Grace Monroe paradoxically shuns artifice, despite wearing a mask of her own. Nine years ago, she stepped off the face of the Earth, and she hasn't looked back since. While Grace never chose a life on the Train, she revels in her quest to rescue children from the False Conductor's heresy. That is, until somebody else comes along…. and leads Grace to a dangerous truth.
Emily Wong prefers to hide stones with flowers, going so far as to sugarcoat cosmic horrors. She left Earth of her own volition, but a recent brush with death has left her torn between her pursuit of an idealized fantasy…. and the harrowing reality of a conscious planet wanting her dead.
In a universe where the events of Book 3 never came to pass, what becomes of Grace a year later, when someone neither denizen nor passenger decides to board the Train?
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"Replicator's Tide is a planet whose inhabitants, many millennia ago, created a new piece of technology. It is unknown why they created it or what they meant to accomplish through its creation, but we do know that the technology they created grew out of their control and absorbed the entire globe.
What they created were self-replicating nanobots, and this is their planet."
How did I just realize that the premise of Grace Gone Galactic—resurrecting a creation of One’s that was reduced to mere artifacts years ago, only to be replaced by the Infinity Train as we know it today—is exactly what I’ve been doing with Galactaron.
"The Cat told me," Simon said slowly, "that many millennia ago, the Train had a MASSIVE reboot. All its technology changed; all its original cars were discarded in a now-condemned quarantine. Almost all of the original denizens were transformed into Ghoms. Even the style of the numbers got revamped."
"You don't say," Grace muttered, pulling up her righthand lavender sleeve to examine her own glowing digits. "Why do you reckon the Conductor did all that?"
"Beats me, but hey, who doesn't like a fresh start? Maybe the old tech just wasn't working for him." He paused, pensively. "Although... the Cat did say... it had something to do with a malfunction. A malfunction of the Brakeman."
"Brakeman?" Grace scoffed. "This is the first that I've heard of a Brakeman. What exactly happened to it—er, him?"
"In layman's terms, the Brakeman broke, and the Conductor rebooted the Train to accommodate for his absence. All these different tasks that were ascribed to the Brakeman became the responsibility of the Conductor. Like giving out numbers, and fixing the cars. That's why the Stewards were made, before they defected to One-One's command. Actually, the original Stewards weren't even called that—I think the Cat called them Pilots. Because they flew around in these massive red ships. She also said something about those being where passengers were 'processed' (whatever that means). Oh! And the ships had this brilliant beam that could conceal something called Brakeman's Gold, so the Pilots could enter and repair cars while they were concealed, 'cause that's what they were made out of. It's kinda what everything was made out of.”
"A golden Train..." murmured Grace wistfully. The notion seemed beautiful.
"The Cat told me that Brakeman's Gold is crazy hard to come by nowadays, but all the tech was made out of it. Heck, for all I know, my number-tracker could be as well. Anyway, since there didn't used to be pods—those were implemented after the reboot—these ships and their Pilots and the Brakeman ran the whole operation. The Conductor just created the cars and kept everything moving. Like a supervisor, or director of sorts. More like what a real conductor does."
Grace took a moment to process all this, then bit her lower lip. "Soooo, did she say what happened to the Brakeman? How it... broke, as you said?"
"I asked her that too; she said it sort of happened over time. The way she put it, though... it almost seemed like he and the Conductor had some sort of falling out." Simon looked down, as if in mourning of another gently drifting dynamic that was soon to be sent asunder by Necessity's wicked hand. "I wonder if he was human too."
Grace felt suddenly cold in her own humanness and stood up with conviction. "Let's go back, hm? The kids are probably worried by now."
"Oh—okay."
Simon turned quickly to her/twisting his whole body/craning his neck (à la Christina's World).
"You're the Conductor of the Apex, Grace. You know that."
