Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. Celeste men steadied her suitcase on
the slick platform, refusing to WinCE as the next burst
of thunder ricocheted off the iron and glass tunnel above her.
The Red Line Express across country relic and congresusly scheduled
for this late hour or hissed at its mumrings. The
rain had been the talk of the ticket line, a
deluge worthy of urban legend, hiding every shape and sound
outside the fluorescent blair. Her fingers slipped on the handle
before she rebalanced herself, pressing her shoulder bag tight and
glancing for the empty time at her Navy land yard press,
bold and red. She double checked the small black microphone
button inside her coat's la bell. If the rumors were right,
she'd need every trick, every tuel. Her cheep umbrella barely
repelled the dampoor. She stored it above her seat with
a single shake, ignoring the water that dripped onto the
corridor re cursion. Inside the carriage, sound changed. It wasn't
just muted. It was rained in hush, almost viscous, as
if the air itself absorbed every cumbers station celice seat
halfway down the carriage faced the passageway door. The intercom
exchanged cautostatic with the storm, and the lights overhead flicker
but never quite failed. Around her, the passengers dulled out
their words like precious resources. A woman in overalls muttered
into her phone. Two main in business suits traded a
few short syllables in Russian, and students hunched over latops
whose greens glowed a faint blue against the window glare.
No one made eye contact for long. Across the aisle,
a young man with restless I squeezed a batter duffel
bag close to his chest, knuckles whitening now and again.
He pulled free ticket, free or actual card. Stuck boarded
in a once bright gold, but now sullly by years
of handling, Its surface was a maze of scribbles, corrections,
and crossings out so les could just see a corner
folded and unfolded so often the paper fipers had bloomed.
He mouthed something as he stared at it, lets barely moving,
breathing so lightly. The glass near by fogged and cleared,
and stuttering intervals. Even across the aisle, the tension vibrated
off him. A uniform conductor color shadowed strode silently down
the carriage with a clipboard tucked his chest and not
a scanner or for an inside. He barely glanced that
the young man's ticket, only grunted an approval before making
some mark on his clipboard and continuing on. The conductor
paused by, Celeste inspected her own paper, first print, not handwritten,
then took one long look at her press badge and
nodded before passing, as if satisfied she mattered less than
the manifest itself. Celess caught the faintest echo of an announcement,
red line Express all aboard, no one scheduled stops remain
in a science seat's staff will be monitoring manifests. Thank
you for your cooperation and for traveling with us tonight,
The words forced to cut through persistent static. She memorized
every seat inside the manifest, the true one was always paper.
Out here, rumor went digital logs were for the front
office or the illusion of modernization. The carriage was barely
half full. Most passengers posture said, don't notice me, don't ask,
don't get involved. She watched the young man tuck his
yellow ticket away, then glanced quickly at the window as
the train's breaks released. With the scream down the carriage,
two uniformed attendants engaged in a hush, murmuring conference, one
holding a batter clipboard, the other jotting on a dog
aid note. Bed the method crude, anachronistic made of skin crawl.
She was used to electronic beats and glowing screens, E
mail and QR codes, not this almost condestine cross chicking
of ink. As a train lurched into motion, street lights
and rain washed darkness blurred along the glass, the outside
world reduced to streaks of gold and blodshey blue. The
engines le thunder soon buried the sand of the actual storm,
turning it into mere punctuation. Celess forced herself not to fidget.
Her heart skitted, not just with nerves, but with the
exhilaration of finally being inside the story itself. On the
edge of a year's old riddle, she become the last
Lincoln and unbroken chain to night was her name's turn
to be present, not just observer. Here and now on
this condemned river of rail. She was not merely a
chronicler for one rain rung night. At least she was
part of the manifest. Back home, newsprint was always her
preferred armor against the unprovable, the unlikely. Even as her
job shifted to online clerks and canned video clips. She
had been trained not to cheese legends. Yet their red
line expressed disappearances would not let go, no matter how
many editors or fact checkers dismissed them as internet chaff.
Her home reflected this compulsion. Under a yellow light, a
single wall was corpeted with solid accusations. There was an
almost architectural density to the fly as she taped up
here old photos of smiling teens, weary parents, tense black
and white mugshots once entrusted to police. Now each name,
each face had been subsumed, b thread, string and s
crawled time lines, case file, red line express, last updated.
She whispered, clicking her phone recorder to catch the creak
of her stained office desk beneath one elbow, her voice husky,
with lack of sleep, no clear pattern of destination or background,
manifest and consistent electronic records missing for nights, with disappearances
company unresponsive, She tapped her lap up the screen of
flurry of pdf, maintenance logs, police reports. She'd stayed up
for dawn too many times, watching old station security feeds,
scrubbing frame by frame for anything faces some one out
of place, suit case left behind by some one no
longer on any list. The obsession infected her sleep schedule,
her friendships. Her sister now only called once a month,
leaving cautious messages chasing ghosts again, so less was the
punch line among the handful, she still leapt past her threshold.
A digital topography of trustannkud her world Rosa, her overcaffeinated
at tea for End, had finagled well beyond to corporate
pay grade to supply manifest scans and security footage. Her source,
an anonymous voice from the train company, provided critical Marx
and just enough lock files to tease real possibility without closure.
Her Lisland mostly online audience she never let herself call
them finds a sounded eager but skeptical every time she
published a new threat. What went on a podcast to
relitigate all tracks? How planned to board had brewed over
month spent hitting dead ends. She insisted on her real
name for the ticket forging would put her straight on
to the incident. List if the rooms were true. Overpreparation
was her failing, but to night it would keep her focused.
Multiple recorders, a pen in her pocket, the lapel mike
here phone with audio always rolling, one battered canqued, a
digital slit place in a zippert's side pocket in her
suit case as battery replaced just before leaving for the station.
Her editor at the chronicle begrossed her this indulgence in
a washtubourban legend, but he'd secured her press pass in
a warning one night, so less no going missing. The
call had ended with the sigh of resignation, and the
far off were of a muted police scanner. She tried
and failed to ride this train before last spring. Her
trip was canceled at the last moment operational issue. Another time,
her ticket misters. They never processed, no wrecker, no refund.
The operators always offered an apology in a voucher for
an unrelated line. The red lines were out split the
country diagonally, a left off from the preterregulation era, bypassed
now by apps and barely noted on digital maps. Its
stations were odd, always on the far edges of towns,
bordering debris strewn lots or endless woods. How ticket marked
in that service listed destinations with name scrape from older
maps than any GPS would show. The train's website itself
looked derelict fonts out of the nineties links, decaying the
journey promisis where the only company would be rain engine
stations and strangers who chose of security. Cilustics hailed, composing herself,
the carriage wasn't cold but a skin board goose bumps.
She unlaced her boots, slowly, tucking her legs up as
the trains were them stabilized into a lawn law. She
pulled her back to her chess, resting her hand lightly
atop it, press passed hat softly against the zipper. She
looked around, counting faces again, the uneasy compish to top
something deeper, growing sets of an old patient plan swinging
into place. She determined to stay alert, to watch her
own story begin, Even as fatigue mumbled its temptations. Every
rumble and flicker might matter to night. She was not
merely documenting vanished passengers. She was, at last one of them.
Shirening through blackis the red line bloods on its way
deeper into rural territory. The storm faded to a backer
and shudder, overrun by the relentless chardgun wine underfoot. Iris
passed with only discreet movements, someone shifting in their sleep
as zipper hissed the slow tick of the radiator pipes.
Celeste sat roundroad straight at first, then as muscles a
wand leaned forward, pretending to study notes on her foam
while the audio captured stray snippets of sound. She began
quietly approaching the student with the headphone cord twisted in
knots around his knuckles. He answered her questions in monosyllable's
eyes flicking to the red light on her mic. His
accent faded country heading home night job he recalled from
any talk of the train itself. Cross the aisle, an
older woman with tired hands and a rain beaten jacket
refused even her first question. A wiry man with oground
nail snapped no interviews to night before drawing his jacket
high around his rope. Each race seemed mapped with fatigue
of suspicion, passengers of necessity not choice. The atmosphere resisted
all attempts at warmth. Just as she considered stepping away,
Celeste noticed a manifest in her seat pocketing. Not the
usual folded schedule, but a rectangular sheet names and seat
number sinked in several different colors, each hand distinct looping
curse of hair blocky capitals. There she scanned for her name,
Marion Celest forty three eight, and found it marked in
bright blue. She saw the anxiousy young man's namely by
a wick Julian forty four seats, was written with a
trembling graphite outline pen press so hard it almost tore.
He had then spoiled his tick again, face pallid under
overhead light, fingers trembling, his lips never stopped twitching. She
caught the words still here, still here, keep hold. It
was the cadence of someone fighting back panic or the
psychic equivalent. Seats around her remained full, but for an
empty one half a carriage ahead Celeste, France. She remembered
with certainty a stout woman with shopping bags had sat
there early. No announcement of a stop had come. The
bag's one brown, one green with faded cartoon logus, sat
and disturbed hand olsley neatly atopped the seat. A scan
overlapped the staff and attendant in a slate jacket, bent
over the manifest, checking each seat with a methodical eye.
As they stopped at the empty seat, the mouth thinned,
and with a pencil they drew a line firmly through
the corresponding name. No attempt was made to gather up
the abandoned bags, nor any word exchanged with fellow crew.
A low wave of unis crashed through her, deeper than
journalistic skepticism. This was a pattern, small but precise. A
missing passenger name, a race, belongings, untouched and ignored by all,
but celested herself. The sense that something was encroaching, quick
and bureaucratic and invisible. Conto Celeste. Now she pressed her
record a closer to her lappel thum swerptitiously, ensuring it
was still rolling for miles after. She watched the windows,
trying and failing to shake the impression of the darkness
out Their pressed back harder. With every mile. She cataloged
every cough and shuffle in the carriage, refusing to let
her eyes shut. Whatever rhythm governed this place, it was
not quite human. The train jolted, then stilled. The intercom
remained silent. The sudden lack of engine noise grew deafening.
The only elimination the sodium glow of rainblow platform light,
and the restless blink of emergency exit signs. Outside. There
was nothing but for us, no town, no station, platform,
no sign the pathelod anywhere the door stayed sealed. Passengers
exchanged glances, some waywardly confused. Celsi sees the moment. Moving
quietly up the aisle. She saw at the students, the
older woman, one of the men in business suits, asking straightforward,
did you see the woman with the shopping bags? Did
she get off with you? The answers didn't fit. She
was here, No, Maybe I was mistaken. Pretty sure it
was empty the whole time, the bags online. Maybe she
left last stop. I can't say for sure. There was
frustration of prickling and cooperative uncertainty, even in those who
looks certain, as if the facts kept assolving the more
one pressed against them. At the seat itself, Celeste opened
the green shopping bag, careful not to disturb its arrangement.
Tucked among a few groceries, she found something strange, A
slip of yellow card similar to the anxious Man's ticket,
A handwritten note listening nine names years appended beside each.
Some names she recognized from her research disappeared in the
red line in different decades, different handwriting styles. As though
compelled of her time, she flagged the passing night porter,
a woman late fifties with nervous hands. Did you see
the woman who sat here, Celeste asked, showing the note.
The porter's eyes flicked from note to see them back.
Maybe she got off at Bramblegate, she said, uncertain. Celeste's
memory flashed with the matt Bramblegate was not on any schedule,
not even among the obsolete destinations. The skuy grew deeper.
Celice moved back to her seat and pulled out her phone.
Priority Contact had equipped her with patched access to security feeds.
She watched the footage on fast forward. The view of
her own carriage appeared. The passengers frozen were in flickering
against the glass. For a moment, the missing woman saw
clear as a faded photo. Then, as Celeste watched the
image flicker, her outline blurred, and she faded frame by
frame until the seat was empty. There was no act
of standing, no movement, just abstraction, gone, as if she
had never been rendered. There at all, Celeste forced herself
to breathe. The evidence was all but vanishing as soon
as it was created. She cornered a staff supervisor in
the corridor, a man with heavy lidded eyes and gray
at his temples. She demanded, the manifest doesn't match reality.
The seats are wrong. Do you update it every run?
He looked at her as a straining to recall, then
said voice raf manifests are always accurate by morning. Sometimes
the names don't add up, paperwork, sometimes slips. Is all.
Unable to anchor herself in the staff's words, she retreated
to the midnight's neck car, a dull burn coffee smell
last the year. Here the filter hunt with unceeasing futility.
To her surprise, the anxious young man reappeared, scribbling furiously
in her note patters. If compelled, Celeste approached. Is everything
all right, she ventured softly. He started gaze flickering to
her face the notepad, then passed her shoulder to the
empty ear. You have to keep your name secure. Name slip,
that's how they take you, Celest, wrote Wick dufel bag
a note, but manifest obsession possible source in her notes,
Feeling a new urgency pressing. The trench shuddered once, and
the Wollway lights flickered to gray. There was no clarity
to be had from any one. The staff avoided her gaze,
all vanished into their overlapping judice. Other passengers became increasingly small,
almost transparent presences, existing only at the edge of attention,
or perhaps just until the next erasure IROs after midnight,
pearly light began to tease the horizon. Sleep's drive finally
gnawed at Celeste as the wheels wretched it over a
sequence of near identical bridges. She fought it, but at
some point her breathing eased and darkas claimed her just
a moment, she insisted. Once she woke, something about the
train felt wrong, thinner. The young man Wick was gone,
His seat was empty, the deafel bag left in his place,
now hunched over like a folded animal. Celess scanned the carriage.
There was no sign of the student with the headphones,
nor the woman with the rain jacket. Worse, when she
rose and tried catching an attendant's eye, no one remembered Wick.
That seats and the signed the nearest attendant said, scanning
her clipboard, loves. Trembling on the edge of a half
occult memory, Celeste sat as the train hurdled over a
stone viduct. Unable to resist, she unzipped the duffel inside,
no clothes, no wallet, caper layer after careful layer, each
marked with columns of handridden names from various time periods,
some in ballpoint, others in ornee cursor. A handful barely legible,
faded with old ink dates round for decades. A few
sheets was craled with fresh graphite names she had seen
on missing persons fliers. A terrible clarity formed. Each train
manifests left its bleed somewhere, always at risk of crossing
names between lists. Her own name was there, Faale, penciled,
shadowed by rasure marks, but Celeste Marin clear as any entry,
sat boxed among columns of passengers. The date two days
shock gave way to terror. She feverishly sorted through the names.
She knew, some of them, the faces she'd mapped on
office walls. With mounting certainty, she realized that reality itself
was shifting to match whatever bureaucratic at it took place.
In these musty records, names could be struck and forgotten.
Actual lives and heathered within a single penstroke or data entry.
She snatched handfuls of the papers and stowed them in
her bag, glancing into every dim corner. How many eyes
watched now the train, with its flickering overhead lights and
seemingly sleepy travelers, had become adversary at mechanisms ancient but
ruthlessly efficient. For the first time, she doubted she would
see the other terminal unless she found a way to
secure herself in the manifest and escape whatever had been
operating unnoticed. In the minute, she let herself slip from watchfulness.
The story was no longer a matter of public record.
It was about memory, and who could still recall she
had ever existed. Celeste forced herself to focus, to breathe
as she gathered every page and checked each one for clues.
The overhead speaker crackled stutter, then lapsed again into silence.
Her own name, faint and imperil had moved from rumor
to scheduled fact. She selst marin chronicle, journalist, relentless and
stubborn had joined the ranks of those schedule to dissolve
with the coming summarize outside dawn gathered behind curtains the
color of all bruises, and the train pressed on deep
into territory where even memory was no guarantee of survival.
At sigh dawn gathered behind curtains the color of old bruises,
and the train pressed on deepened territory where even memory
was no guarantee of survival. Celeste made to herself move
with a methodical urgency, repacking the Daffel's contents into careful
stacks within her own bag. She dared not leave the
papers behind, nor let them out of her sight. Her
finger shook as she zipped his satchel skin, prickling at
the brush of so many ghostly signatures lingering on thin,
brittle sheets. The carriage seen dulted by the knights, a
trishna hollow on a spread between rose like teeth missing
from an old comb. She stood, craning to check the
faces that remained. A heavy old man three rose up,
caught her eye and quickly looked away, his hands curled
into fists on his knees. A pair of students, shoulders
pressed close together, whispered over a well worn note. Because
if desperate to unchor something real in their share presence,
so few bodles less than she remembered. Celeste told herself
she could not afford fear. She needed focus a direction.
The echoing corridor, with overhead lamps still buzzing, fiffully pressed
her forward, like a funnel toward the next clue. She
passed through to the vestibule, searching for or patch of solitude.
The connecting doors his to her approach, we reluctant to
permit more movement. She stepped into the next carriage, doors
closing like the sealed covers of the ledger behind her.
Here the world felt thinner still. The windows, clouded from
condensation and grime, blurred the passing landscape into strokes of
blue and silver, intercinct and transientd She duck quickly into
the nearest lavatory, locking the door behind her, and unfolded
the manifest fragments and tickets on the tiny shelf above
the battered sinc In the pallid light, the names blurred
and overlapped. Some appeared only in the corner of a page,
or sideways along and edge. Her own recurred, often, sometimes
as a mirror. Celesse sometimes just see Marin, as if
different recorders, how different permissions to remember her fully are
then names Julian Wick, Vangeline Harper, Arnold Baya's surface repeatedly
across decades, scrawled and nervous, racable gravite eye in the
sturdy hand of inklong since dride celas phone still worked,
She balanced against the glass, invoking her contacts, app cross
referencing every legible surname and date on the manifests with
online news databases. Some names spot out police reports or
archived missing person bulletins. Others triggered no results at all,
as if those people had never left a digital footprint
before vanishing the mounting droid prest in. Those who were
erased here by paper or data were not only forgotten,
but removed from all records, though lost of viring what
was left of their stores. In the mirrors, the les's
own face looked jaundiced, eyes ruined, and read around pupils
too wide. She voiced, memoed every step, determined to leave
a trail six twelve a ms still on board. At
least three passengers gun from this carriage, not remembered by staff.
Paper manifest differs in handwriting ink method names, including mine
repeat or fate, depending upon the page examined and in
possession of physical proof. Remember do not lose the duffel
bag evidence anchor. She packed everything tightly again and splash
cold water on her face, bracing herself. Returning to the
carriage felt like crossing a threshold not meant for the living.
The trains, in a rhythm, grew more insistent, decline of
metal on track, now almost conversational, as if marking time
for an absent bookkeeper. Pressing ahead, so Less picked her
way to the end of the car, slipping through the
snack bar, swinging doors. The coffee stink had grown sire,
but the attendant poured her cup without meeting her eyes.
The man before her at the counter, neatly dressed with
a commuter's bland efficiency, turned suddenly bumping her shoulder. Sorry,
he muttered, not unkindly. His face twitched with brief distress,
as if he had meant to apologize for something more
profound than a physical jostle. Celicip the burnt coffee sivering
its bitterness, She took a seat facing the door, making
a calculated decision to watch the corridor instead blend into it.
From the far end of the car, the night porter
appeared gathering news, paper cups and napkins. Celesse flagged her
down with a silent gesture, producing the slip of yellow
ticket from the earler's shopping bag. Do you remember who
this belonged to? She asked quietly. The porter turned it
over in thick, careful fingers, lips moving silently as she
traced each name. Her brow furrowed. Then she looked up,
searching Celust's face. Seems old, lost and founds full of them.
Sometimes they double checked the names. Sometimes it hardly matters.
She trailed off, a brittle blankness, settling into her gaze.
Have there been other incidents? Missing people? Sole pressed, the
porter seemed to shrink. Net runs the longest, few stops,
more ghosts. I always say people disappear all the time
on paperwork, but mostly no one notices after a day
or two. Best to ride awake, keep your luggage clothes.
She eyed so less satchel as she said it are
names ever added after the run starts? Celest voice shike.
She detested it. My manifessor never write. The porter whispered
voice nearly extinguished. Every supervisor says it's an old system,
gets fixed by the next day, But she shrugged helplessly.
The conversations and punctuated by a hasty retreat. Solus hunched
over her coffee, she replayed the interaction with Wick, the
echo of his warning returning, keep your name secure, name slip.
She wrote down every snip of conversation, every half go
here and phrase every oddity her own Handwriting a bulwalk
against erasure, she hoped to connatalis manic roll board of
the Still there, she migrated back through the corridor, drawn
by a low, urgent conversation. In what had been the
staff's storage compartment. Just inside the open door, she saw
to your tendants and a man in the ill fitting
uniform of her conductor, huddled around a batted black folder.
It isn't matching, the younger tendant hiss, finger jabbing a page.
If we strike more names, don't, the conductor warned. Old
entrant bleed into the paper. Ones, just mark it. Leave
the rest for h Q. We don't want another incident.
The trio glanced up as the door snake startled out
of their confidence. Celestocked away, bretted, heart hammering its own
most coat of warning. Suddenly the train shuddered, a juttering
larges of crossing an unseen border. The sensation was less
the classic attracts which janced, than an internal cropping, the
feeling of something being cut loose. Time isself stuttered. The
light's flicker then went out. Only the faint ambient dawn
and a trace of sodium hue from emergency belts remained
bathing the world and gray and sickly orange. Her phone buzzed,
we'resa a message, security feed looping only seeing same eight
minutes manifest timestampeeploading, glitching. Celeste thumb shook as she tied
back in the half light. Passenger's gun staff crossing off
named real manifests on paper. I have pieces, some staff aware,
most scared a reply, save everything anchor yourself. Don't trust
any staff. Celice pressed her hand against her chest, feeling
the recorder's curvature through her shirt. She moved forward, once more,
compelled by desperation that boarded on the superstitious movement speech
writing these actions might hither her more securely than passive observation. Court.
Within the next carriage, she collided with the heavy jawed
man from earlier. Your reporter right, he muttered, blunt but nervous,
as he glanced around, Ye, seeing strange things, disappearing folk,
I swear. I sat next to a woman. She had
a thermos, but now he snapped his fingers gone Nobody
but me, remembers Celese nodded, hands steading her bag. It's
not just you. I tracked this story for months. I've
seen signs people struck from wreckers, ragues. The staff keep
old manifest changed them by hand. Some passengers as she hesitated,
then showed the faint pencil listing off her own name,
are at risk right now? How long have you been
on this row? Seven years? Always graveyard shifts. I used
to see rigulars, people with routines lately as why nor
turruns have the same faces? List change me trip. I
started making my own notes, but half of its gibberish.
When I checked later, his voice caught, and then he added,
in a lower tone, I tried making audio locks swear
to guard. Sometimes I play him after and there's nothing
on the tape, just trained noise. Static. She shuddered at
his words, silent in recognition. Ye got family, he asked, suddenly, concerned, flickering,
If you do, remind him who you are, far as
I can tell if you get a race he vanished
for more than this train. Celessee thanked him, quietly, jotting
down each aspect of their exchange. She felt a simultaneous
gratitude for the coroboration and panic at the idea that
her mere presence could unravel into nothing if left and cataloged.
She hurried toward the luggage rack where the old Duffel
had first caught her interest. Hands trembling, she fished through
the few remaining bags, now almost overwhelmed by the notion
that any one of these had once belonged to someone
erased orphaned objects, awaiting a memory to clint to. She
snapped digital pictures of every luggage tack, every torn pocket,
every unexplained scribble, hoping at least one would prove useful
if she made it back. The intercom studded the Red
Line Express approaching Silver Cross. Prepare to remain in assigned seat,
no unscheduled stops. Each pause in the static was more pronounced,
as if the system itself was running memory checks. Celese
returned to her seat. The students nearby now only wan.
The Tollo of the two murmured anxiously, running a finger
repeatedly over a scrolled list in the margin of his goolbook.
The other, whose face she recognized but whose name she
suddenly could not summon, was gone. The remaining student, taller skinned,
spy Kiher flinched as she passed. Did you see my friend?
I looked down and then up, and the seats cold,
like it was emptied all night, I swear. His voice unraveled,
fraying on the verge of panic, Celeus, crushed by his seat,
keeping her voice low. Write your name, she urged, And
your friends, if you can remember it anywhere, you can
paper you arm say it out loud too, Don't let
it slip. He looked at her, wild eyed but willing,
and pulled out pen. He wrote his own name agonas
in jagged blue ballpoint on the back of his hand,
and then, after a pause, nodded his missing friend's name oncerous.
This gaze locked with Celeste as the weight of action
gave him a sliver of steadiness, a jagged idea stabbed through,
so less sense of impotence. If the system operated on
erasure by omission, if memories, physical presence, and documentation all
conspired to dilute person, perhaps the only defense was deliberate,
obsessive inscription to be multiplied, not reduced, by record keeping
in all its forms. She rummaged for a stray pencil,
stops calling her own name on the inside cover of
her note, bad, a train ticket, an empty coffee cup,
and even when panic seized her on the back of
her hand in neat blocky capitals, she pressed her recorders
mike against her lips, stating for posterity, I'm celess Marin.
Ticketed on the Red Line Express June twelve, Manifest number
forty three eight, still present, A fresh jolt passed through
the train, a ripple not unlike a shudder of fear,
made physical and steel and glass. The passing landscape, never
quite in ferks, grew stranger, as if the well outside
the windows were enough to thought rendered only as needed
for passengers inside to make sense of motion. Each second
trickled with the viscous off kilt of certainty that reality
too could be penciled out in replace with a void.
She ransacked the duffel anew, this time intent on finding
a flaw, a thread loose enough to unravel the machinery
behind the area beneath the uppermost layer of Manifest she
found something stiffer and old, faded ledger leather band the
sort secretars, once used in the fifties to record attendance
in inventory on its fly leaf as the red line
expresses insignia stamped in gold until the outline almost dissolved
into abstraction. Inside, however, the entry ceased to be neat
after several pages of normal date and passenger records, handwriting
changed became her tense, almost childlike. Names were sometimes written
in pencil and erased until nothing but indentition remained near
the back, scribbled margins in a heavy block print. If
you find this, do not let the pages out of sight.
Remember every name twice. A deep, private, chill world through Celeste.
She traced her finger along the indentations, half expecting her
own name to surface, half wanting to see it, half
writing confirmation. The trains breaks hist and the speaker warbled
once more. All passengers prepare for the next sequence, remain
in assigned, manifested. It was as if even the language
was evaporating. A new resolve galvanized, so less fear into action.
She started methodically photographing and scanning every page with her phone,
gploading each as slowly as the cell signal allowed to
a secure cloud SiGe. She dictated an email to Rosa's
summarized in the event. Since boarding em besize in the pattern,
the staff' unwilling is to challenge tradition, the way reality
shifted with each revision to the manifest, she attached images
of lyss the ledger, her own scribbled name on every scrap.
Tell everyone to remember me. Remind me, keep saying a
name if I disappear, Do not let these gans go silent,
she wrote, voice trembling as she typed. Rose's reply was
almost instant, but shaky. Doing my best, threading on every
form I can already seeing deletions stay alive. Celeste suddenly, screaming,
erupted from the rearmost carriage. A high gobble chair by
reflects Celeste boulder toward the sound record, a clutch tight.
The carriage door sprang open at her touch, revealing a
knot of passengers standing around, a collapsing older woman, short
hair and fraying gray plates. Panic white in her watering eyes.
She ried, clutching a sheaf of ticket stamped with years
decades apart, my name, my children, don't forget me. She wept,
forcing the crumpold tickets into Celeste hand saved Matilda baos
may till the by ours sixty eight b silver crossing,
I was here, I am here, I am A series
of sickening blink shimmered around her, and by the time
Celeste finished pressing the record button, the space Matilda bios
it occupied was vacant. Her voice cut off as if
mid syllable. The tickets pulled on the linoleum, empty and
pitiful passengers stepped back, blinked, muttered. A supervisor corralled the group.
His eyes swept the floor, never meeting Celestes. Return to
your seats. All was being logged, he repeated, monotone. Celeste
pocketed the ticket's heart, hammering, refusing to let herself more. Instead,
she snapped more photos, filled another page in her notebook,
and as she returned to a seat, began cross Chicky
Mantilde Bio's name. With every list in manifested digital physical remembered,
not then not a trace in the most recent lists
one all scan from a weak brier. That was all.
The reality of Orsia was near total obliteration. With the
ease of striking a match, Celeste realized She had reached
the event horizon, close enough to understand the system, distant
enough to fear it to vitality. The only advantage she
had was both elementary and profound resistance by remembrance, naming,
and recording. For a moment, she leaned into the carriage window,
watching another nameless cops of trees blow by, then locked
eyes with her own faint reflection. The determination that flickered
there surprised her. She braced herself, feeling the rails beneath
vibrate as the train surged forward, deeper into the endless country.
One phrase circled her mind. I will not be raised,
but the train, its bureaucracy of memory and forgetting seemed
to beg to differ. Celeste stay crouched in the corridor
on after the last echo of Matilda Biaz's voice had faded,
the brittle ticket's pressed flat beneath her hand. Passengers had
retreated in anxious clusters, leaving her surrounded by the hush
of receding footsteps and the low hum that passed for
sanctity between carriages. She caught a glimpse of her own
reflection in the glass panel. Pale lips, tight hair, clinging
to her forehead. The sound of the rails was sharpened now,
as if the train were grinding through a landscape. Determined
to resist every wheel, she needed motion, movement was memory.
She turned over the tickets in her palm, noting the
microp Russians left by Matilda's last attempt at a signature,
an annulus scroll barely illegible, that threatened to evaporate under
her gaze. She found her breath coming quicker, not receding.
She forced herself to whisper the name again, just to
hear it. Matilde, by HER's silver crossing, the corridor began
to fill with the edge as light as dawn asserted
itself along the rim of the carriage. Celustraeden dusted her
hands on her coat and braced her shoulder against the
far wall. She slapped the tickets into her notebook, then
scrolled on her phone through the haphazard digital back up.
One file after the next had failed to upload. A
slow horror crept across the progress bar, freezing and then
blinking out, as if dictated by some outside hand. Three
scans remained, the rest lost in a cloud, somewhere between
reality and erasure. Drops of rain still snaked down the window,
each bead catching a glint of sun. For all the
futility of running, she pressed back through to her seat.
Only a few bodies lingered in the compartment, Jonah's slump
with an innaan down his arm, and the heavy jawed
nigh worker staring at nothing. With the dull steadness of
the Alma shaken. The daffle bags waitsted at her The
paper shifted with a rustle. She checked her recorder. The
presence of 'em a Tolda's crackling plea lodged deep in
its memory that was reproved for such as it remained
without warning, the trains li sjodo in briefest nothing, the
world to monochrome. The faded manifest gleamed in the basket
at her feet, her own name smudged but not quite erased.
Each moment now felt newly perilous. The stakes, she realized,
were not simply about capturing a story, but but tethering
her own reality, making herself undeniable to the train, its records,
and its resistless machinery of forgetting This night work would
demand more than observation. A metallic crash from Father Up
sent every one at least half standing in their seats.
Instinct and drive reeled Celeste at the aisle, clutching the
duffel and notebook like lucky charms. The air between carriages
bore the tang of ozon now, as if the train's
very energy systems were starting to rebel. The snack bar
at the head of the train, her new destination pulsed
with a strange, throbing glow from malfunctioning fulorescence. She took
her first shaky step into the next car and was
greeted by a hollow eyed conductor, browbeated with sweat. In
one hand, he clutched a sheath of manifests in the
other at I'm yellowed ledger. His posture was battle rigid,
but the tremor and disrespitrayed a collapse in confidence. The
manifest isn't matching reality, he blurted, fixing Celeste with a
look that was more plead and accusation. Some name vanishment shift.
Others turn up in the paperwork and never boarded. They
tell us it never matters that it clears up in
the morning. But I've seen coworkers disappear even family years
ago from this very line. The confession startled her. She
stepped closer, weighing his urgency. Why keep going along, she demanded,
glaring at the folder. Someone's maintaining this, someone knows. He
lifted the ledger and slammed it down on the counter.
The rules run deeper than any of us. I inherited
this job, a mess marin and the special instructions that
came with it. Correct the manifest, don't question, Never let
the paperwork pile up if you fall behind. If names
appear twice, it starts to slip. Reality starts to recoil.
Who's overseeing the system now, she demanded. He shook his
head grace double catching the flickering light, Not us anymore.
There's a process half analog, half digital. We feed in
union aims and erase the old. A machine. Whatever sits
behind the curtain balances the numbers. I stopped asking years ago,
how it's meant to work, or what happens to those
who cross a line? Celes's voice dropped. Have you ever
tried to anchor some one, record them, call for help,
keep them visible? A smile? Bittersweet? It doesn't always take,
but some of us try. All time, is say, read
the manifest aloud, hold the ticket, say the name, write
it again and again. Sometimes it even helps you want
to survive this line. Don't let your name become a
blank field. She press on. Do you still have the
master list? He nodded Ice, flickering to the folder. It's
in here, names from every decade, odd gaps, re entries.
Nobody knows who's responsible for the aid its now, but
I'll show you on one condition. Celeste nodded, whyn it.
Then he slid the ledger open, careful not to smudge
the brittle margins. If you go farther than this training,
if you get off at the terminal, tell them, make
them see what gets erased. She studied the pages, reaching
for her phone, fingers moving fast to photograph names and dates.
Familiar names lapped up wick buyers, othough she had failed
to catch in time. She tugged at a corner, careful
not to rip the page. Hot thudding from the far
end of the car came a clatter as two staff
members hurried into view. Their voices dropped low, but not
low enough to hide their anxiety from Celesti recorder. You're
pushing the system to you. How we can't keep patching it.
The younger whispered, waving up print doubt. It's not just passengers.
Staff names have begun to shift. You remember old Mags.
She's not in the logs for last Saturday. I was
with her. Sah h, someone's always listening, hissed the other,
glancing Celeste way, a fresh announcement has overed the intercom.
No one scheduled stops manifest as being updated. All corrections
will be processed. The voice was neither man nor woman,
hollow and synthesized, and then it cut out. Celestophone bauzed
a message from ROSA. Got new logs seen this passenger
retention testing phase Roman two some interest referencing memory bands
in the system. They are changing both paper and digital
records at random intervals. Now watch for double names, red flag.
The conductor overheard his face paling. He nodded, almost ritualistically.
If your name appears twice, you vanish. If you raise
and it returns, well, you forget. You ever knew who
it belonged to. That's what the legend says. It's not
just a story. Celeste snapped a sequence of photo's eyes
darting from fading to digital archive ears tuned to rumble,
fear rising in the carriage. New names had been slashian,
several rewritten on scraps, worded between the main pages, some
annotated and desperate looping handwriting. Her gaze locked on a
particularly odd entry, her own see Marin, penciled lightly beneath
the decade old list. Her fingers trembled as she recorded
multiple appearances, confirmation of risk. My own name anchers nothing
on its own. A chair escaped behind her. Joana's approached
voice tense. The lights just flickered. Doors won't open even
it stops. Someone tried the window behind the bathrooms. They're
stuck to celas. Lean into the growing dread, feeling the
cost of further delay. Stay close to people, she advised,
and keep speaking your name, writing it. Don't trust empty space.
The carriage did it as the train entered a tunnel,
plunging everything into a wall of fractured artificial lighting. For
a heartbeats, Lesque could believe nothing outside this cylinder of
noise and shadow even exists. Those at either end of
the car rattled as a tunnel warped every sense of
space and distance. She huddled over the duffel, sifting rapidly
through the manifests, desperate to triangulate which names were at
highest risk, and with a blunt practicality instinct, a loan supplied,
plotting what hope remained for any of them to endured
the night. Suddenly the air snapped, static crawling up her arms.
The phone screened Frogmento flickering intermittently, every surface of glass
showing ghostly overlays of the same corridor. The same passengers
frozen are blowed out of time. The Duffel's contents, barely
anchored by her compulsive inventory, seemed to resist gravity. The
carriage soundcowd pinned in the snack barrob of the garbage
pail cycle for a series of warped announcements manifest, Update
and progress. All revisions will be processed. Celuste eggered up,
snapping her notebook shut. But the lights died fully Now
in the blackness, the voices multiplied. Annish wave of half
muttered names, recited by what sounded like dozens of people
jammed into the carriage, none quite belonging to anybody left.
The train's engine noise pulsed against her chest, throat, and skull.
She pressed backward, ducking into the staff passage the old
conductor gripped his folder of manifest like a lifeline. Were
passed where the tunnel supposed to end, He rasped, I
count the seconds, and every time it's more than before.
There's no keeping track. He twitched, gaze, darting, We're in
a loop now, as if on cue. So less passed
the same rows of seats twice, the snap bar door again,
same chairer, same abandoned cup, even the flickering overhead bob
swinging at the same rhythm as before, a looping corridor.
No matter which way she walked, she landed back at
her point of departure. Her sense of direction spilled away
with every new circuit. Foses pulsed again, clearer, this time,
as if collected by a public address system. Grown sentient
names or anchors. Names are weights, names can be erased.
The speaker intoned static swolling. She resisted panic, gripping her
note book. Each time she passed Jonah's, still hunched and
muttering his name. The passage seemed to flick, as sometimes
he was there, sometimes replaced by a different figure, a
young woman in a postal uniform or a lanky man
with a curious atchel neither prison. Before she made herself
keep walking. Passing for again, she spotted fresh writing on
the manifest sheets in her hand. Someone of something was
actively overwriting new names that were populated, curling, and the
parchment her unwritten in a script she didn't recognize. The
date was for today, but the handwriting for her surname
was neat antique Victorian in its flourish. The older conductor
reappeared in each loop, but his words grew less. Cursp
keep saying it he and toned, then with the jerk
of his chin, or you'll lose it. I've've lost it
all at once. Out beyond the window, the illusion of
outside broken, she glimpsed a mass of identical carriages ghosting
passed on parallel tracks. The cars were transparently layered atop
one another, like tracing paper, with silhouettes of shifting passengers
stuck midaction. Just as suddenly the image collapsed, returns to
walt glass, framing only a smear of tunnel wall that
never ended. Celeste pressed on, heart pounding. The layers of
reality disintegrated, and with them her assumption of external order.
A shape punched in the corner, hands pressed to face
the veteran ticket agent, gray haired, uniformous gear, Aye watering.
You see it, don't you? He gasped, I remember the
first vanishings. People jerked when pranks has jumped off the
side tracks that went on schedule them. We stopped laughing.
Now when the manifestoes wrong, everyone's at risk. He pressed
a batter ticket into her palm, fingers strong. This is
the station that never shows up twice if you're forced
to get off, don't stay on. Keep them saying your name,
make a writt and spoken stuck between every line. It's
the only thing. His eyes rolled. He wept, openly griefed,
solving him even as he handed her the slip. Don't
forget yourself. She nodded and sure if sund would carry.
As reality collapsed, she talked a ticket with the rest
every censer tastes. The seams of the night were splitting.
The train jerked hard, left then right. Passengers slid along
their benches. The intercom sputtered and spat, now repeating list
of names, some familiar, others not. As she fumbled to
her seat, she heard her own marin Celeste Jonas by ours,
Matilda Entry, deletion, Entry, deletion of the names resunded with
neither warmth nor malice, only the blank neutrality of censored history.
Lights failed again. The carriage stretched impossibly long, was heated,
then snapped back to place with wrenching speed, like film
edited by an unseene hand. Celes wrestled her notebook open
and began tearing Liz pages, scribbling her name and those
of still remaining passengers in frantic, leaping strokes, shoving them
into pockets, passing them to Jonahs, to the night worker.
Others joined in the weight of communal fear forcing motion.
The world outside the train was now simply dark, a vacuum.
The trains interior poles with an internal unstable logic of flicker,
a pause, a slip, and a whole seat to word
of reality could disappear. Names cap reappearing in her notebook
that she swore she hadn't writ Nora Arnold, Evenwick. The
system was no longer hiding its operations from the staff corridor.
The older conductor staggered into the car, his arms rigid
with manifests. They told us this would happen, but not
how to fix it. Those experiments they did in the
aid his memory, tess presence mapping, but it was always
about the numbers. A system got hungry and started balancing itself.
He raged, trembling, celes, press closer, force, urgent, what experiments.
He opened a bat of folder, scattering faded polaroids and
staple menois on to the service table. Phoenix trands confidential
stamped heavily cross the top. I found this years ago.
They tried training the system to keep perfect records by
switching from manual to digital. When the code broke, the
algorithm started substituting people for its balance sheet. One name in,
one name out, no matter if that meant erasing someone
who still walked the corridors. Celus scan the memos. The
phrase is stung in memory, accurring procedures unreliable. It tests
subject tracking, failed, passenger retention error. The ghost slots propagate
after manifesting. Her reflection warped in the surface of the table,
as unsteady as the facts. There's a way to anchor yourself, sometimes,
the conductor whispered, motioning to a tattered slip of paper
tape to the last page of the ledger. But the
system has to see you. You have to be named, named, named,
again by every one, paper, voice, digital. If even one
fails you, you start to slip. Nobody can keep up.
The ghost slots always fill. Celeste felt her throat tighten,
the cold pinch of realization setting in. How did it start?
Was there ever a fix? He shook his head, defeated,
Management buried everything, the algorithm still running, part digital, part
hand corrected by terrified staff. No way to turn it off.
They tried back in ninety two, but even firing everyone
on the line didn't stop the failures. The system just
assimilated whatever records it could find and kept a writing.
Celaste gathered the memos, sliding them into a sleeve in
her bag. She checked again the manifest, the notebook pages,
the batter tickets, the photos. Her own name repeated, spelled
in every style she could muster, But increasingly she wondered
if she'd missed something er roule, a detail, a contradiction
in the pattern. Her phone flushed an urgent message from
rosa live audio feed glitching herein needs yours, repeating out
of order with others, social accounts posting your live updates
of getting deleted their titles, even upload backups everywhere you can.
Celus nodded to herself, panic scraping at her resolve, she
started the recorder, setting it to transmit life to every
open connection, email, cloud, drive, streaming link. She dictated her
name on leap Celeste Marin Red Line Express number forty three,
A still present, still present. The carriage structure vibrated the
ethic with the staccato grawl of data failing to form memory.
Jonas desperate, scrolled and new on his hand, now rowin
blotch with ink. The coffee cup from earlier, she seized
it and blurted name, writer, her name, say it, keep
it alive. Other passengers copied her in a spreading storm
of fear, marking arms, wrists, faces, scraps of anything left.
A pulse rippled through the train, a system wide gasp,
A sensation of breathing, not from lungs, but from the
collective action of retinnaines, a stubborn assertion of prisons. A
chime blaired, then stagger, then blurred again. The intercom was
speaking the tinian slurud final stopped, terminalt, All manifest corrections
in process remain remain remain. A cold, sucking hush gripped
the car. The air pressed around Celest as if the
train itself for a scent of resistance. She rose, voice
raised but measured, inviting all eyes, name yourself, write it
down anywhere you can. She scrolled each passenger's name, passing
the notebook. Jonas mirrored, her lips clumsy with exhaustion, jonahs Allan,
Jomas Allen, jonahs Allan. Another passenger collapsed, sobbing. Please remember me,
Gina Delare of twenty four, Cincinnati. Her word cut shot
in the next blink. Her seat was vacant, her name
already fading from Celeste Nobeok. The tension reached breaking, seats
flickered between full and empty, whendow glass became mirrors, doors
replaced with blank wall, as though the layout itself was
being edited in real time. Celese couldn't trust any direction.
Her heart thundered with the recognition that at any instant,
she too could become one of the absent, all memory
and substance bleached away by the trained ceaseless need for
equilibrium with purpose, celestore outpage after page and taped them
to her skin arm's chest, even declaring written names like Arma.
Jonas followed, passing scraps to others. Some watch dazed, but
a hand felected, blank eyed, muttering their own credentials into
bout it. Cell phones pressed against their ears as if
that alone might tether them. The well creuse look with
a reality like the tension before blackout, and even the
sound of her own voice took on a furness that chilter.
The audio recorder pinged, live feed interrupted, attempting reconnect names
and progress mirroring celested. The digital overlay lagged, blending together
the registration of now, then, and almost. Celeste staggered toward
the staff door, nobe crazed recorder, blurring her own name
and those of others. The doors yond open. She stumbled
into the staff lounge, where the old conductor and the
remaining attendant gathered in a huddle. Ear name, Celeste barked,
say it and write it down. She thrust a pen
into the conductor's hand. A beat pass and then, as
if understanding the conductor, the attendant, and celestiagether filled a
blank workship. Names, rooms of names poured onto paper. Celeste,
Jonas Arnold Wick, Matilda, Gina de Laro, bios, each spelling
and variation, dated and timed, inscribed in triplicate. The intercom's
voice warbled, It began to speak over itself, erasure, correction, manifestremy.
Then the system broke, the announcements dissolving into a course
of names were recited in ol tambers and registers, each overlapping,
some frantic, some flat. Jonah's is in stained handshook as
he wrote Jonahs Allen Jonas, Allen, Jonah's Allan again and again.
Celeste seized the moment. She lounged for battered service terminal
above the conductor's desk, imputing every name she remembered, pressing
submit after each, then holding down the audio record of
for a live transmission, hoping that signal somewhere without lost
de lesia. The lights flayed, then guttered. The train shotter, groaned,
and for a split second, stopped in complete electric silence.
The air was sucked out, then snapped back again. Everything
reformed sound, color, gravity, Just as the morning light grew
full and golden, folding hard through the trains east facing windows.
Somewhere outside, brake squealed. The station platform rolled into view
boxy and underwhelming rows of glass doors blinking in the sun.
The train led out along terminal exail overhead, the inter
calm chineda this time just a bland recorded greeting walking
to central terminal, Please collect all belongings. The passage connecting
their carriage through the platform opened by degrees. A reluctant
jaw cless, slims felt and stuck, fluid and boneless. The
duffel bag was still in her lap, its contents slightly
scattered but in diminished. The notebook battered and tattooed with
overlapping signatures, bulged from her jacket. She moved as a
f underwater, guiding Jonas and the night worker before her,
each still muttering names and clutching torn coffee cups scrolled
with ink. Staffs warned the platform confusion painting everything a
ledge between disbelief and panic. Police and security weeded at
the cut drawn by some half interpreted Grays's message. A
woman shoved a microphone that Celeste questions barely formed, teeth
bared as of trying to buy frusatic names registered on
no official look. One officer studded manifest sheets fronning half
these seats. No once here you lost how many? Celeste
preston no book into his hands. They were here? The
system your records, they made them disappear. Her voice sounded crouchy, unfamiliar,
as if she were telling a board story. Staff swept
the train's aisles, retrieving duffel bags, empty cups, torn papers,
frowning each time an inventory came up. Short clipboards exchanged hands,
but names started vanishing even as they spoke quick gina
I told they each spoken less, certainly, each with a
hollow sound. She scanned the faces for survivors. Janas hovered
beside her, muttering constantly. Others blowed at the edge of attention,
as if each glance risked unraveling them still further. The
media pressed in phones and lenses at the ready. When
Celeste tried to play her audio, only static emerge, a
thicket of hissing names punctuated by holes. Uploaded scans wavered
in the cloud, appearing for moments before vanishing. Her editors
tax promised faith, but her own account's g clitched post
deleted records, trim kneeling stead on arrival, his skin steale,
sticky with scold signatures, felt raw and defenseless. She blinked,
as if fighting to keep the present from slipping side rays.
Reality seemed to flicker when she let herself go. Still
like the train's presence remained in her peripheral vision, Celeste
realized survival was possible, but only marginally so. The police
cataloged the Duffel's contents, dismissing the ledgers outdated staff material.
No one could fully remember which ticket's match which bodies.
The paperwork, like the train's memory, was already starting to dissolve.
She stood on the edge of the world she had
just barely escaped, and understood without relief, that not every
wind closes cleanly, and some stories fight hard as to
remain unridden. That knowledge pressed upon her as hard as
any name, refusing to let her go. A week, a day,
perhaps an hour after her escape, celest mail was cluttered
open with a sound too resolute for chance. Inside lane
a marked envelope edges trumpolts, mirrored with a faint gray thumbprint.
With dread hard fingers, She pried it open, breath caught
in her chest. Within she found a single torn scrap
of manifest paper at the edges, yellow and powdery with
age across its surface. Her name was written in three
distinct hands, printed once in fresh blue wink, once in
antique cursor once in a child's hard block letters. Each
instance was crossed her anew wet ink, one slash for
each frosion, and below a date for the coming month.
Prussure built inside us skull, a schisterere memory shivering out
of reach. She looked to her own reflection in the hallways,
glass familiar but paper. Then her voice, hurried through her
own recorder, sounded diffused, as if trickling from a distance.
Images flickered in the periphery, faces, once memorable, now too
featureless to trost. The realization closed in, like water rising
in a sealed room. The train ats roughnous ledger of
the old, broken system. They were not finished, nor even pause.
She had survived the cycle, but the next had already
been scheduled. She had survived the cycle, but the next
had already been scheduled. The wall, pressing on her and
softened by daylight, ought the shuffle of commuters at her
apartment building's entrance. The envelope, flimsy as any piece of
loss mail, quivered between her fingers. It smudged and go
already leaving flex on her thumb. She dropped the scrap
onto her kitchen table. Hot, drumming with attention that sleep
couldn't blunt. For days after the train, her consciousness felt patchy,
as if she viewed her own movements from a delay.
Walking through her building, she caught herself inventing Aliva's subtle reinforcement,
spoken under her breath, checking her reflection as if chasing
after the trace of familiarity before it too faded. Celestece
phone in one hand, notes and photographs fan across the
counter where she first outlined her approach to the red
line months before. She tried again and again to reach
the other's jonas, her only companion from the final carriage,
had answered once, voice thready with exhaustion, now wake up,
thinking I'm still on board. I don't know if this
call even counts. You remember me, right? And then nothing.
No responses to text or emails, as social feed cut
off mid sentence, as though the world's memory were still
catching up to the trains. Her own posts on the
vanishing manifest were a lot of vanisht altogether, sometimes public,
sometimes scrub from me backeys. Within minutes, she emailed her editor,
attaching every last recording, scam page, photo, an annotated timeline
She owned the response came hours later, a curt almost
neutral received any confirmation. This is all new material proof,
chain of custody. Aaronmux collapsed for five minutes after Yasende.
It thinks it's a glitch. The story, it seemed protected itself.
Nothing about it remains stable. Names cumbled, and once even
the headline she drafted for the chronicle reverted in her
own drafts to blankfield. It was to haunting. It was
a malfunction, a bureaucratic sabotage of causality with paperwork as
the weapon. Each time Celeste replayed the last hours aboard,
she found new absences. Matil descend on the Duffel, the
shop tang of peppermint gone Jonas is heavy footfall in
memory Muda. Thenning, she called local police in the city
where she disembarked. But do you have any outstanding missing
persons cases from the Red line last week? The detective paused,
shuffled something at their desk. Don't run that route anymore,
Think you mean a different line. Maybe speak to transport.
Then static call ended her fingers wich to search for
any official acknowledgment of the train's systematic Erasia maintenance up
bit a digitized member and HA complained about the system,
but each attempt was like digging in water. Even digging
into public records the Federal Real Authorities Database Social Security
Deathless yielded cold query errors or redirected her into recurssive
search loops. The deeper she pressed, the more fragmented she became.
Her work station lacked screens, flickering with browser tabs that
closed on their own, rosa her tile as euch Friend
kept trying work arounds. He scanned the manifest try printing
all at once, then signed your name over them before bed.
If you disappear, I'll send these everywhere. Celess implied, but
the nervous smile didn't. Lost. An hourl later, one print
out had partially blurred, smudging her own name to grayvoid.
It was not enough. Her apartment phone rang an unfamiliar number.
The silence on the other end press for acknowledgment than
a stranger's voice, slow, deliberate imesse marin, this is central
terminal security. He left a bag in our lost and
found no identification inside, marked with the ticket stubb and lists.
Please bear rify ownership. Celeste fumbled for words. Yes, that's mine.
I'll collected it, but they asked for bethet, middle name, lost,
known address, as if confident nothing about her would match
their records. Later at the station, the bag was gone
from Lost and found. The clerk peered at her skepticism
painted beneath polite professional concern. Someone else signed for it,
showed ID said they were here for ARCAV retrieval. I'm sorry,
we have no footage of the handover. Must have been
during the system refresh. She pressed, what did they look like?
He hesitated, I honestly don't recall. There was someone in
the lobby, but I can't picture their face. Strange right.
Solictood on the platform for long minutes, feeling as exposed
in a nancode as the name she tried to save.
The overhead board flickered with a schedule, no sign of
the red line, not even in the archive arrivals, not
even as a ghosted slot waiting to be filled. She
listened to the announcements, half expecting her own name to
be called, not as a rival or departure, but as
a correction to a list. The air shattered when she
tried to recount the night, her voice catching drought, closing
over basic facts. She worried her own recollections would undue
themselves if spoken without reinforcement. At Rose's insistence, she began
leaving herself reminders, scraps of paper on the fridge, c
lest you are on the red lion, don't trust gaps.
Alarm set to ping her with old audio logs, her
own image in the bathroom mirror, muttering her full name
in the half dock, but the world seen designed to
reverude these efforts. Once she retrieved her note, but only
to find pages gorolled in her hand that she couldn't remember, writing,
lists of station ames, times, lists of disappearances, with question
marks spiraling into nonsense. Some one herself had written, if
oblivion has protocol, it is bureaucratic. She forced herself to
write again, her true name, the date, her address, anchoring
her physically. Some nights, she will convince the window would
reveal a train pausing under sodium lamps, silent doors half
open to receive her. In those moments, the small private terrors,
her name felt paper thin, and everything in her apartments
seen as interbstantial as a discarded ticket. Then came a
fresh envelope, this time left on her doormat the handwriting
on the front was stately upright inside nothing but a
photo of the red Land stationary herceat number, her name
circled three times in thick ink with a single phrase
pen beneath scheduled for adjustment. The script mashed one of
the older manifest hands, the looping historical script. Celest dread
tipped into fury. She redoubled her efforts not to uncover
so much as to survive. Calls to her old contacts
and oppressed to librarians, to railway employee unions. Most conversations
spun in circle's blank surprise, polite confusion, gentle deflection. One
elderly union rep lawn retired, lowered his voice when she
asked Redline thought they finally buried the story. Lost more
ticket clerks and porters over the years, and I care
to count. We used to say station logs had a
life of their own. Corrections purring im Penny didn't recognize
some foot never came back from a midnight run. His
voice cracked into static, the cold dropping before she could
ask more. A day later, she received a direct message
no sender, a scan of a manifest with her name
Marin Celeste start at the bottom. Attached was a simple sentence.
The only way to hold is to be named by others.
Again and again, there was no reply possible. She tried
one more at preach a livestream into view with Rose
on a public form podcas names ground us celas said,
forcing the words on to the feed. The world and
its requisant as stable as we assume. If you remember
me at all, speak my name, writ it down, keep
it in your system. Some stories will erase you if
you leave them on, witnessed Rosa nodded her own note
Celeste name the red line her home address hit visibly
beside her laptop in the shop. For that ire, Celeste
felt slightly safer, held in the mutually observed spaces of
language and network. But next morning the interview had been
pulled for inaccurate Medata search results for the name. She
catalog dropped out of engine indixes, even post saved in
her own arcif were corrupted, reduced static and blank page captures.
She was a survivor only so long as someone else
could call her back. Only until somebody else needed to
remember the story more than the machinery needed to forget her.
The cycle will claim her as soon as neglect bureaucracy
by accidental omission allowed the new manifest scrap blined with
her name crossed out in all the hands history could muster.
Sat on her desk heaviestone, Celeste did what she could.
She photographed it, mailed the image to every contact, pasted
her name online and for others to find, even stitched
a patch into her jacket Merryn block on white as stark.
As her last hope. She wrote a final insistent message,
signed her name a dozen times, and whispered it into
her recorder. But outside, footsteps moved up the building's hall,
and the train's itinerary, weaving through paper, code and recollection,
ran ahead of her, Indifferent to her preparations. The well
was not finished with revisions, and as the future press close,
names blurred, reality thinned, and only the stubborness trace of
her identity insisted on belonging to the living. Then the
silence of her apartment as duskwelled outside, so lest read
her name once more aloud and waited for the world
to decide if it would let her stay. And that
is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will
see you in the next one.