[866] The Infinity Gauge (chapter 1)
Chapter One: The Tanakpur Anomaly It had been forty-eight hours since Mat boarded the 55371 Express Special, and forty-six hours since the train had violently skipped its last scheduled stop at Tanakpur. They were ascending. Mat could feel it in the deep, aching vibrations coming through the floorboards. The air inside the coach had grown thin, biting, and freezing. Outside the barred windows, the dense, humid forest of the plains had long since been replaced by the jagged, snow-draped teeth of the high Himalayas. The fog pressed against the glass like wet cotton, suffocating the train in perpetual twilight. Mat checked his watch again. The second hand was twitching back and forth between the eight and the nine, caught in a microscopic stutter. It had been doing that since yesterday. He stood up, his joints popping, and adjusted the heavy revolver hidden under his jacket. The passenger cabin behind him was eerily quiet. Some passengers were asleep, lulled into a state of lethargy by the cold. Others were staring blankly at the walls. Panic had peaked on day one when they realized the ticket examiners and guards were missing and the doors between the coaches were locked. Now, grim exhaustion had set in. But Mat wasn't the type to just sit and wait for the end. He needed answers. He stepped over the sleeping form of a chaiwala and approached the heavy steel door leading to the engine room at the front of the train. He had tried picking the lock. He had tried banging on the glass. Now, he was going to try blunt force. He unlatched a heavy iron fire extinguisher from the wall bracket, planted his boots against the swaying floor of the passage, and swung the cylinder with every ounce of strength he had left. Metal shrieked. The reinforced lock shattered, the heavy screws tearing free from the frame. Mat kicked the door inward and stepped into the engine room, leveling his revolver into the gloom. "Cut the engine and step away from the controls!" He froze. The driver wasn't going to step away from anything. He was slumped dead over the massive control board, his uniform stained with dried blood. But it wasn't the dead body that made Mat’s stomach drop. It was the control board itself. The standard levers, digital screens, and dials of the train engine had been completely removed. In their place, welded directly into the steel dashboard, was a monstrously complex mechanical puzzle box. It was made of brass, dark wood, and gears, glistening with fresh oil. It looked exactly like an oversized, mechanical calendar. Through a glass pane in the center, a series of interlocking grooved wheels rotated sluggishly. Mat recognized the basic idea—it was a system designed to endlessly track the days, months, and leap years using a series of deep cuts and grooves. But this machine wasn't just tracking the date. It was driving the train. A loud emergency siren suddenly rang out overhead, deafening in the enclosed space. A red light flashed violently on the dashboard. Mat rushed to the front glass and wiped away the condensation. His breath caught in his throat. Emerging from the fog, less than a kilometer ahead, the tracks abruptly ended at the edge of a massive, bottomless valley. There was no bridge. Just open, lethal air. “WARNING,” a mechanized voice crackled through the speakers. “ROUTE INPUT REQUIRED. SIXTY SECONDS TO CRASH.” Mat frantically searched the dead driver's pockets and found a leather-bound diary. He flipped it open. The pages were covered in frantic scribbles, equations, and dates. The gears dictate the tracks, the final entry read, written in a handwriting that sent a chill straight through Mat’s veins. It was his own handwriting. If the date aligns, the bridge forms. The main lever must pivot exactly into the groove to force the change. "What on earth..." Mat muttered, looking from the impossible puzzle of the notebook to the ticking machine on the dash. “FORTY SECONDS.” He didn't have time to process the insanity of his own handwriting in a dead man's diary. He grabbed the heavy brass rings of the calendar. The current alignment was set to March 14. He looked down at the blood-stained page. According to the scribbled equation, the wheel controlling the months needed to be forced into a quarter-turn. “TWENTY SECONDS.” Mat’s hands were shaking. He jammed his thumb into the month ring and twisted it violently to the left. Something internal engaged with a heavy clack. He spun the day dial, manually pushing the main lever forward and forcing it into one of the deep grooves. “TEN SECONDS.” The train was rocketing toward the deep valley. Mat slammed his fist down on the massive brass button at the center of the calendar to lock the gears in place. For a terrifying second, nothing happened. The nose of the train shot off the edge of the cliff. Mat squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the weightless, stomach-churning sensation of freefall. But instead, the engine room violently lurched upward. A deafening roar of shifting, grinding metal echoed through the valley. Mat opened his eyes. Massive iron tracks were seemingly threading themselves into existence out of the fog, locking into place over the empty space just milliseconds before the train's massive steel wheels hit them. They were suspended over nothing, riding a bridge built by gears and dates. He had done it. He let out a ragged, hysterical breath, slumping against the console. Then, the speakers crackled again. It wasn't the mechanized voice this time. It was the horrific, shrieking sound of twisting metal tearing apart, followed immediately by the screams of fifty people. Mat looked at the rearview screen on the dash. His blood ran cold. The bridge had formed, yes. But it was flawed. In his panic, he had misjudged the depth of the wheel controlling the leap years. The mechanical rules governing the tracks had only been partially satisfied. On the screen, Mat watched as the very last passenger bogie violently broke away from the rest of the train. It hung on the edge of the newly formed, unstable tracks for a fraction of a second before plummeting backward into the fog, taking its screaming occupants down into the dark valley. The train was safe. But it was one bogie shorter. Mat stared at his own handwriting in the diary, the siren still ringing in his ears, realizing that tomorrow morning, the sun would rise, the gears would reset, and he would have to play the deadly game all over again.