Chapter 8: Anti-Phantom Android Development Laboratory (Part 2)
“So, this is what happened, huh…”
Niijima Yukari muttered as she looked at Arisa’s battered and suspended body. Both arms and her lower half had been removed and were undergoing separate repairs. The synthetic skin had been peeled off, and the artificial muscles were being tested one by one—any faulty parts were replaced. Her torso hadn’t been touched yet; the synthetic skin remained torn, exposing the muscle fibers and skeletal frame underneath.
As usual, her head was placed on a desk and connected to a PC.
“She fell into a river. Apparently, it was a fall from at least 40 meters up.”
The one answering was Aoki Daisuke—a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree. To Yukari, he was a senior. Due to his large build, he was often tasked with manual labor. With the professor currently absent, he was the one analyzing Arisa’s data logs.
“You’ve really settled into the lab, Niijima. Even though you’re not officially assigned here yet.”
“Eh, but it’s fine, right?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
Though Niijima came and went from the Shirakawa Lab as if it were natural, technically, she was still an outsider.
“By the way, what happened to Kaizu Rieko-san? She fell together with Arisa, didn’t she?”
“She vanished. Cause unknown.”
“Whoa.”
The one responding was Arisa’s severed head. Yukari still hadn’t gotten used to it.
“Vanished?”
“To protect her, I held her above me and adjusted my orientation mid-air so that I would land on my back. However, after we exited the darkness, she was nowhere to be seen.”
“D-Don’t tell me… Ms. Kaisu was a ghost anomaly too?”
“That possibility is low—approximately 12%.”
“12%… Then, what’s my percentage?”
“8%.”
“Hmm…”
It was an awkward number. The fact that it wasn’t zero was a little unsettling. Did it mean anyone could potentially be an anomaly?
“Still, this time… you only got back by sheer luck, right? You jumped into the darkness and just happened to make it back. What if you hadn’t?”
“That would’ve been a huge loss. Arisa’s unit alone costs upwards of a hundred million yen.”
“That much?!”
“The repair cost this time alone is enough to make your eyes pop.”
“Whoa… Where does that kind of budget come from?”
“Rumor has it the professor blackmailed some company with their secrets to get it.”
“Ha… That’s a joke, right?”
“Well, actually, we’re partnered with Amiya Robotics—the company that developed those cleanup robots. Professor Shirakawa was involved in that project too. He also supposedly holds a ton of patents. So yeah, I doubt funding is ever really a problem for him.”
“I see…”
Despite Professor Shirakawa’s eccentric behavior—like developing an android for anomaly investigation—he really was amazing, Yukari thought again. Otherwise, there’s no way he could’ve created something like an “anomaly-investigating android.”
“…By the way, there’s something I want to ask.”
Aoki said as he typed something on the keyboard, then turned to her with a more serious tone.
“What did the professor say about that abandoned village?”
“Eh?”
Until now, Aoki had been speaking while staring at the monitor, but with this question, he looked Yukari directly in the eyes with a grave expression.
“The reason he halted the investigation.”
“Well… because it no longer showed up in satellite photos, and since the village had disappeared, the investigation couldn’t proceed…”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
He turned back to the monitor.
“The whole lead came from Kurahi’s tweet. We used the attached photo to pinpoint the location. But even when we checked the same spot on Google Earth, the village wasn’t visible.”
“…What?”
“Google Earth updates every few months to half a year. There was about a week’s delay between Kurahi’s post and when we discovered it. It probably got updated during that time and the village vanished. Either way, the investigation was based on the assumption that it had already disappeared.”
“Then… does that mean the village might still be there, regardless of the satellite imagery?”
“Exactly.”
“Then why did the professor call off the investigation…?”
“I don’t know. Arisa didn’t question it either, so maybe he warned her in advance or withheld the information…”
“Why not just ask Arisa-chan?”
“She’s sleeping right now.”
That’s when Yukari realized the earlier command Aoki had entered must’ve put Arisa into sleep mode.
“The professor seemed to know something about that village in advance. And he’s hiding that from us. I suspect something fishy.”
“Fishy… Like what kind of conspiracy?”
“No idea. But I don’t think he’d give us a straight answer even if we asked him directly.”
So that’s why Aoki was trying to investigate discreetly.
“Also, the anomaly-detection AI itself is full of mysteries. It’s something the professor developed on his own.”
“You don’t know how it works?”
“The mechanism itself isn’t that complicated. It’s deep learning—integrating image, audio, language, and smell recognition to reach a conclusion. But it would’ve required training data.”
“Training?”
“It’s like how you teach AI to identify cats—you prepare correct answers like ‘this is a cat,’ ‘this is not.’ The AI compares new data against those examples to learn distinguishing features.”
“So the anomaly-detection AI also had a trainer…”
“Niijima, do you… actually believe anomalies are real?”
“That’s…”
It was a hard question to answer. After all, this was a lab that conducted research on the premise that anomalies do exist. But even setting that aside, Yukari’s thoughts were in disarray. She’d already witnessed two events that could only be described as anomalies.
“I didn’t believe in them.”
“Right? Me neither. Any reasonable adult wouldn’t. Even if you like horror or ghost stories, not many people truly believe in them. But the professor was different. He knew. He knew even before this project began. That’s why he was able to launch something like this with such conviction.”
“To be honest, it’s not so much that I still don’t believe—it’s more that I don’t want to believe. How about you, Senior?”
“Pretty much the same. I’ve only seen what could be considered evidence of anomalies twice. And even then, they’re not exactly decisive. I can’t help but wonder if we’ve missed something... or if there’s still a rational explanation we just haven’t found yet. It feels like being shown a really well-done magic trick.”
“Exactly.”
The abandoned village still left a haze of confusion. They had retrieved video footage and some food samples, but nothing they could publicly present as definitive proof of the paranormal. The same was true for the train. Strange footage was captured, but the retrieved items could easily be written off as lost belongings.
“But this time, we do have physical evidence. So I looked into it.”
He displayed a list on the monitor—statistical data written in a spreadsheet.
“Japan has about 80,000 missing persons reported per year. Though, close to 80% are found within a week. On a prefectural level, that’s about 1,000 cases per year. That’s two to three cases per day. Now, the day in question—January 16th, the day Arisa investigated the train—there were twenty missing persons reports filed with the prefectural police.”
“...What does that mean?”
“Arisa recovered a total of thirty-two items from the train.”
“And what about it? That’s a pretty big difference in numbers.”
“Among those items, four were found to be quite old—over fifty years, at least. So subtracting those four, we’re left with twenty-eight.”
“???”
“Assuming about three of the twenty missing cases are unrelated, we’re left with seventeen. That’s a discrepancy of eleven. Twenty cases in a single day is extremely unusual. Coincidence—or not?”
“Um, what do Arisa’s recovered items have to do with the missing persons?”
“Among the items—phones, watches, books, wallets, cardholders—some can be traced back to their owners. The clearest one is this business card.”
He pointed to the items lined up neatly on a blue sheet, each tagged with a number, as if displayed by the police as evidence. At first glance, they appeared completely ordinary.
“Fuda Kouei?”
“And here.”
He then displayed a public missing persons notice from the prefectural police website:
Name: Fuda Kouei
Gender: Male
Age: 46 (at time of disappearance)
Height: 168 cm
Weight: 65 kg
Clothing: Gray suit, blue tie
“Eh? Wait, wh-wh-what...?”
“I know, right? How are we supposed to interpret this? According to an interim report from a private investigator we hired, he went missing more than half a year ago. But the missing persons report was only filed recently, on January 16th.”
“That makes even less sense...”
“No one noticed he was missing.”
A chill ran down her spine—as if they had opened a door that should never have been touched.
Could something like this really happen? Should it be allowed to happen?
“Then... what about the other items?”
“Electronic devices like phones were damaged. Data recovery was impossible. There are a few more items that could be used to identify the owners... but none have been publicly listed yet.”
Yet. Meaning it’s likely that the remaining items are also connected to missing persons. That even the items they didn’t recover—those left on the train—might be traces of missing people. If they hadn’t retrieved those items, no one would have noticed anyone was missing at all.
“...Huh? But isn’t something off? Mr. Fuda went missing six months ago, right? But Ms. Kaisu... she disappeared two years ago... Um, so, why...?”
“Why didn’t she become a ‘lost item’?”
“Become a lost item.” A strange way to put it. But it was the only way that fit.
Those who board the train leave only their belongings behind, dissolving into nothing. Their very presence, their memory, vanishes completely. That’s the only interpretation that makes sense.
“I feel like the key to solving this anomaly lies in that area. Probably, their sense of time differs from that of humans.”
“So their perception is different... which means the laws of physics don’t apply the same way?”
Honestly, if the entire lab were conspiring to fake all this, that would make it easier to swallow. Right now, it felt like her footing was crumbling. She didn’t know what to believe anymore.
“As for the train... are we going to investigate it again?”
“Yes. We encountered it once over a twelve-day test period. That means the reproducibility is high.”
“I see. So... which station was it, anyway? The station name’s blacked out in the text logs... Was that to prevent people from imitating the experiment? Or maybe to protect the station’s reputation? Or just for dramatic effect?”
Aoki didn’t answer. He clicked his mouse a few times, seemingly searching for something. After a moment, he gave up and looked away from the monitor, frowning with his hand on his chin.
“Huh. Wait. What station was it?”