“Tell me about Hyperloop, the, quote, transportation of the future.”
That’s what they called it. It was supposed to be this new, space age way of zipping around the country, around the world. Imagine, you sit in a train car in New York City, you hear the servos rev up, maybe some panels flash different colors, then you yawn and stretch, but now you’re in London. I don’t remember the exact speed, but when you’re going that fast, the physicists refer to it in a percentage of the speed of light. Needless to say, the PanAm people were pissed. This was right after those plane crashes, so everybody was taking an interest in new forms of travel. Airplanes felt unsafe, unreliable, you were basically stepping into an aluminum coffin on wings. It was a PR nightmare, so of course someone had to come up with some new solution
“So what happened to the project? Did they ever actually start building the tunnel?”
It was never meant to cross the oceans. Oh sure, one day maybe. But nobody then could figure out how to make a tunnel underneath the ocean floor, not until those guys in Europe in the 80’s did it anyway, but this was the 60’s, nobody was about to run subaquatic. Which is ridiculous because it probably would have been easier than tunneling through bedrock. Once you get below the water table, the whole tunnel has to be reinforced, reverse pressurized. They were so concerned with the hypothetical electronics, they looked right over the geological facts. Dig deep enough, you’re gonna hit water.
“What happened next, and how did they fund this.”
As to who funded it, I wasn’t in finance, it was said to be a huge government hush-hush project, some slush fund of a few billion. I think the casinos kicked in a couple billion to have it arrive on the doorstep of the Strip. Can you imagine that? The most technologically advanced transportation network ever devised, the principles which could have taken us to nearby stars, and they wanted it to go to Las Vegas. People.
” Las Vegas? Why there?”
Like I said, I assume it was a way to pump a little extra funding into the project. Secondly, we ran the tube from Houston because it was close access to the egghead headquarters. Hell, NASA still uses our old control center, and what a boon for them, they moved in like hermit crabs when our project was shut down. But I think it was the longest stretch they could find of easy mining and, more importantly, unowned land.
“You ran the tube? As in the project was actually started?”
Started? We built the whole damn thing. It’s probably still out there, rotting under New Mexico. You know they got a town out there named Truth or Consequences? Aptly named in my book.
“Wait, what? I thought it was a legend, a myth? Hyperloop is…is real?”
Yeah. It’s real alright.
“That’s incredible! The amount of manpower, I mean, the mining alone…”
Yeah, it was a big project. But that was the ‘American Spirit’ they kept telling us. If guys with pickaxes could build a railroad to Promontory Point in Utah, think what we could do with a 14,000 horsepower drill.
“So it actually, I mean, did it work?”
Work. Ha! Oh sure, the test car worked great. Left one station, arrived at the other. The only curiosity was the external cameras were all knocked off, but they accounted that to wind shear or faulty mounting brackets. Besides, they had the computer telemetry, they had the interior cameras, and the dummy crew didn’t have a single reading on their monitoring packs. We were on top of the world, even though we were a mile below it.
“Was there anything on the external cameras to indicate a problem?”
The external cameras probably showed us more than we realized, but we were too blind, too drunk on our own hubris to consider there might be a problem. I mean, the car was undamaged, so why press the issue? The tapes recorded exactly 8 seconds of footage, pretty standard. The car sat in the tunnel, the servos wind up, the car launched and they disappeared into darkness. Almost immediately, they went to static. Maybe it was errant electrical fields around the car, or wind shear, like I said. We were so close, so ready to open that gateway and look upon the wonders within, the next phase was pushed through.
“Meaning a live test?”
Yeah. It wasn’t hard finding volunteers either. Word spread at the test flight programs and we had Captains and Majors lining up to be the untouchable “Fastest man on earth” like it was some trillion dollar dick measuring contest. In the end, we found our team of four.
“Can you tell me about them.”
In the end we settled on two military pilots and two scientists. Both sides were pissed it wasn’t 3:1 either way. Dr. Francis Plattner, our chief physicist, Dr. Rodney Hill, Chief Medical Officer and Aerodynamic engineer, and believe me, it was a heated discussion about having a Black on board the greatest technological marvel ever devised, but if he wasn’t there things would have gone a lot worse. The military guys were Major Frank Weiss, our “co-pilot” and Lieutenant Colonel Jonah Mitchell, the “Pilot” even though they never did anything other than give us the countdown and lay in their test chairs.
“Can we talk about the test itself? I get the feeling you’re avoiding it. We can stop if you’d like and pick this up when you’re feeling more comfortable.”
Ah hell, nothing is ever gonna make me feel comfortable talking about it. Gimme a sec. Okay, you want to know about the Hyperloop test phase? Fine. August 11th, 1967. Two years before we set foot on the moon, which did happen, so don’t bring any of that bullshit into your story. We were at our station in Houston, in constant communication with the Las Vegas department, out by the speedway. We had the whole crew up on these big monitoring boards, cameras on everyone’s station, every angle covered. They were in good spirits, thanks to the Lieutenant Colonel. He was a bit of a prick in person, but he wasn’t one of those uptight assholes who needs things done his way. He simply set foot in a room and everyone knew he was in control. So the other three, they weren’t worried at all, it was in the Colonel’s hands.
On our end, it was people biting their fingernails or giggling like giddy schoolgirls. We should have delayed the mission on that alone, people couldn’t keep it together in the control room. But just like you see in the movies, we had a check in from all the stations and everyone came back good to go. At exactly 2:00pm Central time, we pushed the button.
The electronics lit up, the crew braced themselves and they approached the Hyperloop gateway. As they passed through that black shroud, we lost all visuals, to be expected as presumably they were suddenly hundreds of miles away. A few moments later we got the feed from Vegas. The car was on approach, sliding to a stop. Again, all the external cameras were gone, but then the feed switched to the interior cameras.
Mitchell was gone, not just the man, but the chair he was riding in as well. Plattner wasn’t moving and Rodney was lying on the deck with Major Weiss in his lap, clutching his helmet, screaming. At first we wanted to know how the hell he got out of his seat so fast, and where had the Colonel gone, but then we saw the blood.
Medical popped the hatch within seconds and some of them got burns on their hand from some kind of corrosive element on the handle. The major…Major Weiss had suffered from massive blunt force trauma, there was blood streaming from his nose and ears. Dr. Hill was holding the helmet to keep his neck stable and his skull together, as we found. For his part, he was covered in thousands of pinpricks, like some crazy acupuncturist attacked him. Dr. Plattner…give me a moment.
Dr. Plattner was reported covered with a thin film from head to toe and his body had been drained of almost all its fluids, but not before his eyes were boiled from his head. What we saw on the approach camera was a dried out husk of where the man used to be.
“Holy…”
There was nothing holy that happened on that car.
“What the hell happened?”
Externals were no good again and the internal cameras only showed what we saw, the car passed through the shroud and came out the other side like…like that. Telemetry said it was a rousing success, everything went as planned from a technical standpoint, at least as far as we could measure.
“Where did Colonel Mitchell go?”
Written out of existence, I hope. At least, spared the hell that the rest of the crew went through. But his chair was gone. It had been bolted directly to the deck and all the bolts were gone. Not sheared off, not cut through, just gone.
“What about Major Weiss”
Major Weiss received prompt medical attention and thanks to Rodney he’s still alive, at least last I heard. He was in a coma for six months after we pulled him out of that car and when he woke up he couldn’t speak and had debilitating tremors. Some kind of brain and nerve damage. We taught him how to speak again, in a stuttering fashion, but when we asked him about the test run, he would thrash and scream. CIA took over and they held onto him for a few years, but they let him go to live out his life in peace. I think he lives up in Maine now, something about being near a lighthouse was really important to him.
“And Dr. Hill?”
Rodney went catatonic for a few months after the incident, just sitting in a padded room staring at the wall. We had to sedate him every night because his brain wouldn’t let him go to sleep. He was terrified of closing his eyes, jumping at shadows. After a few months, he came around a bit though. Hell, as long as you got him talking about benign subjects, he was almost his old self. But every time we interviewed him about the mission, he would get all bug-eyed and say “It’s down there. It’s in the dark. It’s all around us.” And he’d shut down for a few hours, fall back into that stupor. He actually was brought on to the NASA team afterward as many of us were, consulting on medical. It was his idea to put so many worklights on the space suits. We said one was enough, but he insisted on at least four per helmet. When asked why, he’d get this weird look on his face and say “So they can see in the dark.” I still call him every few months to check in, he’s living out in Georgia in a well-lit retirement home, he says.
“What about Dr. Plattner?”
Autopsy reports from Dr. Plattner indicate that he died of sudden, severe dehydration, though how that explains the eyes thing I don’t understand. He didn’t have any external wounds or anything to indicate his condition, it was like he was out in a desert for a month.
“What about the film covering him.”
It was like some kind of mildew, they said, but it wasn’t fungal in origin. Some kind of biological process at any rate, long protein strands. Everyone called it a spiderweb, especially in conjunction with how we discovered the body, but it was tough and it wasn’t sticky. It was almost like a sheet of medical gauze draped over him but with millions of translucent microfibers. Nobody is sure what it had to do with his death, if anything, but it had to come from somewhere.
“So that was it? No answers, just shut it down and never speak of it again?”
I think in this case, some things are meant to stay buried. Oh sure, people had wild theories, most popular was because we were going through New Mexico it was the spirits upset at disturbing their land, but the only clues we ever got out of Rodney or Major Weiss were the phrases “A cascade of lights, the walls turned bright blue. It was like a rainstorm of glass shards” and “The lights hurt. Don’t let the light go out” respectively.
“What do you think happened?”
What do I think? I think when they crossed that shroud, they weren’t on our earth anymore. The thing is, the internal cameras showed us they were there one moment, they were across the country the next. The broadcast looked normal to us, but the tape…the tapes stopped recording because they ran out of space. 8 hours of black screens. We didn’t piece it together until someone took a look at the mission clock, 11 hours 17 minutes elapsed between the start of the mission and when we got them back.
“11 hours, but how could that be possible?”
Off the record? I don’t think that shroud was a hyperaccelerator like they told us. I think it was a gateway to another world maybe, another dimension. Something with terrors too deep to fathom within its depths, and we sent those four men right into the heart of it. But you can’t print that, some damned fool is going to read it and go digging up the damn thing.
“You mean it’s still out there?”
Sealed up like a tomb. Hopefully deep enough future archaologists don’t ever find it. They filled the access tubes on both sides too. But once we opened that gateway, it never closed. We blew out the support structures, but it didn’t need our power anymore, it simply existed. We didn’t create it, we opened it like a doorway to hell. Now please, don’t print any of that part. You want my official quote on what happened with the mission clock? Malfunctioned. Someone set it wrong, they changed it to account for timezones, whatever. I’d rather look the fool than lead some other fool to their demise. As for the gateway, destroyed. There’s my official statement, it doesn’t exist anymore.
“Don’t you think people deserve to know? What about Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell’s family? Or Dr. Plattner’s? Don’t you think they should know how their loved ones died?”
They do know. Killed testing an experimental aircraft when the fuel manifold ruptured at extreme altitude and radiation poisioning after a leak developed in a new prototype reactor. Dr. Plattner held the door so the other scientists could escape, then sealed himself inside to contain the leak. They died heroes, the families were well compensated. What would you do, go up to them decades later and say “Your grandfather actually was killed by some interdimensional bogeyman in the New Mexico desert?” Let the dead stay buried, son.
“Do you think anything could ever come through from the other side?”
I pray it’s a one way trip, but if something does come through, it’s under a mile of rock in pitch blackness so even if something does make it through, it can stay down there.
“What do you think is on the other side?”
In a word? Evil. You’re familiar with the Lord’s Prayer? Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death?
“I think that’s from Psalms. The Lord’s Prayer is Our Father, who art in heaven-“
Whatever, you know what I’m talking about. Whoever wrote that, I think they saw it too. That doorway leads into the valley of the shadow of death.
“Empty. Figures.”
Jonah Mitchell, former and future Lieutenant Colonel, kicked the boxes out of frustration. They didn’t budge, but his boot sank into the soft, malleable surface before rebounding and nearly knocking him off balance. The box shivered with the impact and bounced across the room, but it retained its form despite being thin cardboard.
He had been the pilot on the Hyperloop program, the maiden voyage on the transportation of the future. He’d been excited at the prospect, not just to step into the history books and personal glory, but to blaze a trail into a new era for mankind. An efficient, clean transportation system would revolutionize the way people thought about distance, travel. The principles unlocked would propel humanity into a new frontier of interconnectedness and beyond that, the stars wouldn’t seem so quite out of reach. The simulations were perfect, the tests were within tolerance, but the moment they crossed the Einstein-Rosen bridge, the spatial and temporal positions of the train and its hapless pilot were separated. The prospect of a new age of discovery and relations would be consigned to a dream locked in a file cabinet in a classified location.
It had been millions of breaths since he had emerged from the long, dark tunnel underneath the Nevada desert into the scorching July heat. He didn’t have any other method of denoting the passage of time since the sun hung oppressively in the sky eternally.
Jonah leaned against the wall of the Hyperloop field office and sighed. He turned glumly toward the glassy eye of a security camera. “I don’t suppose you have any other suggestions where I look?”
A hazy figure shimmered in the security office, like a heat mirage in the desert. Franklin DeWitt was meant to be at his station according to the log sheet. His echo blurred in the utilitarian rolling office chair, a fresh cup of coffee barely touched sat still on the console before him. Steam hung in the air, a single tendril suspended in space above the cup. Jonah had drank from that once. He learned one of the immutable laws of a world frozen in time, things could be moved, but the further from their original arrangement, the more they resisted the change. The coffee had leapt and roiled in his stomach as it resisted the change his body was imposing upon it. After several breaths, the discomfort turned to agony as he forced the noxious liquid out onto the floor.
Eating produced a similar effect, so Jonah had learned to take one bite at a time then wait a five hundred heartbeats for the cramps to subside. He sardonically remembered his doctor recommending he slow down his pace of eating to avoid putting on excess weight, but now a granola bar took too long, too much time according to the biological clock that ticked irrespectively of the world around him. The only machine still running in his endless refrain was the one that maintained homeostasis in his body and it was sending him constant updates that it was displeased with the nutrient level he was providing for it.
Jonah was dying. He was already dead, by the world’s measure. An unfortunate casualty of an experiment gone awry, his tearful parents would take comfort in the words of the chaplain that it was over in an instant.
Jonah knew he’d never make the walk into the city. Only a scant few miles, but without food and water and transportation trapped by the immutable laws of temporal consitency, he had to find some other solution.
He trudged up the stairs back to the operations center, bypassing other shadowy glimmers along the way. The security door hung slightly ajar, wide enough for him to easily slip through, more easily now than when he fisrst pried it open so long ago. Doors in this frozen world strained and resisted being moved, it had taken all his effort to open this one. His clothes hung looser on his frame. His reflection, when he cared to look at it, was pale and gaunt.
He collapsed in the open chair. The memory of Franklin DeWitt still shimmered in his rolling chair next to him. He wondered about the man who had taken a security job at a highly protected project in the middle of the Nevada desert. Surely he must have some ambition, some desire to be close to the cutting edge, experimental technology. Franklin must have stayed up hours in study to pass the rigorous aptitude tests, stayed late in the gym to ensure he was in peak physical form. Jonah imagined him putting in extra time on the battle ropes, pushing a little harder each session, going for one more rep, one more plate. Franklin, a lifetime of schooling and training, hopes, dreams, desires, sat in his rolling chair with a cheap coffee in a styrofoam cup next to him. His whole life had led to this moment and in that moment he probably sat bored watching the monitors and diagnostic panels telling him everything was okay. A mental and physical specimen in his prime, every hope, every fear, every doubt, every dream condensed into a single point in time. How would he be remembered Jonah wondered. A funeral, a memorial service, maybe a small brass plaque in the lobby or on a bench somewhere. But to future generations or remotely curious passerby, he would be a name on a wall, nothing to say to the years of sacrifice and achievement.
Jonah held his head in his hands, refusing to reminisce on his own track record of personal achievements and failings. His mind brought thoughts to the forefront of his attention sluggishly.
“Don’t think I’m gonna be able to make good on my plans at this stage” he said to the Franklin shade next to him. “Was gonna find a shovel, a pick, something, write my name in that damn desert big enough for you all to see. Jonah Mitchell, the man who wrote his name for the satellites and stars to see. Wouldn’t that be something.”
He sighed. There was no guarantee he’d be able to dig in the dirt if he couldn’t even kick through a cardboard box. Then what, his name would appear but for a moment only to be swept away by the wind. He barked a laugh remembering the Kansas lyrics that he’d sing along to in his truck on his way to school. Never before did the metaphor seem more apt.
He sat glumly and let the metabolic processes run down their internal timer.
“I guess we all just want to leave our mark, to believe that we’re here for some kind of reason. What would you want to be remembered for, Franklin?”
The echo gave no reply.
Jonah blew out his cheeks and leaned back to slump in the chair looking idly around the room. “Not like there’s any way for-” He stopped.
On the back wall hung a clipboard with a memo on it. Jonah stood and crossed over to it. He pulled it off the wall and it came away, stubbornly and heavy. He turned it over in his hands then pushed the metal end against the wall and began scraping.
The friction caused a horrific screech as he moved the clip up and down. After a moment he inspected his work. Barely visible in the laminate wall was a mark. Not deep, not nearly as long as it should have been by the effort it took to make it, but there was a mark. Jonah wept. He began scraping again in furious exultation then stopped again. Every action was sapping his depleted stores of precious energy, he would quickly tire. He stopped and leaned his head against the wall. He had one chance to say something, one short epitaph that he could write for himself. He thought about what his life meant, his loved ones, what he wanted for his career, his future, the world. Something wise, something profound, something inspirational that culminated all the desires he had for humanity. It all cascaded in a tumult inside him and he squeezed his eyes shut, wracked with indecision. His eyes snapped open and he began to laugh. All the other thoughts slipped from his mind as he remembered a quote from an “inspirational quote of the day” calendar his old roommate in college had given him for Christmas. “Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.” or something to that effect. Not like he would ever sit. He shook his head and smiled weakly. “Not like I’m gonna get any younger here” He said to no one in particular. He began scraping again.
Franklin DeWitt sat in his utilitarian rolling chair and watched the monitors. His once proud, muscular frame covered by layers of boredom and comfort. There had been a lot of commotion earlier in the day when they pulled the survivors from the prototype in the station below him, but the rumors turned to whispers turned to the same old routine. Several people had been rattled by the experience and there was a pervasive desire to return things to normal, or some semblance of it. Franklin yawned and reached for his coffee. He frowned slightly, it seemed emptier than he remembered. He didn’t remember drinking that much anyway. It was one of the few pleasures in his life anymore, he grimaced at the thought of that small relief being taken away from him as well. He had been sequestered to the campus ever since the project approached its final stages and the monotony had him questioning why he ever took the job to begin with, whether it still worth it. He cracked his neck and felt his shoulders pop and groan in protest and turned around to head to the kitchen area to refill his cup.
Suddenly coffee splashed across his non-slip shoes, his hand unaware that it still clutched for an object that was now rolling across the floor. His mouth hung open as he read the words on the wall behind him.
“Franklin. Plant a tree for me. J Mitchell” The last letter scrawled shaky and jagged, the lines barely visible.
On the floor beneath, was a layer of dust in the shape of a man, and a clipboard with the metal end worn down to a nub.