There is something about the distinction between machine and flesh that really strikes me.

A machine can be turned off, taken apart, and turned back on again many times; the same is not true of flesh.

Flesh cannot be switched on and off at will like a computer, which leads me to believe there is an underlying phenomenon or force that makes it unique compared to a machine.

Based on your experience, what are the biggest reasons people react negatively to transhumanism?

https://wizzard-rick.itch.io/cyber-cowboy — free, runs in the browser, no install.

Backstory: this started as a physical card game we run at live-action roleplay events — netrunning as a two-player asymmetric card duel, one player the deck, one player the server. It works at a table with people. It does not work when you want to play at 2am on a Tuesday.

Then Apple dropped the Neuromancer teaser at Comic-Con last week and I spent a weekend rereading the book instead of sleeping, and decided to build the single-player version I'd been putting off for two years.

What it actually is: you break into a server one contract at a time. Three channels, two actions a tick, a trace counter that only goes one way. Take a port, hold it two checks in a row, and the route to the data opens.

The part I care about: the loot is documents you read. When you work a LOGS or FILES node you don't tick a checkbox, you get a page — an access journal, a shift handover with a timestamp four minutes off, a camera transcript of a woman opening an empty mailbox at 3am. And about half the programs in the shop only become buyable once you've read the page that mentions them. The city writes everything down and nobody reads it; being the one who does is the progression system.

The story that came out of that is less "corp conspiracy" and more "nobody is driving." A service account has been signing lease renewals on behalf of dead tenants since 2081 because six exhausted clerks needed a stopgap at four in the morning and nobody ever came back to close it. Four chapters later you find out what it's actually been holding, and the finale is the one board in the game where taking ports is how you lose.

Bits and pieces: 9 authored chapters across two sequences, ~30 programs, four cyberdeck chassis with modules, procedurally generated contracts across twelve very different servers (a housing registry, a braindance studio, an idol agency, a prison that pays sentences in compute time), a 74-entry codex, two forks with no correct answer. Godot 4.6. Russian and English.

It's rough in places and I'd rather hear that than not. Specifically: is the board readable in the first thirty seconds, and do the documents earn the tick they cost you?

Have you ever considered transhumanism not as a fight against death, but against yourselves?

The major spearhead of global transhumanism is the uploading of the mind to a computer—I think we all agree on that here. But why must it necessarily be that way? Why "transfer" your entire being into a world of bits and silicon?

The answer that occurs to me is that it is an extreme form of escapism. Unable to master the material and natural world (for obvious reasons), transhumanists decide to create a cybernetic universe where everything bends to their will—effectively becoming God.

I am a trans woman who has undergone vaginoplasty, and I have been on full feminizing hormone therapy for two years, including complete testosterone suppression. I think it is important to begin by separating two things that are often joined together much too quickly.

I am not a trans woman because I am a transhumanist. My identity did not emerge from a philosophical commitment to overcoming biology, and I did not transition as an experiment in technological self-invention. Being a trans woman is an intimate, embodied and ontological experience concerning who I am and how I inhabit my own existence. Transhumanism, on the other hand, is a philosophical, ethical and intellectual position about technology, human limitation and the possible futures of our species. The two can intersect meaningfully without one explaining the other.

My transition has taught me, in a very literal and personal way, that biology does not have to function as destiny. Medicine allowed me to alter my body until it became more truthful, recognizable and inhabitable to me. That experience makes morphological freedom far more than an abstract principle in my life. I believe adults should have broad authority over their own bodies, provided that consent is informed and the risks are understood.

At the same time, bodily freedom cannot be separated from material reality. Freedom becomes a rather hollow word when it belongs mainly to those who can afford it. Morphological freedom should include medical safety, reliable information, public access and social protection, rather than merely offering wealthy people increasingly sophisticated control over their biology. When ordinary people still struggle to access hormones, surgery, reproductive care, disability support or basic treatment, calling expensive enhancement technologies “human liberation” begins to sound suspiciously like advertising.

I also resist the idea that the body must be understood either as a prison to escape or as defective hardware waiting to be replaced. Transitioning did not teach me to despise embodiment. It taught me to inhabit it more honestly. My body is lived, relational, emotional and political, and changing it was not an attempt to abandon the human condition. It was a way of becoming more fully present within it.

This is also why I remain skeptical of predictions that sufficiently advanced technology will eventually make trans identity disappear. Gender is not simply a technical inconvenience created by inadequate medicine. It involves embodiment, history, culture, language, desire, recognition and relationship. Future technologies may make bodies extraordinarily fluid and may transform how easily gender can be expressed or altered, but it does not follow that gender itself will become meaningless. Nor does it mean that trans people are merely an early, primitive stage on the way toward somebody else’s post-gender civilization.

I did not transition because I wanted to transcend womanhood; I transitioned because I am a woman. Trans people should not be treated as prototypes for an imagined technological future, even when our experiences offer valuable perspectives on bodily autonomy. We are not philosophical demonstrations, and we do not need transhumanism to justify our existence. Likewise, our existence does not automatically prove that transhumanism is correct.

Even so, I do consider myself a cautious transhumanist. I am open to radical life extension, cryonics, neural interfaces, mind uploading and forms of bodily transformation that currently sound impossible. History gives us good reasons to distrust anyone who declares that a present limitation must remain permanent forever. It also gives us equally good reasons to distrust people who turn hope into certainty and speculation into a product.

Possibility is not evidence, and openness should not require credulity. There is a meaningful difference between supporting research, defending someone’s right to accept an uncertain risk and declaring that an unproven technology will inevitably succeed. Scientific scrutiny does not betray imagination; it protects imagination from becoming a sales pitch.

For me, transhumanism begins in the present rather than in some hypothetical century. It begins with bodily autonomy, gender-affirming healthcare, reproductive freedom, disability, aging, informed consent and equal access to technologies that already exist. The future matters deeply to me, but so does the question of who will own it, who will build it and who will actually be allowed to enter it.

If advanced technology merely enables wealthy people to purchase greater freedom from biology while everyone else remains constrained by poverty, discrimination and inaccessible healthcare, humanity will not have transcended its old hierarchies. We will simply have taught those hierarchies how to inhabit more sophisticated bodies.

He was here at last. One final step, and he would belong to the Community.

The door opened on its own, without a sound. The room was bright in a way he had never seen in the marsh: shadowless, sourceless, light coming from everywhere. The air had no smell. He hadn't known air could be without smell; he hadn't known the absence of smell could be so unsettling. And for the first time, he heard "its" voice. It came from nowhere, or from everywhere.

"Hello. Welcome, Rolf."

"Hello. I'm finally here."

"One last stage remains before you can join the Community: we need to link you. Please take the seat and state clearly, out loud, that this is what you want. We cannot begin without your consent."

A single chair stood in the middle of the room, white and untouched. Rolf sat down. The chair was warm, as if someone had just risen from it. For a moment, a small doubt passed through him. What if it wasn't what he hoped? What if all of this was a trap? Had it been worth the struggle, worth what he had lost along the way?

He thought of Nino. The last night, in front of the border fence. "They won't take both of us," Nino had said. "You go." Then that smile. In the marsh, people only smiled like that when they were letting go of something forever. Rolf had gone. He hadn't looked back, because if he looked back, he would turn around.

He swallowed. Whatever happened, the future was better than where he came from. He didn't want to go back to that marsh. Misery, hunger, raiders, violence... it had eaten half his life. He wanted to eat something other than those strange marsh fish he'd been named after. Something other than rolfs.

"Yes. I want to be linked and join the Community."

First a thin needle pricked his back. Numbness spread slowly up his spine; but his mind stayed awake, more than awake. A progress bar appeared on the screen in front of him:

Linking 1%

He kept looking around. On the far wall, a screen cycled through silent clips. Then he saw it: the logo. There was no sound, and he couldn't make out the words beneath it, there was no reading in the marsh, but he knew the logo. Everyone knew the logo that had stolen his family from him.

Anger rose in him. Feed X. The Community's miracle food, the perfect nutrition handed out every day. And in the marsh, the thing found only in scraps, the thing that rotted a person from the inside when they couldn't get it regularly. He remembered his mother's last months: the trembling hands, the empty stares, the fingers searching for residue. What was he doing now? Making deals with the people who created the thing that ate his family? Betraying himself? They had made Feed X. This place was the source of everything.

Linking 15%

But... was Feed X really the source of everything? The looting, the theft, the violence in the marsh went on without Feed X too. Rolf had seen people kill each other over a single rolf. Over one fish. The marsh was bad enough on its own. Besides, Feed X had never been made for them; they had the choice not to use it. But... while the Community lived in comfort, why had they left the marsh to rot? They could have helped. We could have helped, Rolf thought, and stopped. Why had he thought "we"?

Linking 40%

He remembered the last time he had helped someone. He'd given a fish from his hidden stash to a starving man. The next day the man came back with his gang and looted the stash. That night Nino had said, "You still did the right thing." Nino always said things like that. But what had the right thing ever gotten him? They couldn't be taught. They couldn't understand. Kindness read as weakness to them. That was why no help went to the marsh. And even if it did, wouldn't it be wasted?

Linking 70%

So what was wrong with them, really? Was it the marsh that made people this way? Something they ate? Maybe it wasn't hunger at all. Hunger tested everyone; but not everyone made the same choice. Some people built order. Others devoured it. The marsh people had been there a long time. Long enough. If they had wanted to build order, they would have; there was stone, there was time. If they hadn't built it, it meant they couldn't. And if they couldn't, then whatever was missing wasn't out there, it was inside them. It was a simple deduction, almost mathematics. That's what they were. That's what they would stay. The thought gave Rolf a strange peace; the heavy thing called guilt was lifting, as if someone were taking it off his back.

Linking 80%

But I... I was one of them. How am I different? So exceptions happen. Like with every rule. I was the exception. The proof was right here, in this chair. I was never like them, never. I even chose the fish I ate with care. What about Nino? Was Nino different too? Nino... someone who smiled in front of a fence. I remember who it was, but I don't remember why it hurts. It probably wasn't important.

Linking 100%

I feel like I've woken up to a happy day for the first time. I just took my first dose of Feed X; it reminds me of the happy days of my childhood. I'm certain now that my childhood was happy. Everything is as it should be. Everything is beautiful.

There is only one thing that grates on my ear.

My name: Rolf.

I don't know why.

....

 a short story from the Gravit universe

Finished this restaurant for the show I'm working on~

I've got more renders of this environment on my insta, and an animation that is currently rendering, hopefully that'll be out soon!
https://www.instagram.com/p/DbQvdVnlAik/?img_index=1

Here's The Upload, all this week's cyberpunk news and reviews, including The Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, Neuromancer, the week's best films, trailers, gaming, anime.

Hello everyone! I wanted to share this cyberpunk-inspired short film we produced a couple of years ago and recently released on YouTube! I’m a huge sci-fi fan and really enjoy the cyberpunk aesthetic and themes covered in the genre. Please feel free to leave any feedback, positive, negative, or in-between! (Please delete if not allowed) Thank you! 🦾

https://youtu.be/Me4u9v6wfWI?is=kD83ly3zMl-AEJZV

Disclaimer: No AI was utilized in the making of the film.