One
The evening train rolls brightly lit through clouds and thundershowers. A man on the train, Richard, idles next to the lavatory. There’s a ding as the OCCUPADO light flicks off above him. Someone exits; now it’s his turn. He enters. It looks like a commercial kitchen in there. Unblemished stainless steel gleams in the fluorescent light, and it’s hard to tell where the toilet ends and the wall or floor begins. A little pee misses the bowl at first, but Richard doesn’t mind.
Between him and his seat, a window seat, are two other passengers seated in the middle and the aisle. They’re both sleeping, but the row behind them is empty, so Richard sits there instead. “Nice,” he thinks, as he puts the armrests up and sprawls out, feet on the upholstery. The scenery is blowing by at alarming speed. He’s not sure he’s ever been on a train this fast before. They don’t have Vac-Levs back home. Although the rain is light, it streaks across the glass violently as the train cars whiz through it.
“Excuse me, sir?” Richard is startled awake by a woman standing in the aisle looking down at him. “Sir, your ticket? And can you please take your feet off the upholstery, please, sir?”
“Mm, sorry,” Richard says, sitting upright. He holds his phone out to be scanned.
“Sir, can you please turn your brightness up on your screen, please, sir?”
Richard does so, then returns the phone to be scanned again.
“Sir, it’s still on the menu. The menu where you turned up the brightness. Your screen is still on the menu, please, sir.” The woman gestures toward Richard’s phone with her scanner, smiling at him.
“Yes, I see that. Okay, thank you.” After he fumbles to get his ticket loaded again, the scanner beeps across it and a green icon pops up on the scanner display. The woman reads it and frowns.
“Sir, you’re in 16C. Your ticket is for 15C. That’s the seat ahead of you, please, sir.”
“Yes, that’s right. But I don’t want to disturb the sleeping passengers there. Am I okay to sit here for now?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to take your assigned seat. We can’t have you sitting in an unassigned seat, please, sir.”
“Is this reserved for someone else? There was no one sitting here when I arrived.”
“Sir, could you please take your assigned seat? This seat was not assigned to you, please, sir, so you can’t be sitting here.”
“I don’t…” Richard is perplexed. “Are you serious?”
“Sir?” she asks. Some time passes with the two of them looking at one another. It’s an inconceivably low-stakes game of chicken that Richard quickly loses.
“Yeah, okay then,” he mutters. He stands up and shuffles into the aisle. The woman stands back with a smile and makes an exaggerated gesture toward Richard’s assigned seat. He nods purposefully at her. “Yes, I’m aware of where it is.”
He does his best not to interrupt his sleeping seatmates, but it’s an impossible task. They are both jarred awake as he passes unceremoniously in front of them, squeezed between their knees and the seatbacks ahead on his way to the window seat. They’re looking up at him with a mixture of startlement and disgust. The woman in the aisle seat takes a pointed look behind her, as if to indicate the empty seats there.
“Sorry,” Richard says, making to explain himself with a shrug and a glance at the train car attendant. She is long gone, many rows ahead checking the tickets of the next-nearest passengers. He sighs and takes his seat.
In his peripheral vision, Richard (who goes by Dick) can just discern that the man seated next to him is now staring with tremendous animosity at Dick’s face, or else just past it and out the window. Rather than meeting the man’s eyes to determine which, Dick steadies his own gaze out the window and onto a distant wind turbine, rapidly approaching from the south as the train rockets through the countryside.
Some hours later, Dick awakes. He had slumbered through the evening and into the night, his head bobbing occasionally against the glass window—or was it some kind of plastic? He notices right away that the disgruntled passengers once in his row have now dispersed and are occupying seats other than their own. Suddenly, the overhead lights brighten, and an announcement begins playing over the train car’s intercom system.
“Valued EnparaPassengers: welcome aboard the Enparadiso Express! Before taking your seats, please scan your ticket at the first available Enparadiso Exchange Kiosk and your Enparadiso Card will be issued to you. A complimentary ten EnparadisoBucks will be loaded and ready for spending on your train car! Additional EnparadisoBucks can be loaded at a kiosk or online at enparadiso-dot-mycard-dot-ep. It is now night-time, and the train car lights will be dimmed after some messages from our beloved sponsors.” The message is then played again in Spanish and Mandarin. It’s the same that played when he boarded, and it will play every hour until he disembarks.
Once the ads have ceased, the fluorescent lighting dims to a marginally less abrasive hue. Dick tries to get back to sleep, but he’s awake now, so he heads to the train car concierge to get a snack.
“Hello,” the concierge says.
“Hello,” says Dick. He looks at the available snack selection. “I’ll get one of these corn dogs.”
“Mustard?” the concierge asks.
“Yes,” Dick says.
The corn dog has been oscillating on hot rollers for a few hours already, but fortunately it’s been misted intermittently to keep it fresh. The concierge removes it and squirts mustard expertly in a single helix across the dog from end to end. “You know,” he starts to say, but pauses. “Well, here’s the corn dog.”
Curious, Dick inquires further. “What were you saying?”
The concierge shakes his head. “It’s just this job, you know? I was going to ask you how your trip’s been going. But I already know. It’s the same as everyone else’s. By design. The whole thing has been engineered.” He pauses again before continuing. “There’s been a loss, I think, when all of your experiences are so discretized as to lose completely their natural timbre, pardon my French. It’s as if the goal itself is to render qualia obsolete, erase nuance, to atomize the human condition.
“Look here: you paid with your Enparadiso Card. Seven ninety-nine. You’ve got two dollars and one cent left. Sorry, 2.01 EnparadisoBucks (E2.01). That means you can’t afford anything else at my stand, so you’ll have to spend the rest online, or else reload your card with your own local currency, if we even accept it.
“And look at this: every item here is either E7.99 or E5.99. You can’t get two items. Not with your complimentary EnparadisoBucks, anyway. Why not? What is the point of that? It’s because they want the data. First, they want to know what you’ll buy if only one item is available to you. Corn dog. Okay. Then they want to know who will recharge their card to get more. You’re on a susceptibility list if you do that. Last, they want to see who differentiates between the cheaper and more expensive items.
“See, you can only recharge your card in E15.00 increments. So, in the end, assuming you recharge once, that’s E25.00 you’ve got in total. That means you can get four items at E5.99, or three items at E7.99. You can’t mix and match and get any other number of items. It’s three or four, no matter how you slice it, unless you don’t use up all the credit available to you.
“Anyway, they’ve figured something out about that, I guess. Based on all those possibilities. And combinatorially, it’s quite a few possibilities, spread amongst any number of passengers. Even just in this train car. But for the individual? For you alone? It’s really not many. Six possibilities: one, you don’t buy anything; two, you just buy one item and don’t recharge; three, you recharge and you buy four items at E5.99; four, you recharge and you buy three items at E7.99; five, you recharge and you buy three items of differing prices, two at E5.99 and one at E7.99; six, you recharge and you buy three items of differing prices, one at E5.99 and two at E7.99.
“Is that choice consequential enough to define you? Is that what you want your epitaph to read? Don’t you think there’s more to you than that? They say there’s not. And it’s the damnedest thing: they’ve got the data to prove it. But, it’s just… well, fine, maybe they’re right. Maybe we really are that simple. That reducible. I just don’t know if they’ve always been right. I think maybe they’re right because they’ve made us that way. Our choices have been compartmentalized, measures becoming targets for so long, it’s the only scheme we know. Even for knowing ourselves. A whole six choices, and we get to pick one. One all our own. I think… I think we used to be analog.”
“What if I recharge twice?” Dick asks. “Then I could buy five items. Or more!”
“It doesn’t matter,” the concierge says sadly.