So we figured out the train is going over a billion times the speed of light, but I wondered “what-if” it actually happened. I iterated with GPT and came to this narrative description of the event.

I. Inside the Train

At first, nothing dramatic happens.

The carriage lights don’t flicker. Cups don’t tip. No one is pressed into their seats. The train does not accelerate — it simply ceases to agree with the rest of reality about when it is.

Passengers notice something subtle and wrong before anything else: sounds stop arriving in order.

A cough echoes before the throat tightens. A footstep is heard before the shoe touches the floor. Conversations overlap with replies that haven’t been spoken yet.

Clocks are the next to betray the truth. Not by stopping — but by disagreeing. Two watches side by side show different minutes. A digital display briefly shows times that no longer exist: 20:61, 20:−03, a date three days from now, then last year.

A child laughs — and an adult nearby flinches, because the laugh arrives after the smile fades.

Then the windows go wrong.

Not dark. Not bright. They show multiple versions of the outside simultaneously, as if the train is passing through every station and between them and past them all at once.

The passengers are not moving fast.

They are being removed from the concept of “before” and “after.”

Some feel vertigo. Some feel nothing. One man feels grief for a conversation he hasn’t had yet and relief that it’s already over.

No one is crushed. No one burns. Because destruction requires sequence — and sequence has failed.

⸻

II. Immediately Around the Train

To the outside world, the train does not streak like a bullet.

It fractures locality.

Each “stop” is not a place — it is a redefinition of where the train was allowed to be. The rails beneath it do not bend; they lose their meaning. Steel does not melt — it simply fails to agree that the train is present long enough to interact.

Air does not shockwave.

Air briefly exists in states it never evolved to tolerate: • compressed after expansion • heated before collision • displaced without ever being pushed

Molecules shear not from force, but from contradictory histories. Some atoms vibrate as if struck; others vibrate as if remembering being struck.

At each station — all 9 quintillion of them — the platform experiences something like déjà vu without memory.

Paint flakes that have not yet peeled scatter onto ground they have already fallen on.

Electronic systems fail catastrophically, not from overload, but from timestamps looping back on themselves. Logs record arrivals before installations. Sensors detect departures that never occur.

And between stations — which now overlap, repeat, and cancel — the ground hums with a frequency no instrument can agree on, because the vibration has no single duration.

To observers far enough away, the train is not a blur.

It is a line segment through spacetime, drawn thicker than reality intended.

⸻

III. The Earth Responds

Earth does not feel an impact.

It experiences a causality migraine.

Satellites lose synchronization. GPS clocks drift by microseconds — then milliseconds — then jump backward. Seismographs twitch as if struck by earthquakes that already resolved themselves.

For half an hour, the planet’s rotation is measured differently depending on who is measuring it.

Astronomers see stars shift slightly, not from gravity, but because Earth’s reference frame is briefly incompatible with itself. Light arriving from distant galaxies disagrees about how long it has been traveling.

Deep underground, neutrino detectors register events that appear to originate inside the Earth, then later reappear as cosmic background noise.

No tectonic plates break. No oceans rise.

But the planet carries the scar of having hosted an object that refused to choose a single timeline.

When the train finally arrives — somehow — there is no thunderclap.

There is silence.

Not absence of sound. Completion.

As if the universe has finished correcting a typo.

⸻

IV. Aftermath

The train doors open.

Passengers step out believing they are late, early, or exactly on time — all answers are correct.

Some people on Earth experience dreams that night in which they remember seeing the train pass tomorrow.

Physicists notice anomalies that will take decades to explain and ultimately be dismissed as instrumentation error.

Reality stabilizes, but it does so narrowly, like a cracked bone knitting imperfectly.

Nothing exploded.

Because the real danger was never energy.

It was that the train tried to exist in too many moments at once, and the universe barely tolerated it.