Make A Difference

In A.D. 2048 Lieutenant Jeri Stone still believes that the police can make a difference, turn back the tide of crime and restore some kind of order to ordinary people's lives. No wonder everyone wants her dead. AD 2048- things have got worse. Crime has flourished as criminals found it ever easier to get access to better and better technology. The rich live in Protected Zones, walled communities with cameras and microphones in every public place. Away from these PZs are the 'no-go' zones, the private kingdoms of ruthless gang bosses, where the police never dare to go. Clustered around the walls of the Protected Zones are belts of no man's land called tweentowns. Here ordinary people struggle to stay alive, and adventurous citizens from the PZs come outside the walls for the kind of fun that's illegal inside. The police struggle to keep up day to day policing in the tweentowns, but everyone knows that the big gangs run everything there.  Crime is rampant in the tweentowns every day, and the police do less and less to arrest those responsible. Many officers who patrol tweentown have accepted the inevitable. But Lieutenant Jeri Stone still believes that the police can make a difference, turn back the tide of crime and restore some kind of order to ordinary people's lives. When a solid citizen from inside the Protected Zone is assassinated in tweentown by a relatively minor gang, Jeri sees her chance to do some good. Hitting such a small gang is practical, and with such a respectable victim the courts should be interested in trying the case. But the killing is not all it seems. The evidence soon points inside the walls of the PZ, where crime isn't tolerated. Jeri's investigation leads her into a world of political corruption where crime and big business are two side of the same coin - both just ways of getting more money and more power. All her superiors seem intent on discouraging her investigation, and if she continues regardless - well, she might have to be silenced.