Chapter 2 (2026)
We begin with Morgan buying drugs murdering everyone in the room and then framing their kidnapee for it.
Pleasingly, the focus on androids shifts to how the android really is a model worker because her brain and body are built for it. Yay, we can talk about how much work sucks for humans!
There’s this insane article about fuels being replaced by helium (the noble gas?) that references the terror of the Hindenburg (rationalizing on why we don’t have hydrogen blimps anymore without making it obvious that the only example they have is the Hindenburg) and that all the fossil fuels have been used up (pretty sure if that were to happen we’d all be dying in the co2?), and how to make it burnable they convert helium into hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen is way more common than helium, and that would be nuclear fission. I guess this is secretly saying we are using nuclear energy to power our planes and the discourse has gotten so bad that the media release is completely unrelated proprietary manipulation at this point?
Like, completely rational and logical way to expand on the idea of ‘nonrenewable resources’ except for all the parts where beyond the word itself it doesn’t make any sense. This was probably so much fun to write compared to what I’m doing ugh I’m so jealous.
The answer to how the murder happens this time is that the criminal organization doesn’t use all the techy surveillance, and in their apartment building there’s normal locks and normal keys and no cameras. There’s a class aspect to this — you don’t get the protection from violent crime that the surveilled parts of society gets. Morgan may murder whoever she wants sort of randomly, but what about when she wants to do something easier to get away with? The lion gets old, and likes to eat easier prey? The nonviolent criminal is in the same category as the lower class as the murderer, in that they all fear cameras, so now they all organize into a food web. But hopefully not too much.
Investigation time! Morgan is cleaning up her own murder, complete with hilarious commentary about how she couldn’t have murdered those people in the way she did. That’s clearly a katana to the neck, not a knife! I need this confident incorrectness for every murder in the game.
Emma: Guns and arms can’t defend against corrosion anyway. Rot comes from the deep.
Probably should be “corruption”…
Emma thinks the state should be harsher about every kind of death, because this means she might be catching Heartbreak faster, somehow. Because Heartbreak might be hiding their murders as Mod harvesting attacks (?). Then she makes an argument for a part-time worker who got murdered and ignored for two weeks, until their employer said something. Amazingly, this is actually one of the murders Morgan committed!
…
Anyway. A lot of things happened. We’re at trial now and we find out that our client was not just a bodyguard, but also an assassin. Serra is very pleased to be talking to literally anyone whether they are assassin or military alive hello good indestructible doggy you don’t know you’re surrounded by killers.
Speaking of murderers…
In the future, the police still don’t need to have their body cams on while doing their jobs, which doesn’t really bode well for the amount of police-caused deaths that go uninvestigated. Certainly not for this one, where London has suspicious ties with the mafia and told us to not look too deep into this case. This is along with the detail where if you kill a police officer all the police officers show up in a murder mob. Fucking police unions.
So right now, a mysterious assailant got into my perfectly good murder scene, saw my client fumbling along on the floor half-dead from torture, took his katana, and sunk it into a random police officer’s back when he came to investigate. Then the assailant wiped off their prints, and framed my client (for the second time) and took off into the night.
And the witness to the murder didn’t show up, because he was too busy shaking hands at a political parade instead of, y’know, showing up at a murder trial.
Okay, so in the previous trial, the person who actually did it was… the witness! The person who had direct opportunity and ability to poison the victim and made sure to be right next to him as he died was the one who poisoned him.
Based on that information, I think it’s maybe AM PUTTING ALL CHIPS IN TO SAY IT’S the witness who did it. The second police officer. A classic case of betrayal, by a man of the name of Rogers, a name which has already been known to be associated with pointless and counterproductive intrigue. You could’ve killed him off the job, Rogers, but you just couldn’t resist the allure of that perfect framing story.
Eating pre-chewed food, Rogers? That wasn’t your murder scene was it, Rogers. I know what you did, Rogers.
The witness didn’t hear the music because the windows were closed! I guess these are really good windows that are a lot better soundproofed than usual. God I wish we had 2086 technology.
Also it really doesn’t seem like Rogers did it. He has no idea what’s going on. Fuckkk
Ooh, and now we get to pick an article that shows why the victim was working with the local crime gang. Umm I have no idea fuck. Oh it was because it named what he was sponsoring okay.
Okay um what the fuck!!!!!!!!
Crime within a crime, baby. Someone just tried to sneak in and shoot the lawyer client.
…
So a lot more things happened, and we’re back to examining the crime scene. No idea on who might’ve done it. The court shooter was a Blueblood, which could mean basically anything.
Actually, I’m remembering the beginning of the chapter, where Morgan got the tech mask that was reserved for someone else. I imagine that whoever came by to check on them noticed it was stolen. Don’t know where that could lead yet…
Morgan’s just asked Serra to lick the bloodstains off a burnt knife to determine blood type. Okay. And then we learn the kids born into the Bluebloods get tattooed with their blood type, so they can be organ donors for the older gang members. Which is like. What the fuck, and also presumably this will be extremely relevant soon. IS HAN THE MURDERER… (nahh…)
There is some article on bamboo, where they suggest it as a cash crop for tropic and sub-tropic biomes, instead of soy, sugar, or wheat (temperate crop) (and not palm oil or bananas?). Curiously, they’re taking advantage of the mobile student population and not rural poor people for it as well, which seems like a win for rural poor people in the recent decades if they’re not getting taken advantage of anymore. But also it might be implying that they’re sending the students there that start to get uppity. Honestly, I think this is better than it looks – a mobile, educated population that shares a language has a pretty good chance at being able to do something when they start getting abused. Way better than the 8 year olds that work on palm oil plantations nowadays.
Anyway, we’re chatting up the Blueblood in charge of the host club. She tells us that our leads are bad, the real money’s not in the secret deal they made with the dead cop that alerted him to check out the crime scene, and the mask is back in discussion!
“other day the school announced theyre gonna be doing test prep at every grade level” yeah that’s already happening
Ikariya Patriarch who ordered not_found killings right before not_found other killings that disguised each other! His pretty little euphemisms for group killings should be in the phone. I hate him. We’ve got roman metaphors and then chess metaphors and you’ve decided that you’re better off extirpating other groups than combining them, soooo, no wonder everyone hates you. Like at least the Bluebloods are out there to make money; you’re doing this for the sake of it.
There’s been a lot of talk of heirs and fairy tale inheritors so I’d like to remind everyone of the real reason fated heirs are great, which is that they’re easy to fake– oh goddamnit they really did lock their fortunes behind a literal blood lock and they also need his blood to access it oh my god. Come on just steal his bone marrow and start cultivating it yourself!!
And he doesn’t want to! Because he hates the Bluebloods’ guts, even though Ikariya killed his entire family when he was a baby, because then they raised him. God what did they put in his water to ruin a person like this. Even if it could not be because you had one half-ounce of regret for all the murders you did, surely the ability to peacefully navigate between groups that hate each other is worth something?? You’d rather keep murdering instead of trying?
Not that Morgan’s suggested plan of him telling everyone he’s the heir and getting a fall guy is not much better for the fall guy, I mean. Like the Bluebloods did send a random addict to get chop-shopped and murdered so they really don’t care that much for anyone too far down, so I guess it’s good he said no and Morgan’s doing whatever Morgan’s doing here instead.
Anyway Morgan wants to watch some nice relaxing industral machine accidents and gun-dissasemblies after all that, which I kind of want to as well. Fuck!
Actually this is amazing: Reyes got drunk and came over to defend Morgan, because she’s on everyone’s shitlist hitlist. Including the cops! There’s a brief stutter in which Morgan imagined Reyes came alone and murderable, foiled immediately by the many cops on her cop network, and now we’re talking about amusing personal details, such as how Reyes really wants to get lung cancer from gasoline-powered cars, Morgan would absolutely lose every argument about ancient 2030 tech with her, Morgan tries not to think about first times, Reyes dates her coworkers, Emma came from money, and Reyes spills details about the case while drunk.
Morgan has her sleep on her bed, while she takes the couch.
Morgan is also having terrible dreams! About… someone being mean to her in high school, telling her to found a club, calling it a pyramid scheme. It sounds like her mom.
Anyway, I’m stopping here for the night thinking about how this was written. It feels like script format. Lots of dialogue, and the dialogue connects with itself. Bits of introspection exist very differently from the rest.
So then I was wondering who in this do I want to talk to each other? Each thing anyone says reveals something; if not their guilt or secrets, it’s some new bit of worldbuilding in future dystopia hell. In this post I’ve linked a lot of articles that I find interesting; a built-up world with news articles can be compared against our news articles. I’ll skip you the depressing diatribe on how AI and large language models will poison all of it. What I mean to say is histories can be compared against histories.
I guess with enough brainwashing you can turn anyone against anything.
…
So things have circled back around to Rogers being the main suspect. The first time he was questioned, he was playing dumb about having a secret app on his phone that detected one of the victim’s emergency whistles. Now he’s the only one who was there when his cop partner died.
Han was, uh, involved, by going in to hide a bit of evidence. I’m pretty sure these are like, against the court rules?
“He was bent over when the witness came from behind and–” Serra also sees the homosexuality–
Also oh god was I right??
Morgan is speculating on Rogers’ motive. Previous complaints about Makoto foreshadow her reasoning, that he’d want to murder an “insufferable, spoiled-rich stick-in-the-mud”.
So the dead cop, Chopin, was not actually secretly working for the Bluebloods, but had a bug on their location after searching the phone to get the app of one of their arrestees. After showing up at the crime scene, he found documents that showed that a Proposition aimed at fixing the infrastructure in the poor parts of the city was corrupt by having ties with the Bluebloods. This Proposition… was also backed by Chopin’s parents, which seems to be unrelated intrigue?
Morgan makes this argument to get him to confess: The assassin in the courtroom was actually there to kill Rogers, for causing a trial that would let everyone know about Prop 492, even though Rogers was also trying to cover it up. We hate you for sucking at doing what we want, I guess.
Rogers has backstory! He was living in the Bluebloods’ area, not as a Youngblood but as some random kid who grew up and got helped to go to college by the community. (The community that manages things in this area being the Bluebloods.) If they picked out a fall guy for Sosuke, it’d probably have to be Rogers, sorry my dude but you were ultrafucked no matter how things went. He got partnered up with Chopin to handle things like giving career fairs to kids in high schools instead of entering active shooter buildings, which I imagine the parts of the police force that actually got assigned to life-or-death cases are seethingly jealous over. Chopin, like an idiot, is really mad about teenagers laughing at him, which doesn’t bode well for his political career. Like, did his life path get set up by his parents too, so he didn’t actively choose to be out of the way of any real danger?
I imagine the police force would be split over this, because now it’s a cop vs cop issue. Police who work in the lower wards, who realize that Prop 492 being cancelled is going to drop the canopy on them, versus police who are against murder or the Bluebloods.
Tantalizingly, the thing the Bluebloods need to stop the impending infrastructural disaster is… money! Which Sosuke could have a ton of. There’s something kinda fucky about how no other organization deals with anyone associated with the Bluebloods’ neighborhoods, which is why they have to use their kids as organ donors, but they are also part of the community and keep doing community things like funding infrastructure projects, so if they would up their diplomacy a little bit instead of sending internal assassins and running torture rings, they could be fine. It’s not like every other corporation in the city doesn’t indulge in murders or anything.
… okay, so, as it turns out, Makoto is actually Sosuke’s son, and thus would also be suitable for unlocking the Blueblood’s banks. So they were totally right to try to kidnap him after all. Huh.
Morgan: If Makoto is Sosuke’s son, though, that means he carries his blood. If he stands to inherit from both his Father and Mother, his worth-
Mirei: I understand this is going to be hard for you to believe, coming from a woman like me. But Makoto’s already worth enough. He has his health. He has his Mother. And his Father will always be close by. Every moment we’ve shared as a family is… worth its weight in gold. …. And as you’ve now seen, when given the opportunity to choose between Makoto and the Blueblood fortune – Sosuke chose the former.
Morgan is talking to the spoiled rich heiress who has enough money to own part of the city asking why they don’t need more money. Of course she’d say some garbage only our nuclear family matters shit like this! They don’t need anything, nor do they care about anyone who does need anything, so all that money, which would greatly benefit a poor area of the city even if it’s just chump change to the Ikariyas, is better off locked away. The Canopy’s going to crash down but who cares we’re living in a mansion!! Lots of other families exist but ohhh well.
Morgan attempts to blackmail her with this information, not for anything valuable, but so they don’t get her on more of these cases, and she laughs and reminds her that they have all the cards because they’re rich scumbags. Right.
Anyway, Emma’s come over and flirting with the idea that it was Heartbreak who committed the murders. Hello Emma! I’ve been missing your lesbian drama cat-and-mouse detectiving from episode 0. She dismisses it herself, saying she’s seeing things that aren’t there. A sign of obsession, which is greater than puppy love… or perhaps, to be possessed…
Morgan’s having another flashback. Someone’s telling her about how her advice worked. I guess she wasn’t talking to her mom in her last one. Morgan was the one poking holes and digging deeper, saying try to solve a case first if you want to be a lawyer. And despite her bullying attempts, it really worked out. Was she talking to Emma? I’m not really sure, because Morgan didn’t seem to know Emma came from money in the previous chapter.
Also, a gang called the Rusts are taking credit for Morgan’s kills for some reason. I think there was more about them, but the gang war politics are the least attached aspect so far, and if you asked me I wouldn’t be able to connect the setup to them. But as for the bits I remember, the scary stories the nice drug dealers were telling before Morgan murdered them: the scary purchaser of the noh mask has come around to questioning some children in the epilogue, and they know Morgan has… red hair…
Still don’t know what she’s going to do with that mask…
