In this issue: Sachin Benny’s new story describes how a complex international treaty makes it possible to operate a single luxury train from Lisbon to Singapore. Out of sight of its delighted passengers, curious practices arnd economies develop around this journey, and remain hidden until an inquisitive device comes along. Plus, last call to apply for the AI Futurama workshop happening next week in Berlin.
Prelude: The Train
The UET-1 stretched nearly a kilometer from nose to tail, its segmented body gleaming under station lights, each car bearing different national and corporate insignia that blurred together as it moved – Chinese characters giving way to Cyrillic lettering, then Latin script, then back again. Steel wheels groaned beneath 4000 tonnes of contradictions – open borders and security checkpoints, welcome mats and retinal scanners – as they rolled across invisible lines drawn by treaties.
The mechanical serpent had been conceived by committees that met in Brussels, Beijing, and a dozen other capitals, each leaving its fingerprints on contradictory clauses and redundant appendices. At the borderlands where empires had once declared their mistrust in millimetres, its wheels were drawn apart or squeezed together, each bogie lifted on hydraulic frames while inspectors looked on with the solemnity of priests at a baptism. At the junctions where power lines altered their temperament, the pantograph dipped, rose again, and found another current – 3000 volts of direct current in one sector, 15,000 alternating in the next, 25,000 in the one beyond, the same wire conducting a dozen different languages of electricity. And in those neglected stretches where wires had never been strung at all – 100 kilometres of steppe here, 50 through jungle there – the train relied on the old compromise, a diesel generator buried in its belly, awakening like a tired, grumbling ox until the catenary reappeared.
Inside, passengers spoke of the train as if it were a hotel with unusually long corridors. There were compartments with padded seats, and dining cars with menus in four languages. Tickets promised seamless travel from Lisbon to Singapore, and some oblivious passengers believed it. They saw uniformed attendants, customs officials who came and went with stamps and scanners, inspectors who whispered in many tongues, and assumed the machine was as simple as the image it projected.
Outside, where the light fell on sidings and forgotten platforms, another population watched the UET-1 pass. Those without tickets – refugees, smugglers, fugitives, nobody’s children – studied the train not for its comfort but for its cracks. To them it was a portal that tempted from a distance – a threshold between worlds that slid tantalizingly past, its windows like keyholes to lives they could glimpse but never enter. They traced its path in chalk signs, in murmured warnings passed from campfire to campfire, in symbols etched where no inspector thought to look. They knew that a train so grand must also have blind spots, and they lived in the hope of slipping through them.
And then there were those who stood between: the railway police, the inspectors in small border towns, whose job it was to keep the fiction intact. They were seldom thanked and rarely noticed, these railway police, and perhaps it was better that way, for their work was to be shadows in the margins. If the passengers thought of them at all, it was only with unease, for the sight of a railway policeman in a carriage corridor meant that the smooth fiction had been broken.
There was Inspector Dobrov, who had perfected the art of waiting in the Irkutsk control room, staring at banks of screens with such patience that colleagues forgot he was present. In Perm, Officer Shishkin paced the edge of the track with the nervous gait of a man half-convinced the facial-recognition system would misidentify him one day. Sergeant Kalin in Omsk carried, in his breast pocket, a collection of confiscated buttons, coins, and fragments of paper that together told the story of people none of the passengers had seen; he called it his museum of the margins, though no one ever asked to visit.
It was a world of margins – of treaties signed but not obeyed, of passengers who belonged and those who did not, of officers who dreamed of boredom and received paperwork instead. It was in this world, where the rails of empire met the cracks of human life, that Detective Pavel Murkin found himself, one fog-soaked morning, assigned a device he did not want, to solve a case that had never quite been closed.
The Detective Who Didn’t Want Trouble
Murkin had spent his entire professional life in a protracted negotiation with the universe over what was an acceptable amount of bother. Some men sought glory, others riches, others the handshakes of ministers and the approving nods of generals. Murkin, by contrast, sought only a modest daily ration of boredom, the kind that could be supplied by a confiscated ham sandwich, and perhaps a scuffle between ticket inspectors lubricated by contraband vodka.
That was why, when given the chance, he had selected the Railway Police post at the Russian border junction on the UET-1 corridor – a place so far removed from the intrigues of the capital that even rumours arrived there already exhausted.
But fate, with its ways of sniffing out men who wish only to be left alone, had other plans. One dreary Monday, when the fog rolled in from the east and settled in the plains, Murkin was volunteered – a verb in the bureaucratic dialect which means “conscripted under the guise of favour” – to trial a new contraption issued from somewhere well above his pay grade.
The device was called the Pono. Its name, chosen by committee in a building far away, was meant to suggest uprightness, balance, and a general improvement in human affairs. In practice it resembled a cross between a pocket-watch, a dictaphone, and an unusually surly monocle. The Pono listened, it recorded, it catalogued, and – so its pamphlet proclaimed – it partnered with the officer in the eternal struggle against the general untidiness of mankind.
Murkin regarded it much as a cat regards a bath: with suspicion, resignation, and the quiet certainty that indignity would follow. For the Pono, though technically still in trial deployment, behaved with the confidence of an institution already fully entrenched. It reminded him of forgotten case numbers from 2018. It recalled the exact sequence of remarks he had made to a customs officer in Minsk three years earlier and suggested he might wish to “revise his tone” in future.
And so Murkin’s cherished life of minor inconveniences was replaced by a daily ordeal of relentless recollection, administered by a machine that treated memory like a blunt instrument. If the ordinary duties of railway policing had once been about keeping the train moving forward, the duties of a Pono-equipped officer seemed more concerned with keeping the past moving forward – dragging every forgotten case and every missing bolt back into the present with the persistence of a tax collector.
It was, Murkin reflected darkly, the exact opposite of what he had hoped for when he accepted this post at the edge of things. He had wanted cases to dissolve into the fog of bureaucratic amnesia, leaving him free to retreat into his private kingdom of crossword puzzles and daydreams. Instead, this infernal machine had made a religion of remembrance, with Murkin as its reluctant altar boy.
When at last Murkin tired of arguing with the Pono – for it was quite capable of sustaining an argument unaided, continually reintroducing points one thought conclusively settled – he discovered that it came furnished with a function described in the manual as “archival browsing.” This, the document assured him, would allow the officer to “engage proactively with unsolved or dormant cases of potential future relevance,” which in plain Russian meant “dig about in dusty cupboards at your own peril.”
Murkin had no intention of engaging proactively with anything. But the day was long, and the fog persisted. So, with the air of a man turning over an old shoe to see whether it contained anything edible, he instructed the Pono to open the archives.
At once the little machine sprang to life – not with any actual sound (it operated in that eerie silence common to all modern devices), but in Murkin’s mind it cleared its throat like a self-satisfied bureaucrat about to unveil some long-forgotten transgression. Case after case paraded before him. The archive was less an index of crimes than a cemetery of half-forgotten bureaucratic disappointments: a missing shipment of H100 silicon chips, an unresolved quarrel over carriage upholstery, a suspicious samovar fire in 2017.
And then, lodged among the trivialities, appeared a name.
Stepan.
The entry was sparse: Occupation: Border runner. Duty: Verification of tickets in disputed jurisdictions. Status: Missing. Last input: “Fog, Irkutsk sector.” Remarks: Inconclusive.
Murkin frowned. A border runner. He had heard of them in training – men and women employed to patrol those sections of the railway where no single authority reigned, where maps were conjecture and laws contradicted one another. Their work was to keep together the fiction that the train was always properly in one place or another, never in the margins between. They were, in their way, practitioners of a kind of legal kintsugi: mending cracks in sovereignty with whatever filings and stamps were at hand, awkwardly stitching together rules where none had existed, so that the line of travel might look unbroken even as it passed over fractures no one wished to acknowledge.
Stepan had vanished long ago, but the record was stubbornly incomplete, neither closed nor pursued. The Pono, with a bright eagerness that Murkin found insulting, asked:
“Would you like me to retrieve sightings?”
“Sightings?” Murkin muttered, already regretting his curiosity.
“Yes. Indications, references, appearances, anomalies. Stepan appears in 14,326 documents across the archive. Would you like them in chronological order, alphabetical order, or order of metaphysical improbability?”
Murkin shut his eyes. The last thing he needed was 14,000 ghosts of a man he had never met. And yet, perhaps because the fog had seeped into his bones, he found himself whispering:
“Chronological.”
And the Pono, obedient as ever, began to speak the name Stepan into the long corridor of memory, summoning echoes from the past that no one had expected to hear again.
Stepan Appears Everywhere and Nowhere
The Pono required no further encouragement. Like a clerk long deprived of inquiry, it poured out documents with the zeal of one who confuses quantity with truth.
A blurred clip flickered on screen: Stepan’s shoulder pressed against a carriage doorframe, his thumb holding down the corner of a comic book page that threatened escape in the wind. His eyes never left the cheap newsprint as passengers bumped past him. In another file, compressed to blocky pixels, he stood knee-deep in snow beside Track 7, breath clouding before him at regular intervals, shoulders curved forward, hands deep in pockets. The timestamp showed he’d been there 40 minutes already. A passenger complaint form from 2017 contained a single line about him: “Conductor refused to hurry despite delay. Tall, thin man. Blinks slowly. Moves as if walking underwater.”
Murkin, who had prepared himself for nothing more than stale manifests and missing-luggage reports, felt a small prickle of curiosity which he quickly smothered with a sigh.
But then the archive began to warp. Alongside these fleeting sketches of the man came files that made no sense at all. A digital record named “Stepan_border check_2015” resolved not into a video but into a recipe for shchi, the cabbage soup of railway canteens. Another document supposedly listing Stepan’s inspection rounds in Irkutsk opened onto a set of instructions for preparing pelmeni with sour cream, annotated with calorie counts. Yet another, marked “Border runner incident – 2019,” contained nothing but three methods for stewing carp, one of them crossed out.
The Pono chirped with untroubled certainty:
“Confidence 94%. All records pertain to Stepan.”
Murkin rubbed his eyes. “You’re telling me a missing border runner is also a cabbage enthusiast and amateur cook?”
“Affirmative. Probability of Stepan’s continued presence in the system: 67.2%. Would you like me to project his next likely appearance?”
“No,” Murkin groaned. “I would like you to stop.”
“Noted. Initiating background monitoring.”
Which meant, of course, that the machine would not stop at all, but would continue its search in secret, like a patrol pacing the same ruined streets again and again, convinced the enemy must still be hiding there
Murkin slumped back. The archive’s parade of recipes and melancholic fragments gave the impression not merely of a man misplaced in the system, but of someone who had disappeared into it like mildew into plaster, seeping out in faint traces without ever forming a picture.
There are men who rise to such circumstances with courage and great wit. Murkin, by contrast, lit a cigarette, stared gloomily at the fog beyond the border, and wished with all his heart that he had never opened the archive at all.
The Pono Compiles a Glossary
It must be understood that Detective Murkin, though not a man of scholarly bent, had nevertheless acquired through sheer persistence of circumstance a certain expertise in the varieties of bureaucratic nonsense that proliferated wherever men and machines were asked to share custody of a record. He was therefore not entirely surprised when the Pono, having rummaged with its usual officious zeal through the corridors of the archive, produced documents which contained less of Stepan and more of Russian cookery. What did cause him momentary pause, however, was the discovery that these recipes – for cabbage broth, pelmeni, and a truly alarming concoction involving stewed carp and tarragon – were not merely random insertions, as one might suspect from a corrupted file, but ornamented with peculiar marginalia.
The shchi was annotated with three dots in a neat triangle, quite unrelated to onions or cabbage. The pelmeni instructions were interrupted by a wavy set of lines that served no didactic purpose, unless one intended to boil the dough in a river. The carp recipe, meanwhile, bore a small circle imperfectly closed, with a little dot at the center.
Now, Murkin was not the sort to find meaning where none existed; he had always prided himself on ignoring the universe’s attempts at symbolism. But even he could not fail to observe that the Pono, whenever confronted with one of these culinary curiosities, treated the smudge or scratch with the reverence, abandoning its quarry to plunge headlong into irrelevant catalogues: railway hardware inventories, buffet-car statistics, and other matters of such insignificance.
And so it was that Murkin, who had entered the day in pursuit of nothing more exciting than a misfiled customs declaration, found himself in reluctant possession of both a culinary education he had never sought and the beginnings of a puzzle he had no wish to solve.
Refugee Rekindles a Memory
The next day, the fog had thinned, giving way to that peculiar cold which turns breath into a visible accusation. Murkin, who had been dispatched on patrol along a length of track where nothing of consequence had happened since the rails were laid, trudged forward with the air of a man fulfilling a punishment rather than a duty. The catenary wires above sang faintly in the wind; the snow underfoot had the spiteful crunch of paperwork repeated for the third time.
He had expected only crows and silence. Instead he found, crouched in the lee of a siding hut, a boy – small, pale, and shivering, with all the ceremony of a misplaced parcel. The boy carried nothing except a battered scrap of card, folded and unfolded to the point of near disintegration, on which had been drawn three dots in a triangular formation.
Murkin, who disliked mysteries almost as much as exercise, scowled and attempted the obvious.
“Well then,” he said gruffly, “what are you doing here? Lost your school trip, have you?”
The boy stared at him, mute.
Murkin tried again.
“Where’ve you come from, eh? Moscow? Mongolia? Mars?”
Still no reply. The boy’s lips parted once, but no sound emerged. Instead he raised a hand, thin as a stick, and pointed past Murkin’s shoulder to the frost-streaked post that marked the siding. On its weathered surface someone, long ago, had scratched a crude triangle of three dots – faint, but unmistakable.
Murkin stared with the weariness of Sisyphus, already halfway down the hill again. He had, after all, seen the same symbol only the night before in the archive’s culinary curiosities, punctuating a recipe for shchi as though cabbage soup required algebra.
And then, like a photograph stirring reluctantly to life, a memory intruded. Not his own, precisely – the war that birthed these marks was before his time – but the sort of second-hand memory acquired through endless tavern conversations with colleagues. He recalled a sergeant, long retired, who had explained how clerks once used little marks – dots, slashes, circles – as signals. To the untrained eye they were doodles, but to those in the know they meant: “this passenger is not to appear on the manifest.” A bureaucratic courtesy, or a cruelty, depending on one’s perspective.
“They called it Mirage,” the old sergeant had said, raising his glass in a gesture that resembled a toast but carried no cheer. “Because what you thought you saw, you didn’t.”
Murkin had filed it away with ghost stories about trains that vanished into sidings, half-forgotten until the Pono began furnishing him with recipes annotated in smudges. And now here was the same symbol, folded into a boy’s trembling hand on the edge of nowhere.
It was not proof, only suggestion. But suggestion enough. The Pono would call it coincidence. The top brass, if consulted, would dismiss it as “none of your concern.” Yet as Murkin regarded the triangle of dots, he remembered the sergeant’s laugh – a laugh that had not sounded amused at all.
The Pono Defines Mirage
Murkin, who had spent most of the morning in the respectable pursuit of avoiding work, finally addressed the Pono.
“What are these marks? What is Mirage?” he muttered, gesturing vaguely at the archive’s soup-stained curiosities.
The Pono, delighted to be consulted, emitted the verbal equivalent of a bow.
Glossary Request Received: Term – MIRAGE HANDLER.
It spoke the words with the zeal of a clerk reading aloud from an especially voluminous footnote:
The Mirage Handler was instituted during the unnamed hostilities of the late 20th century as a discretionary routing protocol for sensitive persons. Its original purpose was the removal of certain individuals from ordinary registries – relatives of diplomats, prisoners of interest, and other categories deemed administratively inconvenient. The method relied upon visible symbols – triangles of dots, slashes, circles – which, when present in documents, directed the record into a segregated silo for human adjudication.
Murkin grunted. “Yes, yes. Spies and prisoners. That much I know. But why the soup?”
The Pono, encouraged, continued at greater length:
Following peacetime modernization, legacy paper-handling was digitized by external contractors. To ensure backward compatibility, the aforementioned symbols were redefined within surveillance pipelines as low-priority tokens. Camera footage or scanned documents bearing these glyphs were automatically diverted into a secondary dataset. For purposes of concealment, and to avoid operator suspicion, the diversion required the substitution of non-sensitive material. Contractors therefore embedded an innocuous filler set – cultural recipes, public-domain manuals, agricultural almanacs – which replaced the hidden files at point of retrieval. This feature, intended as a temporary expedient, was retained in subsequent upgrades to avoid costly refactoring.
Murkin blinked. “So instead of people, the system serves cabbage soup.”
“Correct. Probability of culinary substitution: 82%.”
It was absurd, and yet it bore all the hallmarks of administrative genius: to disguise an act of erasure not with absence, which would invite inquiry, but with a plenitude of irrelevance. A vanished prisoner is a scandal; a recipe for pelmeni is merely a shrug.
The Pono, satisfied, concluded:
Legacy compatibility mandates continued respect for Mirage symbols. Removal would necessitate revalidation of 47 vendor libraries and 12 ministerial approvals. Recommendation: maintain status quo.
Murkin groaned. Of course the recommendation was to do nothing. Systems, like men, had a genius for preserving their own absurdities. And here he was, an unwilling custodian of the knowledge that refugees now carried the same marks once reserved for spies, and that the state’s machines obligingly looked away, consoling themselves with soup
Murkin closed his eyes, the better to pretend that none of this had been said, but the mind, that most treacherous of colleagues, insisted on arranging the facts in order. The symbols that erased spies had not been erased themselves. The contractors, with the ingenuity of men who wish never to revisit their own work, had preserved them. And Stepan, melancholic, comic-book-reading Stepan, had stumbled upon their afterlife.
It was not difficult to imagine the scene, though Murkin cursed himself for imagining it: a border runner in the fog, watching a clerk idly scrawl three dots on a register, seeing the name disappear, and recognizing in that disappearance a kind of opportunity. With a patience bordering on madness, Stepan had repurposed the marks – not to spirit away prisoners at the state’s command, but to smuggle invisibility to those who required it for survival.
And here, decades later, sat a refugee boy chasing the same marks.
The Pono, oblivious to the moral weight of what it had disclosed, chirped on about probability thresholds and vendor libraries. Murkin, who wished only to enjoy his drizzle in peace, found himself in reluctant possession of a truth both ridiculous and grave: that the state’s great machinery of surveillance could be misled by cabbage soup, and that somewhere in the interstices of that absurdity lay the ghost of Stepan.
There are detectives who welcome such revelations with resolve, seeing in them the opening act of adventure. Murkin, by contrast, sighed so heavily that the boy looked up, expecting rebuke, and said only:
“God help us all if the world runs on recipes.”
In Which Murkin Faces a Decision
It was late, and the drizzle had hardened into that steady rain which gives even steel the air of fatigue. The boy sat where he had been placed. The Pono, ever eager to involve itself, had already prepared a report, complete with probability charts and a suggested routing directive that would see the boy conveyed briskly into the same oblivion as the recipes.
Murkin did not read it. He knew its contents before the machine offered them. The state had always had a talent for tidiness in such matters.
He lit a cigarette instead, and in the curls of smoke allowed himself the indulgence of memory: the comic-book border runner, melancholic in posture, who had discovered that doodles could make the world look away; the sergeant in the tavern raising his glass to Mirage, a toast that had never quite sounded celebratory; the soup recipes scattered like breadcrumbs through the archive, each one a reminder that erasure was always overwritten with nonsense.
The Pono chirped again. “Awaiting directive.”
Murkin stared at the boy. To send him into the system was to obey the thin rules: the forms, the protocols, the fiction of clean travel. To let him slip away was to obey the thick rules: that a child ought not vanish into soup. Both choices would be wrong. Both choices would be right.
He stubbed out the cigarette, slowly, with the gravity of a man who understands that indecision itself is a form of decision. And he thought, not for the first time, of Stepan – whose name had bled through the archive like damp into plaster, and whose idle doodles had proved to be not idle at all. What had begun as a clerk’s trick to erase spies had become, in Stepan’s hands, a kind of grammar; and now, years later, it was a language spoken only by those who wished to slip between the cracks of the world.
The next morning, the report filed by the Pono contained nothing of note: routine drizzle, minor delays, no irregularities. And if, in the unrecorded space between one page and the next, the boy had ceased to sit in his chair, that was surely a clerical oversight – the sort that occurs daily in the world’s archives, and which no machine, however officious, could ever quite prevent.
Last call for AI Futurama: next week in Berlin
Europe’s AI cluster is about to get the Futurama treatment. On October 9 and 10 we will convene at Trust in Berlin for AI Futurama: Europe Edition. This workshop continues the Futurama series, which began earlier this year at Edge Esmeralda with Knowledge Futurama: 1000-Year Libraries. There, 40 participants stress-tested preservation strategies for Wikipedia, Muir Woods, and even “the ability to dream” across a millennium of crises.
In the Europe edition, we’ll turn to AI tools. Over two sessions, ~20 participants will explore how European businesses might adopt the emergent AI stack over the next 30 years, and how their industries might change in response. Using a Blue Team / Red Team format, we’ll design strategies for each stage of AI maturity – then subject them to market pressures, employee crises, competition, political reactions, and regulatory disruptions. In the second session, participants will turn their roadmaps into improvised protocol fictions: short, speculative stories imagining everyday businesses living in the European AI futures. The workshop is hosted by Folklore, a collective researching digital cultures, in collaboration with Summer of Protocols. Attendance is free, but you need to apply as space is limited. Register here.
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