The feed went on, but Dirk had tuned out again. It was always the same, more of the same, more weather, more flood news, sometimes a discovery by a smart person, sometimes an interview with a not so smart person, politics, some socio-economic debate, and occasionally, actually useful information. Overall, it wasn’t very interesting, but keeping up to date was a necessity, if only to not get caught in radioactive rain, and a bit of a hobby for Dirk. What really caught Dirks fears was innovation, not because he was a technophile, but rather because it scared him like nothing else. It was the inevitability of it that got to him. He felt like a horse. Back in the dark age, horses were ubiquitous, they had a number of use cases to them, personal transportation, agriculture, messaging, war, and more. With each century that passed, they became more and more obsolete as they lost their usefulness. First was the wire. Long range messaging via horse was just inferior to electric signals, so that was done away with. Same for their use in agriculture, a plough pulled by a tractor made a horse seem silly. And when personal transport vehicles and aeroplanes came to be, the world's population of horses went down to less than a quarter of what it had been a decade before. The only reason they were spared extinction was for their use as pets. A Human on the other hand, one might presume, is not a horse, and intrinsically more valuable for they are intelligent. That, however, is not true, and was a very serious miscalculation on the horse's part, and humanity as a species was about to make the same mistake, proving they were quite definitively not above horse kind when it came to planning for survival. Dirk saw it as a natural flaw of evolution. This Darwin character got most of it right. The universe was trying very hard to increase its complexity, to use all energy differentials, and whenever something was better at that job than its predecessors it replaced them via evolution. For humanity, this had played out awesomely over the last couple of millennia. However, evolution is not a concept limited to biological life, or life itself for that matter. Life was just the latest tool it used to create agents of entropy, burning away and spiralling out the complexity of the universe. Technology and its subsequent innovations were just another tool, one much better suited to the task. It always started with a discovery of sorts. The physics, which many thought to have been exhausted long ago, produced another carrot for the horse of technology, and the cart of humanity was dragged on into wherever that particular carrot came from, indifferent to where that may be. And it went on and on and on and on. Wooden boats? Yes, please, never mind deforestation. Steam engines? Of course. Coal power plants? Naturally. Atomic weaponry? We’ll do it before anyone can say otherwise! Gene modification? More crop, more harvest, what’s not to like? Self improving AGI? Gamble after gamble and none too risky to take. When would it finally be realized that the horse only cared for the carrot, and we were all sitting in a cart with no reigns? In a quite impressive feat of ignorance, when reality finally caught up and detonated half the planet in nuclear fury, the rest of us that were left went right back for the next carrot. Cart, carrot, and horse ready to go blindly and enthusiastically over the next cliff. Dirk hated it with a passion, and he was a sceptic by profession.

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“In local news, a woman was found murdered on the Balduin Stair earlier today”

Now this was something real that demanded his attention.

“… Police forces are not yet disclosing information, but assure all citizens that the case will be conclusively investigated …”

So it was a dud for the news for now. Very promising, Dirk thought, and quite unusual. Murder in the heart of the city, which was a very well observed and restricted area, usually came in the form of hate crime or just the usual drunk brawl gone wrong. This was something else, thus, there must be an angle into it for him. Time to get to work. Dirk shifted gears, gone was the dreamy laziness of the past days. He needed a lead, he needed to know where, when, who, how and who he could charge for this investigation. Never mind, he thought, someone would pay up. Although it had happened before that, all he got out of a job was some “sincere regret” and “heartfelt thanks” from the next of kin. Moving on.