December 197 (Station Year), Matsumae Peninsula, Hokkaido
Under a layer of clouds so thick it was impossible to tell if the sun had gone down or not, the snow was falling heavily enough to impede one’s vision. A layer of white covered the treeless landscape. The narrow strip of land featured several shipping container-like buildings, behind which was a small mountain, its slope ablaze with a yellow glow.
The lights were attached to wooden scaffolding that rested against the slope, and on the interior side of the frame was a small tunnel mouth, steel beams jutting around it like the ribs of some massive creature. From a distance, it looked like a construction site at night. More accurately, however, this was a location for the prevention of construction.
Above the tunnel was affixed a metal plate that read SEIKAN TUNNEL. It was JR North Japan’s ultimate line of defense against Yokohama Station’s invasion into Hokkaido.
Fifty years had already passed since the self-replicating Yokohama Station covered the island of Honshu entirely. The Tsugaru Strait was too wide for the station’s structure to cross, so the only thing that needed to be done to prevent it from reaching Hokkaido was to seal off the exit of the Seikan Tunnel. Compared to the southern front that Kyushu was fighting at the Kanmon Straits, this was much easier.
Once suitably doused in the yellow light, the steel beams sticking out of the tunnel entrance could be cut into pieces, then loaded on trucks and taken somewhere else. The metal being replicated by Yokohama Station, once sufficiently de-Yokohama Stationized, was melted down and reused.
“It’s a shame that for all the material we’re receiving this way, that wooden scaffolding has to cheapen the whole look of it,” lamented a young employee wearing a thick work uniform. The foreman’s metal container housing kept out the snow and wind. However, it possessed little in the way of insulation, and only the wood-burning stove could keep away the winter chill that constantly seeped inside.
“It’s to protect against contamination,” said the middle-aged foreman. He had a neat little mustache and wore a coat that resembled a Russian army one from back in the days of the Gregorian calendar. “Organic material is much harder for Yokohama Station’s structure to contaminate than metal and concrete. What would be the point of setting up a scaffold to stop the station from expanding if it’s the first thing that gets absorbed by the station?”
“Couldn’t you just shine the canceler at the scaffolding, too?”
“At the whole massive structure? It’d be a waste of power,” replied the foreman, fiddling with his facial hair.
There were many of the enormous yellow lamps, which looked like theater spotlights, installed around the structure. Fat cables transmitting energy ran from the devices into the tunnel. Strange as it was, the electricity used to prevent Yokohama Station’s invasion was being taken from Yokohama Station itself.
Lines ran across the screen of an oscilloscope sitting on the desk of the container building.
“Sir, we have a number of feral turnstiles approaching. Distance of fifty meters. They’ll be on the camera any moment now. Ah, there they are,” said the young employee just as the automated turnstiles appeared on the display in front of the foreman. They had flat, boardlike bodies and limbs that extended from them like table legs. The head displays, which looked unnaturally tacked-on, wore frozen smiles.
“Turn off the cancelers,” instructed the foreman. The yellow lights attached to the wooden scaffolding went out, and the site below the heavy clouds became even darker.
“Three…no, four of them. Shall we destroy them?”
“Don’t bother—no need to use valuable weaponry. The turnstiles don’t come out of the station anyway. Leave them be, and they’ll turn back around before long,” the foreman stated. No sooner had he done so than the bell sounded to indicate the end of the regular work shift. The younger employee gave a huge yawn, opened the door, and pulled out some beer that had been stuck into the snow outside.
“Shall we celebrate the end of the day with a drink, sir?” he proposed, bringing the white cans inside. The foreman could have told him off, instructed him to go back to the barracks, but his workplace responsibility had vanished with the chime, and instead, he only spoke of primitive desires.
“I’d prefer hot sake instead.”
“Hey, all alcohol will warm you up if you give it time. And this was a gift from the Hakodate folks,” the young man remarked, handing one can to his superior. He waited for him to pull the tab before cracking open his own. “Being the Defense Bureau and all, I thought we’d be having shoot-outs with the turnstiles, but it’s rare even to see them here. Nothing but grinding down the endlessly growing building, huh?”
“That’s right. Normally, the turnstiles keep much farther back into the tunnel.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be the station guards?”
“They’re the Inside guards, technically. There are places in Yokohama Station where you need a Suika and places where you don’t. The automated turnstiles police those boundaries. And that’s much deeper in the tunnel.”
“Ohhh. So the interior of the station and Inside are different things? That’s hard to follow.”
“You get used to it.”
“Do people ever come out? I mean, people from Honshu with Suika credentials are allowed to go outside, right?”
“You think someone’s going to walk all the way through the Seikan Tunnel? What do Inside folk want with this barren land?”
“Huh. I like it, though.”
The foreman snorted with laughter.
“…By the way, if you’ll excuse the elementary question,” the junior of the two began. “Why do we turn off the structural genetic field cancelers when the turnstiles come? Is it bad if they get into the light?”
“No. It has no direct effect on them… Do you know how the canceler works?”
“Yes. You’re shining a localized antiphase field back, right? That eliminates the structural genetic field, meaning the corresponding material is no longer Yokohama Station, and it loses the ability to replicate,” answered the young man, quoting the knowledge he was taught after joining the company. The actual mechanisms of Yokohama Station’s growth were kept secret from the general populace of Hokkaido, so new JR employees had to learn the fundamentals in their first year.
“Right. Automated turnstiles can distinguish Yokohama Station from everything else. They will not venture into a space where the canceler has been deployed. However, if you shine the canceler where they are, it creates a situation where automated turnstiles are present where the station isn’t. And that’s when it causes problems.”
“Problems?”
“I’ve only seen it happen a few times, myself. That head just falls right off. They put their hands on the floor and go quadrupedal.”
“And then what happens?”
“They attack people.”
There was a heavy silence for a moment.
“With guns.”
“What? Those things have guns? I thought they only had wires for apprehending trespassers.”
“Look, see that hole?” the foreman said, pointing at the wall of the container house. There was a glob of earth-colored resin stuck to the metal surface. It seemed to be patching up a hole.
“The weapons aren’t very big compared to their body size, so you can deal with them if you stay calm and focused, but you always want to minimize casualties, see.”
“So basically, if they’re put into a state their programming doesn’t allow for, they go crazy?”
“Perhaps.”
The young man tried to imagine the sight of an automated turnstile crawling around on all fours. The limbs were all about the same length, so dropping down would put the body at a level angle, just like a table. That almost made it seem like the limbs were designed for quadrupedal movement all along. Supposedly, human arms shrank to be much shorter after thousands upon thousands of generations walking on two legs.
“By the way, is Miss Rube on vacation? I haven’t seen her today.”
“Rube was transferred to headquarters in Sapporo.”
“What? I thought she’d be so happy to have some real beer for once. Though I guess they must have plenty at HQ. What division?”
“Engineering 2nd Division. They’ve had a lot of resignations lately. They were starving for new blood.”
“…The infamous 2nd Division, huh?” The younger man appeared almost reverential. “That’s where they have the saboteur android agents we send Inside. I was stunned when I learned we had the tech to do that.”
“It’s no surprise you were unaware. Such things didn’t even exist until ten years ago.” The foreman took a swig of beer. “That was around the time of that scandal, remember? They replaced a whole batch of principal officials in the company. Everything changed after that. Same thing with the canceler. In fact, the whole reason we’ve been able to repel the station so effectively…”
He trailed off, suddenly becoming pensive, anxious.
They’d pushed the front line of Yokohama Station’s advance from Hokkaido back to the Seikan Tunnel. For JR North Japan—and all the people of Hokkaido—that was something worth celebrating wholeheartedly. Yet the foreman’s voice was heavy. It seemed to suggest they were under the rule of some dangerous, misunderstood power they weren’t meant to have.