Story Reader / Festival Event Story / The Night Train on Reunion / Story
People often describe time as a river—one down which we all flow, along which we swim toward a future full of uncertainty.
This river has been coursing through the abyss way before humanity and the world itself existed.
And it is now only through this river that humans manage to remember the occasional splashes of water leaping out of the river.
Thirteenth Avenue Aquatic Center. Please ensure that you have all your personal belongings with you when alighting.
Clank. Clank...
Humans aren't as powerful as previously imagined... Advancing... Thinking...
Layer after layer, strings of words with meanings make their way into your consciousness—before they ripple across your cerebral cortex and body.
Right then, you sense a pull force that jerks you out of the pool of thoughts and boundless darkness...
As you open your eyes, the first thing you see is the same polished car—along with the mysterious mechanoid.
Caught in the middle of a heated argument, the mysterious mechanoid is surrounded by Bianca and Karenina, among everyone else.
In the recurrence just now, I observed some very unusual emotional fluctuations in all of you—especially the two of you, Bianca and Karenina. Your emotional fluctuations were more violent than those of others.
Such emotional fluctuations only ever appear alongside insignificant historical nodes, and yet... you all seem to see them as important. I have a hard time understanding such complicated fluctuations as they're not part of my database...
Agony... joy... happiness... and sadness... are what I observed, and they don't make logical sense.
These emotions are conflicting and contradicting, and I just don't understand how they can appear at the same time...
Past records have shown that pain and sadness do nothing to help humanity progress collectively or individually, which is something human history and experience have proven time and time again...
...
The conductor seems to be having an internal struggle with itself.
It's failed to persuade everyone—including itself—and yet it doesn't seem like it's about to lend anyone an ear, either.
Experience and history tell us that humans never learn from history.
That... is something we get to decide ourselves, though!
Yes, you're free to voice your objections, but you have no right to interfere with the specifications of Gestalt's data.
What we have here isn't just some objection... but a conflict of ideology.
Those emotions probably didn't stir up the slightest bit of interest in you or Gestalt, but they mean the world to us.
I just don't understand what you see in them...
That's what sets us apart from you. Simple as that.
Having those emotions in Gestalt's database or not probably makes no difference to you, but it does to us.
Because at the end of the day, you're nothing more than a program!
...And that would be correct. I'm just a program, which is why I'm supposed to have precise objectives and means with which to accomplish my objectives.
And with that said, I was hoping that you would all be so kind as to once again demonstrate the meaning and value of said emotions.
