Would getting hit by a train hurt, after all?
Sitting on a bench on the platform, dozing off while waiting for the train, Rieko Kaisu found herself thinking such things. The winter chill made her thoughts even darker and heavier.
This station was the terminus. Even if she jumped onto the tracks, the train would already be braking. If she failed to die, it wouldn’t just end with pain—she’d have to live on missing an arm or a leg. If she was going to die, she wanted it to be instantaneous. These kinds of thoughts filled her mind. Forced to work overtime until nearly the last train, she was utterly exhausted.
And then, suddenly, she woke up.
Her brain refused to comprehend the situation. She was on the station platform, seated on the bench, her breath white in the air. The time—she hurriedly checked her watch.
And then she realized: it was “over.”
“You’ve got to be kidding…”
She had missed the train, even though she had been waiting for it on the platform. She cursed herself for being so often distracted and mistake-prone. And yet, it was such an unbelievable blunder. Her blood ran cold. Her mind swirled with irrational hopes—was it a mistake? Could time be rewound somehow?
“...Guess I’ll just die.”
If she lay down on the tracks, eventually she’d be run over. She had just been napping moments ago; she could sleep anywhere. She was abnormally sleepy. Even going home felt like a hassle. With that, she started walking, unsteadily.
“...?”
The next time she opened her eyes, she was inside a train.
Unlike the cold bench earlier, the seat she sat on was warm. Clatter, clatter. The rhythmic shaking made her drowsy again. Her head felt heavy. Her stomach churned.
She’d had a terrible dream—or so she thought.
Apparently, she had boarded the train. Why did she dream such a thing? Still feeling a strange sense of discomfort, she lifted her head.
“Huh?”
There were no other passengers. That, in itself, wasn’t strange—this time of night, this train rarely had many riders. Clatter, clatter. But instead of passengers, “objects” swayed in the seats.
Bags. Smartphones. Laptops. Hats. Handkerchiefs. Books. Earphones. Glasses.
Lined up in perfect intervals, all across the train. Too uniform to be dismissed as forgotten items—this was bizarre.
“What... is this?”
Was she still dreaming? She checked her watch. The time was 3:20 AM.
“What?”
The last train usually ran around midnight.
There shouldn’t be any trains operating at this hour.
“Wait—did I actually miss the train after all…?”
Her heart pounded as she fully awoke.
Clatter, clatter. She stood, holding onto the handrail, and started searching for the LED display. She wanted to know where the train was.
But she couldn’t read it.
The route maps, ads, electronic displays—while they looked like Japanese, none of the characters were readable.
She looked outside the window. It was pitch black. Her own tired face reflected back like a mirror—nothing else. No city lights, no stars, not even the moon. She had taken the last train home countless times. This view was impossible.
And then, Rieko Kaisu realized another critical inconsistency.
When boarding a train, she always chose the corner seat by the door, if available. She remembered vaguely that she had done so this time too.
Which meant this was reversed.
She normally took a downbound train to go home. But this was upbound.
She had boarded an upbound train from a terminal station.
“Did I… accidentally board a non-service train…?”
Except, non-service trains don’t open their doors. At the very least, it would say “Out of Service.” She remembered it said something like “To ○○.” But she couldn’t recall what it was.
Nothing made sense. Her memories didn’t align. Regardless, this was not normal.
“I need to find the conductor or the driver…”
What should she say? That she was exhausted and got on the wrong train without realizing? Maybe it would be less embarrassing to claim she was drunk. Her heart raced painfully.
“Front? Or back?”
She rode the train almost every day, yet she realized she didn’t know basic things. Where was the driver’s cabin? Likely at one end. She decided to head toward the front, holding onto the handrails as she moved.
“...Huh? Eh?!”
When she turned back after changing cars, she saw human figures—through the glass, the car she had just been in was packed with passengers.
She rushed back—but again, it was empty. Only objects lined the seats.
“A dream? A hallucination? Am I losing my mind…?”
Sometimes people mistake dreams for reality. But not when they're awake. Her head spun, but this was real. Maybe some elaborate prank? But she couldn’t think of any reason why someone would do this. Just imagining the malice behind it made her tremble.
No one was in the forward car either. Struggling under growing dread, Rieko Kaisu made her way toward the frontmost car.
…
On weekdays, the last train on the JR ■■ Line inbound route arriving at ■■ Station—the final stop—is at 11:54 PM. If you wait on the empty platform after seeing off that last train, unnoticed by any station staff, a four-car train will arrive at 2:03 AM. This train is not marked as “Out of Service” and instead continues past the supposed terminal station. Anyone who witnesses this train is drawn to board it, and they are never seen again.
This is the summary of an urban legend associated with this station.
Like many flimsy ghost stories, it contains a contradiction: "the account cannot be conveyed." In other words, all individuals involved or who have witnessed the phenomenon are said to have died or disappeared, which makes it impossible for such a story to be passed down. If no one ever returns, then who told the tale?
Railway-related supernatural legends have existed since the early Meiji era, around the time railways began spreading across Japan. There were tales of ghost trains or phantom locomotives, said to be disguises of fox or tanuki spirits. In that context, this particular story seemed to be just another “common,” “traditional” ghost story.
As a result, the research lab's consensus was that the story lacked credibility. However, the anomaly-detection AI had a different assessment. Even with urban legends, rumors, or ghost stories, it sometimes relied on an inexplicable sense or a kind of sixth sense in its judgment.
This story was determined to be “suspicious” with an 81% probability.
And that judgment proved accurate. With an 81% "positive" rating, the anomaly-detection AI was able to gather feedback from this real case and further improve its precision.
2:03 AM, the train arrived. It was not a registered model with the railway company. The design was a grotesque patchwork, seemingly cobbled together from multiple train types. However, unless one were a dedicated train enthusiast, it would look completely ordinary to the average person. Because the “train” itself was the subject of this investigation, Arisa had preinstalled an extensive library of railway-related knowledge for this mission.
"To Kurihashi"
Arisa also possessed knowledge of all national railway maps. No such station name exists.
The doors opened. Arisa boarded the fourth car.
“Departing now. Please stand clear of the closing doors.”
At that moment, her communications were cut off. She recognized she had entered an “otherworld.”
The interior was heated to 24°C. The only sounds were from the train’s motion and the air conditioning. There were no other visible passengers, but seats were filled with items. A ballpoint pen, wristwatch, tablet PC, school bag, floor cushion, handball, mask—various objects. One item per seat. As listing them all would take up too much space, a separate record was created.
She picked up one of them: a smartphone. It did not power on. Assuming the battery was dead, she connected it to her own power source and booted it up.
The lock screen appeared—but instead of displaying the time, it was distorted with incomprehensible symbols. Even so, the user interface remained unchanged. Bypassing the four-digit passcode was easy. However, the contents were similarly unreadable. The photo data was severely corrupted. It might be possible to recover the images using big data tools, but she had none on-site. No identifying info on the owner could be extracted. She recorded the screen and stored the phone in her bag as evidence.
Right after that, a man appeared—sitting in the seat where the smartphone had been. His head was bowed, muttering something in a low voice. Of course, Arisa could hear him.
“Ayu soaked, but that’s for the wetting, right Amisuke caught it they wouldn’t two weeks ago...”
It sounded like Japanese but was grammatically nonsensical. Even for a highly intelligent AI with extensive linguistic data, interpreting this on a standalone system was extremely difficult. She merely recorded the utterance and postponed analysis. Resources are finite. The ability to make such instant judgments is what defines a truly powerful AI.
Before her lay a vast unknown. More data would allow better decisions. Arisa grabbed the man’s chin and lifted his face for identification.
The man had no face. His hair was short and curly, his age estimated to be in his thirties. His clothes were a gray shirt and navy jeans—that much she could verify.
But his face could not be recognized. It was as if it had been distorted or melted into noise—no eyes, nose, or mouth could be discerned. Moreover, despite having his head lifted, he didn’t respond. Like a malfunctioning robot with weak AI, he just kept mumbling nonsense.
In short: an unmistakable abnormality.
“Return it.”
Amid the incoherent murmurs, that phrase occasionally surfaced. As she continued collecting items, more humanoid figures appeared. Each repeated similar phrases:
“Give it back.”
“Please return it.”
“Put it back.”
“Don’t take it.”
“Stop taking it.”
Whether this was coincidence or not, Arisa extracted the most frequently spoken words. After “return it,” the next most common set of words related to family—but even then, “return it” and its variants occurred over twice as often.
In other words, removing the items has meaning. She applied this test across multiple seats. Since her bag didn’t have enough space to collect everything, she prioritized items likely to contain the most information, selecting the rest at random.
The rule was consistent: when an item was taken, a “passenger” appeared. The "passengers" included men, women, children, the elderly, and even apparent foreigners. Comparing their features with a statistically average commuter list across Japan would likely show a match rate over 90%—though this was only an estimate without hard data.
Finally, Arisa reached Car No. 1.
This car was clearly different from cars 2 through 4.
There were no items on the seats—except for one.
A woman was sleeping there. Using her down jacket as a blanket, she lay stretched across the bench. A pair of glasses rested atop her abdomen. On the floor were discarded leather shoes, three empty bento containers, three PET bottles, and eight empty beer cans.
The anomaly-detection AI assessed her with a 12% probability of being a ghost or specter—in other words, she was highly likely to be human.
“Huh? …Eh?”
The woman stirred. Her sleep had probably been light. Arisa’s presence had roused her.
“Whuh? Eh? …Huhhh?!”
Rubbing her eyes and wiping her drool, the woman stared in shock.
“A person?! Wha—uh, who are you?!”
“I am an android. Arisa, asset of the Shirakawa Laboratory at Konshiro University.”
The woman introduced herself to Rieko Kaisu.