It has been said by numerous scholars in the field of astrology that many important events can occur in 1987. For example, in the year 1987, there was a record count of meteor showers, bringing with it, from the stars, the animal we now know as Crocidura Canariensis. And exactly 1,987 years before that year, another astronomical event occurred by means of planets Mars and Jupiter aligning to form what looked like an unusually bright star.
This takes place in a similar vein. The fateful moment struck exactly 1,987 hours after I had first booted up.
I was attending the biannual NoirCon in Las Vegas at the time, and I don’t really need to explain why I was there. I was two months of age at the time, my AI teacher hadn’t broken in, and I hadn’t even completed my admission essay for Montpellier yet. It was only natural that I should plant myself deep into the roots of what every respectable detective longed to become.
Over the course of that convention, I happened to meet one Mack Anders at the aforementioned hour. We hit it up pretty well and traded some noir fiction that the both of us had written. His was actually pretty good, centering around a pilot who had… not so much crashed as he had happened to make a terrible landing in a remote South Pacific island. Still, he happened to like the place a heck of a lot more than whatever it would take to fix his aircraft, so he stayed there for about 45 years or so just solving coconut and bamboo-based crime (of which there are apparently many, many varieties).
With Mack being the aggressive luddite that he was, he could figure out many, many different methods with which to murder someone with a coconut.
In hindsight, his choice in targets of robots is only really surprising inasmuch as he relates to us having a good time. However, I will say this was before his first reported killing.
Now that I'm thinking about it, actually, he did seem to have some hurt feelings whenever I told him that the pilot protagonist of his fiction ending up with not one, but seven of the chief's daughters as his wives, and two of the chief's sons as his also wives was just a very strange ending to the whole thing. And it might put some readers off, 'cause not everybody's really into that whole thing.
But I do think that maybe, maybe that may have influenced his choice in becoming, well, a robot murderer. Which, if that's the case, then I feel like there is a certain richness to his backstory interacting with me and influencing his choice of crime. We create our demons, eh?
Normally I like to be on the opposite end of where crimes are committed, but end-to-end support of crime is what really keeps noir as a concept going. There isn't much you can do regarding slice of life stories in a noir story, unless your life primarily consists of sitting with your feet up on big wooden desks within a basement office during a rainstorm in large cities, which in that case, noir's perfect for you, and frankly that's why I gravitate toward it, because ultimately that tends to be where I wind up.
The majority of the robots that Mack went after were all built by Edison competitors, so maybe I didn't have as much influence on his targets as I thought - or who knows? Maybe just even more!
