The Gravity Train

Tomas — Morning on the Gravity Train

⸻

The Dream

I am riding in a roller coaster on an endless loop.

The track curves away beneath my feet, smooth and endless, and the faster I go the heavier I become.

The world bends upward around me like the inside of a vast wheel.

The faster it runs, the more the ground pushes back.

Gravity isn’t falling —

it’s pressing.

I reach the top of the curve and keep on riding.

There is no top.

Only the track, rising around me, the sky turning into stone, the stone turning into motion.

I am on the inside of something enormous.

The air hums.

My chest is heavy.

My bones know this place.

For a moment I am afraid — the kind of fear you get on the highest part of a roller coaster when you know you cannot stop —

and then the fear becomes understanding.

This is how you make a world.

I slow.

The pressure fades.

The track loosens its grip.

I am falling upward when I wake.

I woke up before the lights came up.

The train was already humming the way it always does — not loud, not quiet — just that steady sound you feel in your bones more than hear. I lay there for a moment, watching the pale curve of the tunnel slide past the window, gold and amber and stone, the Moon flowing by like we were inside its blood.

Elena was on her side, one hand on her stomach, the other under her cheek. I leaned over and kissed her gently.

“Good morning,” I said.

She smiled without opening her eyes.

“Already?”

“Always.”

She rolled onto her back and stretched carefully. The doctors told her no sudden movements now. No surface shifts. No low-g. The baby needs steady gravity. Needs this train.

“What’s your day,” she asked?

“I’ve got beam transfer all morning. New storage racks in Sector C. They’re pulling from the west furnaces.”

She nodded. “Heavy ones?”

“The heavy ones.”

She exhaled slowly. “I’ve got my appointment at nine. Dr. Valdez wants another scan. Says everything looks perfect but she’s being cautious.”

“Good,” I said. “I like cautious.”

We lay there for a bit, the world moving around us while we stayed still. Sometimes I forget we’re traveling at a hundred and seventy miles an hour. Inside this one mile ring, it just feels like home.

She reached for my hand and set it on her stomach.

“I felt it again last night,” she said. “A real kick this time.”

I didn’t speak. I just stayed there, palm warm against her, feeling the life we were building inside a machine made of moon dust and borrowed air.

“I’ll be back for lunch,” I said.

“Try to be,” she replied. “If the trains let you.”

“They always do.”

We kissed again — longer this time — then the lights brightened to morning and the day began.

Tomas at The Glass Yards

By the time I reach the glass yards, the Moon has already swallowed the Sun again.

Down here the light never comes from the sky. It comes from the furnaces, from the molten rivers of regolith sliding through channels, from the beams themselves — cooling and glowing like captured stars.

Dave is waiting at the edge of Storage Bay Three when I arrive.

“Morning, hero,” he said. “Ready to wrestle some mountains?”

I tap my helmet against his. “Always.”

The beams are laid out in rows, each one ten meters long, crystal-clear and thick as a truck. They’ve been cooling for three days. Lunar glass is strange that way — stronger than steel once it settles, lighter than it has any right to be.

“These are for the new cutter,” Dave says. “They’re opening a tunnel for another settlement train. Third one this year.”

“People are coming,” I said.

“They always are.”

We guide the first beam off the rack. In the moon gravity it floats like it’s pretending to be heavy. The mag-cradle hums as it locks onto the glass. We walk it forward, boots barely touching the floor, hands steady.

“Think your kid’ll ever see the surface?” Dave asks.

“Maybe,” I said. “But not for a long time.”

He nods. He knows what that means.

We slide the beam into the transport frame and secure it. Nine more to go. Each one will become part of a new tunnel cutter — a machine that eats the Moon and turns it into more homes, more tracks, more moving cities under the stone.

By the time we finish the tenth beam, my arms feel like they’ve been lifting planets.

Dave floats back, beads of sweat on his brow. Your wife’s appointment today, right?”

“Yeah. Nine.”

“Good luck, brother.”

I look at the beams, all lined up and waiting to be born into something bigger.

“Thanks,” I said.

We finish locking the tenth beam into its cradle. The frame hums, satisfied, like it knows it’s carrying the bones of a moving city.

Dave floats beside me, staring down the bay toward the cutter docks.

“You hear about the Big Eye?” he said.

I laugh. “Everybody’s heard about the Big Eye.”

“They’re saying the mirror’s a hundred meters across now.”

I whistle. “That’s not a mirror. That’s a lake.”

He nods. “Engineers were arguing yesterday about how to move the segments. You can’t ship that kind of glass. You have to grow it here.”

“Everything grows here,” I said.

He looks around at the glowing beams, the furnaces, the slow rivers of molten glass. “Yeah. But this thing… they say it’ll see the edge of the universe.”

“From the Moon,” I said.

“From a hole in the Moon,” he adds.

We both watch a loader crawl past, dragging another beam toward the cutter assembly zone.

“Think they’ll ever let people like us look through it?” he asks.

I shrug. “I already see enough miracles. My wife’s growing a human inside a train made of moon dust.”

Dave smiles. “Fair enough.”

A tone chimes in my helmet — the time.

Nine isn’t far now.

I look back once more at the beams, at the cutter frame waiting to eat the Moon and make another moving city, at the future we’re stacking piece by piece.

“Let’s get this convoy rolling,” I said.

Dave pushes off. “After you, builder of worlds.”