Souls keep quiet as they board the dusk train that takes them from the barracks where heath harvests them daily to the empty unfinished city that will belong to the living. No employee of the embryonic city rides it. Every soul is a one-person company fulfilling a one-night contract they accept by boarding the self-driving train.
The city has a perfect safety record. Its contractors don’t: many dawns the back of the train carries bodies back to the rented barracks where their hearts’ stillness will be measured and their names inscribed in the long list of those declared dead outside the city’s invisible lines.
One dawn hotter than most a software bug freezes the train midway between the city readying for the living and the barracks familiar with death. First the engine. Ventilation and cooling seconds later. The door’s opening systems sometime between.
The souls murmur, talk, yell, gasp and struggle to gasp. Fall silent again.
After some recorded but unperceived time the train’s computers finally defeat the sluggishness of a heat almost equally dangerous to silicon and flesh. Rebooted and patched, it resumes its task of ferrying quiet souls away from the empty city of the living where nobody dies.