Travel Card (Patreon)

At 7:42 am it was finally shut down and the entire station evacuated. It's unclear when it started, but security videos show Matthew Warner at 2:09 as the first one that got transformed at completion of his purchase. There were no lines opened at that hour, but he wanted to top up his travel card on his way walking home from a party. People have had stranger impulses while drunk. The freak out after instantly becoming someone else was understandable. His next action, to post about it on reddit was perhaps less so. It spawned numerous threads on what a lame joke it was, different ways he should kill himself, and other unhelpful tips, but here were also people who started to role play with him, or discussed how this would happen in any number of scenarios involving curses, demons, ley lines etc.

Chris Falkner living nearby recognized the machines and decided to have a look before going to bed. He became transformation number two, 28 minutes after the first victim. The photo of both of them, looking almost identical, sparked a lot more conversation online. It started to spill out on twitter. People accused them of being twins, or congratulated him for good photoshop craftsmanship. The security camera showed the third person being transformed about an hour after the first incident.  Then it really picked up.

Someone with home built equipment to track paranormal activity arrived and started recording all kinds of things, infra sound, radiation, heat signatures. But it was his live streaming that lit Internet on fire and made the three machines famous.  People of all sorts started showing up, at first 10-15 minutes apart, but later by the minute. There were teenagers who put suicide on hold, immigrants wanting to start fresh, people with criminal records wanting a clean slate, colored people wanting to avoid racism, elderly people wanting to extend life another 60 years.

The transit police arrived, the police police arrived, the news crews started to show up, interviewing people both pre- and post-transformation. The whole situation turned into a circus, and it was unclear who was actually in charge. There were no laws being broken, at least no concerning the machines. Just a large number of people slowly becoming approximate clones. They didn't become exact replicas, but more like twins who grew up apart with different foods, different hobbies. At 7:27 the mayor decided to stop the madness, and soon after police had the station emptied.

In a coordinated effort by DHS the site was secured, CDC check for biological contamination, Department of Energy coordinated the radiological surveys and FBI did everything else, including seizing the paranormal study equipment and all its recordings. In the end there were no physical leads at the scene, nothing of consequence recorded in any equipment. Nothing to explain the anomaly at least. By the time the official attempt to perform a controlled transformation, some 20 hours later, nothing actually happened, besides topping up the travel card with $20.

The station surveillance captured 1147 transformations, of which the pre-transformation identity of 727 people have been established. It indeed turn out that everyone transformed shared the same DNA. In an accidental discovery, eight months later, the DNA turned out to be identical to the DNA of Sam Hoynes from Connecticut. His aunt submitted her DNA to Ancestry and was flagged as biologically close to the "Transit-DNA", as it was now known. It caused a minor manhunt with DHS, which eventually leaked to cable news. Sam had never been close to the machines in question. In fact he had never left the state, and he didn't resemble any of his 1147 twins yet, as he was only 14. No satisfactory link was ever established between him and the machines.

While his fingerprints and DNA became the most common in criminal cases for the next century, there was a silver lining for Sam, as three independent churches and two cults declared him divine, or similar status, and started sending him an average total of $1.2 million per month.