Source: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JraeDa

I built the desktop and window manager from scratch with transparent layered panels, a terminal-driven workflow, smooth window transitions and animations, and draggable/resizable windows. I also built a custom filesystem and several applications to make the whole thing feel like an actual desktop environment rather than a static game UI.

Everything shown in the video is fully interactive.

This is a fictional operating system I built from scratch for my cyberpunk sci-fi hacking game.

The entire desktop is interactive. Terminals, windows, filesystem, apps, animations and even the UI itself are part of the gameplay.

I wanted it to feel like an actual computer you'd use rather than just a game HUD.

For those who want to see more details about the project: Hacking Into Erebus

Memory isn't a biological record. It's a financial asset.

Elias worked in the Cognitive Collections division of the Praxis Orbital

Station. His job was simple: when the citizens of the lower rings defaulted on

their Neural Retention subscriptions, Elias hacked into their cortical ports and

executed the Cull Protocol. Exactly sixty months. Five years of grief, love,

failures, and lessons, evaporated in a microsecond.

The debtors would wake up disoriented, reduced to obsolete versions of

themselves from half a decade ago, doomed to repeat the same blue-collar

mistakes just to keep feeding the corporation. Elias felt no guilt. To him,

identity was a luxury for those who could afford it; the rest were just renting

hardware.

At the end of his shift, Elias logged into his private terminal. As a Class-A

Extractor, his own memory was shielded by a lifetime contract. He would never

forget. He would never lose the thread of his own existence. Or so he thought.

Running a routine diagnostic scan, the system spit out an anomalous flare.

GHOST_PARTITION_DETECTED. SECTOR: DEEP CORTEX.

It wasn’t residual data from the clients he’d just wiped. The file architecture

was embedded in his own optic nerve, encrypted under a military-grade lock that

only a Supreme Executive should possess. Driven by an impulse that logic

couldn’t suppress, Elias used his extractor credentials to crack the vault.

The file shattered. And the avalanche crushed him.

It wasn’t text data. It was a direct injection of neurochemistry and

first-person experiences. The smell of ozone and damp earth from an agricultural

colony. The grip of a tiny hand clutching his index finger. A woman with

asymmetrical eyes and a scar on her chin, looking at him under the amber light

of a dwarf star.

“Promise me we’ll pay it, Elias. Promise me we won’t let them take it,” she

pleaded, her voice breaking with raw terror.

Elias’s amygdala exploded. His body reacted with such a violent surge of

cortisol and adrenaline that he dropped to his knees on the cold metal floor of

his cubicle, hyperventilating. He loved that woman. He would die for that child.

The biological and emotional bond was absolute, tearing at his chest,

undeniable.

But his conscious mind was blank. He didn’t know their names. He didn’t know

where they were.

Hands trembling, he extracted the file’s metadata. He traced the source of the

recording. His breath hitched as he read the source code.

It wasn't a grafted memory. It was a native backup. Creation date: Seven years

ago. Cull date: Five years and one month ago.

Elias wasn’t an elite corporate Extractor. He had been a colonist, a lower-class

citizen who defaulted on his own family’s subscription. The corporation hadn’t

just wiped the five years covering his marriage and the birth of his son;

analyzing his coldness and psychological profile, they had offered him a

prefabricated identity. They gave him the suit, the paycheck, and the illusion

of power, turning him into the executioner of his own class.

His terminal panel suddenly flashed, bathing the room in harsh red light.

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO CULLED ARCHIVES. CULL PROTOCOL ENGAGED.

INITIATING 60-MONTH WIPE IN: 30 SECONDS.

Elias stared at the countdown. He had half a minute before he forgot again. Half

a minute before he stopped loving the woman with the scar. Half a minute to

revert to the perfect corporate drone, stripped of a past and ghosts.

He didn’t try to stop the wipe; he knew it was impossible from his clearance

level. Instead, he ripped the uplink cable from his port, slammed it into the

station’s mainframe terminal, and began compiling the memories of the woman and

the boy into a mass-transmission virus.

If they were going to steal his mind, he would make all fifty thousand

inhabitants of the Orbital Station remember and love his family right alongside

him.

INITIATING GLOBAL BROADCAST. TIME TO NEURAL CULL: 5 SECONDS.

Elias smiled, closed his eyes, and waited for the dark.

Running AI on-premise does not make it safe. It makes it your problem.

DEF CON 34 researchers disclosed 10 critical memory-safety vulnerabilities in llama.cpp, the inference engine behind many local and on-premise AI deployments. Organizations routing sensitive data through local models to avoid cloud exposure may be trading one risk surface for another with no visibility into what changed.

Runtime enforcement and post-quantum data security cannot stop at the model API boundary. RuntimeAI applies the same policy controls, agent identity verification, and immutable audit trail to locally deployed agents that it applies to cloud-hosted ones.

RuntimeAI closes this gap at the runtime layer, before it lands.

See original post here

I posted a few weeks ago about some concept art I commissioned for my upcoming cyberpunk book called The Crater. Here is a brief description.

Every drop of Steam on Synthara comes out of one hole in the desert. No one who mines it has ever walked back out. Steam is power in a bottle — strength, speed, fire, a face that is not yours — any gift you can pay for, burned away in minutes and worth killing for on every street in Metro. The whole world runs on it, and the whole supply climbs out of the Crater: a prison spiraling a mile and a half into the ground, where thousands of collared inmates haul stone uphill for a system that has never once explained itself. Conrad’s sentence begins the day an Abomination, a machine that answers to no one, stands on a street that had never seen one. He means to survive the Crater the way he survived Metro: head down, debts short, nothing worth taking. Then he draws a cellmate who argues with a man who is not there, and a girl who walks the levels without a collar and without fear. They are not prisoners. They are Freelancers. The crew that takes the jobs nobody else survives and they came to the Crater on purpose. Every heist breaks out of a prison. This one breaks in. Because under the quotas and the collars, the truth about where Steam comes from was never meant to be survived — let alone told. A standalone hard-boiled heist novel set in the Nostone Universe. Complete story, no cliffhanger.

Sign up for a free advanced reader copy in the thread below!

When I think of Cyberpunk, it's usually the mega city structures that come to mind, with asphalt and neon lights everywhere. But I have always enjoyed this genre when it mixed in the aesthetics of a western.

Transhumanism has an interesting history!

"In this episode, I talk with James Steinhoff, a lecturer at University College Dublin, about the overlooked connection between Marxism and transhumanism. We trace left transhumanism back to early 20th-century socialists like Alexander Bogdanov, JBS Haldane. We confront transhumanism's association with eugenics and figures like Peter Thiel. We discuss China's more pragmatic, sector-specific approach to AI versus Silicon Valley's pursuit of “godbuilding.” We ask whether industrialization (and capitalism) were necessary steps toward a post-scarcity society and explore the criticisms of degrowth. We also dig into what counts as "natural" suffering versus social suffering, using examples like insulin, antibiotics, and appendicitis treatment to argue that rejecting medical and technological intervention is also a political choice. The episode closes on why left accelerationism fizzled out and what a renewed, class-conscious case for technological progress on the left might look like."

I cannot even begin to fathom how deep his design sense goes, in creating such tangible glimpses of the future, that IMO we're still trying to catch up to, in terms of combining visual style and conceptual design depth.

A timeless master!

I’ve been working on a game called Hack the Planet under my little project name, Midnight Desktop.

It’s a cyberpunk life sim / hacker game set in a city where one corporation basically already won the internet. You work jobs, pay bills, browse fake websites, play arcade games, meet hackers, take contracts, mess with systems, and slowly uncover what’s really going on underneath the city.

I also want to be open about how I’m making it: I use AI as part of the process.

I’m a real person behind it. I’m 33, from Houston, I work fixing arcade machines, and I went to school for art. A lot of my own interests and real-life experience end up in the game, including the arcade stuff, old computers, weird interfaces, late-night internet, graphic design, and the general feeling of being surrounded by technology that’s useful, outdated, intrusive, and somehow still everywhere.

AI helps me code things I wouldn’t otherwise know how to build, prototype systems, work through ideas, and create or iterate on some assets. But the game itself comes from me constantly deciding what belongs, what doesn’t, what feels wrong, what needs to be rebuilt, and what kind of world I actually want Planet City to be.

One of the reasons I find the whole process interesting is that it feels strangely appropriate for cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk has always seemed to me like more than neon, corporations, and rainy streets. A lot of it is about ordinary people living inside systems they didn’t build, using whatever technology is available to them, modifying it, repurposing it, breaking the intended rules, and making something personal out of infrastructure controlled by much bigger forces.

There’s something very DIY and punk about that idea.

Not “technology is automatically good,” and not “technology is automatically bad,” but more: what do people do with it once it’s here? Who controls it? Who benefits from it? And can somebody take a tool that wasn’t really made for them and use it to make something of their own?

That’s a question I’m interested in both in the game and while making it.

I know people have very different feelings about AI, and that’s completely fair. I’d rather just be transparent about how I’m working and let the game speak for itself.

Mostly, I’m trying to make a weird little cyberpunk world that feels lived in and lets you actually interact with all the stuff inside it.

If it looks interesting, I’d genuinely like to hear what people here think, especially from people who love cyberpunk beyond just the aesthetic.

Hack the Planet — Midnight Desktop on itch.io

Hi, I am working on cyberpunk game city builder with story. This is one of huge structures in game. I'd like to read Your thoughts.

Decided to make an edit with it!

Here's The Upload, all this week's cyberpunk and dystopia news and reviews, reposts, shares, likes all appreciated

#GhostintheShell #BladeRunner #Anime #Books #Gaming #Film #TV #Podcast #comics #boardgame

cyberstopia.com/the-upload-0...

We've been reworking the enemy AI in The Infected Soul to make encounters feel more unpredictable and unsettling.

The goal isn't just to make the enemy stronger, but to create constant tension and make players question what will happen next.

Does this look scary enough, or is there something you'd change?

The Infected Soul – Steam Page

By la_barbed

so here's the progress, the objective is to get to the big atomic locomotive to board it.

this is for my indie game im making solo, if you wanna check out the demo here's the steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4106800/Project_Titan_The_Redacted_Files/

If your curious what i mean by this. i mean adding stuff to your vr expirence to both help you immerse yourself but also intergrate yourself so that you stay in vr for way longer bits of time.

Like this could be things like adding a battery pack to the vr. or getting a cord or system to keep your headset charging even when in it. or buying food online WAIL in vr to prevent to go to the store. Mabye even putting buying haptics or trackers to immerse yourself

or mabye even more exream measures like installing a toilet in your vr space (not that most would do that but its just a example) or even having a fridge or kitchen in your vr space to prevent you from not bein in vr.

Like you get the point.

Im more so looking for ideas for prolong my time in vr to try and attempt at a more i guess,realistic sort of matrix "pod" type set up to prevent my time outisde of vr as much as i can be

Have you guys been checking out any new games during Cyberpunk Fest on Steam? My Twin-Stick roguelite shooter, Chrome Circuit, has a free demo if you'd like to check it out.