#rounderwords

“cyberpunk future where you need to make payments on your cybernetics or they get repo’d” is good, but doesn’t go far enough. consider cyberpunk future where the terms of service restrict how you can use your augments and implants — your prosthetic hands physically quake and lock up if you try to use them for things your medical company deems “a risk factor” (which somehow includes protesting the very same biomedical conglomerate), and your eyes automatically blur information that tells you how to improve or update augments yourself. but even surrounded by this much greed, widespread underground communities exist of people helping one another jailbreak their titanium bodies, recapturing the autonomy corporations have methodically stripped away from them.

space battles shouldn't be star wars style dogfights. they should be like 16th century naval engagements on steroids -- huge starships circling each other in the void for days and weeks. the distances are so vast that you'll never even lay eyes on the enemy ship; they're just a blip on a radar, a variable in the firing solution calculations. battles aren't short bursts of incredible violence, they're weeks of slow-burning tension as soldiers get up and go about their duties, acutely aware that they could be blown to smithereens at any time if the negotiations happening lightyears away go awry. the minute the captain gets a go order, the missiles fly, and you will never even see the face of the person that kills you.

i like to think that after a certain age, not having prosthetics or cybernetics is a status symbol. the poor get cheap insurance-provided prosthetics, the well-off can buy custom-made titanium faux-limbs. but when a member of the ultrawealthy loses an eye or an arm or has their lungs fail, they just pay for the family gene-labs to grow them a replacement in an artificial womb. flash-frozen stem cells thawed and nudged into the shape of a limb or organ to be transplanted as necessary. a ludicrously expensive process, but it lets them preserve the false sense of purity that sets them apart from the working poor. before you notice someone's clothes, their jewelry, you note the absence of a cybernetic leg or any hardware under their skin, and you know you're dealing with someone whose net worth is measured in star systems.

gonna make a cyberpunk setting with prosthetics and cybernetics that outlast their owners. even with advanced medicine, humans only live for a hundred years tops -- but titanium doesn't age, doesn't rust, doesn't break down. and it'd be a waste to destroy it, so the insurance cartels just repossess it upon body-death, flash-sanitize it, and then put it back into stock for some other poor bastard. they're cheaper, pre-made, already calibrated - only problem is that some people who get refurbished prostheses complain about phantom reflexes, nerve inputs they never sent.

hey sport. yeah. yeah, no, you did great on that last sortie. great kill ratio, excellent sync-up rate. minimal damage to the armor plating. great stuff, a+. there's just like, one thing -- and it's such a small thing, i- i really feel bad even mentioning it. but your mission handlers, they uh. they mentioned that every time you took out a bogey and the neural-reinforcement electrodes in your tac-collar fired you uh. made a weird noise? like sort of a, uh, an exhalation of air. like a gasp. no, not like that. no-- okay, yeah, more like that. yeah. like a moan. uh. yeah. kinda freaked them out. yeah. yeah, i know. it's fine, just- try to not do that? yeah? okay. okay, cool. yeah. thanks.