The interruption occurs at Kilometer 284. It is not a catastrophe, only a reality of load.
System Status:
Anomaly Signal:Brake thermals exceeding limits, Car 3.
Priority: Safety over Integrity.
Adjustment: Deliberate Slowdown.
I do not apologize, but I do slow. I bleed off velocity, the regenerative brakes hissing as they struggle with the heat. We come to a halt in a sun-bleached stretch of coastal scrub.
The Resentful Futurist in Car 2 is suddenly frantic. They look at the telemetry glass—0 km/h—and they feel betrayed. This is the failure they feared: the moment where the "perfect" machine stops. They look around the cabin with a desperate, jagged energy, waiting for the system to collapse because it has admitted a flaw.
Then, the workers arrive.
They appear indirectly in my external sensors: the crunch of gravel, the rhythmic vibration of a human gait. They are not heroes from a myth; they are people in high-visibility vests carrying heavy toolkits. They do not regard me as a god of steel. They regard me as a machine that needs its brake pads inspected.
One worker—a human with oil-stained knuckles—opens my secondary maintenance hatch in Car 3. I feel the "handshake" of their wrench against the bolt. It is a physical correction that I could never perform myself. They work casually, speaking to one another about their own lives, their words a soft, unglamorous counterpoint to the passenger's frantic theories.
The Futurist watches them through the glass. They see the worker wipe sweat from their forehead; they see the grit on the vest. They realize that I am not an erasure of humanity, but a collaboration with it.
Success is not the absence of people. It is the design of a world where humans are still needed in unglamorous ways.
The worker taps my hull—a friendly, rhythmic signal of completion. I lock the hatch. The Resentful Futurist leans back in their seat, their fear loosening but not gone. They are beginning to reimagine a future that doesn't require them to be alone.
Continue.
Not because the machine is perfect. Because the machine is supported.