Genesis

The train station had no clocks, only screens.

Every panel above the platforms glowed with predictions: arrival windows, confidence scores, weather-adjusted delays, crowd-density estimates. The numbers updated every few seconds in a soft pulse, like a city breathing through wires. Most people trusted the screens more than they trusted each other, and Miri understood why. The screens had never asked anyone to believe in them. They just kept being right.

She stood at Platform 11 with a folded paper map in her jacket pocket and a phone at six percent. A security drone slid overhead, humming low enough to feel in her teeth. Its lens swept the line, then moved on. No alarm. No request for identity. Just another loop through another morning.

Her brother had said not to come by train.

"Use a relay car," Jin had told her in the voice note he sent at 2:14 a.m. "No transit hubs. No station cameras. If someone asks, you never heard from me."

But relay cars logged passengers by default, and she didn’t trust defaults anymore. Not after three months at the Archive Office, where she had watched automated policies erase people from systems they had paid into their whole lives.

The screen above Platform 11 flashed:

NORTHBOUND LOCAL // 03:20 // Confidence: 97%