Gunmetal Detective

Preface

Drip... Drip... Drip... Groggily I ease my eyes open, my vision focusing in and out on the slate gray ceiling above me, where a slow stream of water is dropping onto my forehead. My head feels like its been bashed in with a sledgehammer, pain pounding in on me at the temples. I force myself to turn and glance around my surroundings, but there is nothing of note within the room. Just walls made of the same slate gray stone as the ceiling. For the first time I notice that I can't move my arms or legs. Grunting, I lean forward slightly, looking down to see that I was bound tightly to a table by chains at each of my ankles and wrists. "Oh fuck me..." I breathe quietly to myself, now remembering the situation I was in.

A door seems to open out of nowhere in the middle of the wall opposite me, and a man enters the room. He is wearing a blood red suit, with a black undershirt and red tie. His hair is dyed an even darker shade of red than his suit, sticking up in unkempt spikes. He is sickly thin, and walks with a catlike grace towards me. Stopping next to me, his thin mouth opens into a wide smile filled with sharp teeth. I stare into his eyes, and he stares back with the fiery intensity of a being that has lost every shred of humanity, or never had any to begin with. "Detective Shade, I have been waiting for this moment a long, LONG, long time" the man purrs into my ear as he pulls an evil looking serrated knife from his inner suit pocket. I notice absently that dry blood still coats it's edges, viewing it from an almost third person perspective in my mind. "Now, I'm afraid, our beautiful story must come to an end..." He says, ever so slowly lowering the knife toward my neck. I close my eyes, wondering just why my fucked up life had to end in a godforsaken way like this...

I guess I should begin at the, you know, beginning, before the shit storm I'm in even happened, so I'll start with my birth. Let me start off first by saying this, you know how some people believe god to be a woman? That there's a big broad up in the sky watching over us? Well if God is a woman then she was definitely on her period when deciding the fate of Daniel Reese Shader. My life has been one big tragic joke after another. I was born on July 1st, 2200 to a Rachelle Shader and Arnold Shader of Ares Sector, subsector 25. Three days after my birth my mom was murdered for the veggie bacon she had just bought from a vendor. Yeah, you read that correctly. Murdered for fucking veggie bacon. That shit doesn't even taste good. Anyways, so I grew up with just my father watching over me. I didn't see him much considering he was working in one of HumanTech's robot engineering facilities, meaning he worked his hands to the bone almost all day everyday.

On my 17th birthday I was waiting for my father to get home from a 16-hour shift, but he would never arrive. While walking home from the factory he was mugged and killed by a local gang. Wanna know what the funny part is? The only thing they took was his shoes. His raggedy ass black tennis shoes. Idiots thought that a dirty looking factory worker was going to have cash on him apparently, and when he didn't they decided that instead of just murdering him for nothing they would at least get some new kicks out of it. What a sick joke, right? The even funnier part is that the next day I got a letter in the Sector Mail Service offering me his job at the factory.

I took the offer, considering I had no other way to support myself, and I worked there for five meaningless, tiring, and grueling years. A few weeks after my 22nd birthday (which I celebrated by eating two energy bars in the morning rather than the usual one, Happy fuckin birthday to me am I right?) the factory shut down due to the humanoid robots that we were constructing malfunctioning, meaning they tried to kill all of the factory workers. As crazy as that sounds, it's the truth. I have a four-inch scar across my right eye to show for it. Crazy Mech Head tried to rip my damn face off, then flung itself out the window. That ended HumanTech's human robot endeavors, and led to my eventual joining of the Ares' Sector law enforcement department.

I worked my way up the ranks fairly quickly, finding that I had quite the knack for rooting out the shittier people of the shitty Sector. People gave me the nickname Shade due to my quiet way of tracking criminals. I was making a little bit of a name for myself. We'll slow down at this point though, focusing in on the year 2235. I am now a Detective of the force, and have stumbled upon a case that may have a root in my past. A case that just might be the death of me.