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There was a rumor, whispered in the dim spaces behind stalls and laundromats, that if you requested the Whitespeed to restore a person — to reconstruct someone the train had taken — you could pull them back. The rumor came in two forms. The hopeful version: the train reorganized all things into their intent, and a person was, at root, an intent of continuity and presence; maybe, with enough focus, a body could be reassembled. The darker version: the Whitespeed assimilated what it carried into its own motion, and to ask it to return a person was to invite the tunnel’s hunger into the world. "It wants," the darker voices said, "to close its ledger."

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One autumn there was a shift. The Whitespeed's pattern of returns subtly changed. The echoes grew more precise. The distortions less. Scientists announced that the railbed had been retrofitted with a new alignment: "temporal harmonic stabilization," they called it in their papers. Politicians praised the progress. For a while, the city breathed easier. Then, beneath the applause, the ballast began to give back things not as marriages of intent but as imprints of other futures, small overlaps from realities where a different choice had been made. A woman received a letter predicted by the life she might have led; a man found a photograph of a child that never existed in his present timeline. These returns were more seductive and more dangerous; they promised not repair but replacement. People found themselves enamored with the versions of themselves they could not be. There was a rumor, whispered in the dim