Whirr Click

There were ten of us. I counted three times as I took the slow climb out of unconsciousness. I counted my fingers over and over, and then as the room came into focus, I counted the other people around me, all taking the unhappy journey back to the real world.

It was a long, thin kind of room, with a door at either end and windows spanning the longest walls. At first I thought the juddering sensation had been my pounding headache, but as I reached the latter stages of awareness it became obvious the room itself was shaking. Not earthquake shaking, just a gentle sustained rattle, a whirr and a click, with all the furniture swaying in time.

A train. I was on a train.

That was normal enough, I reasoned. Ten sleepy people sat on a train isn’t inherently terrifying. But as we all looked around I could pinpoint the moment we all came to the same conclusion.

None of us had got on this train.

None of us remembered beginning this journey, but here we all were waking up in the middle of it, heading to an unknown destination at a gently swaying speed. We were scattered about the carriage in what would have appeared a very natural way had we boarded the train with our own feet and chosen our seats for ourselves. I was at the very end of the carriage, with a man sat across the aisle from me. Three people had been placed together, sat around one of the table in the centre of the carriage. From the glances they gave each other it seemed none of them knew each other. At the opposite end to me, two other people had been placed next to each other, with the remaining three guests scattered solo at random intervals.

The lady at the furthest end of the carriage was the first to panic. She chose the rather uninspiring move of screaming then breaking into messy sobs, her long dark hair falling forwards to hide her face from view. Nobody moved to comfort her, not even the woman sat next to her. Instead she got up and moved to the row of seats in front of her.

The gentleman next to me took a long breath of air, as if testing the limits of our oxygen supply, his dark brown skin turning a sickly shade of grey. He looked at me briefly, like he wanted to speak, but didn’t seem to have the capacity for forming words yet. None of us seemed to.

I stretched my arms out fully, shaking the last dregs of sleep from them, and stood. I’d been placed in a seat just beyond the bank of windows, so moved further down the carriage in order to see our surroundings.

On looking out of the window I considered very strongly slapping myself about the face. Because this really had to be a dream didn’t it? How else do you explain the possibility of us appearing to be travelling in a train along the ocean floor?

There was an honest-to-goodness school of sharp silver fish flitting back and forth from the train, like they couldn’t quite make their mind up if they wanted to try and board us. I was only able to see that we were looking out on underwater views due to floodlights that had been fitted on the outside of the windows, illuminating the water around the train, and probably drawing the fish to us.

I put my face to the glass between two of the flood lights and looked up. There was only blackness, thick and heavy blackness, meaning we were well under the waters, perhaps a hundred or so feet down.

There were gentle gasps and several panicked screams as the others in the carriage also glanced out.

‘The Atlantic Connection,’ a voice muttered behind me, trembling as it spoke. ‘I thought it wasn’t due to be completed until next year at least.’

I turned. It was the man who had been sat near me, his dark eyes wide with shock as he glanced out on the dark water. As he trailed off, his words ignited a memory.

*

The Atlantic Connection. The insane invention of a teenager with a PhD in engineering. He’d proposed it as an alternative to plane travel, a way to combat climate change. The prototype had been in development for the last five years, as naturally there’d been no end of issues in creating a solar-and-wave-powered watertight, pressure-proof, human safe train that was capable of travelling along the ocean floor without need for train tracks. Originally the plan was to have train tracks, but it proved to be impossible to lay them without causing further damage to the environment.

If this was indeed the mythical Atlantic Connection, advanced magnetic levitation was allowing us to travel at breakneck speeds, hovering over the ocean floor, heading towards the United American Continent. Far, far from home.

*

I tried to think back, to piece together my last memory to see if it offered any clues for how we could have ended up in this situation. But before I could collect any thoughts, a loud voice scattered them once again.

The voice was preceded by a crackle, then over a tannoy system came the calm and crisp tone of our potential kidnapper.

‘All passengers will return to their seats for inspection. Standing is not allowed while the train is in motion. Thank you for travelling on the Atlantic Connection.’

A short but piecing whine concluded this announcement. For a moment, nobody moved. Collectively but silently we seemed to be deciding if this Voice was to be obeyed, given the circumstances. My highly Britonian sense of propriety would be all too willing to follow the directions of such an authority figure whilst grumbling under my breath. But it felt less like a situation where orders must be obeyed when none of us had put ourselves in this position in the first place.

It only took one passenger to sheepishly lower themselves back down into their seat before one by one we all began to do the same. It reminded me of an old psychology lecture on mob mentality my rather excitable professor had given years ago. By the end of it he had driven us all to the point of throwing paper balls at his poor assistant en masse.

I guess we all realised there was safety and comfort in a group setting, like those fish flitting around our prison. It’s harder to get hurt when you’re part of a crowd. It’s also harder to provoke people to hurt you when you follow a rule that felt a little justifiable. If this really was the experimental train, it probably was safer for us to be in our seats.

As soon as we were all seated again, the lights began to flicker - the ones both inside and outside the train. First one little flash, then several seconds of sustained darkness. As the lights flashed on again, the carriage seemed no different, until one of the people at the central table began screaming. The seat next to them, once occupied by a slim red-headed young lady, was gone. Not just an empty seat, but an empty space where the chair and a person had once been.

As we sat there staring in stunned silence, there was a whirr and a click, then the floor slid apart and an empty seat rose up, leaving the carriage once again complete, as if the girl who had once sat there had never existed at all.

Barely a minute passed before the lights once again gave their eerie flicker and plunged us once again into pitch. As our vision was allowed to return, we were all on the edge of our seats peering around to see who had vanished this time.

Well, everyone except the man who had been next to me. He’d vanished this time. With another whirr and click, the seat returned without a person, and the train continued on.

*

We were all too shocked to scream it seemed, or give much of a response beside stunned silence. How are you truly supposed to act when you wake up in such an environment as this, with a group of strangers who begin to vanish around you?

The lady at the end of the carriage recovered from her shock first and jumped up from her seat, running for the door that presumably would lead on to another carriage. She shook it with a strength her near-malnourished body didn’t seem as if it should possess.

‘Let us OUT!’ she screamed, rattling at the handle and all but shaking the door from its frame. With a sudden screech she let go of the door and jumped back clutching at her right hand.

‘It shocked me!’ she whispered.

With yet another whistle and crackle, the tannoy came back to life, with the same genteel voice.

‘All passengers will return to their seats for inspection. Standing is not allowed while the train is in motion. Thank you for travelling on the Atlantic Connection.’

The exact repetition was just too much and the poor girl sunk to the floor instead of back into her chair, head resting against the door sobbing with all her might. And I’m ashamed to say not one of us got up to comfort her.

After all, what could we possibly say? How on earth could we possibly get out of this situation? How could there possibly be anything good waiting for us on this train or at the end of the line?

*

‘All passengers will return to their seats for inspection. Standing is not allowed while the train is in motion. Thank you for travelling on the Atlantic Connection.’

*

‘All passengers will return to their seats for inspection. Standing is not allowed while the train is in motion. Thank you for travelling on the Atlantic Connection.’

*

There was hardly any pause between these next two announcements, and although the inflection or words spoken hadn’t changed one bit, the menacing tone was indistinguishable.

The girl still did not move, not even when the message came through again, and again, and again. She stayed where she was, either in some catatonic daze, or as some quiet kind of defiance.

The flicker in the lights began again.

Off/On

—/Off/On

— — Off/On

— — — — Off

*

This stretch of darkness was longer than the two previous ones, and the carriage was so quiet you could hear that none of us were even daring to breathe. For a second I squeezed my eyes closed and willed myself back to childhood, when I’d play that game with myself on car journeys that you had to hold your breath going through a tunnel otherwise you wouldn’t make it through to the other side.

*

When the lights clicked back on, the girl was no longer on the floor. Well, there wasn’t actually a floor for her to be on. A gap, leading down into darkness. Then all at once a cacophony of whirrs and clicks begin in quick succession until the aisle of the carriage is completely gone, slid away section by section.

I could feel the tightness in my chest becoming impossible to ignore, the panic crawling through my every vein, the feeling of being tied down without a rope in sight. We might as well already be dead this far down in the ocean. Even if we made it off the train, how could we all possibly make it to the surface? And even if by some miracle we did, what then?

This is no train, nor prison. It’s our coffin.

*

I close my eyes, and count my breath in for four and out for four, taking charge of the one thing I still had control over. It’s because my eyes are closed that I don’t see the lights flicker again. I assume they must, because my chair gives way beneath me, pulling me down below the floor of the carriage, down into more blackness.

*

Before I can scream or yell or jump up or run, or basically do anything more useful than I’ve done this entire time on the train, my chair pulls forward and metal bonds spring out from it, trapping my neck, wrists, feet and waist. Like a dentist’s chair, it begins to tip back, but keeps going, the segments folding outwards until I am fully reclined, like I’m lying on a stretcher.

*

The chair jolts forward again, like it’s on some kind of track.

A train within a train.

It travels what must be the length of the carriage above until I’m thrust through a doorway into a brilliantly bright room. The stretcher chair comes to a dead stop, causing me to bash my chin rather painfully on the restraint constricting it.

*

I appear to be in some kind of operating surgery, with gleaming overhead lights, shelves of equipment like scalpels and bags of IV liquid. In one corner I see a collection of what appear to be fridges, one I could swear that’s stuffed full of bags of blood.

Surrounding me, two either side of the me, are four gowned and masked figures, arms all held upwards to maintain the sterility. Their identical poses and outfits remind me of a cult.

‘Let me guess,’ says one. ‘You want to know where you are and what we’re doing.’

‘You’re here to die. Obviously,’ another chimes in with.

‘Unfortunately you are more valuable to this world dead than alive,’ the first voice continues.

*

‘What?’ I mutter, stupidly. I’m guessing eventually they’re going to drug me again and I probably won’t wake up from that, but my brain seems already to be functioning as if I’m under the effects of a sedation.

*

*

‘I thought,’ I begin, slowly. ‘I thought this train…’

*

‘Was supposed to save the world? Was the answer to everything?’ My thought is finished before I can even try.

‘It’s a front. Even when they open it to the public, it’s not really about carrying people across the world and replacing the big bad planes. It’s about money.’

‘But also climate change.’

‘That too.’

*

They talk so fast, over each other, like they’re excited, like they’re sharing some excellent discovery with a friend.

*

‘Climate change?’ I repeat.

*

*

‘The thing that will eventually kill us all?’

Like a spilled jigsaw accidentally falling into place, my overwhelmed brain makes connections it should not be capable of. Climate change is coming for everyone, but it’s coming in unequal measures depending on where you were fortunate enough to be born. The European Federation and the Africasian Foundry noticed the damage micro-plastics that had begun to sneak into our water supplies and food sources were doing to people. In a shocking display of actual effective action, they passed laws banning the products causing micro plastics and enacted a campaign to lessen their impact.

The United American Continent did not pass any such laws, too focused instead on outlawing other things. I’d read a report on this matter just a few days ago. Millions of American citizens were found to be in the beginning stages of organ failure. There was little to be done, given any potential doners were likely to be riddled with microplastics themselves. The beginning stages of a genocide, nature finally fighting back.

The terrifying truth washed over me, as if I was outside the train instead of on board. Organ doners from Europe and Africasia, delivered secretly under the ocean in trains conveniently being ‘tested’ for trans-Atlantic travel. I lived alone, a quiet unassuming life with few close friends I saw regularly. I didn’t even have a pet. I had no influence, little money, a very unimportant job. My disappearance would hardly register.

*

I would bet my fellow passengers were in similar situations. None of us had looked remotely well-fed or well off.

*

‘Don’t worry,’ one of my doctors whispered. ‘You’re doing a great thing for the planet. A brilliant mind will be able to keep working on a solution all that much longer because of your donation!”

*

Those would be the last words I would ever hear. As they spoke, one of their colleagues lowered an oxygen mask down over my mouth and nose. The world around became blurry and fuzzy, like I was swimming underwater. Like I was on holiday, diving into the deep end of a pure blue pool.

Not at all like I was one in a long line of victims murdered for their organs so the rich could go on living. Not at all like there was at least one carriage of people like me above my head, waiting their turn here below.

*

The train hurtled on, through the ocean, aquatic life surrounding it, swimming around it, fascinated by its thrumming artificial heartbeat of whirr click, whirr click, whirr, click.