Bad Metal 02: Dirty Jobs

Gibson has been adjusting to his new job as a Wrecker - part cop, part garbage man, dealing with malfunctioning automatons. But he is beginning to suspect that there is more to these malfunctions than meets the eye.
How is it that some of the malfunctioning automatons seem able to spontaneously learn new skills?
Why did Red Eye, the automaton that nearly killed him, ask such searching, existential questions?
As Gibson and his Wrecker allies ponder a growing surge in cases of automaton 'outliers' - units that begin acting strangely but show no signs of malfunction or external tampering - they stumble across a criminal conspiracy that threatens to change the world as they know it.

Bad Metal 02: Dirty Jobs is the second in an ongoing series of cyberpunk novellas.