A bus stop "one too many" on a Kameido sidewalk, registered as provisional Lineage 148

"I had the feeling there was one more post than usual in the row where my bus stops," the man, 52, recalled. "I took two or three steps into line. Then I noticed there was no route map." The post stands about 2.3 meters, with a round head plate, and was found upright, base and all, pressed into the pavement. The eastern wards' permeation index had held at "moderate" through the night. Recovery took about an hour; the cordon was lifted the same day.

The paint is worn through in patches, and the lower shaft carries a repair of wound wire. A character resembling "7" can be made out on the head plate; the center says there is "no basis for judging whether it is a route number or anything else." A university researcher who studies the material culture of drift objects offered this: "A new drift object carries technology. A worn one carries a life. That wire repair is somebody's time — a thing broken, not discarded, mended and used on."

Isotopic ratios serve as a "fingerprint" distinguishing worldlines; 147 lineages have been registered to date. The provisional entry means that if another object of the same lineage ever surfaces, one thing at least will be knowable: they came from the same world. Fewer than three in ten drift objects ever get that far. The post passes to the national treasury under the Dimensional Boundary Control Act; appraisal, as ever, is months away. By morning the dent in the sidewalk had been paved over. A neighborhood schoolchild, passing by, said a grown-up thing: "I wonder where it went. You can't come back once you board, right?"