Infinity

“But the cheese slices were our independent consciousness, not our infinite selves.” This came from Kwon, who seemed to feel some authority to question Frankie’s understanding of the subject of both consciousness, and infinity.

“You’re not wrong, Kwon, but neither is Frankie.” The Passenger intervened with a note of tangible excitement that got everyone else’s attention too. “You both actually just landed on the root of it all; consciousness IS infinity. Or, I should say, as close as we can get to it tangibly with our current handicaps.”

Off all she said, Ace got hung up on the last word, “handicaps?” He sounded offended.

“She means our individual mental limitations, which for most of us would be disbelief.” Laith answered for the Passenger, not sounding like he had an emotion on the subject, just stating what he knew.

“Yes, exactly.” She confirmed.

“So, you reading her mind now?” Ace challenged Laith without moving more than the muscles required to utter it.

The passenger held up her hand to stop any of the other men from jumping in, and Laith from answering that challenge like it was valid. She took a step toward Ace, which caused him a quarter turn to face her, and asked very quietly. “Where does all that rage come from, Ace?”

“Why don’t you just read my mind and find out?” He spat, rolling his shoulders under the armor like he was itching to fight her.

The Passenger had no desire to fight him, or escalate his desire to fight her, but she stood her ground with calm despite his poking the fire. “I could be over-simplifying here, but the big bad world is way big, and way bad, leaving you feeling helpless in ways without answers… so you rage, because rage feels like power.”

When he tilted his head and raked his lower lip with his teeth, the woman resisted her urge to flinch at the impact of actions not taken. She waited. Eye to eye, but it was no blinking contest, she’d have lost at the first breath; no, their eye contact was about intent and she felt it when he got it. Knot on the anchor undone, the weight plunged away to a larger source of baring burdens.

For clarity, she spoke quietly to him, but knew everyone else was also listening. “Like adrenaline, rage can become power, but you cannot live a life sustained on it alone. Even in the cheese block of infinity, you have free will in your slice, to choose to experience the best version of your life-“

“yeah, no open cheese bags.” Frankie chimed in with a muffled, pained laugh.

“Only open minds.” Laith added, as if to make sure the point wasn’t missed in the laughter while they approached yet another stop they weren’t going to stop for.

Ace’s face went from laughing to dead-serious, but only because he was looking into the face of the Passenger as she had a foreign thought so distinct and powerful it overwhelmed her current train of thought. She breathed one word in a whisper, but projected hard-core the entirety of what she really meant when she said: “Bomb.”

Consider it a conscious drafted e-mail forwarded to every mind on the car (and those beyond) containing the foreign thought. 

Not any specific words, but that whomever had been thinking so hard she heard it, had the distinct impression an explosion was imminent at the next stop while their subway blurred by without stopping. Total obliteration of the station, collapse of the tunnel with a heavy side of derailed subway cars knocked off their tracks as surely as this one.

Like a real e-mail forward by a stranger, most minds filed it in an automatic spam filter hunked down deep in their subconscious, while a few got the disturbing inbox chime “incoming!” conscious discomfort but ignored it for later, or never. The men in the car, changed by conversation, got the message loud and clear, some more vividly than others.

The blast would likely hit before their car passed, or as their car passed. Survivability was in question, but the Passenger at least seemed strangely confident it wasn't her day to die.

By the time she whispered the word "Bomb," she wasn’t the only one who shifted position to hit the car’s floor with hands protecting brain matter in a delicate head. As if they'd rehearsed it, as if the word was a flash mob signal to hit the deck. Whether it was because of training, their connection and trust of the passenger, or instinct when someone says bomb like it's about to go off, car seven reacted in near unison just two seconds before it happened.

She barely felt the cold surface plastered across the front of her body before a warmer, bulky form covered her back, and then all hell tore loose through the train car as the explosion went off ahead of them. Her heartbeats raced through time while adrenaline flooded her system alongside an equally heavy dose of cortisol making her body and senses more acutely aware so her perception of time slowed.

The force hit before the heat, the heat hit before the sound, and the sound deafened her to the world outside of a piercing ringing and the hyper-sensitive feeling of her armorless body being hammered by the armor of the man-shield taking the brunt of it.

Momentum fought the concussive force that eventually propelled them off the rails. It was hot, then that special flavor of warm that sets in after cooling from a scorching, and punctuated by a moment of weightlessness.

She felt the man who’d shielded her gain distance between her, hit something, and then become the air-bag she landed against next. Unfortunately, someone else collided with her and the passenger was winded as surely as sandwiched while the train rolled in a tight, screaming, partial barrel roll for a handful of heartbeats before it jerked in a sudden stop that threw them all upward for another impact that nearly slammed them down with a ground trembling rumble she didn't have to hear to know was a cave in.

Even as their bodies moved in a sick dance of physics, the cars behind them continued with their momentum and crunched the metal around them in a fit of protesting heat and pressure. Not all of them made it. The train was still screaming even after it stopped shaking and collapsing in on itself from behind. The air was thick with toxic smoke, there was a weight to the earth they were buried under, everyone had limbs entangled with each other and parts of the train that would shuttle passengers no more.

For those who still lived, there was work to do, and some of them were newly equipped with an expanded mental awareness. Their new decisions were difficult, but not impossible. 

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The End

(for now)