Wired Horizons

Chapter 1: The Rise of the Webrail

The year was 2075, and the world had changed beyond recognition. What was once a planet connected by invisible signals in the air had become a world tied down, physically linked by the sprawling, complex system known as the Webrail. A global network of high-speed maglev trains that ran across every continent, under every ocean, connected cities, countries, and continents by both data and human transport.

The Webrail wasn’t just a train system; it was the world’s circulatory system. Beneath the sleek, frictionless tracks ran data veins—thick, glowing cables that carried the world's information infrastructure. Communication, electricity, and data moved alongside passengers at speeds faster than any human had ever traveled.

Jai Singh, age 57, sat quietly on a platform of the central Webrail terminal in New Delhi, waiting for his shift. Once, he’d been a passionate systems engineer, working on the earliest prototypes of the Webrail. He’d helped build this new world, believed in it. But now, decades later, his faith had been shaken.

The Webrail train hissed silently into the station, its polished steel gleaming under the lights. The train hovered an inch above the track, held by magnetic forces. A sleek, capsule-like structure, it was more a vessel than a train—roomy, soundless, built for both speed and data transfer.

"Another shift," he muttered to himself, stepping onto the platform. The place was bustling with life. People moved in and out of the compartments, all in a rush. Everyone relied on the Webrail now—there was no alternative.

As he walked to his station deep in the Webrail's inner workings, Jai couldn’t help but think back to his younger days, back when the Signal Disease was first discovered. He had been 27 when the report hit the world like a meteor.

---

It had started as a fringe study, but when their findings gained traction, the world listened. Wireless signals—Wi-Fi, cell towers, satellite waves—were slowly poisoning people. The longer someone was exposed, the higher the risk of developing a mysterious illness: neurological degradation, early-onset dementia, and, eventually, death. The illness became known as Signal Disease.

The panic was instant. Governments rushed to dismantle wireless technologies. Cell towers were torn down. Satellites were shut off, their remnants drifting in space. The future, once predicted to be wireless and free, had to be rewritten.

And so, the solution was born—wired technology. There was no going back.

---

Jai’s boots echoed through the narrow maintenance halls of the Webrail system as he descended into the core of the network. He was now one of the Web Technicians, responsible for ensuring the smooth flow of both transportation and information across the globe. His job was simple on paper: maintain the integrity of the system, fix errors when they occurred, and monitor for breaches in the data veins.

Over the past few months, however, something had been gnawing at him. There had been subtle glitches in the system—nothing major, but enough to make Jai suspicious. Every time he tried to investigate, he was redirected or stonewalled by his superiors.

Jai had seen it before—back in the early days of the Webrail, just after its construction had begun. Projects canceled without explanation, research teams reassigned or disappeared. His own sister, Aisha, had vanished during one of those early assignments. She had been working on an advanced encryption method for the network’s data flow, and then one day, she was gone.

Jai had never stopped looking for her. He suspected that the same people behind the Webrail’s construction might know something about her disappearance. But as the system grew, so did the layers of bureaucracy.

---

As Jai reached the core terminal, he saw the error message again—a small glitch in the data flow between two cities. It was nothing serious, just a minor reroute, but something about it bothered him. The error was occurring too often, and always between the same two locations: New Delhi and Cairo.

There was no reason for the Webrail to reroute data between these cities so frequently. Most of the heavy data transfers happened between larger hubs like Tokyo, London, and New York. Cairo wasn’t even a major node in the global network.

Jai connected his tools to the data terminal and began to dig deeper, pulling up the logs. As he scrolled through the data, he noticed a pattern. Someone was accessing the core system from a hidden location. Not an official node, not one of the public WebNodes or government facilities. It was coming from somewhere in the desert, between Cairo and the Sahara.

His pulse quickened as he followed the trail. The access point wasn’t just rerouting data—it was pulling information directly from the core. Sensitive information.

"What the hell is this?" Jai muttered. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he tried to trace the source.

And then he saw something that made his blood run cold.

There, in the access logs, was a familiar name: Aisha Singh.

---

Jai’s world had just been turned upside down. His sister, Aisha, had disappeared nearly 30 years ago, and now, her name was showing up in a hidden access point deep within the Webrail system. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew one thing: someone was using the system for more than just transportation and communication. And they were using his sister’s name to do it.

The truth about the Webrail, and what lay beneath its polished surface, was about to unravel.