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TALBOT A. felt the whirring hum even before she opened her eyes.

She did not know, at that point, that she should not to be able to feel the movement, regardless of how fast the train was moving. Or that this was her very first sign that things here were broken.

For now, she was trying to wake up, and focus. To retrieve one single memory about where she was, and who she was, from the fog of her reactivated mind.

As her skin began to warm, and her eyes adjusted to the glare of the gleaming white all around her, she sat up from her small podlike, chamber.

She read the notice on the electronic panel near its base. It said TALBOT A., which was how she deduced her name.

She noticed hers was not the only pod in the room, and that several others around her were also starting to come to life again. The glass covers over their pods were slowly opening, receding into a white metal base. All were dressed, as she was, in a loose fitting white cotton jump suit.

At the other end of the room, beside an automatic sliding door, a group of others, also arisen from now empty pods, stood waiting.

“Does anyone know where we’re going?” asked the tall, dark haired woman closest to the door, who was named JOHNSON E.

“To damnation”, said a man’s voice behind her, as the doors opened.

The voice belonged to a disembodied male head, with putrefying grey skin, contained inside a jar of translucent blue liquid. The jar was mounted, at eye level, atop a long, stainless steel stand, with a set of motorised wheels at the bottom, to enable mobility.

“We are going in one endless circle. Never slowing down, never stopping. Riding Dante’s Inferno on rails, all nine of his circles of Hell rolled into one”, the head informed his newly conscious audience. His yellow eyes flickered with life, but something about the way his mouth flapped when spoke made him seem like a puppet.

The whole room stared at him in stunned silence.

“Follow me, please”, the head requested, as his stand turned him in the opposite direction and wheeled him away.

For a moment the group stood looking at one another, uncertain, but then STRYKER P., a chisled, athletic looking man in his forties, started to walk after the head, and the others soon followed.

They all travelled down a long corridor, punctuated with electronic panels purporting to be windows. Each displayed an image of idyllic grassland scenery, whooshing by. Several of the panels were glitching. The images would suddenly freeze, then disintegrate into pixellated abstractions of the image, then jump back to the grassland scenery once more.

As they walked through another set of automated sliding doors, the group entered what seemed to have once been an elegant dining room, now strewn with smashed glass and broken white crockery. Blood smeared the walls and floor, and polished wood and ruby velvet armchairs lay upturned, in various states of ruin, throughout the space. There were no tables, and no visible cutlery.

The head stopped in the centre of the room and turned back to face his anxious followers.

“Allow me to introduce myself”, said the head. “My name is Larry Bardick. I am the inventor of all this, the one responsible for our perdition. In the face of impending environmental doom on the surface of our planet, I created a Neo-Elysium below. I lured people into this - including myself - with the promise of eternal life.”

For a moment, the head laughed bitterly to himself.

“The God I never used to believe in must be laughing his ass off at me right now”, he sighed.

He cast a glance over the sea of bewildered faces before him.

"What happened?’ you all ask”, smiled the head. “In a nutshell, my own grandiose brand of scientific hubris. I thought I could turn Noah’s Ark into a luxury yacht. A techno haven that would spare a chosen few from the unimaginable horrors of a societal collapse looming closer every day. A way to preserve the plant and animal life for a future time when they could thrive on the surface again. Not to brag, but this train is actually a complete technical marvel. It not only houses all our scientific facilities, but it generates substantially more energy than it uses. It was going to be instrumental in generating all our oxygen and artificial sunlight and … “

He stopped dead, locking eyes with JOHNSON E., perhaps reading her grief.

“Every road to Hell is paved with at least a few good intentions, I guess. Anyway, my miracle technologies failed us disastrously within the first two years. The plant and animal life we were supposed to save were gone within five years. And then, with no food, at all, things grew … very dark.”

The head seemed momentarily overcome by his recollections of the past.

“I saw a grim solution to our problem”, he confessed. “In order to guarantee my clients a delivery on their purchase of ‘eternal life’, I had included a cloning facility. Offering ‘back up bodies’, that could be downloaded with their memories via an implanted neural chip. I thought, if we just make some clones without the chip …"

“That makes no sense. If there’s no food, why make clones? Why create even more mouths to feed?” asked JOHNSON E. confused, and then nauseous as the realisation dawned on her.

“Yes, initially the clones were not mouths to feed, but ….“, the head stopped mid sentence, too guilty to finish.

"The feed.” said TALBOT A., filling in the blank, mortified.

A silence hung in the air as the whole group stood dumbstruck, processing the horror of what they had just learned.

“Then a batch of clones escaped and formed a sort of tribe,” the head recounted, “so we found ourselves at war with them. I created more clones to help us fight but, when they found out why the other clone tribe was fighting us, our clones were not happy either. So they teamed up with the other tribe to hunt down and eat all of the ‘originals’. Except for me because I was the only one with the knowledge to keep on cloning. Which they very hypocritically demanded I keep doing so they could eat.”

“This has to be a joke. Please”, whimpered ARCHER G., a short, rotund man who looked like he was about to pass out.

“Oh, it’s a joke alright. Just a Cosmic one”, sighed the head.

“If we’re only here to be food, why bother waking us up at all?!” TALBOT A. bristled at him.

“Because things are no longer that simple”, he told her. “You and I are all part of a brave new society, whether we want to be or not. And let me tell you, I do not. I’ve been reduced to what you see before you after countless thwarted attempts to end my own life. I’m not even to be trusted with a full human body anymore. Can you believe that?”

“Quit your goddamn whining and get to the point!” glowered a wild looking man, with a strong facial resemblance to the head in the jar, as the automated doors at the other end of the room opened.

He strode through the dining room, towards the group, along with a second wild looking man who seemed to be his twin, also bearing a strong facial resemblance to the head in the jar.

Both men’s jumpsuits had been refashioned into tribal dress, in two distinctly different styles.

The first man had the upper body of his jumpsuit cut into strips and tied together, to hold weapons and to reveal the ritual scarring on his skin, the once white cotton now stained brown with blood. His long black hair was tied into a braid behind his head, and his long beard was fashioned into a point, like a spear tip.

The second man had a jumpsuit with the sleeves removed and the legs shorted. The whole thing was covered in bloody thumb prints. His head and face were bald, but adorned with dried blood markings.

“Abide by the rules!’, the head barked at the two men, furious. “You are to wait outside until I have explained the choices to the newborns!”

“Get on with it then!” demanded the tribal leader with the blood marked face.

The ‘newborns’ all stared at the two men in saucer-eyed terror.

“Get out! - both of you - and I will!” ordered the head.

“You have two minutes. Time starts now”, scowled the tribal leader with the blood marked face.

“Don’t be fooled by his bullshit", warned the bearded tribal leader, before heading back. "Letting you choose your own brand of Hell just helps him wipe away any guilt about your suffering.”

“Get out!” screeched the head, enraged.

Shaken in the aftermath, the head took a breath to compose himself before turning his attention back to his utterly disoriented audience.

“The two clone tribes battle with each other now, in competition for the territory and resources of this train” explained the head. "Although it’s largely a measure to thwart boredom, and to ensure ‘the survival of the fittest’, according to their measure of it, the fight for your life here will be a very real one. To inhabit this Hell, you must become a demon. The only ones who live here, do so by eating their own kind.”

ARCHER G. burst into tears and JOHNSON E. did her best to comfort him.

“The choice I have been allowed to offer you is between becoming a soldier or a sacrifice; the consumer or the consumed”, continued the head. “I have a blue pill you can take to calm yourself, and walk into your fate as an offering, with no pain and no emotion. Or I have a red pill that will give you a burst of rage and adrenaline to equip you for battle. If you want to abstain from both choices, taking your chances unmedicated, that is, of course, a third option.”

The group looked around at each other, seeming shell shocked.

“We need to escape. We need to figure out how to get off the train”, said TALBOT A. desperately.

“Maybe the surface has recovered now”, suggested STRYKER P., brightening.

“Whatever’s up there can’t be any worse than what’s down here”, nodded ARCHER G.

“There’s no way off this train”, the head told them gloomily. “And, I’m sorry to say, the surface will never again be an option for anyone here.”

“Why not?” asked TALBOT A., her torment growing.

"I didn’t tell you the full story about when things went belly up for us”, admitted the head. “When we recognised our own imminent catastrophe, we went back to the surface to see the lay of the land. To our surprise, the earth was in nascent stages of recovery, and a growing community of survivors were trying to build a new environmentally conscious and egalitarian form of civilisation, taking on all the lessons from the ones that failed before them. We were elated. Until they told us, in no uncertain terms, that we were not welcome in their new world. They said our selfishness was unforgivable. They accused us of wasting precious resources on an escape hatch for ourselves, indifferent to the consequences for the rest.”

JOHNSON E. shook her head, shattered.

“I tried to bargain with them, offering them my skills and technology, if they allowed us to stay”, said the head. “I proudly gave the few engineers in their community a tour of this train and its capabilities, confident they would see what a valuable asset I was. But instead, they put us all back onto the train, welded us in, and sent us back below the surface. They locked our course into a never-ending loop that generates power for the population above the surface. This train will keep running, for them, regardless of what happens to its passengers.”

TALBOT A. gripped her head with her hands.

“But this isn’t fair! We shouldn’t be punished like this”, cried ARCHER G. “We didn’t choose this any of it! We’re just clones, not even the originals!”

“I’m sorry, but your originals chose for themselves and, by extension, for you”, the head informed him. “Welcome to a brand of eternal life guaranteed to make you long for death.”

The whole group stared at him in defeated silence.

“I’m sorry, I truly am”, said the head, cheerlessly. “Choices, eh?”