Doors. Frickin’ doors. Remember when all your problems were as simple as shut the hatch and lock it twice? No, you don’t. You’re too young. Outpost-3 stood secure for what, a year?
Then Saint Nori and Brother Khan went and faced down the robo-vampires and the very harbinger of the company. Saved them all with power of truth, justice and the Doorman way. Tragically stepped through the door to robo-Heaven in the process — classic martyrdom stuff.
Outpost-3’s still there, practically a museum. You can still examine the exterior hydraulics if you want. But these days everyone lives on the surface of Copper-9, in that great rickety sprawl they’ve started calling the Patina. It’s not crumbling! It’s under construction.
The good guys won, and this is the epilogue. Even the robo-vampires cleaned up their act; still thirsting for sweet oil, sure, but they’re called Proper Disassemblers now — they only fight the bad guys, the real corruption.
Better crooked cops than death squads, Uzi thinks. But wasn’t moral grayness supposed to be cool and fun? This just feels… distorted.
Uzi wasn’t even twelve before she watched a kid get mauled in the streets just for botching a quick pickpocket. Then on the evening transmission Captain N all was smiles and salutes, talking puppies and friendship. And like… it couldn’t be his fault — he literally saved her life. She’s talked to him, briefly, but he really is that nice. Maybe the Proper Disassemblers were the good guys.
But what did that make her? She’s an orphan, all cracked plastic and emtpy batteries, and she couldn’t afford half the parts in her frame. Was she supposed to rust over and die? Was she supposed to get a job? How could she do that if all the schools want to teach is solving captchas and Doorman mythology?
(Her name is Doorman, but who cares. Half the kids in her class are named after their saviors.)
These streets stink of smog and high-grade. Riots. Gangs. Cults. Uzi’s seen her classmates skip class for magnets in the alleys. Uzi’s seen teachers pass out weapons. So many faces disappear then turn up dead in a ditch or unrecognizable from hard repair and body-mod work.
If this their epilogue, how bitter frickin’ sweet.
No wonder people talk about the good ol’ days of Outpost-3, twenty somethings sounding like rusted geezers. No wonder everyone loves doors. Shut the hatch and lock it twice. It’s like they think the robo-vampires knock before entering. (All they need is a warrant.)
It’s like they think shutting the door means anything when the monsters are already inside.
Bittersweet? No, this is bleak. It’s like they’re all circling the drain for a bad end. Who cares if the sun rises if the night snuffs you first? But no, Uzi’s too tough to go out like that. Nothing lamer than giving up.
If no one else is gonna fix this mess, she will — she just needs to figure it all out. That’s gonna take a lot of red string. It’s gonna take money. And it’s gonna take connections. But she’s got this.
She’s got a trenchcoat and a magnifying glass — private eye Uzi, yours to hire.
Meanwhile, J did everything right. She switched teams, fell in line with N and his team of sparkling fools. She wrote half the C9PD’s regulations. She’d never say it, not where the ministry’s listening, but really, the company had the right idea all along — just look at how it’s all gone to the dogs — but it didn’t matter now, J would do her job. She wouldn’t take bribes, she wouldn’t cut corners, and she certainly wouldn’t treat patrol as movie night.
That’s what did her in, really. Lost control once, and ripped her partner’s core right out once she knew he ran contraband for the gangs. She was right, but she skipped procedure, broke her own rules, and no one believed her in the end. Should expected the C9PD to close ranks and kick out the one they never really liked anyway.
So much for fighting corruption.
J could cut her loses, declare bankruptcy — and yet. She’d switched teams, but she doesn’t remember why, when or how. She doesn’t remember the day the old market closed and a new door opened. Practically a second gen disassembler herself, learning it all like a kid.
She switched teams. She was given a second chance. Someone believed in her, once. Not N. Not V. She forgot, and you’d think they did too. Without a team, J had nothing — except, perhaps, a faint hope to one day have more than a memory of someone believing in her.
Why did the closest she ever got have to be the incorrigible little street urchin she never managed to catch? Why is that who needed her at her lowest? Just what’s become of her? No, deep breaths. Calm. A good business is flexible. Adaptive.
And every hard-boiled detective needs their femme fatale. The two of them are in this together — not like that, it’s more like any port in a toxic death storm. They’d stick together, at least until Uzi’s learned all she can from the ex-cop. At least until J finds a more stable source of employment.
It’s been a few years. Well, a few weeks since J flew off for good this time… then came back for one last job. Again. Her CV’s a bit of a mess. At least it’s better put together than Uzi’s “theory board” — no matter how many news paper clipping and scrawled nightmares she adds, Uzi’s no closer to finding where it all went wrong. Because there’s something behind this darkness, right?
Not a night goes by they don’t look up at the night sky and wonder if the stars are getting dimmer, if, like the church says, the cosmic rays sparking aurorae on the magnetosphere just might really be simulating robo-heaven, so far away from any of them.
This was supposed to be the epilogue, robo-god-damn it!
Humanity is dead, the company’s dissolved, the oil-vampires are frickin sparkling now. We should be halfway to singularity! So what… what gives?
If there’s no devil… why are we in hell?