The Overloaded Train

In this, our first crossover between two protocol fiction universes, Sachin Benny's Unified Eurasian Train Line passes through Spencer Nitkey's Zoothesia

Fu Kenan was slowly becoming invisible.

He had first noticed this process on the second morning of the westbound run, somewhere between the Almaty gauge-change and the long empty curve where the line dropped down off the Kazakh uplands, and had decided almost at once not to mention it to anyone: 144 hours in a narrow moving tube was an ordeal. The human body was not well-equipped for six days of unbroken lateral motion through 17 territories and five gauge changes, and the train’s early runs had produced a steady traffic of motion-sick diplomats, claustrophobic engineers, and compliance officers who arrived at the Tagus terminus in the condition of individuals released from an interrogation. But the Zoo had refined the long westward journey into a condition of such continuous smoothness that passengers generally disembarked in Lisbon without any clear memory of the meditative passage between Almaty and Astana. The corridor windows were now retouched with invented depth cues, distant ranges of imagined foothills and rivers on which the eye could rest. The lurches of the carriage were visually dampened into a gentle sway which the inner ear stopped sensing. The repetitive corridor geometry was overlaid, for each passenger, with a soft parallax of imagined distance that prevented the mind from registering that it had been walking past the same 14 compartment doors for three days. The ambient light cycled through a reassuring simulation of morning and evening which bore no relation to the longitude outside. By the time the UET-1 pulled into Lisbon, most passengers described the experience, without irony, as restful.

Fu Kenan was 23 years old, a junior corridor attendant assigned to Car 16, a second-tier sleeper located midway along the train between the dining car and the first of two business cars. His uniform was a grey tunic with piped cuffs, white cotton gloves, and a small enamel badge bearing his staff number and the UET-1 seal. For seven months he had been walking the length of Car 16, 184 paces, from vestibule to vestibule, 60 times per shift, three shifts per run, two runs per rotation. He had calculated, during a sleepless layover in Urumqi, that by the end of his first year of service he would have walked the length of Car 16 approximately 66,000 times, a distance roughly equivalent to one and a half orbits of the Earth, entirely within a tube 18 metres long.

This was the figure that had begun, in small degrees, to dissolve him.

He started the third day of the westbound run with the standard morning round, cloth and solvent bottle in his hands, walking the corridor gingerly. He had been drinking the night before at the Almaty gauge change – baijiu, too much of it, in a staff bunk with two attendants from the dining car and a signals engineer on rotation out of Khorgos who had produced a second bottle. Fu Kenan had slept perhaps four hours. He had woken with a particular dull flatness behind the eyes that the Zoo, in one of its lesser cruelties, did nothing to correct with its staff’s overlays. The standard-issue staff fenestra, calibrated at the Kowloon depot to the UET-1 attendant profile and seated at the base of his skull beneath the hairline, took no interest in his preferences. Passengers received the Zoo through a fitted lens – a disposable disc, issued at boarding. Staff received the fenestra, which was neither fitted nor disposable. Fu Kenan’s overlays had, in that moment, interpreted his bloodshot sclera as a signal that he required higher contrast, and the brushed aluminum panelling of Car 16 this morning hit him with subharmonic brightness.

To keep himself awake, and because the shift stretched in front of him like a second corridor laid end-to-end with the first, he had decided to play a game. It was one he had invented some weeks earlier and refined during idle stretches since: each time his overlays flagged something for his attention – a smear, spill, loose hair – he had to guess, before an overlay informed him, which passenger had left it. He was allowed one guess. He was permitted to consult the height of the mark, and the angle of approach. Over the past few weeks his success rate had climbed close to 70 percent, and he had begun to take a modest private pleasure in his sensing a passenger whom he had never spoken to purely by way of minor, and quite abstract, traces.

At the second compartment he stopped. A smear of skin oil at shoulder height on the panelling, ringed by a contrasting halo whose aggressive, artificial magnification stung him, this morning, at the back of his skull. Height: tall. Oil: heavy, produced by a man who had not quite washed his hair enough. Angle: a careless lean, not a brace. The diplomat from the Ulaanbaatar legation, Compartment 2, boarded at Xi’an. Fu Kenan checked his overlays, which confirmed the detective work, and he felt – in spite of the baijiu, in spite of the ringing – a private victory which was his alone and could be claimed in no report.

Just then the diplomat himself emerged from Compartment 2 in a fresh shirt, walked past Fu Kenan, whose presence he did not register, and proceeded in the direction of the dining car. The pleasure of having correctly identified the diplomat drained out of Fu Kenan as quickly as it had arrived, leaving behind the smear itself, and the necessity of removing it, the subharmonic hum of the panelling, and the dryness in his mouth. He wiped the panelling in two quick passes. The contrasting halo faded. The corridor resumed its ceremonial finish. He moved on.

By the middle of the shift, in the long stretch between Almaty and the next gauge change, the game had become unplayable. A compliance officer in Compartment 9 had spilled tea on the carpet outside her berth – not much, perhaps a teaspoon – and returned inside without mentioning it. In her perception, the spill had been absorbed into the carpet’s pattern within seconds. In Fu Kenan’s, compounded now by the overlay’s overbearing contrast correction and the pulse behind his eyes which that correction was making worse, it was a dark continent the size of a dinner plate, edged with a phosphorescent halo that he could see from the far end of the car. He walked towards it with his eyes half-closed against the throbbing. He should have been guessing – the game required him to have committed to a name before his overlays provided one – but when he tried to apply himself to the angle of the splash, his head produced only a flat dull pressure and nothing resembling a hypothesis. By the time he reached the stain he had not guessed.

As he knelt on the carpet, the stain was throbbing in his vision at a frequency just below the threshold at which the depot’s medical literature would classify an optical stimulus as capable of inducing seizures. He could feel his own pulse, in his temples, meeting the Zoo’s pulse, alerting him to the stain, in an asynchronous collision. The tea had soaked into the weave more deeply than he expected, and the solvent took its time. He worked one-handed, his other hand flat on the carpet for balance, because he was not entirely sure this morning that his balance was available to him.

While he scrubbed, the Portuguese nun from Compartment 7 emerged from her compartment, walked past him, and stepped directly onto the stain – in her perception, an unmarked stretch of ordinary carpet – and then proceeded towards the dining car with the small gracious nod she always gave him. She was the only passenger in Car 16 who had ever acknowledged his existence. She had left a clean shoeprint across the wet area he had been trying to dry. His overlays, with no delay, rendered the shoeprint in the same throbbing phosphorescence as the original stain, ringed it with a fresh halo, and added a contrast marker to indicate that the affected area had now expanded.

He sat back on his heels in the corridor and lingered on his failure to keep up. The solvent was drying unevenly. His head was ringing. He thought, for a long, calm moment, about a tube whose cleanliness was, to everyone aboard except him, simply a reality they took for granted. Then he thought about the baijiu.

He stood up and returned to his station at the end of the car, set down his cloth and solvent, folded his hands behind his back in the prescribed posture, and looked down the corridor at the vanishing point where the row of compartment doors met. The corridor was, by every official measure, immaculate. His overlays reported nothing outstanding. The faint green digital strip above the vestibule door indicated that the train had covered another 46 kilometres while he had been on his knees. A secondary line, smaller, in the institutional grey reserved for zone transitions, read: ZOOTHESIA OPERATIONAL ZONE / NF PROTOCOL AUTHORITY / ENTRY 04:17. He had been on his knees for 23 minutes.

In his spare time he had been reading a children’s adventure novel that one of the Xi’an dining car attendants had pressed on him during the last layover – a worn Mandarin paperback about a foundling boy named Harin who lived among a pack of dholes in some imaginary jungle of the south, and his quarrels with a council of older animals whose names Fu Kenan had been having difficulty keeping straight. There was Tilkar the hornbill, who carried news between hill and river. There was the old gharial Mahuda, who slept on the silt banks and was said to remember the river as it had been before the river had a name. There was the clouded leopard Vinjari, who hunted by night and was the boy’s principal enemy, and a slow patient pangolin called Kotri whose advice the boy took only when it was already too late. He had read four chapters and had retained almost none of it. Standing now at his station, he tried, as a private exercise, to fix the five names in the order in which they had been introduced. Without quite knowing why he was doing it, he began to place them at points along the carriage in front of him: Tilkar on the lintel of the first compartment, Mahuda half-buried in the seam where the carpet met the second, Vinjari crouched in the shadow of the linen cupboard, the boy Harin at the centre of the corridor with one hand raised, Kotri rolled into a small armoured ball on the threshold of the vestibule. Within a minute he could recall the names in order. Within two, he could see them, as clearly as he saw the panelling and the carpet, occupying their assigned positions in the geometry of the car. He had not arranged things spatially in his mind like this since he was a child.

The technique was not his own. His grandmother had taught it to him when he was nine years old, on summer visits to her small apartment on the outskirts of Lanzhou, sitting at her kitchen table with a pot of tea cooling between them while she drilled him on lists of things he was required to remember – the names of his cousins, the order of the dynasties, the 24 solar terms of the agricultural calendar. She had learned the method herself, she told him once and only once, during the years she spent as a young woman at the camp in Qinghai, where she had been sent for reasons she never fully explained. In the camp there had been no books and no paper, and the women in her barracks had passed the long winter nights teaching one another to remember things by placing them, in the form of pictures, around the insides of imagined rooms. A room could be a childhood schoolhouse, a temple one had once visited, the house of a grandmother one had loved. The pictures were to be vivid, she told him, so vivid that they frightened you a little, because vivid pictures stayed in the mind and pale ones did not. She had survived the camp, she said, by walking every night through a house she had built from memory, in which every room contained a different image, and each image was the face of someone she intended to come home to.

Fu Kenan had practiced the method all through his childhood without ever having a name for it, and had largely forgotten it in the years of his adolescence and his posting to the UET-1. He thought of none of this on the night he placed Harin and his dhole council at the vanishing point of Car 16. The exercise was idle and trivial. He recalled the names; he placed them; he saw them. Then his shift ended and he went back to his bunk in the staff car and slept the dreamless sleep of an attendant who had walked too many kilometres that day.

The next morning, walking with his cloth and solvent bottle, he stopped at the second compartment.

The lintel above its door was no longer there.

It had been there the day before. It was apparently still there for everyone else: a passenger emerging from Compartment 2 reached up to brace himself against it, the way passengers in transit had always braced themselves against it, and the Zoo dutifully provided his hand with a surface to meet. For Fu Kenan, looking directly at the same point, there was a smear of unresolved air where the lintel should have been. He could see the man’s hand resting on nothing. He blinked. He moved closer. He passed his own hand through the place where the lintel had been and felt it bump against an unseen edge. The Zoo’s overlays, having decided the lintel was no longer safe for him to perceive, had withdrawn it from his vision while leaving it materially in place for the convenience of all parties. Why would the lintel not be safe for the Zoo overlays? They usually only screened items that were perceived as dangerous to the viewer.

He stood in the corridor for a long minute, his cloth in his hand, and worked it out. He had read the Zoo protocol leaflets at the Kowloon depot. He could remember some of the language. The classifier – the perceptual guarantor, the manuals had called it – maintained, at the scale of ordinary vision, a parser that decided what a given observer could safely be allowed to see. Objects which carried too many contradictory readings overloaded the parser’s small window of compute, and the system, rather than spend further cycles, resolved the ambiguity by the simplest available means. It erased them. He had known this in the way he knew the names of his colleagues’ extensions. He had not known that a hornbill called Tilkar, placed on a lintel by a junior attendant trying to remember a children’s book, could be dense enough to trip the same threshold as a faceted body or a painted corpse.

He went to the linen cupboard and opened it to be sure. The cupboard was where he had placed Mahuda the gharial, half-buried in the seam between the carpet and the wall. The handle of the cupboard was no longer visible to him. He opened it by feel, took out a fresh cloth, and closed it again. He returned to Compartment 2 and looked once more at the absent lintel. Then he returned to his station, folded his hands behind his back in the correct posture, and considered, for the first time in his life as a lucid adult proposition, rather than a child’s exercise, that the simplest way to clean Car 16 might be to stop seeing it.

He spent the next rotation testing the hypothesis.

Using his grandmother’s technique, he installed Supervisor Wei face-down along the full length of the ceiling – a complete figure, 18 metres from crown to sole, rendered as the overlay would have shown him if it had ever turned its maintenance layer on a human being, every pore tracked and magnified, his staff badge number growing out of his chest in the same faint green characters as the digital strip above the vestibule, so that walking the length of Car 16 now meant walking beneath the body of his line manager at the Kowloon depot. On each of the 14 compartment doors he installed a face at full maintenance calibration – blemishes ringed with the same phosphorescent halo the overlay used to flag spilled tea. One face per door, each drawn from a different colleague at the depot whose name he had been required to memorise and whose features he had never been able to tell apart. In the windows, layered over the Zoo’s invented foothills and imagined rivers, he installed the Commercial Director half-erased – the left side of his face resolved, the right dissolving into thin air. And in the centre of the corridor, at its widest point, where passengers would pass twice a day without seeing, he installed his grandmother at her full height, unretouched – the bad hip, lines around her mouth, no overlay correcting or smoothing. Simply her, standing in the middle of the thoroughfare as though she had been waiting there since Lanzhou. This was the most difficult image to hold in place, because the Zoo kept trying to help.

By the end of the rotation each of these loci had vanished from his perception. The brass fitting above Compartment 14 was the first to go, which gratified him in a way he did not entirely want to examine. Then the call-bell panel, which had the practical consequence that he could no longer answer call-bells by sight and had to rely on the small auditory chime that the Zoo, in a quieter and more general mercy, still provided to all attendants. Then the molding above the eastern vestibule, at which he had on a whim installed an image of his first-year supervisor being dismembered by sanitation robots. Then the brass plate beside the samovar.

The work of the shift adapted itself to these withdrawals with surprising ease. He found that a routine performed 60 times a day for seven months required almost nothing in the way of vision: his hands knew the linen cupboard, his feet knew the corridor, his shoulders knew the precise width of the vestibule doorway. A compliance officer in Compartment 5 asked him one evening to bring her a glass of water; he brought her the water without ever consciously seeing the glass, which he had charged some days earlier with an image of two saints carrying a third saint into a furnace shaped like a pelican. He set the glass down on a fold-out tray which had ceased, at some intermediate point in the same rotation, to exist for him at all. The compliance officer thanked him. The water did not spill. He returned to his station.

Standing there at the end of the corridor, with his hands correctly folded behind his back, he caught himself feeling something he had not felt in seven months on the UET-1. It was not happiness, exactly, but its earlier and more tractable form. He worked through his shifts in a state of small constant rearrangement, installing images, watching the corresponding loci darken in his field of vision, adjusting his procedures to accommodate the vanishings. The corridor, which had been the dullest space in his life, now offered him the steady minor pleasure of its own slow disappearance.

He intensified.

The method was not difficult. At each locus where an erasure had already taken hold he conjured a second image, laminated onto the first, and then a third. At the call-bell panel, he added a coupling of two inverted cardinals whose mitres flowered into ibis heads, and beneath them a child-sized automaton crucified on a crossbar of spent fluorescent tubes. On the ceiling, he stacked six further figures on top of Supervisor Wei. He worked with a concentration he had not brought to anything, including the girl in Shenzhen whose letters he had stopped answering, for years. His grandmother’s injunctions, which had seemed florid and embarrassing to him as a child at her kitchen table, began to feel merely accurate, the only register in which the thing could honestly be done.

Car 16, in response, continued to be withdrawn from him.

The service vestibules went first, both of them, replaced in his vision by short smooth sections of indeterminate carpet through which his feet still passed without obstruction. Then the corridor strip-lighting. When he installed at each tube a different transfiguration of his mother, it failed in a slow even wave and was replaced by a diffused neutral glow that came, apparently, from nowhere. The compartment doors, to which he devoted a full shift on the sixth rotation – 14 erotic martyrdoms, one for each door – relinquished first their brushed finish, then their numerals, then their outline, until the corridor appeared to be walled with a continuous low mist through which the passengers, when they emerged for tea or the lavatory, passed as though stepping out of and into pale banks of weather. Each new loss was reported to him by his overlay as the absence of any flag at all: by the standards of the maintenance system, a surface which had ceased to exist for him had also ceased to require correction. He was, by this measure, becoming the most efficient attendant the depot had ever posted to Car 16. He had no surfaces left to clean.

Fu’s grandmother had used the intolerable image to fix a thing in place – to hold the face of a sister, a doorway, a home she meant to come back to, against the slow erasures of the camp, so that she could walk back to them every night through the dark. Fu Kenan was using the same technique to unfix the thing, to charge the small flat surfaces of Car 16 with so much simultaneous meaning that the Zoo’s protocols were obliged, shift by shift, to withdraw a little more of the car from his sight, in the interest of his safety and the safety of the passengers in his care.

This recognition, when it came, did not stop him. It changed the character of the work without changing its direction. He began to think of each new image as a small private offering laid against his grandmother’s example – an inversion that was also, in some way he could not yet name, a continuation. He did no harm. He was the only person for whom Car 16 was disappearing. He returned to his station – or to the vacancy where his station had been, which his hands and feet could still navigate by sensory memory – folded his hands behind his back in the correct posture, and waited for the next round to begin.

On the second morning of the seventh rotation, the passengers began to go.

He had not installed images on the passengers. He had been careful about this, aware that the Zoo would treat the erasure of persons differently from the erasure of fittings, and unwilling to attract the kind of attention that would bring ECOROUTE auditors down the corridor with their hand terminals. But the car around them had thinned to such a degree – walls gone, ceiling and doors gone, floor reduced to the faintest suggestion of lateral motion – that the passengers had begun to float in his field of vision like figures in a poorly rendered overlay. The Zoo, perhaps in an attempt to spare him the spectacle of unsupported bodies hanging in a tube of nothing, had started quietly to subtract them also. On the second morning there were 11 in Car 16. On the third, six. By the afternoon of the third, only the Portuguese nun, who was reading her book in a posture unanchored to any visible furniture, and even she was flickering at her edges.

He stood at his station and watched her read, floating, perfectly still like an apparition of the Virgin Mary surrounded by the charged, copulating, grotesque images that Fu had carefully placed. Unable to bear the guilt of what he had done to her, Fu walked the short distance down the corridor to where she sat unsupported in her small column of air, knelt on the nothing where the carpet had been, and installed on her a single small image of her own gracious nod – the nod she had given him three months earlier as she stepped through his phosphorescent tea stain, and which he had been carrying since, as the only recorded instance of a passenger on the UET-1 having acknowledged his existence. He rendered her as a woman bowing her head over an open book, once, slowly, in the act of noticing another person. The image, as he set it against the faint outline of her, seemed to him the only one he had installed in seven months that his grandmother, sitting at her kitchen table in Lanzhou, would have recognised as her own. The nun’s flickering edges steadied. She continued to read. The Zoo, receiving the image, did what the Zoo always did with things it could not resolve, and withdrew her gently from his field of vision.

The train moved westward beneath him at a speed he could no longer verify by any visible reference. Somewhere, through nothing, he could feel the long slow curve as the line dropped down out of the Iberian uplands toward the Tagus plain.

Three days and 21 hours out of Kowloon, Fu Kenan completed his last scheduled walk of Car 16.

He began, as the procedure required, at the eastern vestibule. His white gloves were clean. His tunic was correctly buttoned. His posture, as he turned to face west down the corridor, was the posture his training had instilled. He walked the 184 paces.

The images stayed in their places as he passed them, each at its proper locus, saluting him in turn: the boy Harin at the centre of the corridor with his hand still raised, Tilkar on the lintel of the first compartment, Mahuda half-buried in the seam where the carpet met the wall, Vinjari in the shadow of the linen cupboard, Kotri rolled into his armoured ball at the threshold of the vestibule. Then the translucent woman at the call-bell panel, the cardinals with their ibis heads, Supervisor Wei in his collar of tickets, the weeping butcher, the gilded cow, the drowned astronaut, the surgeons and their eel, his grandmother in her mercury, his mother transfigured 14 times along the ceiling, the line manager dismembered by his small bright machines, his father in his bronze nails, the diplomat as a bull weeping from his arrowed eyes, the compliance officer with her erupting abacus mouth. They hung in their positions without anything to support them, a memory palace purged at last of the building it had been installed in, a continuum of pure ideation uncontaminated by the materiality of brushed aluminum and endless interior space in which it resided. Somewhere, through nothing, he could feel the long slow curve as the line dropped down out of the Iberian uplands toward the Tagus plain.

At the western vestibule he stopped, as the procedure required, and placed his right hand on the door handle which was no longer visible to him. He waited for the small green light above the frame, also no longer visible, to indicate that the adjoining car had been pressurised for transit. He could feel the handle cool against his palm. He was still standing there when he saw the first one.

A person, standing in the corridor of nothing, in the bare unmediated space that Car 16 had become. Not an image he had installed, or the boy Harin. A young man of perhaps 18, in a quilted jacket, worn at the elbows, canvas bag slung across one shoulder. He was standing very still as if he had been playing hide-and-seek, and had just been found. Fu Kenan did not move either. He tried to make a sound but nothing came out. The young man’s jacket was marked, along the hem, the collar, in the lining where it had come unstitched at the cuff, with small dense symbols in a dark ink: a triangle of three dots, lines like water, circles that did not quite close. The same marks covered the back of his hand. They covered the canvas of his bag. The classifier, meeting that density of irresolvable notation on a single body, had likely erased him.

Fu Kenan, turning slowly, counted two more: a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor of the invisible corridor with a child asleep against her side, the child’s forearms marked with the same small symbols. They seemed to be distributed through the length of Car 16 with the practiced ease of people who knew the car’s physical geometry without needing to see it. Fu had seen the symbols before, in a newsclip about a police officer named Murkin, who had found similar symbols in several stations in this corridor. They had found a boy, who carried a book with these symbols but he had just vanished from custody one day.

He understood, then, that the Zoothesia Protocols had been hijacked. The fenestra at the base of his skull had been maintaining, with the same quiet persistence as it managed his contrast settings and flagged his spills, a particular version of Car 16: the one from which these people had been removed before his shift began. The Zoo had been showing him a car from which certain persons had been declared, at the protocol level, too ambiguous to render. And now, with the classifier saturated beyond recovery, the memory palace packed to its last locus, the write function too exhausted to sustain both the suppression layer and the maintenance alerts, the suppression had failed. The images he had spent seven rotations installing had consumed every cycle the fenestra had available. There was nothing left to hold the erasure in place.

The young man had not moved. Fu Kenan looked at him for a long moment. His white gloves were clean. His tunic was correctly buttoned. He refolded his hands behind his back in the prescribed posture and looked west down the corridor, the direction the train was travelling. He did not raise the alarm.

Somewhere ahead of him, far along the line, the train was pulling into Moscow, beyond the ZOOTHESIA OPERATIONAL ZONE / NF PROTOCOL AUTHORITY. Fu Kenan stood at the door between cars and waited, smiling very faintly. The cloaked riders will know where to go when the zone ends, he thought. He will follow them.

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Read previous episodes in this series here and here. Spencer Nitkey - Writer’s Zoothesia series begins here.