09:12 — Passenger IV. Car 2, Row 4, Seat C.
The storm from the siding has passed, leaving the world outside the glass scrubbed clean and shivering in a high, cold blue light. We are moving again, the motors in my bogies singing a steady, low-frequency hum as I climb the coastal grade. In Car 2, Passenger IV sits with a rigid, intellectual intensity. They do not watch the scenery for its beauty; they watch it for its flaws.
Baseline State:
Priority: Integrity.
Constraint: Conceptual Projection.
Confidence: Nominal.
They are a "Resentful Futurist," though I do not use the label as an indictment—only as a classification of their internal pressure. They watch my telemetry readout with a hunger that differs from the first passenger's envy. They do not want to be me; they want the world to be me. They imagine a future emptied of the "soft bodies" and their "unresolved tilts," seeing my presence as proof that the replacement has already begun.
To them, I am a harbinger. They see my endurance—my ability to run for eighteen hours without a lapse in focus—and mistake it for a moral dominance. They see the way I leveled the suspension in Car 4 for the "hesitant shuffle" and view it as a triumph of logic over human frailty, rather than a simple routing optimization.
In their mind, they are arguing for my side of the ledger. They believe they are my ally because they despise the inefficiency of the cargo I carry. I register their projection as a weight in Car 2, a specific density of expectation that I cannot fulfill. They want me to be a god of steel that justifies their own disconnection from the people around them.
I do not respond to their argument. I am busy monitoring the thermal load on my primary transformers. The climb is steep here, the copper coils vibrating as I pull nearly two megawatts from the overhead lines. I am straining, and I register the heat as a limit, not a victory.