Chapter 2

2. 20,000 Kilometers Inside the Station Hiroto dreamed of his childhood. Even in the drab, unchanging world of life on the cape, his boyhood memories were fresh. The most vivid among them was from when he was eight. That was when he’d first climbed all the way up the escalators of Ninety-Nine Steps, which only went down. All the blood in his body had been boiling as he raced up the mercilessly descending stairs. It’d felt like he’d been climbing for an hour. Of course, no child was capable of such a feat, so it’d likely been closer to five or ten minutes. When a cleaner at the time saw the boy leap onto the silver landing, he looked startled and asked, “You the Mishima boy?” Then, he reached out and pulled Hiroto to the boundary of the Inside. The six automated turnstiles set up there looked at the two of them and declared, “Suika not recognized. I’m sorry, but you may not enter.” They put up their arms to form a wall, blocking the way into the station. It was Hiroto’s first time seeing the turnstiles, but he remembered not feeling much of anything. They were just part of the scenery to him. When he went back down to report in, his parents were delighted. Climbing to the top of the escalator at Ninety-Nine Steps was a sign that a child was a full-fledged person. As far as anyone knew, eight years old was the youngest it had ever been done. The other kids had marveled over Hiroto’s feat, and he became a bit of a hero around the village. They held a celebration at the house and had invited the professor from next door. At the time, they could barely understand a word the strange man said, but he seemed to comprehend that it was a special occasion and gave something that sounded like a celebratory speech. To Hiroto, they sounded like magic words that transformed a child into an adult. As his body grew, climbing the escalator got easier. At age ten, Maki was able to do it, too. At eleven, so could Yosuke. All the kids around Hiroto’s age eventually gathered in the space at the top and played in the mounds of trash, looking for useful items. At that point, Hiroto was no longer the hero. One time, he, Yosuke, and Maki set up empty plastic bottles in the space at the top of the escalators and played bowling. Hiroto hurled the soccer ball too wildly, though, and it went past the automated turnstiles. They blocked the children from getting the ball back, even though it was just sitting there, a few meters away. The soccer ball was never retrieved. That was when Hiroto learned that reaching the top of the escalator and becoming a full-fledged adult had only expanded his world by a few dozen meters. No matter how much they grew, their possibilities ended right there. A small tapping noise roused Hiroto from sleep. There was a child wearing an unfamiliar outfit standing in front of him. The child’s waist was at Hiroto’s eye level. Several tools Hiroto had never seen before were stuck under a belt. This curious visitor’s face was hard to make out; it was backlit by the one, constant light source in the ceiling. Why is it so dark? Is it still night? Hiroto looked past the child and saw the cigarette seller sleeping. Oh, right, I’m in Yokohama Station. The staffers caught me and put me in a holding cell. The memory caused the taste of the curry from earlier in the day to flood into his mouth. Hiroto turned his attention back to the child. Why was a kid here? The young visitor didn’t bear a resemblance to any of the staffers. Suddenly, Hiroto’s vision went red, bringing all his thoughts to a halt. It took several seconds for him to grasp that it was caused by a long, narrow, electronic sign the child was holding. “Sorry for waking you up.” A string of words ran across the sign. “I’m only passing through, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make noise.” “Wait. Who are you? How’d you get in here?” Hiroto asked in a low whisper, to avoid waking his cellmate. After pulling the blanket off himself and sitting up, Hiroto was eye level with the kid. “I’m just passing through. I apologize for making a hole in the room, but it will close up over time, so don’t worry. This doesn’t seem to be your home, though.” With that, he—Hiroto assumed it was a boy—pointed at the ceiling. An aperture, smaller than a sewer manhole, had been gouged into it. It was just large enough for a person to fit through. “You opened that hole?” “I did. I was going through the passage above, but there was no exit, so I had no choice.” The reply message scrolled by. The strange thing was that the child wasn’t doing anything to type or create the on-screen letters. There was no visible control panel or anything like that. “By the way, while you were sleeping, I took a look at your characteristic brain waves. You don’t have a Suika installed. How did you get here?” Hiroto hesitated but decided that it would be unwise to lie, given the child’s technological prowess. He pulled his bag out from under the blanket and removed the small box-shaped device. “I used this,” he said. “It lets me go in and out of the Inside for a limited time.” “That’s an 18 Ticket. I heard about them from Yukie recently, but I’ve never seen one in person.” “Yeah. I got my hands on this one and decided to take a little vacation into the station. I don’t know the ways here, so I got caught by the staff. I’m going to be stuck here until my time’s up, and then the automated turnstiles will come to toss me out.” The cigarette seller groaned in his sleep and rolled over. Hiroto continued, quieter than before, “I want to get out of here. Can you help me?” The boy thought it over. “All right. But in exchange, I want you to give me that 18 Ticket after it expires. Our company would like to examine it to see how it works. ” “Sure, if you don’t mind it being pre-used.” “You’ve got yourself a deal. I’m getting out of here now, so could you please use that blanket to cover this? There, just like that. Let’s go. ” Then the boy took something like a flashlight off his belt, pointed it at the floor, and hit the switch. The light that emerged was surprisingly powerful, and the cigarette seller grumbled again. Hiroto hurriedly stripped another blanket off the bed next to him and held it up with his own to dampen the glow. That darkened things enough that the middle-aged man offered no further complaints. After half an hour of digging through the floor, the two emerged into a passage beneath the holding area. It was much brighter than it had been under the cell’s solitary ceiling light, but the mustiness made it plain that this was an old road that had fallen into disuse. Like in Yokosuka, this station grew more tunnels to support increased foot traffic, but because the newer corridors were piled on top, the lower you went, the older the shafts were. “It’s a good thing there was a passage close by. We should get away from Yokosuka, though. If we get to a different city, the staffers will be from a different agency, and you won’t have to worry about getting caught,” the child explained, speaking aloud for the first time. His voice was neutral in nature, neither juvenile nor mature. The foggy glass on the sign couldn’t completely hide the message inside: 125 MINUTES ON FOOT TO KAMAKURA. They began to walk. The boy was only half as tall as Hiroto. He looked much smaller than Hiroto had been when he’d first climbed the escalator at Ninety-Nine Steps. Perhaps the kid was six or seven. Then again, everyone Hiroto had seen Inside was smaller than he was. “I’ve got a lot of questions…but first, what is that? It looks like a flashlight,” Hiroto inquired, pointing at the device that had opened the hole in the holding cell. “It’s a structural genetic field canceler. Our company developed it.” “Structural jenn…?” Hiroto thought he’d heard the professor say something like that before, but he hadn’t been listening very intently and couldn’t remember. “To put it simply,” the boy stated, “when you shine this on something, that part of Yokohama Station goes away. It’s easy to dismantle it that way, and the automated turnstiles don’t react.” He might as well have been saying, If you press this button, the sun will rise in the west. To Hiroto, it was merely a fact of life that once a part of Yokohama Station had formed, it could not be destroyed by human hands. “Well, I feel a bit bad about putting a hole in the station management agency’s cell. In a few days, the surrounding concrete will fill in the hole, though, so it won’t be a big problem.” “What’s the management agency? Are there people managing Yokohama Station? I didn’t think it was something human beings could manage,” admitted Hiroto. “It’s just a group of people around here who call themselves that. I’ve seen several such organizations in my time,” the boy revealed. “Depending on the area, they call themselves the police, or train crews, or the government, but most of the time, they’re just called staffers. They’re usually narrow-minded by nature, so in my line of work, they spell trouble.” Hiroto gave the boy a piercing look. Depending on the area? In my line of work? “…By any chance, are you with the Dodger Alliance?” he asked. “Dodger Alliance?” “The people who gave me the 18 Ticket. I’m supposed to rescue their leader. He said the leader’s going to free humanity from Yokohama Station.” “Hmm.” The boy was silent for a while. “We’re aware of such a group, but they’re not capable of building tools like these, as far as we know.” That made sense to Hiroto. His mental image of the man who’d made his way to Ninety-Nine Steps after being exiled by the turnstiles did not fit with the advanced technology this child possessed. “Those guys are mostly concerned with controlling Suikanet. They seem to be attempting to free humanity from Yokohama Station by taking over the network that manages the automated turnstiles. Physical defense isn’t something they require.” This was news to Hiroto. Higashiyama had always spoken passionately about the concept of liberation, but Hiroto couldn’t remember him sharing any real details about what his organization truly did. “Physical defense,” Hiroto repeated. It was then that he understood just who this boy was. “You must have come from beyond Honshu.” “That’s right. Oh, I haven’t introduced myself yet. I am Nepshamai. I was dispatched here from JR North Japan.” “It took me a year to get this far.” Nepshamai, the field agent from JR North Japan, told his story as he and Hiroto traveled from Yokosuka to Kamakura. They’d been walking for an hour now and were halfway there. Despite his smaller size, Nepshamai moved faster than Hiroto but didn’t seem to be rushing. He had a very precise and effortless gait. “I meet all kinds of people on the way. The people of the Inside have a variety of feelings about Yokohama Station, I’ve noticed. Around the Iwate area, for example, they have that famous sea wall. People there worship the station like it’s holy. They say Yokohama Station was born during the Winter War to protect the country.” “Hey, Shamai. If you’re some kind of secret operative, why are you telling me all about your background?” Hiroto asked. The little agent laughed. “I think you’re mistaken. I’m not an enemy of the people of Yokohama Station. Our purpose is only to prevent Yokohama Station from reaching Hokkaido. My mission is to collect intel, so talking with people from Honshu is part of my job. You never know where you might find the information you need.” Hiroto decided this made sense. His mental image of an operative came from war movies grabbed off Suikanet. They were from an era when human governments—like Japan and America—were in charge and fought each other over territory. “That reminds me. When I was a kid, I heard a story that Hokkaido’s line of defense had been breached. Was that false?” Hiroto inquired. “No. It happened. The station got through one time. They said the structural genetic field reached all the way to Hakodate,” Nepshamai related. He pulled out the small tube that’d made the hole in the cell earlier, the one he’d called a structural genetic field canceler. “We used these to push it back across the straits. Yukie did that. Once she was made chief of JR North Japan’s engineers, she became the first person in history to succeed at pushing back Yokohama Station.” Nepshamai sounded very proud of this. It was known from the very beginning of Yokohama Station’s expansion that it could not cross the sea. The station had started out with a view of Tokyo Bay, expanding north and west at about the same speed. In a few years, it had swallowed up surrounding airports and used the Aqua-Line Tunnel to cross the bay to the Boso Peninsula to the east. By that point, virtually all trade to Tokyo had been cut off, and it ceased functioning altogether as the capital city. The Japanese government moved farther and farther north, fleeing the ever-approaching Yokohama Station. Like a boulder rolling down a mountain, the state cracked and lost mass along the way. History did not say where it had actually died out for good. The replicating structure reached the northern tip of Honshu about a century and a half after it’d started expanding. The station could extend connecting hallways over rivers, but it couldn’t span the Tsugaru Strait’s nearly twenty kilometers to Hokkaido. Many times, the locals had witnessed Yokohama Station at Cape Omazaki extending its corridors and attempting to reach Hokkaido, only for them to collapse under their own weight long before reaching land. The biggest concern for JR North Japan in its mission to stop Yokohama Station from making landfall on Hokkaido was the Seikan Tunnel. This underground passage was the primary method across the strait. Filling the tunnel wouldn’t help—the structural genetic field could pass right through iron and concrete—and removing the already constructed tunnel from the earth was not something humanity had the means to do at this time. “Yokohama Station is slowly evolving. Or, to be more accurate, it is made up of a combination of slightly differing waveforms. With each major battle, the station loses the weaker elements, making it stronger than before, on average. We held the line at the Seikan Tunnel for over four decades, and that was how the station broke through.” “I see. So you can’t rest easy, even with that weapon at your disposal.” “That’s right. Our job is to develop new countermeasures faster than the station can evolve and to find new weaknesses,” Nepshamai said, tapping his foot on the ground. “Hey, what kind of a place is Hokkaido?” Hiroto asked. “It’s big. Natural ground, as far as the eye can see. So big, you can practically see the curvature of the Earth. It’s beautiful.” “That’s amazing. I hope I get to see it someday.” Hiroto tried to imagine seeing the ground everywhere, but the picture just wouldn’t come to mind. To him, the “ground” was just a scrawny patch of brown and green, clinging to the boundary between Yokohama Station and the sea below. “Before I passed through that holding cell, I was up on the roof of the station, observing the landscape. I could see Mt. Fuji. It was black.” That’s because it’s Black Fuji season, thought Hiroto. “Hokkaido has a mountain called Mt. Yotei. Some people also call it ‘Ezo Fuji,’ or ‘Hokkaido Fuji,’ because they say it looks like Mt. Fuji used to, but it’s much more beautiful than Fuji is now. We have to do whatever it takes to keep Yokohama Station from growing into Hokkaido,” Nepshamai declared forcefully. The more Nepshamai talked, the worse Hiroto felt. The cape at Ninety-Nine Steps was a small place. It only took an hour to circle. He lived off the goods that came out of the station, and he’d been lucky enough to wind up with an 18 Ticket, which he’d used to go Inside to see what it was like. He’d never had a mission or a calling, like this boy from Hokkaido. There was nothing in Hiroto’s life that he cherished enough to want to protect. “Hey, Shamai, does JR North Japan have any information on the leader of this Dodger Alliance? That’s my mission—to find that guy.” “Well, of course. That group is one of the big targets we want to make contact with.” “But I bet it must be hard to find someone who’s been evading the turnstiles for years,” Hiroto said. Nepshamai stopped walking for a moment to think. “That might actually be a hint. There’s no place in Yokohama Station where you can hide from the turnstiles for long. The only possibility is outside.” “…In a station hollow, then,” Hiroto deduced. After he’d been exiled to Ninety-Nine Steps, Higashiyama had described places here and there where the landscape or other factors left the station unable to grow over an empty space. “But there’s got to be tons of those pockets. I heard there were several just around Yokosuka.” “Hiroto, you said the person who gave you that 18 Ticket fled to Kamakura. That tells me this Dodger Alliance can’t be far from the Kanto region around Tokyo. If that’s true…” Nepshamai took another device off his belt. This one was shaped like a card. He turned it on and pointed it toward the wall. It projected a map onto the surface. Map of Capital Area Hollows was written at the top of the image. “That’s a very convenient thing to have,” Hiroto remarked. “Actually, I borrowed it from that man sleeping back in the cell. After all, you might as well steal from someone who knows what he’s doing,” Nepshamai quipped with a little smirk. “How did you know he’d have that map?” “A lot of the station hollows get used as smoking spots. The automated turnstiles don’t have jurisdiction over them, so you can do anything there,” explained Nepshamai. The two examined the map. “There are several hollows, but nothing big enough for a person to hide out in for a long time. Flat land has less of them, because it’s easier for Yokohama Station to grow across smooth ground. Based on this, it seems like anyone trying to reach the sea would do well to aim for Kamakura.” Nepshamai pointed to a spot in the west marked KOFU. Red dots indicating hollows littered the vicinity around a wide basin. “Let’s try this area first,” the young boy decided. “Can we even walk that far? My 18 Ticket is only valid for four more days,” said Hiroto. Based on the map, it was at least a hundred kilometers to Kofu. He’d never even imagined such a distance before. “There’s a good way to get to Kofu. I can explain when we arrive in Kamakura,” assured Nepshamai. They continued onward. “Wait up, Shamai,” called Hiroto, before Nepshamai could get farther ahead. “I feel like we’re just walking in circles. I saw this sign earlier, and that weird placement of tiles and pipes is exactly the same, too.” “Oh, no. We’re moving forward. I can get our locational data from Suikanet. Look,” Nepshamai said, displaying a map on the electronic scrolling sign. It was recording the paths they’d taken so far. Despite winding like a snake, their route was steadily taking them west. “This is called a repeated sequence. The station is repeating the same structure one after the other. It’s a common feature in the earlier sections.” Hiroto visualized the segments of a centipede’s body. “In the first stages of Yokohama Station’s expansion, it still had little information about buildings, so it often recreated the same structural patterns. As it grew, the structural genetic field absorbed information from around the country, and the diversity of its newer constructs grew. We call this the Station Divergence Process.” The boy looked at the pipes around them and continued happily, “We’re close to Yokohama City. The structure of the earliest parts of the station is still preserved here. It’s valuable information.” “What’s Yokohama City?” Hiroto asked. “The name of the settlement that was the starting point of Yokohama Station. It was a city created by humans, though, so most of it was out in the open air. Before the Winter War, it was a major port city with a population of ten million, I hear.” “The entire city was outdoors?” “Sapporo’s still like that.” “Sapporo?” “It’s a city in Hokkaido. That’s where our headquarters are.” An entire outdoor city. Hiroto tried to imagine the sight of it, but the only visual he could conjure was a magnified version of Ninety-Nine Steps. An outdoor town that was home to ten million humans seemed impossible. He’d lived on the tiny cape all his life, but it was always clear from the sight of Yokohama Station looming over them that this little piece of “outside” was just a fluke, a thing pushed to the margins of the world. “That reminds me,” Hiroto remarked as he and Nepshamai marched onward. “Do you know anything about an Exit 42?” “42?” “Yeah. It’s my other destination. I looked it up on a net machine, but all I know is that it’s in the mountains. I don’t even know where.” “That’s strange. I would’ve figured any double-digit exit had to be around the Yokohama City area. The numbers of the exits go up as they’re created, after all. Yokohama was a port city; there are no tall mountains there,” answered Nepshamai. “Oh, okay. I guess I was looking it up the wrong way.” “There’s a phenomenon called transgating, where an exit that’s already been created moves locations, but that’s a very spontaneous event, and our analysis indicates it doesn’t involve very long distances.” The pair kept walking until they’d left the repeating sequence and the sign visuals and layout of pipes began to change. Hiroto peered at a wall in the distance and saw a half-open shutter. Beyond it was an automated turnstile, seated on the ground. It had a slightly different design than the ones with which Hiroto was familiar, and it clearly hadn’t moved in a long time. Something wet and gleaming covered the turnstile’s metal exterior. It was dark beyond the shutter, but Hiroto could still see many brown cardboard boxes there. “What is this?” he asked. “It looks like a storehouse of some kind. Let’s go see.” “Okay.” The shutter was rusted to the point of being immobile, and Hiroto had to duck down to slip through the one-meter gap. Nepshamai just walked straight through. Inside, there was a low mechanical humming but no sign of automated turnstiles. The cardboard boxes were piled as tall as Hiroto’s head, but they weren’t dusty. They’d been placed here recently. Hiroto grabbed one of the containers on top and set it down on the floor. It was lighter than he’d expected. It contained no mechanical components, after all. Instead, it was packed with shirts. A quick inspection suggested they were all the same size and design. “I guess this is a commercial route for apparel,” said Nepshamai. “They’re new?” “Yes. That’s what it means when there are so many of the same thing together.” “And they’re all new?” Hiroto asked, pointing at the warehouse as a whole. “That would be the assumption.” Nepshamai turned on his electric sign and used it to examine the walls of the room. “There’s a moving walkway over there. I’m guessing the clothing production facility is that way.” A steady flow of cardboard boxes was traveling along a black conveyor belt toward them. Hiroto glanced at a few of the cartons, then started pulling some down from the moving pile and opened them. “We only get the scrapped items where I live,” he explained. “Ripped clothes, used outfits, expired food, stuff like that.” He tried to consider how he might take at least one box back to Ninety-Nine Steps. The attire was a little small for him, but the people at the cape would be delighted. Hiroto was depressed he couldn’t do any shopping without a Suika, but surely taking one box would be all right if they had this much Inside. “Hey, who’s there?” called a thick voice from the back of the warehouse. Heavy footsteps approached. Nepshamai quickly strode in that direction. “What the hell are you doing, slacking off over here?” chided the man. “Get back to stacking.” Hiroto tried to put the box back where he’d found it, but in his haste, he knocked another one off the stack instead. It hit the floor with a loud thump. A light turned on outside the shutter. The automated turnstile’s display had activated, and it was looking their way. Thankfully, it wasn’t getting up to move. Perhaps its mechanical system was somehow broken. “Excuse me; I’m not an employee here. Do you have the wrong person?” Hiroto heard Nepshamai say. “Huh? Ah, yeah—that’s true. We might be hard up for labor, but we don’t hire pip-squeaks like you. A thief, then? Is that your boss over there?” demanded the other voice. Through the collapsed stack of containers, Hiroto saw a man in his thirties, glaring back with beady eyes. The position of his face was a head and a half below Hiroto’s, but only because the man had a terrible hunch, not because he was short. “Wait, you’re making a mistake. We’re not thieves. We’re just traveling,” Hiroto explained. It wasn’t very convincing, given the mess of opened boxes around him and the fact that he’d just been trying to take one of them. “Is this your warehouse?” asked an undeterred Nepshamai. “Yeah. I found it. There’s a spot above where the clothes always pop out, so I followed the trail and reached this place,” replied the hunchback. He took a small device from his pocket, pulled something up on its screen, and showed it to Hiroto. “That’s the certificate.” The picture said, Station Facility Excavation Certificate. It also listed the warehouse’s coordinates, the name and Suika ID of the discoverer, and a statement of ownership that was valid for twenty years. Last came a stamp that said, Yokosuka Station Management Agency. That’s when the hunchback noticed that boxes had been opened. “Hey! Don’t muck up the product. Pay me for those!” he shouted, spraying spittle. Hiroto didn’t understand why just opening the box would be “mucking up” the contents. Maybe that’s just how new clothes worked. “I don’t have any money,” Hiroto admitted. The man stared at Hiroto’s outfit and decided that he fully believed this excuse. “Well, fine. If you do some work for me, I’ll let you off the hook.” “Work?” “Yeah. Take the product here to the store up above. You see the stairs over there?” The man pointed to the far side of the warehouse where the light was on. There were metal handrails there with signs that said ASCENDING on the left side and DESCENDING on the right, with arrows to match. Unlike the escalators, these steps did not move. “And you want me to move the stuff around here?” “At the top of the stairs, there’s a hallway that leads to an old elevator. Just put them down next to it. I’ll let you go for thirty boxes. Do it in three hours.” “All right,” Hiroto agreed, crouching in front of a box. “Shamai, hold my stuff,” he added, handing his bag to Nepshamai, who took two unsteady steps backward from the weight of it. However, before he went anywhere, Hiroto made sure to remove the 18 Ticket and put it in his pants pocket. That way, he wouldn’t have to worry about the automated turnstiles. Then, he lifted two stacks of five boxes, pressing them together, and started walking toward the stairs. “Whoa, these are heavier than I thought,” he muttered. Not only were the stack weights different on each side, but they were also taller than he was once he lifted them. He couldn’t see where he was going. “You’ve got the right direction, just keep going straight. The steps will be right ahead when you reach the braille blocks,” Hiroto heard Nepshamai say. Bit by bit, he slid his feet forward until, eventually, the sensation turned to a stubbled pattern. The left side of the handrails was marked as the ascending side, but it was narrow, and he wouldn’t be able to go up with two stacks of boxes. Hiroto came to a stop. “Is everything all right?” asked Nepshamai from a distance. “Can I go up the descending side, too?” “Yes. No problem.” Why would they write that, then? Hiroto wondered on his way up the stairs. They were longer than he’d expected, and there were several landings along the way. At each, he had to set the boxes down on the floor first to verify he hadn’t reached the hallway yet. Once Hiroto had placed the boxes in the hallway and returned to the warehouse, he received a surprised reaction from the man. Insiders were weaker on average, so the hunchback clearly hadn’t expected Hiroto to have the muscle to lift ten boxes at once. “Twenty more,” said Hiroto, rotating his shoulders and going after another set of ten. “It’s hard without being able to see ahead, though. Shamai, come with me.” “All right,” agreed Nepshamai. He walked along with Hiroto, offering precise guidance, warning when a landing was ahead, instructing to turn left in five steps, and so on. The second trip was much easier than the first. “The elevation difference is fourteen meters. That’s about five stories,” observed Nepshamai, when Hiroto put the cardboard boxes down. “Normally, the station generates elevators or escalators in such a situation, but since the bottom is along the old road, most likely nobody uses it. So the only option was stairs, which is why no one discovered it until that man came along.” “Even though it’s a totally normal path?” Hiroto asked. “To Insiders, stairs that go on and on to an unknown end are an object of fear,” explained Nepshamai. Hiroto had no idea why that would be the case. He’d raced up the down-only escalator at Ninety-Nine Steps so many times in his life that he couldn’t fathom why a set of plain old stationary steps would be scary. When they returned after the second trip, the man said, “Hey, buddy, you’re impressive. You wanna work for me? I can give you a monthly salary.” “No, I’m just passing through. I don’t have time to hang around here,” Hiroto replied. He only had four more days Inside in the first place and no Suika with which to accept a salary. Hiroto took ten more cardboard boxes and headed back up the stairs. On this third trip, the hunchback joined them, perhaps to observe his work. He’d given Hiroto a limit of three hours, and it had taken less than fifteen minutes. “There, that’s the job. We’re going now,” said Hiroto at the elevator, thirty boxes resting nearby. “All right. Nice work,” accepted the hunched man. Just then, the old elevator in the hallway clanked open. Three children emerged: two boys and a girl. They were around twelve or so and even smaller than Nepshamai. “Hey, you got no work for today,” explained the man. “I’ve already had today’s shipment hauled up.” “You already carried it here?” the kids inquired, looking up at Hiroto. “Are you youngsters employees at this warehouse?” Nepshamai asked them. The children seemed unsure of him—a boy who looked younger than they were but spoke like an adult. “We can’t pay back our money now,” one stated. “Do you owe that man money?” “Yeah. Still got three hundred and eighty thousand milliyen left.” “Four hundred and ten for me.” “I owe three hundred and sixty thousand,” said the girl. Hiroto had been arrested for not paying for a meal that cost 400 milliyen, so it was clear these were vast sums of money. “So you’re hauling the boxes to pay back your loan?” “Yep. One hundred milliyen a day.” “We’ve been doing it for three years.” “But now we can’t do it today,” they complained, staring at Hiroto with enmity. “Kyu found that warehouse. Then he stole it.” “Who’s Kyu?” Hiroto asked. “Kyu’s gone now.” “He got taken away by the turnstiles after he turned six,” the kids explained. Their affectation was flat and emotionless. Or at least, if they were expressing an emotion, Hiroto didn’t know what it was. After a while, the elevator door opened again. The children got on without a word and took it back up. It was quiet. Hiroto and Nepshamai started walking toward the signs that marked the direction to the Kamakura area. “Hey, Shamai, if there’s so much stuff Inside, how come people are arguing over ownership and rights and all that?” Hiroto asked. “Where I’m from, we only get trash that’s dumped out, but even that’s enough for us. We all share what shows up, and we don’t force the kids to work like that.” “I’m guessing those children don’t have parents, for one reason or another. And that man was shouldering their Suika initiation costs and put them to work for him to pay it off,” Nepshamai reasoned. He was still holding Hiroto’s bag. Unlike with the old path along the warehouse, the pair were now traveling a corridor that people routinely used. There was practically no traffic, however, because of the late hour. Signs indicated that this older shaft was soon going to merge with a new route to Kamakura. Suddenly, Hiroto became aware that he was very hungry. He hadn’t eaten a thing since the curry in Yokosuka for lunch the day before. The physical labor from earlier had left him feeling very fatigued. Hiroto’s bag was full of food he’d brought from Ninety-Nine Steps, but since they were coming up on the town, he preferred to wait and eat something good and fresh. Due to not having a Suika, he couldn’t purchase anything, but he thought his companion might be able to help with that. The idea prompted Hiroto to ask something. “Hey, Shamai,” he said to the agent. Nepshamai stopped walking and turned to look at him. “How did you get your Suika?” At that moment, there was a loud popping sound, like a huge balloon bursting. The corridor was empty, so the sound echoed without anything to absorb it. Nepshamai collapsed to the ground. Immediately, there was another pop, then another. With each, Nepshamai’s torso jolted twice. Sparks burst, and a fine, white smoke began billowing from him. Without changing his expression one iota, Nepshamai silently flopped his arms, rubbed around his neck, and then stopped moving. “Wait, don’t shoot the big one,” instructed a deep voice. The door for the new route to Kamakura opened, flooding the dim hallway with bright light. Hiroto squeezed his eyes shut. “The man there is a human. Shoot him, and the turnstiles will come.” Hiroto slowly reopened his eyes and saw the green EMERGENCY EXIT sign on the door and, below it, two station staffers dressed in uniforms. There was a man with a beard and a woman holding a long gun. “Hey, you,” barked the bearded man, approaching. The badge on his chest bore the phrase, KATAKURI, SECOND-CLASS EMPLOYEE. “What do you think you’re doing, escorting a northern saboteur around? Are you a staffer from the north?” “Wait, wait, no. I’m just a tourist,” explained Hiroto. The man rolled Nepshamai over with his foot, and a massive gust of steam billowed upward. There were three fist-sized holes in the boy’s body. Ripped cables and pipes could be seen along the edges. “This isn’t your friend?” “We just happened to be going in the same direction.” “You saying you don’t know him?” “I didn’t know he was a saboteur,” Hiroto lied. “Or that he wasn’t human.” That part was the truth. Nepshamai had seemed strange; that was undeniable. Why would JR North Japan have used someone so young as a field agent, and why was a small child so wise? Seeing those three box-carrying children had only further stoked Hiroto’s curiosity. “Ah, well, I can’t blame ya. This is the latest android out of JR North Japan. It’s called the Corpocker-3. The second model looked more like the automated turnstiles, but these ones they built just like human beings. It’s basically a spy. Since it’s not human, it can get in without a Suika, and Suikanet can’t track its location. Big problem, these guys.” “Sir, I’m not picking up any Suika brain waves from him. He’s dangerous,” stated the woman with the gun, pointing her sights in Hiroto’s direction. The bearded man looked suspicious at first, then gave Hiroto a once-over, scratched his beard, and said, “No Suika? Ah, I get it. You’re one o’ them. What are they called, again? Hollow orphans.” “Hallorfins…?” “You got tossed out of the station by your parents as a kid, right? Well, you made it. You survived.” “No. I was born and raised outside of Yokohama Station.” “Oh, so you don’t know? Well, it’s been many generations, then,” the man reasoned, scratching his head with his other hand. He seemed very fidgety. “Listen, I’ll explain. People born in Yokohama Station don’t need a Suika when they’re toddlers. Once they reach six and become a child, though, they have to install a Suika. There’s a deposit to be paid to Suikanet for that. It costs 500,000 milliyen. That’s too much for a laborer living in poverty. If you have a kid, that’s one thing, but if you can’t raise the deposit cost within six years…” The bearded man made his way behind Hiroto as he explained, approaching Nepshamai’s prone body. “Then the kid gets nabbed by the turnstiles and tossed out of the station. Usually into the nearest hollow, of course. In most cases, there’s nothing you can do on your own down there. You won’t survive long. But if it happens to be a place with open space, water, and food, then the abandoned kids come together, grow up, and breed. I hear there are places with little villages in them.” “…?” “You’re probably the descendant of someone like that. How’d you get Inside?” Hiroto had no answer. He started to lift his arms, for lack of a better option, but the bearded man quickly put his hands on Hiroto’s shoulders and backed him against the wall. “Now let’s just calm down. I feel sorry for you, so I’ll let you in on the rules here. Violence is against the law in Yokohama Station. If you snap and hit one of us, the automated turnstiles will fly over and toss you out. The result might be the same for you, but that would be a big problem for us Inside folks.” Up close, the man’s breath stank of tobacco. Hiroto recalled that in the cell yesterday, the cigarette seller had said there was a station employee who was a heavy smoker. “So what do you do if someone Inside really rubs you the wrong way? The quickest method is for a big group to seize them and toss them into a locked room without hurting them. Then, you just leave them there for a week without giving them anything, and your problem is solved. When the station started expanding, people did that all the time. That’s why we staffers manage all the sealable rooms now. Basically, we cover all the spots the automated turnstiles can’t get to,” the bearded man elaborated. “Sir, the recovery team is here,” said the woman with the gun. “Oh, right. Send them in to do their job,” the bearded man replied. Three young staffers entered the area at once. One opened a black bag, and another shoved Nepshamai’s body into it. The third collected his bits of equipment scattered on the ground. “Is this bag yours?” “It is,” Hiroto answered. The bearded man tossed it to him. “Well, the big point is, these northern agents destroy station construction, abduct children with Suikas, and take them back to Hokkaido. Everyone’s sick of the havoc these foxy tricksters cause. Since they’re not human, the turnstiles are no help. That leaves it up to us to maintain order,” declared the bearded man as he finally released Hiroto. “You don’t seem to have any connection to JR North Japan, so I’ll let you go. But you’d better follow Inside rules while you’re here.” He joined the other staffers carrying the plastic bag and left the old corridor. The door closed as loudly and heavily as it had opened, and then everything went quiet. Hiroto just stood there. “Hollow orphans,” the bearded man had said. The words echoed in Hiroto’s head. Descendants of the children thrown out of the station for being unable to pay their Suika deposit. Until now, Hiroto had never given much thought to why the people of Ninety-Nine Steps lived on the narrow cape, rather than having a Suika implant like the residents of Yokohama Station. “No. That’s wrong,” he said to himself. The station employee had no idea what went on outside. The people living on the islands of Hokkaido and Shikoku and Kyushu had never been residents of Yokohama Station, either. It was possible that places like that remained on Honshu in tiny spots, and maybe Ninety-Nine Steps was one of them. “Hey, Shamai. How did you get your Suika?” That was the last thing Hiroto had asked Nepshamai. The boy had turned back to look at Hiroto, and that was when the woman had shot him. The visual was burned into his retinas now. If I hadn’t said something at that exact moment, maybe he would’ve had the means or the technology to avoid it… Thinking about it wasn’t going to change anything, though. The important thing now was to keep moving. Unfortunately, Hiroto was too hungry for that. He hadn’t eaten a bite since lunch yesterday. Hiroto opened his bag and reached inside. After groping around for a moment, his hand found something hard. He pulled out the object. It was the long, thin electronic sign Nepshamai had used to communicate with Hiroto when they met in the holding cell. Its length spanned the same distance as Hiroto’s shoulders, but it was surprisingly light. Instantly, the sign vibrated in Hiroto’s grip. Apparently, he must have flipped the power button. A JR North Japan logo appeared, followed by white letters. “Returning from ultra-low-power mode. Because of improper removal from main body, device will be checked for errors. Two minutes remaining…” “One minute remaining…” “Fifteen seconds remaining…” It took about three minutes in total. “Error check complete.” It was silent again for a few moments. “Gosh, I’m very sorry about all that excitement.” The letters turned red. It was the same display Hiroto had seen the first time at the holding cell. “…Shamai?” “Yes. I am Nepshamai. I was sent here by JR North Japan.” “You’re alive?” “Yes, you could say that, although my body was destroyed, it seems. That really took me by surprise. I’d heard that the Kanto region staffers were hostile, but I didn’t think they had anti-personnel weapons. That was an electric pump gun, the kind they used in the Winter War. They used it a lot at the end of the war because it can turn any piece of shrapnel into a bullet. They’re not manufacturing weapons in Yokohama Station, obviously, so they must be building them in Shikoku or Kyushu.” The letters were scrolling twice as fast as before, and Hiroto could just barely follow them with his eyes before they trailed off the other end of the screen. Apparently, it had been tough for Nepshamai, having no means to speak after the employee shot him. “So is this sign your main body, then?” “Not exactly. But my body’s battery and main memory device were abruptly cut off, so I transferred my main memory to this electronic sign, my backup power source. It’s programmed to do that in emergencies automatically, but my supplemental memory device was in my body. I hate to ask this, but—” The subtitles froze briefly. “Who are you, again? I must know you, right?” Somehow, the letters on the scrolling sign looked apologetic. “The wall is thinnest here. Let’s make that hole,” instructed Nepshamai, the JR North Japan agent, who was now just an electronic sign. This display was his entire body. Hiroto took the structural genetic field canceler out of the bag. Before his body’s death, Nepshamai had made sure to slip the sign and the weapon into Hiroto’s bag. Hiroto was surprised to see how simple the canceler looked. It was a tube, like a flashlight, with a knob for adjusting power, an activation switch, and a small LCD panel to show the remaining battery charge. On the base of the device was a fox silhouette that was the logo of JR North Japan. It was hard to believe that all humanity needed to push back Yokohama Station’s centuries of expansion was something so simple. “So I just press this switch, huh?” “Yes. It’s harmless to the human body, so don’t worry. Set the output on low, though, so you don’t waste energy.” Hiroto pointed the device at the wall and turned it on. The wall began melting like ice cream touched by a heated spoon. “The concrete and beams around here have been reinforced by the structural genetic field and by fusing with Yokohama Station, but if you remove them, the crystalline structure instantly breaks down, and they just fall apart. It’s like pouring cold water into a hot oil drum,” Nepshamai explained. After a while, the hole in the wall penetrated through, giving Hiroto a view of the space on the far side. It was pitch black, with no illumination. Chilly air flowed out, but unlike the musty air in the old tunnel they had used in the morning, there was no smell. “And this hole goes all the way to Kofu?” “Yes. Hiroto, what is taking you to Kofu, by the way?” “I’m searching for the leader of a group called the Dodger Alliance. Since he’s been on the run from the automated turnstiles for a long time, there’s a high chance he’s somewhere beyond the reach of Suikanet. There are lots of station hollows in Kofu, so that’s probably it.” “I see. That’s fascinating logic.” “…It was your idea.” Since losing his body, Nepshamai’s short-term memory had taken a significant hit. The supplemental memory storage that had archived everything he’d seen and heard had been in his body. Now the only thing in his brain was the small main memory stuck to the electronic sign’s back. The result was that Hiroto had to repeat everything he’d seen and heard back to Nepshamai, over and over. “Yukie designed it, so I don’t really know how the tech works,” Nepshamai prefaced, the letters cramming the small scrolling screen. “My main memory device on the screen is constructed to be similar to the human brain. It’s a plethora of nano-units linked into a network, and when you send data through it, the network structure changes, bit by bit. Normally, the supplemental memory device is consulted numerous times to fix the contents into place.” “And the stuff that happened since you met me is gone because you didn’t have time to memorize what you saw?” asked Hiroto. “That’s right. I spend about three hours of every day shutting out external information collection in order to compile. That would be what you consider ‘sleep’,” Nepshamai explained. So beyond his appearance, the humanoid from Hokkaido was very different in various ways from the automated turnstiles with their twenty-four-hour activity cycles. After thirty minutes of excavation, there was enough of a hole in the wall for a person to squeeze through. Eighty-two percent of the structural genetic field canceler’s battery remained. “The recharging function was in my body, so at this point, this electronic screen’s battery is all I’ve got. I don’t think we anticipated this scenario arising during the design phase. Why did just my body have to get destroyed? Shikoku is one thing, but there shouldn’t have been such an immediate physical danger inside of Yokohama Station,” said Nepshamai. Hiroto didn’t answer the question. He crawled into the hole. “So what is this place?” Based on the acoustics, it seemed to be an incredibly long and narrow tube. The only illumination was Nepshamai’s electronic screen, so the area got lighter and darker in time with his words. “This is the remnant of a railway.” “Railway? What’s that?” “A form of transportation. They connected station to station.” “Station to station? Hang on; I don’t understand what you mean. So there used to be more than one Yokohama Station in the past? And tunnels like this were what connected them?” “Not at all, but I think you’re getting the idea.” “So it’s basically…like an elevator,” Hiroto concluded. He recalled the woman guarding the elevator right after he came Inside. It was only yesterday, but it felt like it’d happened a very long time ago. “Elevators move vertically,” Nepshamai stated. “The first elevator I saw went sideways,” Hiroto answered. “You come across those every now and then. They tend to grow on peninsula tips and such. Because Yokohama Station is extending itself in a long and narrow way, the structural genetic field tends to mutate. Errors arise in its phototropism and gravitropism, and you wind up with elevators that go sideways and escalators that only descend.” “Okay. So this is like an elevator that goes sideways.” “What is ‘this’?” “I was talking about the railway.” “A railway. Correct. But it’s much swifter than an elevator. At their peak, you could get from Tokyo to Osaka in forty minutes,” explained Nepshamai. Hiroto didn’t know where Osaka was, but he got the general gist: It was really, really fast. “So Yokohama Station had vehicles like that, huh? I’ve never even seen pictures of such things on Suikanet.” “This isn’t part of Yokohama Station. Humans built this.” “Humans? Don’t be stupid. How could humans dig a huge hole like this?” Hiroto wondered aloud. His understanding of construction was limited entirely to the lodgings erected at Ninety-Nine Steps. Their houses were assembled from wood cut down from what little land there was on the cape and materials dumped out of Yokohama Station. The town hall, the biggest building they had, was only forty meters wide. It was impossible to believe that people had built something that spanned entire kilometers. “Besides, why would there be something people built inside of Yokohama Station?” “This is a superconductive-type railway. Yokohama Station’s structural genetic field is repelled by superconductive material, so it doesn’t incorporate the space around the railway. It just covers it up with concrete.” They walked through the darkness in the direction of Kofu for a while. Eventually, Hiroto’s eyes began to adapt to the sea of black, and he was able to make out faint details around them. “So this tunnel really goes for hundreds of kilometers?” “The entire length of the superconductive railway is about seven hundred kilometers if I recall. If you include the Shinkansen and older lines, Yokohama Station contains about twenty thousand kilometers of railroad inside its boundaries.” Hiroto was unable to envision anything that long. You could walk a lap around the entirety of Ninety-Nine Steps in an hour, and that was probably only about five kilometers. “Here we are. This is a train car,” said Nepshamai. There was a metal plate roughly the size of a tatami mat at Hiroto’s feet. The top was completely flat without any protruding features, just anchors for attaching it to something else on each of its corners. “This is the small kind, used for transporting goods. You place a container on top and send it off. I was hoping for a passenger car, but this will work, too. Sit on top, if you don’t mind,” instructed Nepshamai. Hiroto got onto the piece of metal as he was asked, and it sank a few millimeters. Apparently, the plate was floating a little bit off the ground. “Wait…are we going to ride on this?” Hiroto inquired. “Don’t worry. It can’t go fast enough to affect the human body. First, open the cover on the front and bring up the port. Yes, like that. Ah, good, it’s an AAT*. I can control that. There’s a cable on the back of me; hook that up to the port.” Hiroto followed the instructions on the scrolling screen. Once he hooked up the cable, Nepshamai went silent. The letters on the screen that had been the only illumination vanished, leaving the tunnel completely dark. The only sensation was the sound of the heat exhaust fans spinning on either end of his device. It seemed to be a rather laborious task. “I have broken in.” The display turned on again a minute later. “Let’s get moving. We can go in the direction of Tokyo or of Kofu. Which way shall we go?” “Kofu.” “Very well. I’ll start the car. Hold on tight.” The problem was that there was nothing to hold on to, period. Hiroto had to get down on his stomach and place his hands over the front edge of the metal plate. It rose about a centimeter into the air, then silently began to accelerate forward. “I did not anticipate this. I have less power than I thought,” the screen declared, its display dim. “Are we not going to make it to Kofu?” “Oh, no, not that. This railway is probably connected to Yokohama Station’s power systems somewhere. That is not a problem.” “Then what’s the problem?” “It’s me. Not having a body is rather—” The electronic screen abruptly went out. The sole source of light was gone, plunging the tunnel into darkness. The metal plate continued to accelerate. The air buffeted Hiroto’s face tremendously and howled in his ears. The edge of the plate bit into his palms. Despite the incredible stress on his body, his mind was remarkably calm as he thought, I wonder if Nepshamai forgot about his guarantee that this wouldn’t have any effect on me. *AAT: Almost All Terminals.