A cop. A cop he was. Every day, he would go back home to his family. What could be better than hugging your lovely partner at a hard day's night? Tickling your kids so that they're screaming in the unbearable joy of the moment? Having a nice cold drink, after all?

Yeah. Not exactly.

"Not exactly" was the story of his life. Back in the day, he was a star—for some, at least. They made a movie about him, and then another. But this media industry never-ever showed a sign of interest in his real life.

What about the struggles of paying a mortgage? What about all the joys and hardships of marriage? Raising kids? No, they'd never had the will to make some documentary about his real life, let alone just ask him how he was doing.

So he was —is?—a star, but not exactly. The same applies to his family. This "not exactly" family was made up of two offsprings made at a nearby plant where they also make iPhones. And the partner, well, he was from abroad. A refurbished nuclear rocket from Cuba with an autograph of Fidel Castro on his belly. He was talkative as hell, which should have compensated for how silent our hero usually was.

People used to call our hero "Robocop", and he didn't mind. What he did mind was the mortgage he'd been paying and the fact he couldn't drink anything nice and cold in the evening. "Only machine oils, only hardcore!" is how his partner would like to state it, ironically. Robocop's children wouldn't say anything at all, as they didn't have speech modules installed.

What a life to live!

So, that was just an ordinary day. Robocop awoke with a start, got his hot, vigorous morning oil, and went to work. He was about to ask for a vacation to, you know, center himself, rethink his life, all that stuff.

Well, the rethinking started just as he came to work only to find out that he was dismissed, effective immediately. The station laid off one third of the police officers to replace them with chatbots to fill in the forms and make investigations. Even though they wouldn't manage well, it wouldn't be worse than what the fired officers would do and chatbots cost less anyway.

Robocop grabbed all his staff from the table to put it in a box. Paper, a lot of it. Pencils. An old lamp. An "employee of the month" badge. A ballet dancer figurine. Unwanted things that the meat-based coworkers would stack on Robocop's table just because he didn't need pretty much anything as he was doing his job either with a built-in interface or with a gun sticked to his thigh with a tape.

He never figured what to do with those things, he just decided to accept them. So he took all of it out of the station and sat on the porch. He was sad as he didn't know what to do. Graphic, violent pictures pierced his mind then. The anger spoke to him, urging him to act. Until he realized that he could grab some cannabis oil and just chill. In the end, it was legalized in London, Ontario, where he settled after a short career in cinema.

He stood up and walked tall to the nearest cannabis shop. There he was, proudly unemployed and mortgage-dependent. The day was young, yet the housing crisis was still in its prime.