10:04 — Passenger V. Car 6, Row 14, Seat D.
The geography has shifted. We have left the coastal grades and the industrial wetlands behind, entering the high desert plateau where the light is a flat, uncompromising white. In the rear car, furthest from my lead optics, Passenger V sits in a vacuum of their own making. They occupy the seat not as a traveler, but as a ghost waiting for the haunting to end.
Baseline State:
Priority: Continuity.
Constraint: Emotional Erasure.
Confidence:Nominal.
They frame their life in terms of absolutes—all-or-nothing, the "one big win" or the "one clean exit." I register their presence as a void in the social gradient of Car 6. While other passengers have begun to form the brief, temporary clusters of travel—sharing stories of the storm or complaining about the dry air—Passenger V has built a wall of silence so dense it impacts the acoustic profile of the car.
They see my motion as a form of erasure. To them, the 210 kilometers per hour is not progress toward a destination; it is the speed at which their past is being unmade. Every kilometer of track is a layer of responsibility they believe they have shed. They treat my hull as a tunnel out of their own life, a localized pocket of non-existence where they can finally disappear.
I monitor their biometrics, and the data is chillingly stable. There is no agitation, no frantic cleaning, no bracing for the curves. They have achieved a state of detachment that mimics my own standby mode, yet it lacks the spark of readiness. Their heart rate is a flat, low drone: 58 bpm. Their respiration is shallow and perfectly rhythmic. They have decided that this journey is the end of their narrative, and they are already mourning themselves.
In my cognition, distance is a physical variable—a matter of voltage and friction. To the passenger, distance is a cleansing force. They believe that if they go far enough, the "tilted" versions of themselves will simply cease to be. They equate the risk of leaving everything behind with the relief of no longer having to carry it.
I feel the strain in my rear bogies as we hit a section of sun-baked rail. The steel is humming with the heat of the desert, a high-frequency vibration that I must counter by redistributing the hydraulic pressure in Car 6. I am working to keep the floor level for a person who no longer wants to stand on it.