New York City had only neon lights, no nightlife. Its high-tech surroundings looked more like Background Characters, and the people walking through them wore their own terminals yet barely interacted with the backdrop at all.
Beautiful vending machines were filled with all sorts of goods and played cute music, but passersby had no intention of using them. They simply walked past with smiles on their faces, then moved away.
Skyscrapers adorned with neon lights packed tightly together, slicing the sky into narrow slits. Yet the people working inside merely sat at their desks with smiles on their faces, doing nothing.
Time was the key factor determining what actions they took. Like marionettes, people clocked in and out on schedule and ate together at designated times. As Kara carried Harley past those windows, Harley saw people still sitting motionless in their seats at midnight, smiling all the while. She keenly felt the impact of the Uncanny Valley Effect.
They looked far too much like humans, yet their strange behavior set them apart from normal people.
Humans felt a subtle fear toward things that looked highly similar to them but were clearly not human. Of course, Harley felt the Uncanny Valley Effect was not some rigorous theory of control. People had different tolerances for fear and were disturbed by different things, so whether they felt that fear varied from person to person.
So she seemed to have found the reason Jason had become a serial killer amid his mental confusion: he had felt fear and immediately responded with a stress reaction—killing.
When he believed something inhuman was watching him, fear drove him to kill.
But none of that really mattered. Harley herself sometimes killed for trivial reasons, like running out of cat food or not sleeping well the night before. So even