MergePunk: An Ooorah & WattpadPunkFiction Anthology

Train Station Platform - @KarlOConnor - SteamPunk + Anti-Villain SF

Train Station Platform

A SteamPunk + Anti-Villain SF story by KarlOConnor

Ever feel as if you are caught in a perpetual moment of déjà vu? Or have you ever been somewhere and for a moment or two, perhaps longer, you have no idea as to how it is you managed to get to where you are or why it is you are there at all? Yeah ... that kind of situation ... it can be quite disorientating. 

What if such a moment kept resetting like some sort of video game with you in a lead role also coming with the exception that it is at least a little different each time, just as if tasks are being presented to you for not only your attention but for you to react to and complete in whatever manner you see fit?

Your natural instinct to any task of seriousness would be to do the right thing despite your only desire being that of wanting to move on with your life, to get away from your place of endless déjà vu.

As horrible as it would be to go against your desire to be a good Samaritan and provide aid, your moments keep resetting and beginning anew in an endless cycle, a nightmarish loop to the point quite possibly will even lose your mind. What could you do with all this? Keep trudging on through in the hopes that all will be restored to what your life should be, whatever that is?

At what point would you decide that enough is enough? At what point do you decide you are not willing to play games? Could such a decision be made? Can such a time come? Perhaps there would be other means to move on from the nightmare and onto some kind of normalcy as in reaching some game like checkpoint.

Games, however, do not play out with situations of reality.

1.

John takes his pocket watch out for a third time, only two minutes have passed since he had last checked the gold rimmed piece and his train in this moment is still five minutes away from being due. He begins tapping his right foot, then checks that his brown leather briefcase is still at his side and soon decides to stay standing right where he is rather than try finding something to occupy his mind for those incoming five minutes.

The train will arrive soon enough and it might even seem to arrive all the quicker if he could manage to refrain from continually checking his watch.

He feels as if he has been here ... forever, as he also feels as if he has only just got here. If only he could properly remember. Why can't he remember? What came before? Why is he here other than to get onto a train? A reset, a start over and a way out should soon be here so he thinks to himself before wondering why he is having such thoughts at all. Still. There is a train coming and he feels a need to be on it.

An awareness isn't quite there about the numerous mind wipes that have occurred, one more severe than the others, all of which have placed a haze over what has come before. His initial transit here to this place has also created that haze. If for a moment he has forgotten how and why he has come here then it will return to him soon enough or so he would be sure. What is for sure and somewhat unbeknown to him is that something is about to come his way. There is something he is supposed to do, isn't there?

Irritation and anxiousness would soon join his impatience and forgetfulness when a boy no more than six or seven begins to walk the edge of the platform as if it were a tight rope and this occurs no more than two dozen feet away from where John so happens to be standing ... waiting. Two adults near-by, possibly the boy's parents, are distracted by two other children and both continue not to pay any attention to the platform edge walking boy.