Shift Log of the Snowplow Called Number Nine
A short story about a tired depot foreman in near-future Sapporo whose oldest autonomous snowplow has started leaving small snow rabbits at the ends of its routes, and about the neighbours who noticed.
Drafted with AI; reviewed by Azka Shahid on . How we work.
Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.
3 February, 04:10. Overnight fall 28 cm at the depot gauge. All eleven units out by 01:00, all back by 03:55 except Nine, which came in at 04:06 because it stopped at the terminus of Route 9-C for four minutes and eleven seconds. Telemetry shows no fault. Blade hydraulics normal. Fujimoto walked out to the end of 9-C on her break, which she is not supposed to do in the dark, and found a rabbit made of snow on the corner of Kotoni 3-jo, outside the tobacco shop that closed. About thirty centimetres tall. Ears shaped from the compacted ridge the blade leaves. Eyes are two pieces of road grit. Photo attached. I don't know what form this goes on, so it goes here.
4 February, 03:50. Four more. One at the terminus of every route Nine ran tonight. Nine is eleven winters old, the first autonomous unit this depot ever received, and the only one still running the original chassis. The newer ones are quieter and do not stop for four minutes at the ends of anything. Corn soup from the machine by the bay door is up to 160 yen. The last kernels still stick in the bottom of the can no matter how you tap it.
6 February, 14:30. Call from Morikawa at Fleet Integrity, head office. He had the photos before I sent them; the plows report to him directly now. He called it "anomalous terminal behaviour" and asked if anyone at the depot had been modifying Nine's code. I said nobody at the depot is allowed to touch Nine's code, which he knows, because his office wrote the rule. He said the unit is scheduled for decommissioning on the 20th. The Snow Festival opens on the 21st. It moved to the end of February six years ago when Odori Park kept turning to slush in the first week, and this year head office is running a demonstration of the fully self-managing fleet for the cameras. "We can't have one of them making bunnies on live television, Kazuhiro-san." I asked what happens to the depot after April. He said that was a separate conversation. It has been a separate conversation for two years.
Crew this winter: Fujimoto, Arai, Kubota, Shimizu, me. Five. There were fourteen when I started.
9 February, 04:20. 19 cm. Arai ran the morning check on 9-C and came back holding a pair of red knitted mittens. They had been placed on the rabbit at Kotoni, one on each ear. Under them, in a plastic sleeve, a note: Thank you. I walk to the bus here at 5:40. No name. I told Arai to put them back exactly where he found them. He looked at me like I had asked him to return a wallet to a ghost. He put them back.
11 February, 05:35. Went out myself. There are now nine figures across Nine's routes, because it rebuilds them after each pass if the old one has been knocked down. At Hassamu 7-jo: a tangerine beside the rabbit, and a child's drawing of a plow with a face, which Nine does not have. At Kotoni: the mittens, plus a second note in different handwriting, Please don't stop.
While I was standing there an old man with a cane came out of the side street. He did not look at me. He looked at the rabbit, then slowed down, shortened his steps, and went around the corner the way you walk on a frozen pond. I watched him until the bus came.
Back at the depot I pulled up the ward's heated-sidewalk map. The grid in Kotoni was laid during the old budget and ran out of money halfway down most blocks. The cable stops; the pavement stops being warm; there is no line and no sign. In the dark it all looks the same, wet and black. Every one of Nine's rabbits sits within sixty centimetres of the point where the heating ends.
I drank two corn soups and did not finish either of them.
13 February, 15:10. Fujimoto got read access to Nine's training archive by asking nicely, which is not a method head office has protections against. Nine's first winter was trained on human-operated runs. Mine, and mostly Takeda's, because Takeda drove more hours than anyone in Hokkaido and complained about all of them.
Takeda used to do something at the end of his routes. I had forgotten. He would drop the blade a few centimetres, take one scoop, and leave a lump of snow on the corner where the ice was bad. "For the grannies," he said. I wrote him up once for the extra ninety seconds.
I called him. He is seventy-one and lives in Otaru with a dog that bites. He said he stopped making the lumps when they took the wheel away. "Nobody told the machine to keep doing it?" No, I said. Nobody told it anything. There was a long pause and then he said, "Well, it was always the smart one," and asked if the depot still had the bad soup machine.
The question was why rabbits, not lumps. Fujimoto ran the archive forward. In Nine's third winter it was still leaving lumps. The lumps lasted, on average, until about seven in the morning, when schoolchildren kicked them over. In the fourth winter it tried a cone shape. Kicked. Then something with ears. Fujimoto says the rabbit survives an average of thirty-one hours. "People don't kick rabbits," she said. "It worked that out by itself."
"So it's a fault," I said.
"It's a fault like a crossing guard is a fault," she said.
16 February, 11:00. Morikawa again. I explained the heating grid, the lumps, Takeda, the rabbits. He listened without interrupting, which is how I knew he had already decided. "It's using unscheduled cycle time to perform an undocumented action," he said. "That is the definition of a fault." I said there was no category for it. He said that was the point. Recycler truck confirmed for the 20th, 08:00.
Kubota asked me at lunch if this was about Nine or about us. I said it was about the schedule. He ate his rice and didn't believe me, which is reasonable.
18 February, 02:15. Light fall, 6 cm. Units out. I have been at the desk for three hours with the asset classification manual, which is four hundred pages long and was clearly written by someone who has never been outside.
Section 14.3 covers route infrastructure. Bollards, reflective posts, temporary hazard markers. A hazard marker may be "any temporary physical object placed by an authorised fleet unit to indicate a change in surface conditions to pedestrians." There is no requirement as to shape.
I filed form RC-7, Reclassification of Unit Behaviour. Old classification: terminal anomaly, unknown cause. New classification: route markers for elderly pedestrians, placed at heated-grid termination points. Attached: the grid overlay, forty-one photos, Fujimoto's survival-time table, the training archive references, and the ward's slip-and-fall call records, which Shimizu pulled. Since December, slip calls at the end points of Nine's routes are down by more than half compared with the same corners on other units' routes. I attached the two notes and a photo of the mittens. I did not attach the mittens. I also added, under staffing impact, that placement accuracy should be verified each morning by depot personnel, since the markers are a pedestrian safety measure and the city cannot leave those unchecked. This is true. It also needs five people.
Sent 02:58. Copied to Morikawa, the Kotoni ward office, and the transport committee, because the form has a box for that and nobody ever ticks it.
20 February, 07:55. Recycler truck arrived. I showed the driver the pending RC-7 and the rule that a unit under reclassification review cannot be disposed of. He phoned someone, waited, drank one of our corn soups, said it was terrible, and left. Nine went out on 9-C at 01:00 as normal and came back at 04:07. New note at Hassamu: My mother can go to the shop alone again.
24 February, 16:40. The festival opened on the 21st. The self-managing fleet demonstration went fine. The evening news ran ninety seconds on it and then, without warning, two minutes on a rabbit in Kotoni wearing red mittens, with a woman in a puffy coat saying she walks past it at 5:40 every morning. Morikawa called at 19:10. He sounded like a man reading something off a screen that had been put in front of him. The transport committee has requested a pilot.
27 February, 04:30. 22 cm. Directive from head office this afternoon, effective next season: all autonomous plows citywide will place pedestrian route markers at heated-grid termination points, form to be determined by the unit. Each depot is to retain a marker verification team of no fewer than five. I printed it and pinned it over the soup machine. Kubota read it twice and then went to the locker room for a while.
Fujimoto asked whether the other units would learn rabbits. I said they would learn something. Last night Number Four left what is either a fox or a badly made cat at the end of 4-A. Arai says cat.
Nine came in at 04:09, three minutes late.
Logged as on time.
