(Plot: 19th Century US West, Railway, Cold Observation)

The heat in the Nevada Territory is a physical weight. It presses down on you until your thoughts become as slow and thick as the mud in the gullies. I arrived at the Central Pacific railhead in 1865 with a degree in civil engineering and a complete lack of interest in the human condition.

My job was to ensure the grade was correct and the spikes were driven deep. I spent my days looking through a theodolite and my nights writing reports in a ledger.

The workforce was a sea of desperation. Chinese laborers, Irish immigrants, former slaves—men who had been chewed up by the world and spat out onto the edge of a continent. They died in thousands. Blasting accidents, heatstroke, cholera, and the occasional midnight brawl over a bottle of rotgut whiskey.

I recorded it all.

*July 14: Three laborers killed by premature detonation of nitroglycerin. Cause: negligence. Impact on schedule: 4 hours delay.*

*August 2: Outbreak of dysentery in Camp 4. Mortality rate: 12%. Impact on schedule: negligible, replacements arrived via rail.*

I didn't feel pity. Pity is a luxury for people who aren't responsible for a deadline. I viewed the men not as humans, but as biological units of energy. If a unit broke, you replaced it. If a unit slowed down, you applied pressure.

The foreman, a man named Miller with a face like a scarred piece of leather, liked me. He appreciated my lack of sentiment.

"You've got the right head for this, son," he told me, spitting a glob of tobacco onto the dry earth. "Most men come out here and start thinking about 'rights' and 'dignity.' That's how you get a project that never finishes."

I agreed. Dignity doesn't lay tracks.

By 1869, we reached the summit. I stood there as the Golden Spike was driven into the ground, marking the union of the east and west. The executives in their silk hats cheered. The politicians gave speeches about the 'Manifest Destiny' and the 'triumph of civilization.'

I looked at the tracks stretching back across the desert. I didn't see a triumph. I saw a long, silver line of corpses. I saw the thousands of men who had been ground into the ballast to make the journey faster for people who would never know their names.

I opened my ledger and wrote the final entry.

*May 10: Project complete. Total fatalities: 15,402. Total cost: $112 million. Efficiency: Optimal.*

I closed the book and walked away from the celebration. I didn't feel pride, and I didn't feel guilt. I felt nothing. I had spent four years observing the machinery of progress, and I had learned the only lesson that mattered: the world is built on the backs of the disposable, and the only thing that survives is the record of the cost.

[OTMES-V2]-T9-06-[theta:180, M1:6, N1:0.4, K2:0.8]