Metal Killer
It always rained at midnight in Dante City, tonight was no exception. The night detective John Kovacs was on call again, homicide. He dreamed of moving up state and retire and start a family and get a dog. That was a pipe dream. He had another ten years left before the state can even consider his application for retirement. For now, he’s gotten used to this life, nightly dealings with the lowest lives in Dante City. The department issued police cruiser had a big crack in the windshield. Kovacs gave up trying to get it fixed. The department’s budget was already stretched. The grubby screen on his dashboard indicated that he was one minute from the crime scene. He turned the red and blue light on as he slowed down and began the descent. He stopped rationalising as to why these low lives did what they did at night. He just prayed that he could wrap up tonight’s call quickly and go home on time for once. He parked his cruiser in front of a run-down housing complex and got out. The cold rain was relentless. The boys in blue were already on site and taped off the area. A rookie, Officer Brown gave Kovacs a respectful nod as he walked by. He was a good guy. Good guys were hard to come by in this city.
More beat cops waited for him in front of the door on the fourteenth floor. Nothing surprised him anymore. Twenty years in this job, he just went through the motions every night. He entered the apartment. What a mess. Blood splatters all over the already dirty wall. A woman and two men were butchered like worthless animals. Couple of metres from the body of the woman was a worker drone, cheap and could be purchased in any electronic store on sale. This was something new, Kovacs told himself. Drones of this class only had capacity to do simple housework, maybe cook with the right after-market chip. This was something else. The drone was at least five years old, the humanoid metallic hunk of metal appeared to be shot by one of the dead males and it was cut into pieces. Kovacs tried resetting the drone. It was dead. The memory card has been taken out. This bootleg version of a robot had zero capability of committing multiple homicides. It was going to be a long night.