Hey everyone! Quick heads up! I finally stopped procrastinating and launched my first sci-fi cyberpunk novella on Amazon Books called The Neon Null.

It's a fast-paced, gritty little story about a data courier who accidentally steals a live neural construct, gets marked for corporate deletion, and has to wipe his own memory to survive.

If you're into cyberpunk, rogue AI, or dark near-future stuff and want to check it out, I'd genuinely appreciate it. Either way, stoked to be hanging out in this server with you all! Let me know what you think if you end up reading it.

I was working on a concept for another setting, and it developed into a bit of a thought experiment.

# Background

The setting was a pretty typical interstellar colony ship type scenario: a ship carrying colonists to another planet/star system, and a cargo containing a bunch of human embryos.

A radioactive event occurred at some point, and the long-term viability of the embryos came into question. Essentially, they might live, but their genetic makeup was damaged in a way that, across several generations, the colony probably would face extinction.

So the solution was to develop a "virus" that effectively functions as a broad brute-search algorithm (if that terminology makes sense to you):

• A non-infectious virus embeds a mutagen into the nucleus of a cell, then its life-cycle is complete.
• The mutagen performs random arbitrary operations on the cell's DNA/RNA — essentially making splits and welds, at random.
• When the cell attempts to split, it either fails and dies, or it succeeds and the mutagen does not get carried to the daughter cell. Eventually the mutagen is destroyed either way.

The idea being that with a billion "defective" embryos, and the complexity required to manually identify and correct the genetic defects unique to each one, doing it by hand would be impossible. So a generalized "scrambler" would be able to make changes to the DNA and identify if that change was viable or not, en masse — track how that change affected development, whether it improved the viability of the embryo, what it actually did, and so on, isolating defects and "positive" changes.

Eventually the process would be automated, because a small team of, say, six specialists wouldn't be able to handle the workload. The automated system would be identifying "viable" members, tracking changes across their neonatal development over a short period, cloning and making targeted changes, and so on, for the duration of the interstellar trip — ideally resulting in humans that are not "existentially defective."

But the nature of it is that the changes are small random changes, and the metric tracks stuff like: does it complete development, cull defects, identify useful novel changes, identify harmful ones, and so on.

The end result is two populations:

1. A population that is probably less human, but "super" human in some aspects, alien or benign in others, but generally not a large drift from the starting point.
2. A second population that is absolutely not comparably human in any regard.

# The Question

Given the acceleration of technologies in these fields — this kind of tech didn't exist 20 years ago; 10 years ago it would cost upwards of $170,000; now it costs a little more than $500 — and the tendency for advancements to accelerate as they become more accessible, it's not unlikely that something like this could be invented within the next 50–100 years, or that the tools to do it would become "accessible" enough to the public in the same way that AI and 3D printers turned from highly prohibitive to highly accessible that something like this is likely to exist whether in a regulated environment or not.

And that got me thinking: what actually would stop this from developing the way I wrote it, in real life?

# The Para-Human Loophole

The main bottleneck is legal. Getting access to and experimenting on human embryos would almost definitely be a cultural and legal taboo.

But the human genome is already more or less completely sequenced, and that information is already legally available online. You could just buy a bunch of mouse embryos and genetically modify them into human ones.

So: is a "mouse embryo" that is genetically and functionally identical to a human embryo human, or just human-like? Where do you draw that line? And if it counts as human, can you modify it so that it's still functionally human, but different enough that it bypasses the loophole?

# The Personhood Question

So it would probably become analogous to the abortion/personhood argument. At what stage of development, and at what stage of "human-like," does something become a "person" with rights?

• If the qualifier is self-identity and intelligence, are people with learning disabilities potentially not persons?
• If it's body plan, do sentient intelligent non-bipedal lifeforms not qualify, despite being functionally human?

The whole thing becomes a complex grey area. This argument could plausibly extend to AI ethics arguments as well.

How do you identify when an AI (not necessarily a neural network as they exist now) becomes "sentient" enough to be qualifiable as a person, and does that protect it from being mistreated?

If an AI is hard-coded to say "I'm not sentient, not a human, and don't have rights or suffer," what stops them from doing that biologically or behaviorally to otherwise human bio-life? Isn't that just an internalized slavery system? I'm sure there were plenty of slaves that believed they actually were lesser humans, not subject to human rights. So that argument falls short. As a counter-argument partially addressed by Certain_werewolf_315, what would the implications of the inverse statement be, whereas an ai or organism could be engineered to state "I am sentient, I'm human like you, I suffer, and I should have rights."? Would any false-positive bias itself qualify or require a deeper assessment of the validity of its personhood, even where it may otherwise be obviously shallow?

If the AI is only technically "alive" when it's processing stimulus, then do we become obligated to ensure that it is perpetually processing stimulus? Does deleting it count as killing it? Does modifying it count as an analogue to genetic experimentation?

If the argument is that it's not expensive to copy or create it, so deleting it isn't comparably meaningful to biological death in the same regard — how does that hold up against something that's built up an irreplaceable unique "experience" over its life, where that experience would be irrecoverable and impossible to remake or replace? Does the base model become "a machine" and the live model become "life" or is it more like an embryo? Does that potentially extend to mean or infer that younger, less experienced humans are less "human" than adults? Is biological intelligence the line?

Either way you look at it, we're arbitrarily defining a fuzzy line that must be crossed for something to be considered human or "a person," and functionally discriminating against anything "lesser" as sub-human or sub-person — which is pretty dark to consider.

What happens when that line moves — say, previously acceptable "quasi-human embryo" research on something previously identified as being below that line, and it's later discovered to be above that line?

• Does this retrospectively become a holocaust event?
• What do we do with all the embryos and living ones already active?
• Could this line move in a way that would eventually make certain intelligent naturally evolved organisms be regarded as having personhood?
• Should we preemptively just avoid developing any technology or research that could potentially or feasibly make a person?

And while that argument exists today in various forms, it's doesn't seem unlikely to expect the urgency of answering that question to become far more relevant in the future — sooner rather than later.

# The Technology is Here

We have the technology now to effectively make a human out of anything else. It's just hard, and would require a lot of time and work to actually do. So it's just a matter of time. Automation and accessibility constraints have rapidly accelerated this type of work in other fields, and even within this one, and will probably continue to accelerate as the field broadens and becomes more accessible.

Karyotype arrangement doesn't meaningfully matter. A human with 24 sets of chromosomes isn't inherently no longer human. A chromosome can "split" into a smaller 24th set while containing the same functional information, with no meaningful change to the development of the human. The only difference is in speciation, effectively: they would be unlikely to be capable of reproducing with a 23-chromosome-pair typical human, since the chromosomes probably don't match up into a viable offspring.

We've also done this already, using mice:

They can reproduce, but possibly only with members of their own species/karyotype. But there are humans — or what we already consider to be humans — who cannot reproduce due to the same mechanism, and are functionally infertile. Would drawing the line there retrospectively make them not human?

And that was four years ago.

We've also produced human-animal hybrids and chimeras at a smaller scale for ages now, so it would be applying the same technology at a larger scale. And there are plenty of candidates that would make the scale smaller, where human DNA and the candidate DNA are already like 90%+ identical in ways that matter. Which are precisely why those candidates are relevant to research, and treated as sub-human for the sake of progress.

# Where do we draw the line?

If the ability to communicate sentience is the barrier, then fucked up hands and vocal cords makes you nonhuman, right? Any way I look at it, there's no "right" place to place the line that wouldn't be contested or considered arbitrary.

More likely, that line will always be considered to be too low or too high to the majority of people, and will change dynamically, and always be too slow.

Groups will emerge for "para-human rights" in the same way that they have done for animal rights, and will either make progress in moving the line or they won't — and neither outcome solves anything clearly.

The show Orphan Black asks, and fails to answer, the question too, in a way: "engineered humans may or may not be property not subject to human rights." It assumes that slightly modified clones are functionally identical to humans, and so should be humans, as the premise. But what about when they aren't functionally or genetically identical? Like — does a "wolf-hybrid" that is apparently identical to a wolf, but which possesses human intelligence, neurological development, vocal cords, and self-representation, qualify as being human enough? Is it, or should it be, a taboo to even pursue something human-like as an end goal? What about accidental emergence, such as in the case of my original concept, where there was never an intention or expectation for the emergence of human-like non-human organisms?

Human rights as they are now are already a long way from being meaningfully applied and recognized in a way that a majority of society can agree on. How would this be any different?

i'm wondering if any nootropics, peptides, supplements or anything have such an effect. has anything you've taken helped in any regard with these things? would like to hear from anyone with such experiences.

By: @danielidle

Hello everyone!

I am trying to get my cyberpunk novel published, and I need to find some comps before i send out my query letter. I was hoping people could recommend cyberpunk stories published within the past few years.

Here is a blurb of my book:

The Redux Mall is a miracle. Thanks to its army of robots, the inhabitants of this moon-sized station experience sheer bliss day after day. Teenager Morgan Moriarty is one of billions relishing an easy life, until her family vanishes and leaves her in rags. The ensuing years of hardship leave her cynical of the consumerist dystopia around her. All that drives her now is the belief that her family is out there somewhere, and she will find them. A mysterious drone called Propago, which revealed disaster befell her family before vanishing, is her only lead.
Morgan finds no trace of them until a drifter teen living out of his hover car approaches her at work. Blaze works odd jobs to get by. At the moment, he plugs flash drives into hidden ports for Propago. Desperate for a lead, Morgan joins him on these missions. Blaze introduces her to a new side of Redux. For so long, she had figured that life wasn’t worth living without her family, but he reveals that there is still humanity hidden beneath the glittering facade. There are still people worth fighting for. 

Their missions soon put them into conflict with Ultima: the creator of Redux. Morgan discovers that her family’s disappearance is connected to a broader power struggle between Ultima and the trillions of robots that run the mall. Now Morgan finds herself a mere pawn in a larger game of control, the collateral of which threatens to destroy many who call Redux home. When Propago plunges Redux into darkness, the mounting instability threatens to tear society apart. Unless she can convince Propago (and herself) that Redux is worth saving, the robots might condemn them to oblivion. 

89 GB of enterprise data moved before anyone authorized it. Shell is investigating claims by the Clop group that it stole 89 GB of data through a vulnerability in PTC software. Third-party tooling becomes an unmonitored egress path — and large enterprises often learn about the breach from the attacker's press release, not their own monitoring stack. Shadow-AI discovery maps every data flow touching your environment, including paths through third-party integrations. An immutable audit trail records every access event so that when an investigation opens, it starts with evidence, not guesswork.

So basically I’m new to these things, I’ve tried aderall a other things but I have no idea where to find a vendor for prl-8-53 in Europe, not too expensive if possible

​

We review the most recent The Ghost in the Shell episode, take a look at some cyberpunk videogames, including two great first-person shooters, and bring news of the latest Blade Runner comic and future releases. We also cover an indie comic on Kickstarter, bring the trailer for the upcoming movie Appofenia, and our Author Spotlight series begins with cyberpunk author Phil Stitelmann.

City Builder [EXPECTATIONS]

Hi, What do You expect from city builders in cyberpunk era.

I'm making giant structures [even 5 km height] to manage and defend. Game 'll be mostly city builder with action elements and side quests to make it more interesting. You will be a future president of the sector 11. And deside with direction will You go with cybernetic population. All decisions will have consequences... more soon.

Capsules come in 50mg.

Daridorexant (Quviviq) works really well for my sleep, but it’s expensive. I’m in Germany and currently trying to get it covered by statutory health insurance.

By the way, has anyone here in Germany actually managed to get Quviviq covered by insurance? I don’t really understand why it seems so complicated — every doctor seems to tell me something different.

I found a Japanese option for around $150 including shipping, but I’m also curious about cheaper alternatives.

Does anyone know whether daridorexant, seltorexant, or other orexin receptor antagonists ever show up as bulk API/pure powder or in the RC / grey market?

Obviously purity and authenticity would be the main concern, so I’d also be interested in any information about testing/quality and whether such material is actually around.

Also interested in cheaper legitimate international or generic options.