, yellows, blues and whites all bleeding together. He couldn’t make out a single real object, or even attempt a guess at what the blurry streaks were.

“Wha—how…. How fast are we going?” The young man asked himself in a groggy whisper.

There must be a way….. There must be a way………. There must be a———

“Hey!” The young man called. He leaned forward in his seat and reached out to stop the young woman, gently touching her left arm.

“Where are we? How fast is this train moving right now?”

She stopped pacing, robotically turned in place, and simply stared at him. He could see a muffled reflection of himself in her glasses. A mass of dark black, shoulder length hair, hung over a vague, pastel-rubbed, featureless face. The longer he looked, the less he could decipher his own reflection.

She continued to stand there without giving any kind of response. It was almost as though he had spoken a completely foreign language, and she was now waiting to see if he would try another. Then, suddenly, she tilted her head to one side, gave up, and turned away to begin pacing and mumbling again.

“What the hell is her problem?” the young man thought to himself as he turned his head to watch her walk towards the front end of the train car.

A tug on his right arm jolted his attention and caused him to whirl around in his seat.

“Oh don’t mind her….” A fragile, whispered, old voice said. “She’s just too worried about finding the right way to solve our problem before attempting anything. Instead of being willing to possibly fail and have to correct herself after the fact, that is.”

The young man eyed the owner of the voice. “Was he always there?” he wondered. “He must have been. I just can’t remember if he sat down before I fell asleep…..”

The old man looked somewhat frail in his khaki-coloured slacks and a faded-blue, slightly baggy, wool sweater. A short, fluffy, well-groomed beard of white wrapped around the entire bottom half of his face, leading up to a thick horseshoe of white hair that surrounded whispy leftovers atop his head. His bright eyes seemed to shine as though they were projecting a variety of colours into the world, rather than possessing any single colour themselves. When he smiled, the young man felt as though he was looking at a child smile. There was a joy and playfulness in it that the young man almost absorbed into himself. It made him feel.... lighter.

“It really is a shame though. So bright, so creative…. She has all of the potential. Missing the courage."

“The courage?” asked the young man.

“To be wrong of course. It’s okay to be wrong!” he giggled. “In fact, without discovering our own wrongness, we’d never have been able to improve enough to be somewhat right.”

“What do you mean, 'somewhat' right?”

“Heh heh, ahhh oh my…. Well of course we have discovered many things we believe to be ‘right’ or ‘truth,’ but that is simply because we can predict them with great accuracy, or they lead to positive outcomes. It does not mean they are perfectly right or finished. AND, we also have to remember that there are many ways in which a great deal of us make the things we want to believe, or the things we already believe seem or feel right. Much of the time involuntarily! Heh heh heh, what bizarre creatures we truly are.”

“Okay, but there is no actual ‘right’ or ‘truth’ when it comes to matters of opinion and choice…. That is all subjective. Part of growing and evolving as a species, part of the reason we have everything we do is because we encourage this.”

“Ahh ha! Very true, our creativity is born of this variety of perspectives, yet there are ideas that can be more right than others, statements that can be more right than others, and actions that can be more right than others..… This still does not mean that we have discovered the absolute best or final ideas, actions, and knowledge about a given circumstance, but they can objectively be stated to be ‘the best we have’ at the time. More importantly, we should always view them as ‘where we want to begin improving upon ourselves from.’ Knowledge and ideas are never finished with us, or by us, and we should never be finished with them. The only real ‘right’ choice is to constantly be searching for more.”

“Well, I don’t see how much more there is to search for when we live in a time where I can get any answer, item, or information I want almost instantly. I think we’ve found the ‘more,’ haven’t we? Or, at the very least, we know where and how to find it when we need it.”

“Mmmmm indeed. But is being able to point to a piece of knowledge the same as really knowing it?”

The train jerked violently as the old man finished asking the question, but to the young man it seemed like no one else had even noticed.

“Sorry to break away from your question for a moment, but do you know how fast we’re going? Or where we are? The turn around that last bend felt dangerously sharp, and I imagine we will need to start slowing down soon to make the first stop at…… at…………….. sorry I don’t even remember what the first stop on this line is, but I assume we must be getting close.”

“Oh. This train isn’t stopping” the old man answered with a compassionate smile on his face.

“You mean we are just going right through to……. Ugh AGAIN!” the young man half-shouted. “Sorry, I must still be suffering brain fog after dozing off. I can’t even remember what station is at the end of this line right now. Regardless, if this is a direct line that means we will bypass my stop. I didn’t know this was a direct line.”

The young man sat, shaking his head in frustration at the fact that he would now have to wait for a train headed back in the opposite direction that would get him home.

“To be honest with you,” the old man butted in softly, “I think you did.” He was still holding his smile steady under his bright, teary eyes.

“What? Why would I have gotten on a direct train when my stop is only halfway down the line?”

“Perhaps because you’re not looking for your stop?” he replied.

“It doesn’t matter anyways, like I said, this train is not stopping…. Even at the end.”

As he let these words trickle from his mouth, the old man glanced out the window, staring deeply into the mix of blackness and the golden-bluish lines currently sweeping past them.

“What do you mean ‘even at the end’? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Oh, this train was never intended to arrive anywhere, it will simply go until we run out of track.”

The young man just stared at the older man blankly, confused by his words.

“We are all going to the same place eventually aren't we? We are only given so much track to run on.”

Still confused, and somewhat upset by this comment, the young man pressed the older man.

“Until it RUNS OUT of track! As in CRASHES into whatever is at the end? That’s ridiculous, why are any of us on here then? How is this even ALLOWED to happen?”

“It is allowed to happen, because it must happen. Like I said, we’re all going to the same place.”

“So EVERYONE is just okay with this?” The young man stood up for the first time, grabbing onto the bar protruding vertically from the back of his seat into the roof. He realized that not only did it look warped, it was warped. He could feel it bending in towards him.

He glanced around the cabin. The walls of the train continued to arc both towards the far end of the car, and in on top of him. It seemed as though the entire train car was flexing, and the sensation brought a whole new meaning to the word vertigo. The young man even began to feel as though he himself were beginning to warp in concert with the train around him.

Oddly enough, the other ten passengers he could make out did not seem to notice the unusual physical nature of the train car, or the fact that the young man was now calling out to them.

“YOU’RE ALL JUST HAPPY TO SIT HERE AND WAIT TO RUSH INTO…… WHATEVER IS AT THE END OF THIS LINE? I’M REALLY THE ONLY ONE WHO IS GOING TO TRY TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?”

“Young man,” the old man quietly cooed, “They are all pre-occupied. Notice their fixations.”

The young man looked around again, straining against the invisible gravitational forces created by the immeasurable speed the train was currently traveling at. He almost thought his eyes were vibrating until he realized that the waves he was seeing were actually there. Everything was becoming wavy and muffled, like his reflection had been in the young woman’s glasses.

He saw faceless, warbly creatures in their warping plastic seats glaring into slightly angular phones and tablets. He watched as two faceless creatures mashed their dark, fuzzy versions of what could have been their faces together. Then, the young woman pushed past him mumbling the same phrase to herself. She knocked him off balance enough that the force of the train’s speed would have pulled him forwards and down to the floor had he not been hanging on to the warped support pole.

“They are resigned to drift along until the track runs out my friend.” The old man whispered softly again, staring straight into the young man’s eyes.

Oddly, the old man was the only thing in the train car that hadn’t started to warp or blur.

“Not me” he retorted. “That’s insane. There has to be a way to stop the train. There’s always emergency brakes somewhere!”

“Well, sit back down then. Let’s discuss this. Perhaps there is a way.”

“NO! There’s no time to sit back down and discuss the solution” the young man countered impatiently. “We need to do something now! The train is clearly speeding up, you can see it in the way the structure is starting to….. warp? I don’t even know WHAT it’s doing. All I know is there is always an emergency braking system, and I’m going to the front to engage them.”

“But…. How do you know that is where they are?” The old man questioned.

“Where else would they be? If the engineer has lost consciousness, or worse, at least I’ll be there to engage the brakes. If they are doing this on purpose…. I guess I’ll have to remove them.”

“But again, are you certain the braking system will be at the front?”

“It HAS to be. Why are you doubting me?” The young man was becoming more agitated with each passing moment and each new question the old man asked him.

“Who else in here thinks the emergency braking system is going to be accessed through the engineer's console in the front car?”

A few blurred, wavy hands rose into the hazy, distorted space of the train car. Most of the creatures seemed not to even notice the question.

“You see. Anyone who pays ANY attention or cares about this situation agrees.”

“Mmmmm” the old man nodded, “And if the braking system can be accessed from there, how is it you would get there?”

“What? I go through the door! I keep making my way through these passenger cars until I get to the engineer and the command console.”

“Oh, I don’t think you should try that....” the old man offered, squinting his eyes gently. “I don’t want you to.”

“You don’t want me to? Why?”

“Because I want you to search for more.”

“I….. ju…… Whatever old man. This is ridiculous. You’re just trying to keep me here because you WANT this thing to reach the end of the tracks. I don’t understand why you could possibly want that, but I’m not waiting any longer.”

The young man planted his feet and stared through the rippling waves of the train car. The waves were now fluctuating to the point that they were causing his eyes to view the world like he were looking though a camera bobbing on the surface of the ocean, half underwater and half above it.

“WHO WANTS THIS THING STOPPED? HUH!?” He called out to the car.

Immediately all of the distorted creatures shot their hands into the air, then pointed towards the front door of the train car.

“That’s what I thought” the young man grumbled.

He turned himself towards the door and staggered from support to support, reaching out from one to grab on to the next before attempting to take a step forward. It felt like he was wearing cement blocks on his feet. The closer he got to the door, the heavier his feet grew, and the more violent the waves tearing their way through the train car became.

Once he had finally reached the door, he used all of his strength to glance backwards towards the old man and the seat he had come from.

He had only traveled past 2 rows of seats to get to the door, but it felt like it had taken him forever. Now, glancing back, he could see why.

The third row of seats, the one he had come from, was hundreds of meters away. Even though the rest of the car had become a swirling mess of colours and objects, all warping and blending together, the old man sat in his seat, perfectly in focus, shaking his head slowly in what the young man sensed was…. disappointment.

He turned back to the door and smashed the ‘open’ button…….

——————————

*Hfffffff*

The young man’s eyes shot open as he sucked in a breath of air. Again.

The same feeling of slowly recovering all of the sensations in his body returned.

The same blurry, ‘I’ve just woken up’ kind of vision plagued him.

The same young woman approached from the rear of the train car — There must be a way…..

Yet, this time he remembered what had happened before he had fallen asleep.

“Wait…. I didn’t fall asleep. I was opening the —”

“Yes, yes….. the door” the old man muttered, finishing the young man’s sentence for him. “Not quite the result you had expected?”

“N——what? How are you? The train…. Why is everything back to how it was when I first woke up? The train is, almost normal again. But when I was at that door, everything was so distorted it was as if…… YOU! You were still normal. How?”

“Perhaps I was. Perhaps I was not. Maybe it was merely your perspective that viewed me as ‘normal,’ and others here viewed me as warped. Who is to say how any other creature might truly see or understand the world through their perceptions.”

The young man whipped his head around, following the young woman who had just passed him as she moved towards the front door of the train car. The car itself was not drastically warped or stretched yet. It was just slightly bending inwards, exactly how the young man had observed it to be during his last 'awakening.' He quickly looked back in the other direction, seeing the exact same muffled, faceless creatures in their spots. All of them still fixated on the same things they had been before.

“No matter.” The old man chuckled, breaking the silence and grabbing the young man’s attention.

“You made an error. You believed you knew how to fix a problem, and you did not. But here we are. Still on the track you see! The mistake has not taken the ability to continue on your journey from you….. the track is never taken from us just because we may explore, or use our train incorrectly at times.”

The young man was incensed, and quickly losing patience with both the old man, and the situation.

“What? What do you mean explore or use our train incorrectly? Stop talking in little twisted riddles and tell me what is going on. The train warps and distorts further and further as it picks up speed right? When I try to leave this car, or even my own seat to try to stop it, I make the effect worse….. and I can’t even go anywhere anyways! I’ll just get rebooted right back to where I started. It’s like this is some kind of time loop, or 'Alice in Wonderland mushroom trip.' I don’t understand……. Where ARE we?”

The young man stopped talking for a moment and lowered his head into his hands.

“This can’t be real” he whispered to himself.

“Questions! Questions are important! Asking them of others when you do not truly know something…. Which is to say, when you are either fully ignorant, or only believe you know..... is extremely important.”

“If I believe I know something….. don’t I know it?” the young man asked dejectedly, his head still buried in his hands.

“Ahhh heh heh heh. Of course not. Knowing and assuming knowledge are very different. It is much easier to admit ignorance than to admit we do not know when we think we do. This is why we need to ask questions. Both of others, and more importantly, of ourselves!”

“Alright well, I have asked you questions and you haven’t given me a single answer that makes any sense. Just circular talk and riddles. It's like you are toying with me.”

“Mmmmmm not at all. Answering questions honestly, patiently, and in appropriate detail when you have the expertise others seek is essential. In this case, neither you nor I have the knowledge to answer the questions you ask. What to do….”

“What do you mean WHAT TO DO?” the young man erupted as he raised his head and sat up in his seat. “We need to stop the train, but CLEARLY that door is not the way to do it.”

A pause. The old man sat quietly looking at the young man.

“So, we try something else. It’s just common sense. That door doesn’t let me get to the front of the train to hit the emergency brakes….. but maybe there are some at the back.”

“Mmmmm, there may be emergency controls there too. But are you certain we need to stop the train?” the old man questioned, smirking ever so slightly at the young man.

“Yes,” the young man gritted his teeth and glared at the old man’s bright, ever-changing eyes.

“Obviously we do.”

“Why?”

“Wh— BECAUSE if this thing makes it to the end of the track and crashes, or flies off of an unfinished segment, or…… WHATEVER is going to happen, we all DIE! Others in the area could too!”

“Well I—“

“Wait. Maybe that’s what this is…..” The young man had cut the old man off.

“Maybe I’m in some kind of time loop or game scenario that requires me to solve the puzzle in order to exit! Like that movie…. Oh what was it called? Gah, it doesn’t matter. That is what makes the most sense. That’s why I would have been rebooted to sitting right back in this spot, and why all of the other people would have been reset to their positions too.”

“How do you explain me?” the old man chimed in.

“Obviously you are some kind of NPC specially designed to help players orient themselves, navigate the level, and understand their task. It’s even possible you’re actually necessary so that people don’t freak out and have a psychological breakdown because of how real this all feels.”

“Okay. I’ve got this. No need to panic. I’m in a game of some kind. Front door is non-functioning, so it must be the back door.”

The young man stood up, needing to use the support post again to steady himself against the train that had started to distort in response to his actions.

“I must say, you do have the courage” the old man offered, shaking his head gently as the young man rose to his feet.

“I just know what this is and what I need to do now, that’s all.”

Then the young man started to make his way to the back of the train car.

The distortion increased in intensity again, just as it had before, with waves starting to ripple through the space of the train car as he got closer to the back door. Instead of a mere three rows to walk, which felt excruciating to him last time, now the young man was trying to make his way past five rows in the opposite direction.

This time as the distortion increased in the train car, other beings, players he assumed, were responding to his presence by pointing their warped arms and hands towards the back door. Although they had also done this during his first attempt at the front door, the young man assumed that they were simply as confused as he was, and pleased he was going to try to rescue them all by using another exit.

As he got nearer to the back door, the distortion became so great that the train car began to darken, almost as though the light and colour itself was being warped and twisted into blackness around him. He fought hard to hold himself steady against the pressure forming behind him, threatening to hurl him forward and smash him directly into the back door. It took a great deal of effort to turn and glance back towards his original seat. It felt like his head was being held in a vice.

Once again, despite the swirling darkness engulfing him, the young man could see the old man’s head as a tiny white dot, thousands of meters away. The young man turned back and pushed on, reaching the back door in almost total blackness. He only knew the door was there thanks to a tiny neon ‘open’ button, glowing faintly in the black.

The young man reached his hand out, watching his arm stretch farther than he knew it should be able to stretch, and barely managed to knick the button with his outstretched, disturbingly elongated middle finger….

——————————

*Hfffffff*

The young man’s eyes shot open as he sucked in a breath of air.

A third time.

“No. NO. NOT POSSIBLE. Ughhh what the hell IS THIS PLACE?”

“You have the courage” the old man said quietly, “but our mistakes are intended to guide us. They are not okay in and of themselves, only as aids to greater knowledge and understanding.”

“Gahhhh SHUT UP! I didn’t even MAKE a mistake. HOW can I be making mistakes when I don’t even know what I am supposed to be doing….. or trying to do?”

“Precisely” the old man said with a smile.

“WELL!?!?”

“Oh, don’t look at me. As I said, neither you nor I have the answers we need to solve this.”

“Well.... I’ve tried both doors” the young man began, becoming more infuriated by the moment.

“We’ve established that YOU can’t answer me…..”

There must be a way….. There must be a way………….

“Nutjob Nancy over here just stares at me when I talk to her! And the rest of these…. people? THINGS more like it, they don’t even exist do they? They just all point at the same thing. Half of them don’t even respond or engage anyways. It’s like they can’t think….. they are drones.”

“Yes, well” the old man started, clearing his throat, “Be that as it may, there is always a way to learn from our experience, and always someone to turn to. Though it may not be someone we expected, or someone in line with who we believe should know the answer. Our job is to be better than our our own beliefs and accept knowledge from anyone who knows more than us about the matter.”

As he finished, the old man leaned forward a little and nodded towards the aisle.

The young man turned his head, and there, to his astonishment, stood a little girl.

Fully defined, just like the young woman and the old man, she couldn’t have been more than five years old. She stood beside him holding onto a little stuffed, cartoon-like owl, coloured purple and blue with big black orbs for eyes. Her tiny black shoes matched her owl's eyes, sparkling as though there were stars twinkling inside of them. Her forest green sundress made the young man feel relaxed for some reason. He quickly shot glances up and down the train car’s aisle, but did not see any new creatures, or potential players if this was a game, that could have been the one who spawned or were in charge of this little girl.

“How—— Where did—” he stuttered, looking back towards the old man. But the seat was empty.

“What the———” he stood in a slightly squatted position, leaning on the seat in front of him and looking up and down the train car, but there was no sign of the old man.

As he slumped back down into his seat, he laid his head in his hands again and began to mumble.

“Whaaaat is going ooooooon here. I’m losing my mind…… This. This HAS to be some kind of experiment. They are trying to see how much I can take. Maybe I’ve applied for some kind of military intelligence program that requires infiltrating data storage via neural interface. Ya. This is just a test to see if I can distinguish reality from code. Well…. If you can hear me, please pull me out. Please. Just pull me——” the young man felt a small hand on his knee.

He raised his head slightly and tilted it to the left to look at the little girl.

She stood staring into his face with the exact same ever-changing eyes that the old man had. Something about them drew his attention and caused him to sit upright. As he did the little girl simply pointed her small hand towards the ceiling, where an emergency escape hatch waited directly above them.

“That!? I can use that?” The young man questioned.

The little girl stood like a statue. She didn’t nod, or shake her head. She didn’t speak or motion again with her hands. She simply stared into his eyes with her own fluorescent pupils.

Then, she disintegrated into millions of infinitesimal flakes. They drifted slowly away from him as though the ‘warp’ of the train car was forcing them to float towards the back of the train.

The young man stood up, grabbing onto the support pole and planting one foot on the plastic of his seat. After carefully rising into a steady, standing position on his seat, he placed his left foot on the top of the backrest, gripped a higher position on the support pole with his left hand, and raised himself up onto the backrest of the chair. Unlike during his approach to both of the doors at either end of the train, there was no increase in the distortion inside of the train. In fact, as the young man placed his hand on the latch and twisted, he felt as though gravity itself had turned off.

The latch proceeded to open itself slowly when — SNAP — it was ripped from the top of the train.

“Okay…. maybe....... that’s it?” he thought to himself.

“Maybe all I needed to do was open that hatch. Now the train will have to start braking in response. That only makes sense.”

But the train showed no signs of slowing down.