Blaine the Mono

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blaine the Mono is a demented monorail train appearing in the third and fourth books of Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Roland and his ka-tet hear rumors of a monorail train as they approach the vast and crumbling city of Lud. This seems to be connected to the creepy children's book found by Jake, "Charlie the Choo-choo". As they draw nearer the city they see a monorail track, and crashed into the River Send, a smashed blue monorail train. Jake, however, is convinced that this is not Blaine. After Jake is kidnapped and Roland sets off to find him, Eddie and Susannah move through the not-quite abandoned city to find the Cradle, the Mid-World equivalent of a train station. They reach the Cradle and discover that Blaine is still there, waiting in his berth.

Although Blaine seems to be a sentient train, he is really much more, a "ghost in the machine", the artificial intelligence that resides in Lud's mammoth underground computer systems. Over time, as the world has moved on and the computer system slowly breaks down, Blaine becomes more and more deranged.

The crashed blue mono seen from the Send bridge is revealed to have been named Patricia, apparently possessed of a separate sub-personality within the Lud computer. The Patricia personality lapsed into a depression, and could not stop crying. Blaine "liberated" her by removing certain blocks in her programming, and once freed, she committed suicide, derailing herself in the river. It is a sign of Blaine's cruel personality that he finds this amusing.

Blaine also has a smaller countermind called Little Blaine, who represents the weaker partner in Blain's schizophrenic processor mind. Little Blaine speaks in the voice that once was used to make cabin announcements onboard Blaine in better times. He is, unfortunately, of no help.

Blaine promises a method of escape to the outside. He requires the ka-tet to answer several riddles in order for the them to board him (although an 'it', he thinks of himself as a male) and then pulls a surprise: He plans on following Patricia's example and destroying himself, and in the process crashing the mono with the tet trapped inside. He proceeds to demand Roland tell him riddles to keep him amused on the trip. Roland refuses, infuriating Blaine who threatens to derail in the terrible Waste Lands outside of Lud. Roland faces Blaine down, and convinces Blaine to let them try to save themselves. He proposes to riddle Blaine and if they can stump him, he must let them go. If they can't present a riddle Blaine is unable to answer, he will kill them. Blaine agrees, and the riddling contest begins.

It becomes clear that Blaine has a huge library of riddles from many different levels of the tower at his disposal, and programs to decypher the riddle's wordplays or hidden clues, so the game seems doomed. Roland is unable to pose a riddle that Blaine can't answer, and neither can Jake or Susannah.

Finally, Eddie figures that the riddles he can't solve are the unsolvable and exceedingly stupid jokes humans sometimes make, one such riddle is:

Why did the dead baby cross the road? Because he was stapled to the chicken.

This drives Blaine completely insane and causes his computer to crash. When he finally comes to a stop (he actually crashes), it is in Kansas... in a wiped-out world like that described in The Stand.