Gabriel was just going to work, like every other day. He dresses up in a suit, eats breakfast, goes to the bus station, takes the bus, goes to the train station, and waits at train station A-243. He was very ordinary. He works as a salesperson, trying to persuade investors why they should invest in whatever product he's helping the vendor. It's tough and tedious, as missing a point would get him fired immediately. He had a loving wife, two children, a pretty standard house, but that was it. He always hoped that one day he didn't have to work so hard and could enjoy his life well. And it so happened that it was today he can stop hoping.
While waiting at A-243, he noticed something strange: There were nobody next to him. He thought that he was at the wrong train station, but he looked up and it said A-243. He looked at the stairs, and it was endless. The walls were wavy. The floors were wobbly. It all seemed like a dream, but Gabriel felt the pain as he slapped himself. "What the?" Gabriel questioned as a wavy train stopped in front of him. It opened up and there was a crew. "Come in!" Said Sophia. So Gabriel hesitated. Where am I going, what will happen to my family, who are these people, when will this stop being a dream, and why am I here? Gabriel asked himself. "Just come on in Gabriel," Sophia persisted. Gabriel was shocked how she knew his name, but decided to enter because there were nowhere to go.
"I forgot to give you a proper introduction! My bad." Sophia said. But Gabriel didn't even respond because he was so focused on looking around the train. It was blue, purple, green, a slight hint of black, and the windows looked bleak and absolutely void. Also, the walls had alien languages, seats constantly showing and hiding while he moves, doors moving in a direction undefinable, it's almost as surreal to see as to comprehend. "My name is Sophia, Sophia West. Let's see about you..." Sophia looked at a board and said, "Gabriel Zhu. Age 40, two children, ages six and-"
"What the hell Sophia? Give this poor man some time to think!" One of the crewmates, Zachary, walked up and greeted Gabriel. "Sorry for actually not giving you a good introduction, this is the alien train, known as the 4D Hyperspace Transporter. This is all new to you, right?" Zachary asked. "Why, yes. One question, what will happen to my family?" Gabriel said.
"You lose it. Because once you enter this train, your 3D position will be always fixed to somewhere. So you collide at things not in front of you and walk through stuff in front of you." Another crewmate, Orland, slept on the seats. Then he grabbed a beer bottle through the seats, which illuminated portal effects. As he drank, Gabriel asked again, "So, I never get to see my family ever again?"
"Precisely. Come and drink beer with me, you'll get over it. After drinking for years. And doing stuff," Orland explained. As Zachary took his first sip of the thousandth beer he drank, the captain said, "ATTENTION EVERY TRAIN RIDER: ASSEMBLE IN CART #8, ASSEMBLE IN CART #8. WE HAVE A NEW MEMBER IN THE TRAIN." Sophia explained, "When he says that, always go to the cart. Otherwise the doors lock and you get penalized." Sophia said, "trust me, I skipped one meeting once and my punishment was to scrub my cart clean. Including the seats."
As the crew gathered in cart #8, there were 8 crewmates, 4 system navigators, 2 engineers and 1 captain, she being captain Riley. "Hello all train riders. Today I have a very important announcement to make. We have a new crew member, so let's introduce Gabriel!" Immediately everyone looked at him. He was very sheepish and confused. "So Gabriel, I'm Riley, and do you know why you were selected to be on this train?"
"Um... no? I was going to work?"
"A salesperson, right? Who was your last customer?"
"Um... a person named Riley Proston? Oh. You were selling uhh... those crystal cube things?"
"Yes. Do you know what those are?"
"Nope. I never check the products. I just persuade the buyers."
"Those are spacial cubes we are sending to the Alien Alliance. Let's go get them!" So Riley went to drive in the cab, the engineers went to work, the system navigators went to the control lab, and the crew just hang out. "What do we do as crew?" Gabriel asked. "We work to operate the missions, like selling spacial cubes, transport aliens to other planets, etc... you get it eventually." Sophia responded. Then Gabriel asked another question, "I'm quite curious about the driving itself... can someone explain?"
"You have to be prepared to understand, mate," Blake said. "This is a 4D train, so it travels through the universe in a special way. You know those 3D paintings which as you move the painting changes? It's just like that except it's for a train and the train is the viewer. You get that?"
"Your explanation is... uncannily understandable..." Gabriel was shocked how a complex idea can be explained so easily. "I've been here since the beginning of the discovery of this train. I know everything," Blake said, gesturing Gabriel to follow him to the system lab.
On their way there, a door opened. "When a door opens, it means that someone has left or entered the train. In this case Captain Riley went to get the cubes," Blake explained. Then he pulled out an alien-looking compass with numbers on it. "Using this compass, we are able to see that in this position, we are at the 3D space of... your office. Let me show you the system lab quick, because after we get the cubes we are going to do stuff. Like, exporting aliens, fighting rival groups against the Galactic Kingdom, Import items, and more. Follow here, go through that door that says, "Fast Travel", you get to this maze with infinite paths and a hollow void, and then uhh... the door with that one atom of redness. Then jump off and go on the bottom of it, then walk to door A-00000, and voila!" So now Gabriel and Blake were in the system lab. It was so incomprehensibly large that the maze they just went through is like a little box in a warehouse. "Basic summary: The section in green is the system data storage, in there are trillions of years worth of data-"
"What? I thought big bang happened only billions of years ago."
"Yes, but things existed before big bang. There were billions of big bangs before the big bang you had. And there's constantly big bangs everywhere. It just creates stuff, not the universe. Anyways, The red section is the system structure manager, basically checks if any damages have occurred and the engineers fixes those. The yellow section is the universal cable connecter, basically we can communicate with the other species. The orange section does navigation and positional checks, it works with the captain. The other colors are quite useless and I really don't have to explain. The blue one is chemical checking, purple is health check, pink is managing the storage room, black is the carts, and brown is the weaponry."
"That's cool to know. Thanks for explaining for me."
"You think this is huge and crazy? Check out the four dimensional carts after the trillions of carts. Those are insane." Immediately Blake pulled out a 3D model of the cart. "So the size of the cart changes as you walk in it, because a 4D shape consists of seven 3D shapes including the center, therefore as you walk you really are just walking in your own 3D shape, meaning you have to travel multiple pieces just to get through it."
After Blake explained the concept of traveling a tesseract train cart, Riley came back and announced, "ATTENTION ALL RIDERS: I have successfully got the spacial cubes without force. Woohoo! We are heading to the Galactic Kingdom to drop them off."
"Alright. You get the idea. We just do stuff for the Galactic Kingdom because we're supposed to be the underdog good guys. Let's leave the system lab now," Blake said. "It's impressive how you don't faint the second any of us mention topics like this. The first time Sophia came here, she had a brain stroke. Like, seizures and stuff. Stay curious!" Blake told Gabriel.
Maybe all this space time isn't too bad than having to work 10 hours a day, Gabriel thought.