Strangers' Gate
What comes after the death of masculinity?
Welcome to Post-WWAI America, on the far side of the Automation Age.
Firearms are illegal. The U.S. economy is now the world's fifth-largest, lagging both the European and African Unions. Major coastal cities, including Miami and New Orleans, survive only as haphazardly geoengineered islands. The words woman and man have been retired in large swaths of the country, replaced by fem and masc. Babies are grown in Exowomb birthing centers staffed entirely by fems, because the presence of Y-chrom attendants affects fetal development in mysterious and inexplicable ways. And that's the good news.
The real problem - for everyone, everywhere - is the global prevalence of a diabolically designed genetic virus nicknamed HEX (Human-Engineered CRISPR-Kallmann Syndrome), which was created and unleashed by persons unknown to engender a single, devastating result: reducing the production of testosterone in every infected human with a Y chromosome to near zero. Permanently, and for every generation thereafter.
But for Oz Pagano, this is all just background noise. A digital forensics specialist scraping by gigworking for the NYPD's Computer Crimes Unit (with the occasional surveillance job thrown in to fatten his wallet), his cozy basement office in the Bowery is far removed from the ferocious political battles and paranoid conspiracy theories roiling the rest of the world - and that's exactly how he likes it.
But then, one fateful poker night, Oz is abruptly summoned to a crime scene in Central Park, where he finds a meticulously arranged, nearly naked corpse draped over a stone retaining wall. Chiseled into the rough surface beneath the contorted body, he glimpses two inscrutable, half-obscured words: STRANGERS' GATE.
And thus begins the worst week of Orazio Pagano's life.
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