They didn't take the express.
Bram insisted on that immediately, with the casual authority of someone who had already checked the prices and decided they were stupid.
"Express rail skips the good parts," he said, feet kicked up on his pack as they waited on the platform. "You blink and suddenly you're somewhere else, poorer, and you don't know why."
Rhea snorted. "You say that like you're not the one who just got paid."
"I got paid," Bram corrected. "I didn't get rich. There's a difference."
Daniel stood a step back from them, watching the platform cycle through its pre-departure routines. The floor lights pulsed softly, guiding foot traffic without signage. A drone drifted past at shoulder height, scanning tickets and biometrics in the same motion.
The system didn't ask if you were ready. It just assumed you were part of the flow.
They boarded a local transit spine—one of the long-haul service routes that hugged the inner curve of the cylinder. The car was narrow but clean, with wide observation panels instead of ads. The seats reconfigured themselves once the doors closed, accommodating Bram's shorter, broader frame without comment.
Rhea dropped into a seat across from Daniel, studying him openly. "You look… taller."
Daniel shrugged. "Gravity does that."
"Yeah," Bram said. "It also does that thing where it sneaks up on you and suddenly your knees hurt forever."
"I'm twelve," Daniel said.
Bram grinned, stroking his full twelve-year-old beard. "Give it time."
The train eased into motion, acceleration so smooth Daniel barely felt it. Outside the windows, the landscape slid by—not rushing, not slow. Agricultural bands first. Dense vertical stacks of green, layered like folded fabric along the curve of the world. Irrigation drones moved in precise swarms, misting crops in patterns too complex to be random.
Rhea leaned forward, pressing her forehead lightly to the glass. "I still don't get how this all works," she said. "I mean, I know how it works. But I don't get it."
Bram followed her gaze. "You grow up inside it, you stop seeing it. Like plumbing. Or air."
Daniel watched silently. In his first life, agriculture had been fields and tractors and weather you couldn't argue with. Here, the weather was scheduled.
"How much of this is automated?" Daniel asked.
Bram laughed. "How much of what?"
"All of it," Daniel said, gesturing.
Bram considered. "Ninety-eight percent? Ninety-nine? Depends how you count. Humans mostly handle edge cases. Weird failures. Judgment calls."
"And art," Rhea added. "And sex, apparently. The system's terrible at both."
Bram nodded sagely. "Catastrophic, really."
Daniel smiled despite himself.
The train curved gently, transitioning from agricultural bands to industrial layers. The light outside shifted from green to silver. Vast manufactories clung to the inner surface of the cylinder, their interiors exposed through transparent shielding. Daniel saw things being grown instead of built—structures extruding themselves from nutrient baths, guided by invisible fields.
"Biofab," Bram said, following his gaze. "Grown-to-fit components. Self-healing. Mostly maintenance-free."
"Mostly," Rhea echoed.
Bram shrugged. "Everything fails eventually. That's job security."
Daniel felt a strange hollow sensation open in his chest. In his first life, manufacturing had been loud and dirty and full of people. Here, the people were absent—or present only as supervisors, their attention distributed across dozens of processes at once.
"What year is it?" Daniel asked suddenly.
Rhea blinked. "What?"
"What year," he repeated. "Relative to… everything."
Bram tilted his head. "That's a weird question."
Daniel hesitated. "I don't actually know when my memories are from. Not precisely."
Rhea's expression softened. "You mean from before."
Daniel nodded.
Bram scratched his beard. "Depends which calendar you're using. Earth-standard, cylinder-local, post-Expansion—"
"Roughly," Daniel said.
Bram did some mental math. "A few decades, give or take, since the gods awoke. Hard to be exact. We stopped caring about exactness once relativity made liars of us all. You, in your first life, were one of the first that went through Hades, right?"
Daniel let that sink in, nodding absently.
A few decades.
The world he remembered hadn't ended. It had just… continued. Without him.
The train slowed as it passed through a transit hub. People boarded and disembarked in quiet efficiency. A group of children ran past, laughing, chased by a hovering drone that politely reminded them of platform safety protocols.
Rhea glanced at Daniel, then reached out through the Lace—not intrusively, just opening a channel.
"You don't have to," she said aloud. "But if you want… we can sync gain a bit. Bram too."
Bram raised an eyebrow. "You're suggesting emotional oversharing on public transit."
Rhea shrugged. "We've done worse."
Daniel felt the instinctive resistance rise. Then he remembered Elise's trembling hands. Kael's anger. Nancy's quiet sadness.
He nodded.
"Okay."
They adjusted their Lace settings together, dialing up sensitivity and cross-channel transparency. Not full merge. Just enough to let impressions bleed through.
Daniel felt it immediately.
Rhea's curiosity, bright and unguarded. Her sense of wonder at systems she still found miraculous. Bram's dense, layered attention—practical, grounded, threaded with ancestral memory that wasn't his own but lived in him anyway.
And they felt him.
Not the Shadow. Not the monster.
The weight.
The absence shaped like a person.
Rhea inhaled sharply. "Oh," she whispered. "Daniel…"
Bram went very still. His usual flippancy drained away, replaced by something older. "That's… a lot."
"I know," Daniel said quietly.
Images surfaced—unbidden. Elara's hands. The shop. The way her attention could feel like gravity. The way it could crush.
Rhea's eyes shimmered. "She loved you."
"Yes," Daniel said. "And she broke people."
Bram swallowed. "Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"No," Daniel agreed.
They rode in silence for a while after that, the shared channel slowly settling. Outside, the industrial layers gave way to residential terraces. Parks spiraled along the curve, dotted with people who had never known Earth and never would.
For the first time since waking up in this life, he wasn't alone with his temporal dislocation. He wasn't the only one bridging gaps—between systems, between eras, between ways of being human.
Daniel watched the world pass and tried to line it up with the one in his head. The scale was wrong. Not bigger, denser. Every surface was doing something. Growing, routing, regulating. The quiet wasn't emptiness. It was delegation.
Bram leaned back, hands folded over his stomach. "We covered this in gestation sim," he said, casually. "The gods, I mean."
Daniel glanced over. "Covered how?"
"As layers," Bram replied. "Not personalities. Not beings. More like… consensus engines. You learn the inputs they take, the outputs they produce, the failure modes. Same way you learn stress tolerances or fluid dynamics."
Rhea nodded. "They don't teach it like history. More like… maintenance theory."
Daniel pondered. "And what do they say about before?"
Bram shrugged. "Messy. Transitional. Lot of people thought the stack would solve arguments. Turns out it just made them faster."
"That tracks," Daniel said.
Rhea tilted her head. "It's weird hearing you say 'before' like it's a place."
"It was," Daniel said. "Just not a stable one."
They passed into a residential band. Towers curved overhead, their inner faces staggered with balconies and walkways. Children played in midair parks, tethered lightly by gravity assists. An android paused to help an elderly man adjust a cart, then stepped aside without comment.
Rhea watched Daniel watching it all.
"In sim," she said, "they talk about the first uploads like pioneers. Brave, scared, improvising everything."
Daniel smiled faintly. "That's generous."
Bram chuckled. "Yeah, the sims are kind."
"They don't really explain what it felt like," Rhea went on. "Just the decision trees. Risks. Ethics. You're a case study, basically."
Daniel exhaled. "Lucky me."
Bram glanced at him sideways. "They say continuity was the big unknown. Not the tech. Whether the person on the other side would still… care."
Daniel looked back out the window. "I cared."
Rhea's voice softened. "Do you still?"
Daniel thought about Elara. About the Shadow file. About the weight he carried now.
"Yes," he said. "Just differently."
The train slowed as it entered another hub. Below them, far down the curve, Daniel could see massive transport flows—cargo moving without drivers, schedules adjusting in real time, systems talking to systems with no human in the loop.
"In sim," Bram said, following his gaze, "they warn you not to anthropomorphize the stack. That's how people get hurt. You treat infrastructure like it owes you something."
Daniel nodded. "That lesson came later, for us."
Rhea smiled faintly. "We get it early. Doesn't make us smarter. Just… less surprised."
Daniel leaned back, feeling the vibration of the rail through his spine.
A few decades, he thought again.
Not an ending. Just a handoff.
He hadn't been left behind.
He'd been skipped—like a stone across water, touching down once, then again, much farther along.
The train announced their next stop.
Bram stood and stretched. "All right. Enough philosophy. Next leg's on foot."
Rhea grinned. "You ready to see how much of the world runs without anyone noticing?"
Daniel stood with them, adjusting his pack.
"I think," he said slowly, "I've already started."