--- Nidoking <nidoking@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Are police boxes usually inhabited? I thought they

were basically

telephone booths with special purpose phones.

You're thinking police boxes in England, of Doctor
Who fame.  These are more like mini-police stations.
Giving directions might be what they do in practice,
as Nidoking said, but only because there is not that
much crime to fight - or so I've been told.

http://www.washington.edu/ark2/archtm/Tky53.html
http://www.police.pref.kanagawa.jp/eng/e_mes/engg0001.htm

Actually, squeezing the squad into one of these
wouldn't be that tight a fit, unless it was an
especially small box.

The police box, or "kouban", is a box that sits on
many street corners
in Japan (a different box for each corner,
naturally)

---

We are the police box.

We were originally an emergency measure.  During the
boomers' final rampage, the AD Police gained many
cyborg officers - even quite a few that, by law, were
boomers themselves.  Not that anyone cared: if it was
wearing a police uniform and shooting more machines
than people, it had a place on the squad.

But emergency prosthetics never were artistically
crafted prosthetics.  Before long, quite a few boomer
officers were noticeably boxy.  "Police box" - never
"koban" - was the term that caught on, and it
eventually described a majority of the force.  The
necessities of war in this land that had not seen true
war for so long soon saw these officers coordinating
almost telepathically by radio - and before long,
there was no "almost".  To survive, they merged their
consciousnesses, believing they would separate once
the crisis passed.

But the crisis did not soon pass, and with every
passing day in the link, the officers found themselves
less willing to give up their newfound
closer-than-blood siblings.  Indeed, a few even
leaked the protocols to some of their loved ones,
"upgraded" to save their lives just as the police had
been.  Very little scorn came of this: besides the
strictly utilitarian boost to the network, or the fact
that the officers all found themselves loving the new
member as only their one unit had, they came to view
the decision as their own.  Before long, we recognized
the truth: while many in bodies, we have become one in
heart, mind, and soul.

The battle has recently ended, we hope.  We now sit on
every street corner, watching for activity that might
signal survivors, or any remaining boomers intent on
destruction.  An hour, a day, a week...the power grid
remains up, so our bodies can feed; beyond that, our
mind wanders while our eyes keep their ceaseles vigils
on automatic.

Many of the remaining humans are afraid of us, unsure
whether we are the boomers that slaughtered their
fellow citizens.  But we guard the stockpiles of food
and water, and without these, they can not last long.
Some of our faster selves distribute the supplies, but
some of the boomers distributed poisoned food, and the
survivors have long enough memories.  So, we have
commandeered a factory to build new shells for
ourselves, entrusting the designs to one of our
surviving human sisters who has pledged to make us a
form the humans will trust.

The survival of Japan may depend on Nene's ability to
make us cute.

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