June 198 (Station Year), Okayama, Northeast of Great Seto Bridge
Violent rain lashed at the concrete surface, with its equally turbulent undulations, signaling the arrival of the wet season. Clouds utterly blocked out the moonlight so that only the glow from Inside illuminated the ground. Yokohama Station covered Honshu, but the Okayama region was close to the western edge, and its structures had only recently been generated. The floor was formed of unspecialized concrete, its structural purpose not yet fixed.
In places where many people came and went, like the cities of Kofu and Matsumoto, such spaces like this one inevitably became hallways that piled up and overlapped until they took the shape of a multilevel city. But in lowly populated areas like these, only a bare minimum of corridors appeared, and the rest remained untended concrete with the texture of soapy water.
Here and there in Yokohama Station were doors that allowed access to the roof from Inside, but few citizens ever ventured through them, especially during monsoon and typhoon season. The toxic rain clouds from the Winter War era were clean now, as two centuries had passed. However, most people Inside were ignorant of that fact. To them, rain would always inspire fear.
So if anything was moving about on the roof during a storm, it couldn’t be human. Yet it was not an automated turnstile, either. It was a Corpocker-3 android, made with the finest engineering in all of JR North Japan, and it bore the appearance of a young girl.
“Haikunterke, can you hear me?”
The voice from Suikanet entered her primary memory device. It was the voice of Kaeriyama, a technical officer of JR North Japan.
“There’s no place around you where you might be able to block out the net. I was hoping for some exposed natural hillside, but oh well. Head out to sea instead.”
“Roger that,” replied Haikunterke, calling up a map from her supplemental memory device. It was a straight twenty-five-kilometer shot to the Seto Inland Sea. Confirming that she had adequate power reserves, she began to run to the south. Despite the extreme fluctuations in the concrete surface, several meters at times, her specially designed body proved capable of traversing it as easily as if running on flat ground.
She reached the seaside in about an hour. There was a strip of exposed natural ground between the station and the shoreline, a buffer several dozen meters wide. A long line of pine trees grew there, most likely the descendants of trees people had planted to preserve the sand line.
“It’s Haikunterke. I’ve just reached the coast.”
“All right. Cross the water and head to Shikoku. I was planning on using the Great Seto Bridge, but it looks like we don’t have the time for that. Based on the turnstile movements, its immune memory is quite strong around there. You should get away from the Inside.”
Kaeriyama’s voice held a nuance of unease and resignation. She guessed he was probably against sending her over the water rather than the bridge but had been overruled.
“I’ll do that. But I won’t be able to access the net for a while.”
“…I know. There should be increasing Stationization in the Kagawa area, but we don’t have any accurate information about the net status there. Find a way to contact us as soon as you can. Good luck.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Haikunterke ended the connection there. She cut down some nearby pine trees and spread out a water-resistant plastic sheet she’d acquired Inside to make a simple raft with a canopy. She’d heard that android bodies were waterproof already, but she didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks in the sea.
She checked her power level. It was adequate for now, but there was no telling when she’d be able to recharge again. Best to let the waves carry her and minimize the energy usage. She rowed the raft out into the water.
The Seto Inland Sea was inky black. After a while, she finally reached a place with no Suikanet signal. That should finally put an end to the immune response, and Haikunterke breathed a sigh of relief. It also meant there was no determining her precise location, however.
The automated turnstiles of Yokohama Station purged anything moving that was not an element of the station. Many exceptions existed, however, including humans with a Suika implant and children under the age of six. The reason JR North Japan’s android saboteurs looked like human children was to take advantage of this quirk of the station’s immune system.
Unfortunately, once they were active Inside for long enough, the station’s defenses began to learn and identified them as a threat for the turnstiles to eliminate. Since reaching the Noto Peninsula on the north side of Honshu, Haikunterke had been within the Suikanet’s range for several months consecutively, allowing it to develop an immune response for her. She needed to distance herself until the net could no longer identify her and let its memory of her fade over time.
A faint light was visible in the direction the raft was drifting. It looked like part of Yokohama Station, but it could also have been the glow of civilization on the small islands within the Seto Inland Sea. Haikunterke couldn’t detect the net waves continuously emitted from the station structure, but the light seemed a little too large to be coming from a human construction.
Ultimately, it was neither of those things.
It turned out to be a structure that looked alien, even from a distance. It resembled a building, except that it possessed no straight beams or walls. The entire edifice was bent and curved at odd angles. The windowpanes were similarly twisted into rhombus shapes, allowing dim light to spill through. It was like Yokohama Station had fallen unconscious in mid-stretch or like a melting gingerbread house.
“A station spore,” Haikunterke muttered. “I’ve never actually seen one before.”
It was a piece of Yokohama Station that had landed on this remote island through some means, then built itself up entirely on its own. The structural genetic field was incomplete and could not create a proper building, and its growth capability was extremely weak compared to the main body of Yokohama Station.
There were many possible causes for the scattering, from the movement of ships contaminated with the structural genetic field to drifting materials. The phenomenon only occurred in rare cases on tiny islands that were the proper distance from the mainland. JR North Japan was only aware of a handful of such cases.
Because it was not in physical contact with Yokohama Station, there was no danger of Suikanet sending its immune memory here. Even better, it seemed there was power in the spore. Haikunterke decided to land on the island.
At a closer distance, she could see that the station spore covered the western half of the small island, which measured about two kilometers across. The eastern side was natural ground with jutting terrain and thick tree growth. Haikunterke brought the raft to shore there and pulled it onto the sand so it would not drift away.
The android climbed up a hill to get a view of the area. It wasn’t very open, but it was enough for her to tell that there was no light source aside from the spore itself. Still, out of an abundance of caution, she increased the sensitivity of her auditory and visual systems.
Then she walked around the vicinity of the strange building, collecting observational data. A station spore was a precious source of information when it came to understanding the nature of Yokohama Station—so much so that there had been plans to grow one on a remote island near Hokkaido for research purposes. The idea was only rejected due to the risks it posed.
“No matter furnace signals. Unclear if the isolated structural genetic field is missing the information for a matter furnace or if the size is too small to generate one. The energy source is most likely rooftop photo-absorption panels. Based on the degree of genetic field mutation, I estimate this spore’s age at nearly a hundred years. Its energy supply density is low in comparison to the real thing and so slow to develop that it still hasn’t covered this little island in all that time…”