The train derailed in the boreal wilderness of
northern Ontario, its steel bones halfburied in
snowdrifts. Elise Voss, a tech entrepreneur from
Toronto, wakes in a bunkhouse with no
recollection of how she got there—only the scent
of pine resin and the hum of an old generator.
The town of Kettle Lake, once a hub for the CPR
during Confederation’s expansion, now clings to
survival, its people wary of outsiders.
Elise’s first act is to retrieve her tablet,
only to find it wiped clean. A local mechanic,
Tomás, recognizes her name but says nothing of
her past. He offers her a job repairing the
town’s failing power grid, which runs on a
strange, selfsustaining battery system salvaged
from the abandoned rail yards. The townspeople
whisper about “the track” as if it were a living
thing.
She begins to piece together fragments:
blueprints for a geothermal reactor, a failed
startup, a project that went silent after a
storm. But the deeper she digs, the more the
town resists. Weather patterns shift unnaturally,
and the river behind Kettle Lake freezes midflow,
as if time itself is fraying.
One night, she stumbles upon a sealed vault
beneath the station. Inside are files labeled
Project Arctic Pulse—a prototype energy system
meant to harness permafrost heat. The documents
show her name as lead engineer. But the final
page is blank.
The town’s mayor confronts her, revealing that
the project was shut down after a worker
vanished during a test run. Elise realizes she
must have been there when it happened. Her
amnesia is not a flaw—it is a safeguard.
The eerie silence of the forest grows louder.
The generator fails. The lights flicker. In the
dark, Elise hears the sound of metal groaning
beneath the snow. She runs to the vault, opens
it again, and this time finds a hidden
compartment. Inside lies a key and a single note:
Turn it off before it turns you.
She doesn’t know what it means—but she knows the
track is still running.
