Remove ads

Skitterdoc 2077

Reader mode
lancelot said:
So I'm looking forward to how the metal wars play out. Not sure if Taylor will be a full doctor by then but after a month or two I doubt it'll matter. I can see her rebuilding people that every other doctor writes off and hopefully gaining a new tag of Nightingale to replace that madison shit.

After that maybe unionizing the Night City Ripper docs, or simply making a support network between them. Damaged tools, access to cyberware using each others connections, holding all rippers to a certain standard, keeping track of people sprinting for cyberpsychosis. Fuck with one ripper and find not a single ripper in the city will have anything to do with you.

She wouldn't have to personally run it but thanks to her Father being a union man all his life she'd be the only who would think of the idea.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Arranging a Union for paramedics might make sense? As long as this is arms-length for her.

A bolt-on Credit Union, for those short of cash, would likely be popular, too. Look at the situation of her friend, having to scavenge cyber-bits, just to ensure she can bring-up her child. Yes, I know, she has an on-going problem, but a Credit Union can help people get over the lumpy bits of life, without resorting to loan sharks. Who in this setting may take 'that'll cost you an arm and a leg' in a rather more literal sense...

A Union that helps people with legal services, and can at least point people towards extra training, maybe arrange exams... What other services might a Paramedic Union offer members?

Also, how far will Taylor have to escalate before she breaks canon in this setting? Even if her escalation is as covert as she can manage?
 
Last edited:
Ace Dreamer said:
Arranging a Union for paramedics might make sense? As long as this is arms-length for her.

A bolt-on Credit Union, for those short of cash, would likely be popular, too. Look at the situation of her friend, having to scavenge cyber-bits, just to ensure she can bring-up her child. Yes, I know, she has an on-going problem, but a Credit Union can help people get over the lumpy bits of life, without resorting to loan sharks. Who in this setting may take 'that'll cost you an arm and a leg' in a rather more literal sense...

A Union that helps people with legal services, and can at least point people towards extra training, maybe arrange exams... What other services might a Paramedic Union offer members?

Also, how far will Taylor have to escalate before she breaks canon in this setting? Even if her escalation is as covert as she can manage?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
No that would get her killed by the corps the para work for. Rippers don't work for a corp so it could work.
 
lancelot said:
No that would get her killed by the corps the para work for. Rippers don't work for a corp so it could work.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
TL;DR (Why) Corps are monstrous, Taylor shouldn't forget
---
It might help to think what the corps are. Looking at history/anthropology, and things like Dunbar's Number, humans started-off as 'tribal', everyone knew everyone else, and could predict their likely behavior.

Once you start getting larger groups, 'towns', 'cities', things have to get more abstract, and rather than high likelihood predictions of behavior, mental shortcuts, 'clues', have to be used to quickly classify unfamiliar people. Why? Because there's no time, not enough 'mental resource', spare energy and effort, to do anything else.

You get standard appearance, standard clothes, standard behavior, and any deviation from these tends to be suspect. Why? Survival. A need to be able to ignore a lot of your surroundings, to have enough personal resource to get on with living your life. Things like 'fashion', and 'protest clothing', interact with this. Strangers, who differ from what's expected, they cause concern. Arguably, this is the basis of default prejudice, intolerance, bigotry.

A great deal of larger society runs on inertia, requires most of the people, most of the time, to follow the rules. Rules carefully, and painfully, crafted over millennium, because they work, with most human mental structures. The printing press and wider literacy shook a lot of things up, mass communications, like radio, tv, more recently the web, and social media. Changing information flows require changing the rules.

Put people under enough pressure, enough failures in the social rules, and they go 'tribal'. For their own survival. Without big, extended, families to fall back on, well-known and trusted neighbors, things can get... strange. Physical association, community groups, sports teams, youth groups. But, groups can get disconnected from larger society, it can become 'them', and 'us' can become things like groups of conspiracy theorists. Messy.

Most 'tribal' groups are to do with individual survival. Corps are to do with the survival of the corp, and people can hook their own survival to that. Wider society would be strongly advised to carefully watch and control what self-perpetuating groups, like corps, can do - morality and ethics don't tend to be part of the corp 'mission statement'. Cyberpunk corps tend to push that all to an extreme. For human society, they are seriously bad news - the tail is wagging the dog. Also, they tend to be pretty bad at giving the humans that make them up 'room' to live their lives.

Why are things like corps tolerated at all? Because, for the bigger problems, people need to get together in groups to start solving them. And, society needs those problems solved, because, over time, things change, and the existing solutions need changing, sometimes a complete re-write.

Hope this doesn't go too far from the point, but I feel the dynamics of what's going on can be rather interesting!

I think we can see a lot of the elements, talked about above, in Taylor's life in Night City.
 
Last edited:
Ace Dreamer said:
Hope this doesn't go too far from the point, but I feel the dynamics of what's going on can be rather interesting!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

So... what your saying is that yes the corps would zero Taylor in a hot second if she fucked with their bottom line by trying to start a union with their people. Which is what I already said with a fraction of the words.

Seriously, what the fuck was that.
 
Last edited:
lancelot said:
So... what your saying is that yes the corps would zero Taylor in a hot second if she fucked with their bottom line by trying to start a union with their people.

Seriously, what the fuck was that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Because, to answer the question 'Where do we go from here?', it helps a lot to answer the question, 'How did we get here?'.

This is not my story. I'm not the author. But, the question 'How does Taylor get a society that she's reasonably happy to live in?' is one that interests me.
 
I enjoyed the chapter, though there were a few errors that stood out to me.

SpiraSpira said:
The fact that I work there would queer that deal.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Queer is probably not the word you were looking for as that means it would strange up the deal, which doesn't make sense.
SpiraSpira said:
Two twenty-five metres
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The rule I was told was to write out numbers under ten in letters and use the numbers for above then. That would make this 225. Or write it out fully as two hundred twenty five.
 
RisenIre said:
I enjoyed the chapter, though there were a few errors that stood out to me.


Queer is probably not the word you were looking for as that means it would strange up the deal, which doesn't make sense.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is from a British English Victorian-era idiomatic expression "queer [the/someone's] pitch," which uses an older etymology of the word queer which means "to ruin." I think "queer the deal" is somewhat common idiom in the UK, at least it was when I learned English.

However, you're correct that it is a little out of place because I don't think I've actually heard this idiom in American vernacular. I might change it, similarly to how I have changed the word "aeroplane" in the past, as Taylor likely doesn't think in old British idioms even if I occasionally write in them.
 
SpiraSpira said:
This is from a British English Victorian-era idiomatic expression "queer [the/someone's] pitch," which uses an older etymology of the word queer which means "to ruin." I think "queer the deal" is somewhat common idiom in the UK, at least it was when I learned English.

However, you're correct that it is a little out of place because I don't think I've actually heard this idiom in American vernacular. I might change it, similarly to how I have changed the word "aeroplane" in the past, as Taylor likely doesn't think in old British idioms even if I occasionally write in them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
her mother is an English professor. Taylor at one point said she loves reading books. It's fine to use an outdated British expression. It didn't bother me at least.

The listeners of course think it's further proof Taylor is daughter of aristocracy.
 
SpiraSpira said:
This is from a British English Victorian-era idiomatic expression "queer [the/someone's] pitch," which uses an older etymology of the word queer which means "to ruin." I think "queer the deal" is somewhat common idiom in the UK, at least it was when I learned English.

However, you're correct that it is a little out of place because I don't think I've actually heard this idiom in American vernacular. I might change it, similarly to how I have changed the word "aeroplane" in the past, as Taylor likely doesn't think in old British idioms even if I occasionally write in them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'm American and it didn't seem odd to me, perfectly familiar with that phrase. In fact I had to go back and find the reference cause it didn't stick out at all.
 
Last edited:
lancelot said:
So... what your saying is that yes the corps would zero Taylor in a hot second if she fucked with their bottom line by trying to start a union with their people.

Seriously, what the fuck was that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Cyberpunk is explicitly a hyper-capitalist dystopia. Of course they'd kill anyone trying to start a union. Companies would do that today if they thought they could get away with it, and they quite explicitly did do that back in the late-19th/early 20th century.
 
IronySandwich said:
Cyberpunk is explicitly a hyper-capitalist dystopia. Of course they'd kill anyone trying to start a union. Companies would do that today if they thought they could get away with it, and they quite explicitly did do that back in the late-19th/early 20th century.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yup, there's even a gig where V kills/captures a guy who runs a operation specifically to break up unions in very violent manners for Corps. And a news broadcast talks about how one labor union was straight up declared a terrorist organization. And there are several NCPD Scanner missions where union strikers were gunned down by Corpo Mercs and the like.
 
SpiraSpira said:
This is from a British English Victorian-era idiomatic expression "queer [the/someone's] pitch," which uses an older etymology of the word queer which means "to ruin." I think "queer the deal" is somewhat common idiom in the UK, at least it was when I learned English.

However, you're correct that it is a little out of place because I don't think I've actually heard this idiom in American vernacular. I might change it, similarly to how I have changed the word "aeroplane" in the past, as Taylor likely doesn't think in old British idioms even if I occasionally write in them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Ah, ok. I had never come across that phrase before. Still a bit odd phrasing as Taylor is American and thus would pick up American turns of phrases, even if she was once an avid reader.
 
Taylor can't unionize but she can build an enlightened Corpo or Gang of her own. If she finds enough goodish people to enact her vision her organization will make NC better. Or use her connections in academia, city hall, Tygerclaw gang, dollhouse, nomads and the Netrunners' underground. Subliminal messages from the dolls, hypnoactive substances in the Laguna Bend, a curious scientific article about enlightened capitalism, the right people saved by heroic trauma teams and the wrong people die tragically by the same and the right people in the right places to lead the populace. It's possible, right?

Kiwi can hack her 2 partners probably. If they go psycho, why not tell Kiwi to pilot them to Taylor's clinic and admit them into Taylor's clinical trials on cyberpsychosis? That will be cool. Unless those 2 hear about it and attack Taylor and Kiwi in a bout of psychoparanoia. Taylor needs to tell Kiwi. Build backdoors and implanted commands into the cyberdecks of those fools. It'll be cool. ;)
 
Last edited:
"Enlightened gangs" don't work. Canon explicitly shows that they don't work. Tyger Claws began as an "enlightened" gang that tried to protect its people and make the city better. Now look at it. The Sixth Street were the same, trying to secure the future of abandoned war veterans. Now it's burchering civilians by the dozens because they were in the same area as one former member who betrayed them (as one of the side gigs shows). The Voodoo Boys were either made as or BECAME a gang that protected their own cultural groups, but quickly degraded to "Fuck You, I Got Mine, here's a crazy AI". The Mox were formed to protect the prostitutes of Night City and make it a better place. By the time CP2077 takes place, they're the first in line to exploit them.

Enlightened gangs do not work. Mainly because of two reasons. First, you compete with far more established and significantly more ruthless gangs, so if you don't stoop to their level, you are at an enormous disadvantage from the get go, and they won't give you the time to bridge the gap. Second, criminal organizations attract a specific kind of people: the desperate, the cruel, the ambitious, the ruthless and the greedy. You physically can't vet everyone for being a good person, when you need hundreds or thousands of members to even register, let alone have an effect. That makes corruption inevitable. You can try to delay it, but eventually, there will be enough profit-obsessed people in your criminal organization that you have to start compromising on your ideals to keep them pacified, or they will rebel and replace you, or just split off and form a new gang, completely out of your oversight.
 
Last edited:
Akasha said:
"Enlightened gangs" don't work. Canon explicitly shows that they don't work. Tyger Claws began as an "enlightened" gang that tried to protect its people and make the city better. Now look at it. The Sixth Street were the same, trying to secure the future of abandoned war veterans. Now it's burchering civilians by the dozens because they were in the same area as one former member who betrayed them (as one of the side gigs shows). The Voodoo Boys were either made as or BECAME a gang that protected their own cultural groups, but quickly degraded to "Fuck You, I Got Mine, here's a crazy AI". The Mox were formed to protect the prostitutes of Night City and make it a better place. By the time CP2077 takes place, they're the first in line to exploit them.

Enlightened gangs do not work. Mainly because of two reasons. First, you compete with far more established and significantly more ruthless gangs, so if you don't stoop to their level, you are at an enormous disadvantage from the get go, and they won't give you the time to bridge the gal. Second, criminal organizations attract a specific kind of people: the desperate, the cruel, the ambitious, the ruthless and the greedy. You physically can't vet everyone for being a good person, when you need hundreds or thousands of members to even register, let alone have an effect. That makes corruption inevitable. You can try to delay it, but eventually, there will be enough profit-obsessed people in your criminal organization that you have to start compromising on your ideals to keep them pacified, or they will rebel and replace you, or just split off and form a new gang, completely out of your oversight.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Obviously, Taylor needs to create the group Sky-Net.

Why is it called that? Because it is policed by networked, uplifted, borged-up, pigeons, who drop electrified nets on people who break the rules. :)

Yes, those pigeons are watching you. :)
 
Akasha said:
"Enlightened gangs" don't work.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Do the Undersiders support support your paradigm? Brockton Bay is another shitty city full of awful gangs. No one believed it can improved and the gangs and government worked hard to keep it that way. Taylor tried to make a difference through the Undersiders. Her results in canon are questionable but it gives us a picture of what she can do.
 
corblimey said:
Do the Undersiders support support your paradigm? Brockton Bay is another shitty city full of awful gangs. No one believed it can improved and the gangs and government worked hard to keep it that way. Taylor tried to make a difference through the Undersiders. Her results in canon are questionable but it gives us a picture of what she can do.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Comparing the canon of Worm to the situation of Night City is absurd. You might as well claim that using a gang of teenagers to improve a village of one hundred people is evidence of them being able to do the same for a sprawling megalopolis, or even a country. It isn't. The sheer scale is mindbogglingly different.

Brockton Bay has a population of one hundred thousand at most. The Undersiders were practically nobodies until a literal Kaiju wrecked the city and decimated all opposing groups, from the Empire to the New Wave and the Protectorate. Not only that, the Undersiders had two powerful precogs covering their asses (even if Dinah wasn't doing so willingly) AND Cauldron wanted to see them succeed OR fail at their own merit, so external meddling was at an all-time low. The Undersiders were such a small group, working with such a relatively small city, that the issue of progressing corruption was minimal. Plus, it was making things better only because the alternative was complete collapse, and because people treated Capes very gently. Rachel, for example, had her dogs maul civilians left and right in her territory, and nobody cared. Even then, that state of affairs lasted... How long, exactly? It collapsed very quickly.

In contrast, the situation in Night City is massively different. There are roughly seven million people in Night City, increasing the scale 70 times over; there are several gangs with membership in the thousands, literally everyone can have superpowers due to implants (so the power isn't concentrated in just a few people), megacorporations are practically warring for the city and assassinating or subjugating all potential competition, and the cops are willing to shoot you for bumping into them. There are no precogs to save your ass, you have practically no funding, there is nothing minimizing external influence and nobody will give a damn about your secret identity or life, just because you wear a cape. You step into that match, and you're free game, as is everyone around you. And since the scale is so much vaster, you can't just get six or so teenagers you trust and make them take over. You'll need thousands of people to make a dent in this shithole, and that's when the corruption slips in. Because at that scale, no system is incorruptible, and criminal organizations, unlike governments and corporations, fundamentally attract and concentrate mainly people who want to spread corruption, whether out of desperation, malice or greed.

Edit: That isn't to say Taylor can't succeed, or have an effect. However, it definitely won't be through a gang. She'd have more success as the leader of a terrorist cell, honestly. It wouldn't be a positive effect, but still.
 
Last edited:
"Enlightened gangs" don't work because the revenue steam always involves exploiting somebody. Taylor doesn't need to do that, what she needs is enough power, both physical and societal, to keep others from just taking what they want from her.
 
Last edited:
Remember that Taylor's territory in Worm canon was deeply in the red and would have collapsed without money injections from Coil (which was intentional on her part, she wanted to waste his money, but that doesn't change the fact that without him she wouldn't have actually been able to do stuff like provide food or run the orphanage without resorting to dirtier crimes like the other Undersiders were doing).
 
Akasha said:
you can't just get six or so teenagers you trust and make them take over. You'll need thousands of people to make a dent in this shithole, and that's when the corruption slips in
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
TL;DR - You can't just scale stuff, because, 'humans'
---
There's a funny thing called 'span of control', which is backed-up by practical research into the limits of the human mind - an individual can directly supervise/control about 7 (5+/-2) others. A more subtle thing is the ability of the human mind to 'handle' multiple levels of such control - research shows the limit is about 2.5 levels.

Do the sums, and an organisation can have about 50 people involved in it, in 2.5 levels, before it starts creaking, badly. How do larger organisations work? They 'black box' sub-organisations, and normally just manage the inputs and outputs of these. Then, there are reporting procedures, inspectors, computer modelling, to spot 'funny' flows of goods, money, information, abuse of power (use outside the scope which it's designed for)...

Funny how many organisations fall apart when they grow beyond about 50 staff... Or, grow so inflexible they can't handle changing circumstances...

Yeah, I know this is all 'boring' stuff, but it's one, major, reason why you can't simply 'scale' stuff which involves humans up.

Now, if you have a (trustworthy) super-human AGI to help you scale things, and, yeah, you really want several of those, doing interlocked, redundant, checking of each other...

I'm pretty sure that, if poked correctly, Taylor's shard-let would let her uplift and enhance social bird or higher mammal brains to become really useful AGIs. Though, it may have difficulties understanding why she doesn't just recycle some of this potentially useful neural tissue that's walking around calling itself 'human'...

Maybe the Group Taylor could set-up would provide guaranteed-neutral and data-secure management services to other organisations/groups?

(Some of the ideas for this sort of AGI are looted from Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind stories. Yeah, he's not one of the better known authors. There's some chance you might have read, or at least heard of, the short story Think Blue, Count Two.)
 
Last edited:
There's always the mind reading hat for if she really wants to vet every single person she recruits, but that sounds like a huge fuckin waste of time, especially when she's currently just trying to go to med school.
After that, it's entirely likely that her mother's family will come into play more heavily- They might be a deus ex machina that just dumps however much money she needs into her lap, or they might try to kidnap her and force her to tinker 24/7.

I'm super excited to see where this goes no matter what ends up happening.
 
SpiraSpira said:
This is from a British English Victorian-era idiomatic expression "queer [the/someone's] pitch," which uses an older etymology of the word queer which means "to ruin." I think "queer the deal" is somewhat common idiom in the UK, at least it was when I learned English.

However, you're correct that it is a little out of place because I don't think I've actually heard this idiom in American vernacular. I might change it, similarly to how I have changed the word "aeroplane" in the past, as Taylor likely doesn't think in old British idioms even if I occasionally write in them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Actually, Americans *used* queer for more than just certain slang to refer to certain people (in fact I think the term got coopted for that purpose during the 30's, but I'd really have to doublecheck) it til a certain point. I'd have to look specifically when it fell out of use, though we tended to use it more for "strange" than "to ruin". But given as people pointed out, Taylor *is* the daughter of an English professor, and as well *a bookworm* before that infamous Summer camp... she'd likely use it.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top