Well, something’s got to keep the stories going

We’ve all heard about the Hong Kong cops, right? Most of them are one the take, and the few that aren’t always end up being killed by their partners or some local gang thing, like you see in the movies. Well, the movies ain’t all fiction. Sometimes the good cops come back.

Word has it that there was a Mechanomancer in Hong Kong, nobody knows his name, who was traveling the world looking for new things to see, new places he’d been before. You know the kind of thing I mean, surely. Well, suffice to say he was doing a lot of traveling, seeing a lot of the world and stocking up on memories. It doesn’t really matter much, but you get the idea. So one night, completely fucked on opium and booze, he starts to pin down the essential scene that can be used to describe a place. The kind of thing that could happen elsewhere but you’d be surprised to hear of it happening. American Suburbia has the perfectly aligned houses, each with matching white picket fences and identical cars in the driveways, everything locked into the very precise grid of normality, Munich has the Oktoberfect — that’s the only one where the defining scene is an actual recognised event, as far as I know, England has the garden party at the manor house, all cricket and lack of chin and cucumber sandwiches. No, I am not making this shit up. You think I’d say that about England if I were? Give me some credit, please.

Anyhow. He figured that the defining scene for Hong Kong was the good cop being shot by his crooked partner, and then coming back looking for revenge. Of course it’s a bloody cliche. That’s what they all are. And I suppose he’d watched too many crap movies whilst whacked on drugs. It’s not like I met the little shite or anything. So he works on a way to make it happen. in the end, he’s got this device, 36926037 cubic feet. All subdivided into little compartments, and in certain compartments, a human brain. Three hundred and thirty three of them. It took him five years and some heavy duty mojo to finish it, but it did what it was supposed to: It stored the ghost of a good cop that was killed close to where he hid his gadget. Let the bugger manifest to avenge wrongs and eventually kill the guy that killed him. Only problem is, once that’s done the ghost is wiped from the memory banks.

Why is this a problem? Well, the machine has to do it’s job. It can’t stand being empty. As soon as one ghost is gone from the memory banks, it will throw out weird mojo to get another cop to die. It is actively throwing out enough psychic static that the cops in H-K stay corrupt all to buggery and that any good ones get whacked, just so that it’s not empty. It’s not a nice machine.

As for the creator, I honestly don’t know what he gave up for that machine. And I don’t think I want to. I don’t know if he’s still alive or not, either. After he built that device, he just sort of faded away. Maybe he just forgot who he was.