ZENITH: AFTERMATH
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Chapter One
Griffin St. Clair
I didn’t begin dictating this journal until three days after the crash. What was the point? What was the point of anything?
Even now, it’s not from a desire to preserve a record of the events so much as it’s out of a desperate need to somehow rationalize the unthinkable. People always called me a dreamer, but I couldn’t have dreamed what happened to us. Or what happened to the world either.
What’s the quote? “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”
I still can’t make sense of it. Can’t imagine any purpose, as much as I ache to. Because otherwise, it’s all my fault.
Maybe verbalizing this account will help. At the very least, it will be a record of my culpability: of the people I wronged, and how.
So, I’ll just relate the facts as I know them.
‘Crash’ isn’t even the right word. I don’t know what to call it. The Zenith Train didn’t hit anything physical. If it had, every person on board would have been spread over the inside of the salon car like a coat of paint. One moment we were approaching spacecraft speeds—a fleeting realization that the train was way past its planned velocity, the tunnel magnets over-emitting—and the next moment ….
It was as if the blind spot of my eye expanded to wrap around my head and then pulsed like the skin of John Bonham’s bass drum, each throb a color never seen before.
OK, not helpful.
Madison says she just blacked out. I think most did—maybe I did too, and I only imagined the rest after we came to. By then the train had stopped dead, lying on the tunnel floor like a felled leviathan. I don’t know how long that had lasted before our awakening. Even with just a residual field from its backup magnets, it probably could have coasted around the whole continent on its momentum. Except, something tells me that, wherever or whenever we are, the tunnel is no longer intact all the way.
Just a feeling. Like a parent might sense if one of his kids was hurt.
Also, the tunnel’s vacuum has been breached.
I’m not telling this well. I’m dictating it to my Personal Digital Assistant, Scheherazade. (Sher, can you throw some identifier tags in this entry for me?)
[Time: 1100 hours 7 minutes; date: unknown; location: unknown—presumed to be the surface of the Earth, but GPS locator is non-functional; speaker is Griffin St. Clair, owner and president of Aladdin Unlimited LLC and its six subsidiaries. Do you wish to attach current biosensor readings?—Sch.]
(Hell no!)
(Those would be contradictory anyway.) I’m sitting in the middle of the most serene clearing you could imagine. Verdant and lush —every blade of grass perfect—surrounded by a forest of implausibly straight trunks reaching toward a canopy of blue distilled to absolute purity. My lungs draw deeply for the sheer pleasure of it. There’s no sound other than reverent breaths from the seven other people here. A sigh from Madison, a meter to my right. No breeze, no bees, no birds in the trees. Nothing moves. Sunbeams radiate from a cloudless sky to warm my face. It’s peacefulness incarnate.
If there’s any such place in the 21st-Century continental US, I’ve never heard of it.
I try again to figure out where we really are—or even if I’m still actually alive and this isn’t some cliché of an afterlife. That thought makes my blood pressure misbehave. If I hoped that dictating this journal would be a distraction, I chose poorly.
Back to known facts.
The Zenith Train was my baby. I’d made my name with the internet stuff, and GriffinSpace led the pack of fledgling, private space-industries; but I’d wanted to do something for the teeming billions on the surface of the planet.
[Note: The Griffin Foundation provided $787M USD to twenty-seven charities and NGO’s in 2043. In addition, 6.8% of Griffin St. Clair’s waking hours involved charitable events and civic engagement on a voluntary basis.—Sch.]
(OK, don’t add stuff like that, Sher.)
The point is, I was sure I could do more. Something authentically world-changing. Non-polluting high-speed travel would shrink our global village more than ever, and that would be a good thing, right?
The brightest minds still couldn’t think of a way to build tunnels across the oceans, or under them, otherwise I truly believe we’d have extended Zenith around the whole bloody world. Instead, after ten years of wrangling contracts, engineering miracles, grubbing for money (my own fortune isn’t without limits, despite what people think), and a subtle invasion of grey hair, I had to be satisfied with the America Circle. Still, it’s transit on a scale never before attempted, and we got the damn thing built!
Not only that, but people loved it. We had nearly fifty million riders the first year—more than Amtrak—and ridership went on to triple by the middle of year four, almost all of it at the expense of the airlines. All those billions of liters of jet fuel left in the ground and billions of kilograms of CO2 kept out of the atmosphere. I’m proud of that. It’s true that some of the electricity to run our magnetic boosters came from fossil-fuel power plants [16.732%—Sch.], but I can’t fix everything.
So, with such a popular success, what do you do to celebrate a five-year anniversary? Something outrageous, of course. Especially if you’re Griffin St. Clair.
Fast, too. I love speed.
We already owned all the rail speed-records. I wanted to achieve velocities that no one could touch, this side of Earth orbit. After all, even aircraft have to contend with friction. The Zenith Train, in a vacuum surrounded by only a magnetic field, has no such handicap. I pictured the train like an atom in a giant particle accelerator, boosted faster and faster by magnets until … well ... until the universe cried “Uncle”.
Except the universe is a devious bastard.
To turn America Circle into a giant linear accelerator meant closing off all branching tunnels from the main trunk-line to the cities. Not technically difficult, because airtight doors were built at every junction to make sure most of the system could still function even if one line sprang a leak. As my chief of engineering and right-hand woman, Madison Douglas’s eyes lit up like blue-green fire at the thought of doing something so cool. My COO and the whole financial department hated it. After all, this would be a trip with no stops, ergo, no paying passengers. The cost of shutting the doors for even a day … well, do the math.
[146,293,177/365 x 39.75 (average ticket price) = $15,931,928.18—Sch.]
A helluva lot of money!
I won’t ask Madison what she thinks of the idea now. She’s stuck here with me, and I don’t know if she’ll ever recover from two days in a pitch-black tunnel. That’s on me, but I didn’t know she was mentally fragile, I swear. Apparently, she only carries a few days’ worth of meds with her.
New Year’s Eve was my idea—not only a symbolically perfect time for a bombastic promotional stunt, but probably one of the lowest times for ridership, too. Everybody should be partying, putting off their travel plans until the morning after. Right, Sher?
[A plausible assumption, but not factually true.—Sch.]
The record-smashing trip wouldn’t be without passengers—any spectacle worth its salt needs witnesses—but the passenger list would be insanely exclusive. More than one train car would slow us down too much. That one-car train would be my private salon car, and it only holds twenty-five people in the ostentatious comfort such an occasion demands.
California governor Glenn Marshfield was the first one invited because California was the first state to get onboard with Zenith. Glenn’s wife Jean hates trains, so he brought his mistress instead. That turned out to be a good choice, since Jean stayed home and survived. Glenn ... well, I’ll get to that.
Lakisha’s still alive, but I’ll bet she wishes she’d been content to remain Marshfield’s PR officer, stayed out of his bed, and off the train.
I wasn’t surprised that Secretary of Transportation Laird Grady would pull rank to hitch a ride, but I was stunned to discover that his head administrative assistant was Lauren Cooper. No way I would have expected her to come along, with me involved. Yet she did. If that meant she’d forgiven me, you can be sure that that forgiveness has now evaporated into the fantasy-world sky over our heads.
Who else? Well, the event of the decade demands to be recorded for posterity, so you bring along Aladdin LLC’s newest videographer, a sweet kid named Kate Harford, hired only a month ago You invite journalists (but only the friendly ones): a science writer, a business columnist, and a pop culture blogger, as well as the top video interviewer of our generation, Charlotte Moorhouse. I had a secret crush on her.
My own spin doctor, Naomi Barber, reluctantly came along to escort the media people and a rep from the Guinness Book of World Records, a feisty grandmother named Cheryl Neale. I took a liking to Ms. Neale right away, and I wish she’d made a different choice back there in the tunnel. I have a feeling she had inner strength and wisdom we could use now.
God knows I didn’t want Franklin Grant on the train or anywhere near me. Ever. Bastard gave everyone wealthy a bad name. He gave human beings a bad name. Thing is, he was getting some traction in a takeover bid of Griff-Gen, and I thought I might get him to back off if I threw him a prestigious bone. Not to mention introducing him to Grace Andersson, whom I’d personally invited because she had as much charm as she had money, and I knew I’d need both for a new GriffinSpace project I had in mind.
I also personally invited Robbie Tam, not because he’s still one of the planet’s favourite music stars, but because he makes me laugh, and has, ever since we were kids together. As soon as the corner of his mouth twitches upward, you have to smile with him. It’s a superpower.
No actors were invited. I hate actors.
(Who am I forgetting, Sher?)
[Physician Dr. Vaughn Kinsella, physicist/futurist Devlin McFarlane, caterer Leah Sanders and her assistant Kristi Korbi, bartender Danny Markham, Zenith Train engineer Ben Matthews, and Lena Cubiña.—Sch.]
(I hadn’t forgotten Lena. I never could. It’s just that ….)
I’m sorry, Lena. So, so sorry. I wanted you by my side during a big moment—wanted to show you off. And then I paid no attention to you at all. One whirlwind month of romance and passion and then, when you should have been sharing my triumph, I shuffled you off to the side.
I’m such a shit sometimes. No wonder ….
Anyway, I think that’s everyone. And maybe someday when I figure out what’s happened to us, I’ll also learn why Fate picked some of us to live and others to die.
