Train Ride To Oblivion.

March 2156, final testing date fast approaching.

The test dummy, the mannequin, call it what you will, had been positioned, slumped upright, restricted into the one sole and lonely seat in the entirety of one carriage, by a standard five-point safety harness, emblazoned with the typical yellow & black zigzag markings all over it. The mannequin was a typically adorned, in an all-in-one cream-colored jumpsuit, it's size around that of an ordinary 5' 6" human, which had been in use as the industry standard 'crash test' tool for the past few centuries. Typically functional and inanimate with no humanistic features whatsoever - its face, simply a yellow-red-black colored diamond symbol.

Inside the cabin was pressurized, to withstand some of the speeds that the train would be achieving but no evidence of it's existence was in sight as yet, other than the single chair occupied by the crash-test figure along with a multitude of thin colored spaghetti cables and piping clamped at periodic intervals. The remainder of the bullet-shaped seven-foot-long cabin otherwise it was yet to have it's fixtures, fittings, aesthetic and acoustic panel cushioning fitted, with aerodynamically designed small plexiglass reinforced translucent steel windows in the upper portions, so when finally, all the tests and safety checks had been tested to capacity, satisfying both of the key figures in place, Kerry Simmond, Derrick Einholme, and Lucy Bitt, who would then safely be in position to sign-off on the long awaited project to allow the go-ahead of the final stages of aesthetics fitting and passenger seating. Once all of these pre-stage surveys were done, time tabling and live passenger check-ins could then begin.

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Since the dawn of the technological age, the truth depth of humanity's thirst for knowledge, had far surpassed their own abilities to safely grasp what they were ever actually doing.

So-called minor technicalities. such as electrical wiring fires, the odd staff member being taken to the on-site company first responder with just a negligible number of them warranting further local hospital emergency departments for 'after incident' assessments.

It seems that not one person actually really learned anything worthwhile after any event. Thankfully though, if you could lever even the slightest positive learning curve out from each of the 'minor technicalities' then it was this -

No one yet had died or been killed as a result... yet. But was it merely just a matter of time, before an innocent life was lost?

Up until the mid-22nd century, all land-based trains throughout the world, had always been controlled and piloted by a real life, breathing, walking-talking, human person.

However, the newly equipped and sanctioned, 'Department of Robotic Artificial Intelligence Travel Administration' or DRAITA, when it was formed in 2152, had been tasked by the world's leaders with harnessing these new technologies into creating the world's first ever 'driverless' ultra-high-speed-train.

The DRAITA-1.

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Leanne Derle had propped herself up against the university students bar drowning her sorrows through one pint of lager too many, no longer aware of the music that was blaring across the sound system, that the university had recently had installed with a state-of-the-art entertainment package, that had been purchased for the academia by the local DRAITA company, that seemed to eagerly employ qualifying graduates directly from, these days. The university had become the only leading institution in the entirety of the northern hemisphere in the last eighty years, that provided high quality biomechanical engineers and electronic systems programmers, that DRAITA was so keen to take on for their labs (hence why this university regularly received bi-annual 'sweeteners' in the form of large sums of money directly from them.)

Leanne had attended the end-of-course party, hoping for some kind of mental escape from her six years of intense studies, that her complete devotion had been focused upon, which had contributed to her long-term boyfriend having unceremoniously dumped her at last week's date night.

So, she was neither in the spirit for socializing nor was she of the mind for any sleezy chat up lines, from a myriad of 'eligible' males present there that wanted to prey on her vulnerable state of mind right now. No, her only thought that night was on one thing, and one thing only, getting very drunk and in the shortest amount of time possible!

Leanne had recently been head-hunted by DRAITA management; due to her high scores she had attained in the biomechanical engineering degree finals ahead of her class.

For this 27-year-old brown haired 5'5" and very 'leggy' women though, she had pretty much lost any and all interest in the DRAITA offer that had been made to her. Preferring for the time being anyway, in discovering the psychological comforts of what she felt was, the liquid assets of rather copious amounts of alcohol, caring not anything for the unworldly hangover that would indubitably visit her the next day.

No, this night was hers. The bar was over-adequately stocked with lager, and the amber bubbles had her name stamped all over it. The night passed by all too rapidly for Leanne's liking, as to her mind, she had not drunk any way near enough to put her in the enibriated state that she had wanted to find herself in before being taken out safely and find herself back in her digs on the university campus site.

Nevertheless, the close of the night it was, and her insatiable wonting for the hops had seen its lines cut-off to her. The petite figure of a woman made her befuddled first attempt at getting up from the bar stool she had been drowning her sorrows in for the last few hours, in an endeavour to walk toward the exit doors of the pub to begin her ten-minute walk across the vast campus to her digs at the far end, with her well-meaning intention of flopping on to her soft bed, without even any intention of stripping naked, as would be her regular nightly choice of doing, to sleep a hopefully dreamless sleep for as many hours as she cared for.

Well, the initial effort of stepping off the stool most certainly did not go as intended. The room suddenly began swirling around her head, the lights in her head went dimmer with her sense of sight slightly hampered, her sense of direction somewhere long forgotten, she did not as much sense her body aiming at the carpeted flooring before landing 'nose in it,' This seemed just a little unexpected to her as she clamped her hands around the bar stool and staggered upright once more, quickly glancing around her to fix her bearings and sheepishly glance around at the rapidly unladening of the bar area; hoping against hope that her spectacle had not been witnessed. Leanne assumed she was on the safe side there though, as it appeared that many of the occupants were experiencing likewise moments and therefore otherwise preoccupied in themselves.

Struggling to partially regain some of her basic senses, she slowly staggered toward the doors once more and eventually out into the darkness of the night. The full moon shone brightly up in the night sky, bathing the campus in a bright warm glow, the university electric lighting appeared almost pale in comparison. The weather seemed rather warm with only a gentle breeze softly blowing, just enough to tickle the green leaves from the numerous trees that adorned the campus site. As the young woman's senses partially returned to her as the natural moonlight and subtle breeze forced an almost unwanted state of reality into her uninhibited and vulnerable physical state, she suddenly jolted, wincing at the sharp discomfort to her upper right arm, rubbing it in sudden recognition that it was hurting. She vaguely recalled a drunk guy falling into her during the earlier part of the evening, who she had passed off as the bloke trying to hit on her simply putting the soreness down to that encounter, shrugging it off and cautiously heading on her way again in the vague direction of where she had lived for the better part of the past decade.

Shaking her head, inhaling a few deep breaths of the fresh night area, before taking some gingerly steps forward, she continued along her way alone with just the moonlight and the stars to guide her safely home.

And that was all she could ever consciously remember of that night. Leanne never recalled the sensation of falling into the grass below her feet, her vision rapidly diminishing to black, and the sensation of being dragged off from the safe grounds that she had slowly staggered through earlier, nor the unceremonious action of being roughly being dumped into the back seat of the darkened van which sped off into the shroud of darkness that was the night.

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"Do you have her?" snapped Lockhart in a cold, uncaring and calculating way.

"Oh, we have her sir, where do you want her?" grunted one of the men.

For a brief, few moments of time, Lockhart grinned to himself fiendishly before emotionlessly answering back at them, "take her to the prep room, strip off her clothing, dress her in the mannequin outfit, then strap her into the crash chair onboard DRAITA-1. Before she even begins to develop even the slightest signs of consciousness, the drug will keep her under long enough, before she even starts to wonder where the hell, she is..."

The men nodded coldly at their directives, then grabbed at Leanne's lifeless state, to carry out their inhuman tasks.

Lockhart smoothly spun himself around, making his way back to the control center, grinning broadly from cheek to cheek, "this is working out perfectly, Einholme will promote me after this one for certain, she won't even be aware long enough to see her end, and Einholme will get his contract he so desperately wanted!"

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Close of March 2156.

Scene: DRAITA live testing site.

The big proving day had finally arrived for the DRAITA company, all their employees and the hundreds of students, that had been studying for this magnificent world first at the large university, they were about to witness (every single one of them) the prototype initiation of the DRAITA-1 maiden ultra-high-speed fully automated sentient train system.

The only humans to be boarding would be the paying passengers, no live conductors or inspectors, but the most overriding difference this time, was that there would be no human driver or navigator onboard in the cabin.

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Light had been breaking through the small aerodynamic windows of the silent and empty, sparsely yet decorated (and what was to be one of the five eventual passenger areas) once today's live prototype test run had been carried out without the discovery of any safety hitches. One of the ingenious new safety systems that DRAITA-1 boasted, was the creation of 'real time' passenger sensors that were built into each and every singly seat in the passenger cabins. As the train was a fully pressurized containment system, capable of transporting 450- fare paying passengers at never before achieved ground speeds of Mach 2.9 (roughly 2,149 top cruising speed, every passenger boarding was required by Lucy Bitt and her safety team, to undergo real time live vital sign monitoring, continually being observed over the 24-hour time cycle back at DRAITA operations command center. Of course, things were a little different with the case of the crash test dummy, as any live vitals understandably were not going to be seen during this test out as a result of the crash test dummy itself being totally inanimate and devoid of any life-signs.

The cabin had been given the final 'once-over approval,' it was noted by one of the on-site engineers, that the emblazoned jumpsuit appeared just a tad under-occupied. When his site inspection leader asked him what he meant by it, he simply answered with a, "for the usual mannequins they put to use, this one didn't feel right, it didn't entirely fit snug into its testing fabrics." The site leader simply scoffed at the junior who had spoken the words to him answering back with, "not the most scientific description laddie, just stick to the facts not the hunches right... okay let's close her up!"

A little disgruntled with an air of uneasiness deep inside his stomach that slowly grew with every minute that passed, he took one last nervous look around, shrugged his head with a non-descript "guess so then...," and slowly made his way out from the test cabin and back into the hot midday sun. Last off the mobile metal support steps was the site lead, then a few moments later the cabin was secured, with the lead satisfied before the cabin environment was turned on.

On the ground, Miss Bitt approached George, the site inspection lead and spoke directly, "Are we a go then George?" The site lead turned to face her, shrugging off his junior's 'momentary wobble' with him and calmly and confidentally confirmed what he believed, "this is a definite go for fire up Lucy!" Tapping the inset wireless push switch that was discreetly placed slightly underneath her left ear, Lucy spoke the words, "Derrick, Kerry, this is Lucy Bitt, we have a confirmed go for fire up at ground zero."

Moments passed before a silent hum could be heard eminating from the control cabin which headed up the hub connected to the passenger test cabin carrying the crash test dummy. Neon purple running lights began coming on line, around the upper and lower external shells that formed the fusilage, and gradually the DRAITA-1 prototype began moving forward at first fairly slowly, but as all safety systems came on, green lights flickering steadily across both boards in the control operations center and the onboard DRAITA-1 control cabin, safety braking systems disengaged, the initial slownness began to dissipate, in the blink of an eye, the fully automated prototype suddenly and silently dissapeared from sight.

The maiden test run was about to be broadcast to the world over, that this new transport system, was capable of doing something never before achieved, that of being capable of speeding across the Earth's surface at speeds of well over Mach 2. Land mass and seas were no longer any hindrance, due to the cataclsmic disasters that had readily occurred over the last 150-years, sea-levels had dramatically reduced as a result of years of severe worlwide droughts, leaving many areas across the hemispheres devoid of anything other than excess land. The DRAITA-1 as it was designed to be a completely electronically autonomous train system, was easily capable of trillions of fine navigational corrections with milliseconds of each one, thereby negating any and all possibilities of collision impacts (something of which could never feasibly be carried out by any human operator.)

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Onboard DRAITA-1 the passenger test cabin was so smooth and silent that any live passengers sat comfortable in there, would be absolutely oblivious to what was happening in a blinding flash to the exterior environment. Nothing whatsoever could be felt within the cabin, it was simply as if the entirety of the seven-foot-long human carrying 'capsule' was actually standing still. All thanks to the newly invented, designed and built, gravity plating that had been implemented throughout the structure; something that the space industry was only just experimenting with over the past fifteen-years of the 21st century. The aeronautical department would have payed above and beyond to get this system from the hands of DRAITA. Of course, should this test run prove 100% streamlessly, Derrick Einholme was banking on it literally. He would be richer, more famous, and heralded by the space industry alone, once he sold the blueprints for the gravity plating. But he had hit just a few snags along the way through this pet project of his. Leanne Dearle had been a thorn in his side during ther final years at the university. Once she had cottoned on to Derrick's plans to bypass the vital human trials that were essential to the success of DRAITA-1 gaining the world transportation contract, and Derrick being in the confirmed position to sell-off his anti-gravity plating system to the space industry, Leanne was a constant pain in the butt to his ultimate dreams and goals.

Derrick wanted her gone for good, before she had any opportunity to open her mouth to the attending press team and blow the whistle on his entire faulty, safety cut, project, closing it up for many years if not a century to come.

Silently and ominously, the large red LED display centered at both ends of the cabin, sited above what will, in time, play the part of the the sliding access/exit door into and out from the next passenger cabin, but for now served as the sealed maintenance hatch into the driverless automated motion cabin, steadily glowed brightly and menacingly reading out the cabin temperature, current time and, the live train speed. Internal cabin temperature was displaying 25⁰ Celisius, 16:15hours EST (Eastern Standard Time) with an awe-inspiring ground velocity of 2.2 Mach.

The pressurized plexiglas reinforced translucent steel cabin viewing windows, were giving out natural light into mostly empty test cabin, well, almost empty if you didn't count the inert mannequin harnessed into the only current seating too. Filtered oxygen was filling the cabin but at this time in particular,Lucy Bitt had insisted on activating and running the O2 system as if there were humans onboard, so as to ensure absolutely every safety management system was operating correctly. Suddenly the covering encasing the crash test dummy developed signs of slight motion.

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Towards the front row of the operations department control monitoring center, a series of bleeps began emitting, subsequently followed by a large piercing two-tone siren across the compound. Red flashing lights followed suite, bathing the operations center in a strobing red hue. Competing with the whale of the siren, the medical and safety observer teams instantaneously began shouting at each other over the alreading head-splitting siren.

"What the hell?" both of the team's analysts screeched. "This is impossible. There are absolutely no life forms onboard that damned train, so how in hell is an independant pulse and heartrate showing up in that cabin?"

Suddenly for what felt like an eternity, the room fell deathly silent, before one of the safety systems colleagues under the gripped eyes of Lucy Bitt, shouted out. "Abort the test run, abort the test run, this is not a drill, I repeat, this is not a drill!" The loud hum of activity rose to a crescendo as the motion team rapidly made their calculations for an inbound emergency dead stop manoeuvre (IEDSM.) A couple of tense, nail-biting minutes passed before one of the IEDSM team analysts shouted out into the room, "the train is not responding to it's recall command!"

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The test dummy onboard moved more lively at this point. A pair of shaking arms raised themselves from within the covering displaying the signs of the tell-tale yellow-black striped hazard material. As they made their way to the head, they began clawing at the shrouded covering, finally freeing and uncovering the white, hazard sign emblazoned attire. "Where on earth am I?"

The voice was that of Leanne Derle...

Hurriedly freeing herself from the confines of the harness restricting her, the so-called, crash-test dummy was now unmistakingly, well and truly alive. She attempted to remove the overalls that she had been dressed in then thought better to leave them on, as she was pretty much naked underneath. Leanne had no recognition of how she had got here but, as her eyes began slowly focusing to her environment, a stare of pure horror fixed across her face. She then finally understood, she was no longer on the campus, she had no recollection of whether she even made it to her bed on the campus but, no, she couldn't be here. No way had she ended up getting so drunk the last night, to end up here. But somehow she was... this was DRAITA-1!

Gingerely alighting to her feet, she walked slowly up and down the seven-foot-long cabin. "Well," she said to herself, "at least I can talk to myself without anyone thinking I'm nuts, at least the gravity plating is working perfectly!"

Then the dreaded fear of realization all too clearly hit her. "Derrick bloody Einholme got his damned way anyway." Einholme would have done anything to get a live test run through the project without any authorization from the health and safety team lead.

And he had done just that. Even if that meant, putting a real person's life at risk. Unbeknown to Leanne, she had been drugged and secreted onto the train, without any safety protocol authorizations. She was blissfully unaware that the IEDSM protocol had failed and, there was no way of making verbal contact with the operations center to alert them. She was unable to gain access to the autonomous cabin ahead of her, to access the override systems onboard either, as she had no clue in a million what the alphanumeric access code was.

The air was breathable, that was one thing, but would it last, she couldn't even see where exactly she was at this stage of the test. It was bright outside but, what she was able to view from the windows was simply streaks of white light. She glanced back at the display screen, only to see that the train had now achieved 2.9 Mach.

"Well, look on the bright side kiddo, you now know that DRAITA-1 was able to achieve it's maximum proposed velocity and that, the O2 systems were operational, with perfect anti-gravity facilities, just that, who am, I gonna tell?" With that, Leanne fell to the floor passing out from the realization of deadly fear andshock.

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The onlooking team were struggling in their blind panicked states to manage to successfully get an override to the automated train but with no luck so far. The medical analysts were able to confirm that the onboard human life signs were indeed those of Leanne Derle, but had noted that her life signs had suddenly dropped.

"Somebody get hold of Derrick, he needs to know about this, and he needs to know about this all-mighty cock-up now!"

After what was to be just short of one hour, not one single employee had been able to locate Derrick Einholme anywhere, he was not at the university, not at home, nor was he anywhere to be found on-site.

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Onboard DRAITA-1, the O2 had suddenly begun to fail and luckily for Leanne (if any level of luck could be found from all this) the train compartment temperature had heated up to 33⁰ Celsius and was continuing to rise. Current velocity indicated 3.7 Mach. An impossibility for this prototype. Never in any of the testing results was it identified that DRAITA-1 could attain these speeds. All safety specs showed time after time that break-up speed was a certainty, unless operations could regain access to the IEDSM system and regain control of the train.

This needed to be achieved with a matter of utmost priority. Luckily for Leanne Derle, she remained unconscious at this point. Should worst case scenario be the certainty, then DRAITA-1 would vaporise at Mach 3.9 should this be reached. Thev devastating demise of this runaway train would be felt across the modern world, an unauthorized and uncontrolled indescriminate nuclear detonation with a fallout that would surely see the end of much of the human population, was what was to be the effect...

Was this the end?

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