Page 11: Where are we?

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Rant incoming: But I promise that out of all the comics, this is the bleakest one.

In my mind this town is still small/undeveloped because it’s inside an absolutely massive superfund site. The few locals we see are the stubborn nails who refuse to leave their homes, or the nuts who chose to take on the risks.

By this point in the setting, I figure most places probably have a local poison. Part of buying/renting a home is choosing what will show up on your medical chart in a few decades. But this place is worse.

But the deer is doing okay. Even contaminated habitats seem to be better for many animals than developed ones. Any scrap of land where they can follow their instincts and act normally is a blessing as far as they’re concerned. They seem to thrive in abandoned factory sites and military bases, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, etc. Apparently we’re often worse for them than 60 years of toxic waste from munitions, fireworks, paint manufacturing, or actual radiation.

It also fits a background setting theme of apathy. That this is a world where people have mostly given up. They’ve shifted smoothly from ‘none of this is bad for the environment’ to ‘whelp, the environment’s fucked anyways, there’s no point in trying to do anything’ especially if it could make products more expensive.

Superfund sites have kind of represented some of that for me for a long while. Trash the place, make a buck, move on. Let the regular people deal with it. And nobody stops them.

And where most people have given up, the people who stole the gunbot and rigged it to a deer have gotten more radical. They’ve been blocked and criminalized and this is what they have left. I don’t think this was a sincere attempt to preserve the deer’s life so much as a bad joke with a lethal punchline, people helplessly watching the world burn lashing out at the ones who’ve helped it along.

So they’ve stolen an AI from a corporation that made it to be shot at, gave it too much intelligence and the bare minimum of knowledge to do its job, and then discarded it when it didn’t make the grade. The thieves have modified it, deceived it, set it on a suicide mission, and in doing so, they have abused it in many of the same ways.

Whether the bodyguard can exceed their expectations and make an actual difference will remain to be seen.