Looks like the shooter cleaned out some CEOs
(twitter.com)
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This kind of stuff is reminding me more and more of a cyberpunk novel--random street rats with a grudge assassinating corpos. It's pretty inarguable that we live in a cyberpunk dystopia if you stop and think about it for a minute, just not a very exciting one.
The least believable aspect of cyberpunk was the ripperdocs. No way would a back alley doctor be able to successfully perform complex surgeries where they wire advanced bionics to your nervous system while high on drugs and in a filthy room, and you'd have any chance at all of surviving it.
That's true, although it is kind of amazing the amount of punishment the human body can take and keep on trucking. Before antiseptic, people survived gunshot and stab wounds with basically no treatment.
There's skeletal remains of a neanderthal with injuries that suggest he was deaf in one ear, blind in both eyes, was missing an arm, but died of old age. Then you hear stories from the Victorian era where someone got a fatal infection from a small cut. Though, to argue against your point, there's a huge difference between closing wounds and organ transplants.
I think the idea is such surgeries are much less complicated than they would be in our time, and the ripperdoc no doubt has automated help. Usually the truly kickass stuff (read: for boss NPCs) requires a bleeding edge corporate clinic. Also, not all of them are high on drugs during surgery...
I'll need to watch it again, but in Edgerunners that bullshit time acceleration thing the main character got was a complete spine replacement, right? Bleeding edge tech reserved for special forces troops. And at that point the main character was relatively unaugmented, just a bootleg USB jack in the back of his head (that didn't even work). If he survived the procedure, he should have got cyber psychosis right away.
I believe in universe its a graft, not a replacement. Plus in universe cyber psychosis doesn't affect everyone the same way. Some people are more resistant than others, and Adam Smasher seems to be basically immune. Although that's probably because he was always a psychopath.
The Sandevistan is not time acceleration.
i think that whole cyberpunk idea was sort of a spin off the old idea of off the books "doctors" who patch up criminals after a gunshot wound.
It has exaggeration. Think of, instead, you come down with the 'rona. The "ripperdoc" of the modern era says "take this triple-purpose malaria-medication-slash-horse-antiparasitic, some vitamin D and C pills, and some nyquil/rum mixture. Fix you right up it will." Even though that's against every sacred tenet of Corporate Medicine.
You're not doing open-heart surgery, but you are being prescribed medications and chemical treatments.
Is there explicit canon on how the cybernetics interface with the body? Maybe it’s possible that the implants do a lot of the work themselves, and all the ripperdocs need is a moderate level of specialization to put things in pretty much the right place.
Deus Ex Human Revolution was the only cyberpunk property to base it on real-world robotic prostheses, basically leveraged from a mixture of myoelectric-prosthesis (using grafted exo and bio-skeletal augmentations or implementations to "enhance" basic human mobility or functionality) and separate software interfaces not unlike Elon's Neuralink.
Myoelectric prosthesis exists already: https://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-025-01604-0
The more advanced form of attaching the prosthetic onto a surgically grafted metal bone where the missing limb used to be has also been successfully tested by DARPA....
https://youtu.be/sk1NkWl_W2Y
....but it's not very convenient or cost-effective right now. It's also known as robotic osseoprotheses or osseointegration: https://www.hss.edu/health-library/conditions-and-treatments/list/osseointegration
Some of the advancements in the field have included getting still live nerve endings to interact with the electric impulses from a robotic prosthetic, so that it acts like a normal limb. Alternatively, there is the third-party software, oftentimes referred to in cyberpunk fiction as "wetware" that interfaces between the human mind and the prosthetic/implant to function as necessary. Most of that software is relegated to app-controlled software on smartphones at the moment:
https://youtu.be/VTs8wnMsh0k?t=207
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgC7la_3IIA
The libertarian in me still thinks unhinged levels of individual force multiplication will fix society. When one guy can buy a Chinese virus and delete a trillion dollars of assets from existence, the world will start to heal.
Or it will kill us all when one loon with a really specific cause gets his hands on a private nuke.
Maybe the occasional culling is a feature, not a bug.
I didn't say it was perfect.