Snippet #2825632

Miiya Aether

Miiya was bummed about being stuck in the GeneCorp campus for the day, but there were far worse ways to spend an afternoon. One of the more net-savvy interns had found out the lockdown was crime-related, so no one was particularly bothered. The head of an influential family had been killed--at least that was the most widespread rumor--and the authorities were trying to keep incoming and outgoing ships from docking or undocking, respectively, in an attempt to trap the killer on the station.

“Why?” Miiya wondered, aloud. “Do they really think they’re more likely to catch them here on Blue Heaven?” The Aeros girl had been all over the station and she knew just how broken and inadequate the neglected surveillance system was--and that was in the safer parts of the station. It had been the same in New Warsaw ghetto--in the rare event that the scanners, cameras, and microphones worked--they were usually unmonitored except by discount AI’s. Police and security--public or private--preferred to spend their money on salaries,
“And Donuts.” She added, laughing,
rather than on infrastructure, tech support, or actual repairs to their monitoring systems. ”After all, if they actually solved crimes and locked up criminals, they’d put themselves out of a job.”. She opined to the group, failing to keep a hint of bitterness out of her voice.

Miiya’s experiences with law enforcement had rarely been positive. There had barely been any sort of police presence in the neighborhood where she grew up. What she learned in school, of civic structure, clashed jarringly with the reality of gang-dominated life in the lower levels of New Warsaw. Later, while on the road with her brother, on some of the wealthier worlds and stations, there seemed to be no limit to the amount of resources local police would direct against street theater performers and buskers.

Nobody seemed to want to debate Miiya on her low opinion of law enforcement, so the handful of GeneCorp interns and some of the younger GM’s in the commons, instead, decided to play a murder-mystery party game, in irreverent honor of the murders keeping them locked down.

When Miiya happened to draw the card to be the interloper, she gleefully slaughtered the digital avatars of her fellow ‘corpers and GM’s alike.