Megopolis
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007Premise: Astro boy meets I Robot the movie with modern anime style and Firefly storytelling.
In the future robots are everywhere. Construction workers, garbage collectors, waiters, maids and nurses. Safe, affordable machines that protect, serve and preserve. Although they interact in quite naturalistic ways, these robots are just machines, tools used to make our lives better, and like any industrial product, closely regulated by the government.
Of course some less savory characters also have use for super strong, super fast, tireless servants – to intimidate, steal and terrorize. Thus the Megapolis Police Department organized the nation’s first Robot Crimes Unit, specially equiped to counter the unusual threat to public safty and order posed by robots in the wrong hands. Now you’d think it would take a robot to stop a robot, but the RCU depends entirely on normal human officers. This is partially because robots make poor crime fighters since their ability to make complex value judgements is rigidly constrained by their safety programming, partly because any robot’s programing could be subverted by the very criminals they’re trying to stop, and partially because of the unit’s chief, rising star Leon Rockwell has a deep seated suspicion of the machines he’s charged with protecting the public from. Under Leon’s leadership the RCU has asembled a team of diverse skills and equipped with the latest anti-robot hardware that nontheless is completely manual, utilizing only the most primitive of pocket super computers.
Until today…