Identity of Steam: A Journey from Real Life to Sodor

It was a gray and rainy Sunday evening when the spine-tingling sensation began to ripple through your body. Sitting alone in your room, you were leafing through an old, worn book of classic “Thomas the Tank Engine” stories, nostalgia washing over you like a tide. However, something was different this time. An unknown force seemed to grip your limbs, making you feel disconnected and strange.

You tried to stand up, but your legs refused to obey. Panic and confusion gripped you as your limbs began to tingle, then stiffen. “What’s happening to me?” you whispered, voice trembling. But the room gave no answer. Instead, the changing sensation spread.

Your arms grew heavy and solid, the skin transforming into cold, unyielding metal. You watched, horrified, as your once agile fingers stiffened, merging into large cylindrical shapes—the beginnings of wheels. You wanted to scream, but your voice was caught somewhere low in your chest.

Terror overwhelming you, you felt the same transformation beginning in your legs. Your feet, once capable of taking you anywhere, started to lengthen and reshape into wheels. The bones popped and shifted, forming the metal hubs, spokes, and rims. Unable to hold yourself upright any longer, you crumbled forward, hitting the floor with a heavy, metallic thud.

The transformation did not pause. It seized your torso next, your skin and muscle swelling, hardening into a massive, elongating boiler. Your human flesh gave way to riveted steel. Your heart raced, or at least, it felt like it did—until it too was overwhelmed, becoming part of an intricate steam circuit. Helpless, you watched as everything you knew as human was slowly replaced with unfamiliar machinery.

Your breath hitched, though the air was now steam hissing through pipes. You became aware of a strange new sense of power and pressure within your metal body. "No—this can’t be happening!” you tried to shout, but what emerged was an alien, whistling cry.

Pain lashed through you one final time as your face began its transformation. Skin turned pale, hardening to that signature gray of the living locomotives of Sodor. Your mouth stretched, reshaped, and stiffened, adopting the same simplistic but expressive form seen on all Thomas's friends.

“Help! Please!” you tried again, but your voice had already shifted, deepening and taking on the resonance of steam and steel. “Bust my buffers!” The exclamation came before you could stop it. It felt strange, and yet familiar, like dusting off an old memory that had somehow slipped away.

As the changes continued washing over you, a fog seemed to roll into your mind. Memories began to blur, incomprehensible and fuzzy. Who were you? Nothing made sense. A part of you fought the transformation. You were human! You had a name, a life!

But those thoughts were eroding like sand under the tide. They didn’t fit. You weren’t made for walking on two legs, but for gliding smoothly on tracks. The distant scent of coal and steam teased your senses. Wasn’t that how it had always been?

Finally, the fog lifted, and with it, the last semblance of your human self dissipated. Clarity returned, but it was the clarity of a steam engine. You knew now that you were on the island of Sodor, in the warm, protective confines of the Tidmouth Sheds. The gentle rising and falling of breathing engines surrounded you, friends who had worked alongside you for years.

“Are you alright?” a familiar voice asked.

“Bust my buffers! What a nap!” you replied, the words coming easily now.

You still remembered your human name, though it felt distant and unnecessary. Your true identity was here, as it had always been. You were one of Sodor’s many reliable engines, built in the 1980s by skilled engineers near Sodor, never a human—such an idea was preposterous! Human life was but a fleeting dream.

The other engines welcomed you back with familiar warmth. The workday began as usual, and as you chuffed along the tracks, a strange new peace settled into place. The last of your resistance faded away, replaced by a comforting sense of purpose. You had a job to do, friends to see, and a life on Sodor that was as real and as permanent as the tracks beneath your wheels.

This story was generated by user MeganAndy with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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