What the Train Could Not See
The Northstar Express was a silver needle stitching its way through a tapestry of pure annihilation.
Outside the opaqued, armored windows, the world had ceased to be. There was no land, no sky, no horizon. There was only fire.
It was not a fire of mere combustion. It was a plasma event, a consequence of a solar flare of such monstrous magnitude that it had not just bombarded the atmosphere with radiation, but had ignited it. The very air had become fuel. The nitrogen and oxygen, under the stellar assault, had entered a state of perpetual, catastrophic combustion.
The train raced through a canyon of flame. The fire did not burn in patches; it was a continuous, rolling ocean. Waves of it, a thousand feet high, crashed against the thermal shielding of the train with the force of tidal waves. The flames were not just orange and red. They were a blasphemous spectrum of colors—searing white at their core, bleeding into cobalt blue and lurid, poisonous green at the fringes, where the atmosphere was laced with vaporized metals and chemicals from the vaporized cities below.
There was no sound of roar, for sound could not exist in such a vacuum of fury. There was only a constant, pressure-wave thrum that vibrated through the very frame of the train, a physical sensation of the world screaming.
Below the track, which sat atop a raised, miraculously intact berm, was a sea of molten earth. The soil had liquefied, glowing a sullen, bloody red. The skeletons of forests were black, jagged teeth protruding from this hellish slag. Where towns and cities had been, there were only vast, glassy plains—the result of sand and concrete melting and re-solidifying under the intense heat.
The sky was gone. In its place was a ceiling of superheated ash and swirling, incandescent gas, lit from within by constant, silent lightning strikes that jumped from one plasma cloud to another. It was a vision of a planet being forged anew in a demonic furnace, its past life scoured utterly away.
The train's external sensors, those that hadn't already fused into useless slag, fed a continuous stream of catastrophic data to the central AI. External Temperature: 2,800°F and climbing. Atmospheric Composition: Unbreathable cocktail of carbon monoxide, cyanide, and vaporized heavy metals. Atmospheric Pressure: Fluctuating wildly due to thermal cyclones.
This was the data that had triggered Protocol Beta-1. The train was no longer just maintaining a comfortable environment; it was engaged in a desperate battle for survival. Its outer polymer shell was designed to reflect heat, but it was now glowing a dull cherry red. The photovoltaics embedded in the windows were overloading, sucking in more energy than they could possibly store or dissipate.
The Voice's calm announcements were not lies, not precisely. They were drastic simplifications of a losing war. "Cooling countermeasures" meant the train was sacrificing every non-essential system—lighting, entertainment, WiFi routers—and diverting all available power to the heat pumps and radiators, trying to shed the immense thermal load it was absorbing. It was a race against time. The systems were designed to handle a desert sun or a chemical fire, not the surface of a star.
The train was the last ordered, coherent thing in a universe that had reverted to chaos. It was a tiny, fragile bubble of logic and machinery hurtling through a storm of elemental fury. Inside, the passengers worried about murder, about Wi-Fi, about their families. Outside, the concept of family, of murder, of worry itself, had been rendered meaningless. Everything they had ever known, every place they had ever been, every person they had left behind, was now part of the fuel.
The silver needle sped on, its destination unknown, its fate sealed. It was not traveling to anywhere. It was simply moving, a solitary, blinking data point in a world that had become one giant, uninterrupted error message. It was the last train, running on a track that now led through the heart of the sun, carrying the ghosts of a dead world who did not yet know they are fates.