Cyberpunk

To celebrate my new short story collection, Death March to Happiness, I'm sharing one of the cyberpunk stories in it. This is The Tell-Tale Cardiac Pump Unit, which is my dystopian corporate cyberpunk take on Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.

https://michaelwmoss.com/the-tell-tale-cardiac-pump-unit

Here's Poe's original if you want to compare: https://poemuseum.org/the-tell-tale-heart/

There are couple more, much longer cyberpunk stories in the collection called Speed Kills and The Miracle, as well as some fantasy, horror, and steampunk stories.

Author @rek2@lemmy.ml

Hello fellow hackers and cyberpunk enthusiasts,

After 12 months of writing and research, I'm excited (and honestly a bit nervous) to share my first tech-thriller novella "Connection Timeout: The PingStarved Chronicles" with this community. This is my first time publishing fiction, so I'm both shy and thrilled to finally put it out there.

Set in 2030 Barcelona, it follows Andrés "PingStarved" Reyes, a 56-year-old hacker who must choose between protecting his estranged son and surrendering a revolutionary mesh networking protocol that could liberate global communications from corporate control.

What makes this different from typical cyberpunk:

• Features real mesh networking protocols (Meshtastic, Reticulum)
• Based on actual security research and exploitation techniques
• Grounded in technologies currently in development
• Authentic hacker culture representation - written by someone who lives it
• NO DRM - All formats are DRM-free because information wants to be free

This has been a labor of love, combining my passion for privacy tech and resistance against surveillance capitalism into a narrative that I hope resonates with our community. As someone who's been hacking for years but never written fiction before, I poured everything I know and believe about our culture into these pages.

Details:

• 29,429 words (86 pages, 2-3 hour read)
• Available in PDF and EPUB formats
• Price: $4.99 USD / €4.99 EUR
• DRM-FREE on all platforms

Available at:

• Gumroad (DRM-FREE): https://rek2.gumroad.com/l/connection-timeout-cyberpunk
• Amazon Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPZ18STC
• Amazon Kindle Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0FPZ18STC
• Also available on Amazon in UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Australia, and many other countries

If you enjoyed Neuromancer, Little Brother, or Mr. Robot, this explores similar themes of surveillance capitalism, digital liberty, and technological resistance - but grounded in the real tech we're building today.

Any feedback from the community would mean the world to me. Thanks for reading!

P.S. - For those who prefer open platforms, the Gumroad version comes with both PDF and EPUB, completely DRM-free. Support indie publishing and digital freedom!

I saw a trailer for this game and was intrigued enough to look into it. It made me realize that I've never seen a cyberpunk souls-like game before. I'm no souls-like expert but every souls-like I'm aware of has a dark fantasy setting. Yet there's nothing inherent to the souls-like genre that requires a dark fantasy setting, it just seems to be where most souls-like fans tend to go. Weird.

Anyway, after looking into it, I guess the developers only call this game an "Action RPG" despite users adding the 'souls-like' tag in steam. The trailer certainly looks like a souls-like but maybe the gameplay isn't actually souls-like. I'm not sure, I haven't played the demo.

Also, I guess this game is the final entry in their Liuyin Trilogy, after Nine Treasures of Liuyin and Redemption of Liuyin. Both those previous games had a dark fantasy setting (maybe souls-likes?) and this game just happens to be far enough into the future to be cyberpunk. So if it isn't souls-like, it certainly looks souls-like-adjacent.

Liuyin's World releases on September 19.

This is a 9-minute preview from IGN about Replaced. I've had this game on my steam wishlist since 2021 but it looks like it might actually be close to release now.

Given that this video is from IGN, there's a lot of hyperbole about how this could be one of the greatest indie games EVER MADE. So hopefully the game at least ends up being "good". It still looks cool though, I plan on picking it up whenever it releases.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1663850/REPLACED/

The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster was written in 1909. It predates Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers by a couple decades. The light bulb was still a recent invention. Yet the world Forster wrote about is oddly recognizable.

It's about a crazy world where everyone just sits alone in their room, staring at a screen and making reaction videos to other people's reaction videos. The main character is a woman who's fully invested in her reaction videos and is perfectly content with her life. But her son has this crazy desire to touch grass. Ridiculous! Sure, anyone can go outside and touch grass if they want, but why would they? All media feeds are on their screens, indoors! Besides, her son lives on the other side of the planet and everyone's rooms look the exact same, so why bother going anywhere at all?

This is just a short story, less than 50 pages. Or if you enjoy audiobooks, it's an hour and a half. And honestly, there isn't much of a plot here. This is mostly the author imagining a horrible world where everyone lives their lives glued to technology and they don't even see a problem with that. So a lot of the story is just the author describing that world. The son fills the role of "voice of reason" as he shouts at his mother for being so obsessed with her videos. And that's where the author injects what he's really trying to say with this story (as if it was subtle before that). Of course, this isn't just a snapshot of life in this world, something has to happen. So towards the end of the story, the machine stops. Because if humanity becomes so reliant upon technology, what will they do if that technology goes away?

A lot of the story made me think of the humans from Wall-E if they never left their rooms. And I liked how the humans weren't being forced to stay in their rooms like prisoners, they just... didn't see any reason to leave. And that's where this story feels proto-cyberpunk to me. It's in the dehumanization through technology. These humans aren't being subjugated by technology, they're voluntarily using this technology. And it makes them less.

Since the story was written in 1909, it's in the public domain. So you can read it or listen to it for free. I borrowed the audiobook on Hoopla and I thought the narrator did a great job of making the mother character always sound irritated by the minor inconveniences in her life. That feels accurate.

This short story isn't exactly a masterpiece but it's an interesting oddity from 1909 and isn't a major commitment to read so I recommend checking it out.

https://store.playstation.com/en-us/concept/10008070/

Dive into the dystopian cyberpunk world of Neo Berlin 2087 – a unique third- and first-person action RPG crafted for fans of immersive single-player experiences. Uncover a deep, narrative-driven story through never-before-seen gameplay, new levels, cinematic cutscenes, and intense combat. Meet new characters Bryan and Phoenix in this action-packed Gamescom 2025 reveal.

First trailer here https://lemmy.zip/post/20994790

Cool animation in the retro-futuristic and cyberpunk vibe

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/46425403

I have mixed feelings about Upload (as I've ranted about before). The setting is so extremely cyberpunk yet the story they decide to tell in this world is a rom-com. It's enough to keep me watching while at the same time knowing this show isn't for me and I'm not the target demographic. But then they'll throw the occasional nugget my way, like a William Gibson cameo, and I keep watching.

Anyway, here's a trailer for the final season, which is just a 4-part finale to wrap up the story. I don't mind that the show is ending but It's always nice when a cancelled show is allowed some closure.

I'm constantly torn between "I should make more of an effort to keep this cyberpunk community alive" and "I should give up on this whole Lemmy thing"... so here's a meme.

I really should find a giant repository of random cyberpunk artwork that I can post regularly since I can't keep up with a constant stream of discussion topics. Of course, if I did that, this community would turn more into r/cyberpunk with its random "here's what I drew in class today" posts.

Ok, yes, this movie isn't cyberpunk. I'm not even sure if it's cyberpunk-adjacent. But it feels like they wanted to make a cyberpunk movie and were forced to shove a War of the Worlds storyline into it instead. I know nobody is going to care about this movie but I wanted to talk about it anyway. Well, I mostly just wanted to share my rambling thoughts after watching the trailer...

First of all, one of the movie's taglines is "DATA IS THEIR FOOD" and that just... what does that even mean? Are the aliens AI now? How does that even make sense? Is that just an intriguing statement for the trailer or is it actually a plot point? I have to watch the movie now just to see if the aliens actually "eat" data because that's ridiculous.

More importantly, the movie seems to be focused on mass surveillance, technology, and personal data. That's where it almost feels cyberpunk-adjacent to me. If the real focus of the movie is on the "surveillance industrial complex" (another line from the trailer) then I'm curious where they're going with this. I've always considered the topic of data privacy to be adjacent to cyberpunk themes so I'm curious if that's what this movie is truly about.

Final thought... Is the entire movie just Ice Cube sitting in his office watching the events transpire from his computer/cellphone? Because that'd be amazing. The trailer makes it look like everything is viewed as a combination of facetime video calls and streaming video news reports and I wonder if that's what the actual movie looks like (and how long they commit to that bit).

I looked into it a bit and apparently this movie was filmed in 2020 and is only just now being released. The trailer dropped today and the movie will be available on Amazon Prime on July 30, so less than a week away. There's no way this movie will be good and I assume the only reason it's seeing the light of day is for tax purposes. It could be a glorious train wreck though.

Ok, this new trailer actually explains the plot and I'm intrigued. It also features a new NIN song which I certainly won't say no to.

While I can appreciate wanting to stay true to the original, I wish this game was more of an upgrade. Something like the 2023 Dead Space remake. That game did a phenomenal job of taking the original's ideas and improving on them in every way. It felt like a new AAA game that just happened to mimic the original 2008 classic.

Instead, this trailer shows a comparison between the original and the remake and... that's it? I guess it has better textures, but that's the only change I see. The character animations are still awkward and clunky, the walls and floors are still just repeated patterns, and nothing seems improved.

Now, I don't want to complain too much. The original 1999 System Shock 2 is a classic, and if they just re-released the original that wouldn't suddenly make it a bad game. I just had higher hopes because this game doesn't look "updated" for a new generation of gamers. It looks like a mod-pack to get the original game running on modern hardware. And those have been around for years.

Of course, re-releasing classic games is Nightdive's specialty and I'm sure they did a great job here. And this game looks just like their remaster of the original System Shock so I shouldn't be too surprised. But SS1 was just an ok game and SS2 was genre-defining. I would've liked more effort to go into this one. I guess my complaint is that it looks like the intended audience here is people who already have nostalgia for SS2 and it's unlikely to introduce any new fans.

Anyway, the game is on Steam and is available now. Sorry for going on a rant; the game has Very Positive reviews and you should probably just ignore my whining and play it.

I think this song is just ok, but the music video is fantastic.

Edgerunners 2 was announced but the creators did confirm that David is dead. For those hoping to see a resurrection, you might be out of luck but this is welcome news for those hoping to see more of this world.

Still nothing shown in this teaser except a couple character designs. I like having reminders that this is moving forward though.

Over on the newly-updated !eurographicnovels@piefed.social, notorious netrunner @JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social made a post about the German-based cyberpunk artist Darius "BakaArts" and gave a link to an interface to their Insta account with many more images:

• https://imginn.com/bakaarts/

FYI the artist's motto is "no, it's not AI".

Absolutely nothing is shown in this teaser but IT'S REAL, IT'S HAPPENING!

This looks like it might have more cyberpunk themes than the Schwarzenegger version while still retaining some of the light-hearted aspect of it. With Edgar Wright directing, I'm cautiously optimistic about this one.

I was going to make a flippant post about a 12 year old Julia Stiles in the PBS show GhostWriter playing a hacker. Seriously, check it out. The clip is only 41 seconds long and it's so incredibly cringe.

But then re-watching the clip myself, it reminded me of how optimistic we were in the 90s about the future of the internet. There was a time when the internet was a new frontier. It was a way to find people with common interests, or have conversations with people on the other side of the planet. It was a way to share ideas without any boundaries. This could only be a benefit to humanity.

I remember seeing someone talking about Trouble and Her Friends and how the book was written from this optimistic perspective. It was written in 1994 (the same year as that Julia Stiles episode). The book takes this 1994 optimistic vision of the internet and extrapolates it out into a future world. And now, in hindsight, it just feels anachronistic. That future never happened. It's a world of ubiquitous internet and virtual reality, but the internet of Trouble and Her Friends has no commerce whatsoever. It was never monetized. And that just seems quaint now.

It reminds me also of the early 2000s internet where things had picked up but only young people and tech enthusiasts used it. "Old people" just didn't get it . I remember politicians trying to regulate the internet when they themselves had never used it and only had others briefly explain it to them.

There was a band at the time, Machinae Supremacy, who had a bunch of songs about internet culture and the politicians trying to stop them. Like their song Force Feedback:

This is the world you're in
And this is where ours begins
A borderless nation of thoughts to replace
Your walled-in existence in space

Sure you already know
That your age was long ago
We augment reality online
And you hail from ancient times

Again, this protection of internet culture just feels quaint today. I don't know if internet users in the 90s and early 2000s could've predicted what would happen when everyone was online or when businesses realized there was a profit to be made online. Maybe they could never envision that future; or maybe they just didn't want to.

I guess I don't really have a point here. I just wanted to watch a silly clip from a tv show but ended up feeling nostalgic about the optimism we used to have for the internet, and for what could've been.

Dystopika, the game where you build a cyberpunk city (and... that's the entire game) has just released a free anniversary update with a bunch of additions. The game is on sale for $4 so you might as well check it out!

Despite reportedly dropping tools back in 2024 to turn its attention to other projects, CD Projekt RED is seemingly still not done when it comes to development for Cyberpunk 2077 as more content is on the way.

Last year saw CD Projekt RED reveal that it would no longer be supporting Cyberpunk 2077 after getting the hit RPG to a state that it was finally happy with.

Not only that but with the studio having to turn its attention to a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel as well as The Witcher 4 and a handful of other projects, this announcement made sense.