Our Cyberpunk World: 3D-Printing the Perfect Blonde (and Your Own Clones)

The article: 3-D printing of human body parts (Business Insider) Technology is overtaking cyberpunk science fiction yet again — and this time biopunk too. In this case, it's a process called bioprinting which uses 3D-printing techology to print living organs, whether to repair or transplant. As the speed 3D printing is advancing today, eventually we'll be able to print entire human bodies. I can see four uses for this:

1. Cloning your replacement body: As a matter of fact, this is how the replacement clones used in the clone-resurrection process are generated. Not vat-grown anymore as in classic cyberpunk, but 3D-printed like the anti-plasma bomb being printed in the background of Shira's opening videoblog post.
2. Organ replacement: what bioprinting is used for today, but naturally more advanced. Eventually the technology will get good and cheap enough that people will be able to replace organs at will, like replacement parts for machines.
3. Designer deformations: What if you're bored with your baseline human appearance? What if you want the latest fashionable deformations? There's pretty much no limit to how much the idle rich can pervert bioprinting technology. Some of them, of course, will make themselves superhuman or outright transhuman. The likes of Neuromancer's Lo-Teks won't be quite so low-tech anymore.
4. Printing the perfect blonde: Forget eugenics. Why wait on genetic engineering, gene doping, and old-fashioned breeding when you can design your human physical ideal in a CAD program and then print it? You can design in pretty much anything you want, including amazing superpowers, without having to rely on the hereditary luck of the draw. You can create bodies more beautiful than anything Nature can design, as living artworks.

Naturally, since in the cyberpunk universe (i.e. Spanner) technology requires the money that the rich are stealing from the poor and hoarding for themselves, like all medical technologies bioprinting will of course be a luxury for the rich, intended to turn them into a transhuman master race eventually able to overthrow even the American Empire's superhuman oligarchs known as the Liberators. For the natural-born newtype superhumans of Team Spanner, this means they have to race against yet another ticking clock and try to convince humanity to save themselves before the Tech Lords make their species obsolete.

Sexbots 3: Sexbots of the Human Kind

To sum up the previous two posts, real sexbots are nearing mass production, and somebody will hack some into rapebots. There's already speculation about an even more dystopian scenario: in the future, there will be people implanted with some mind-control device that will turn them into human robots, or "meat puppets". I'll eventually post something about specifically that. But right now there's one particular use I'm concerned with. If people can be physically hacked into robots, some of them are bound to become human sexbots.

You know the Man will spin robotization of humans as the ideal way to dispense with criminals without killing them. To the corporations, they'll sell it as the ideal workforce; certainly the prison-industrial complex will try to profit huge from this. But some Corporates and political types will see through the spin...

What is the feminine ideal for the male power luster? Beautiful, insatiable, naked, and utterly obedient to his commands. Stereotypes are always misleading. Most women have at least some sense of dignity. But what the man of power wants is a harem of pliant beauties who worship his every sexual craving and bear his children unquestioningly. Since humans are as unreliable as they are sexy, the way to make them perfectly reliable (not to mention pliable) is to hardwire their brains so that they become soft-fleshed sexbots. Then they'll have no will but his own. He won't have to worry about them leaving him, much less turning feminist, ever again. If he's especially ruthless, he could do the same to his own wife, or even his daughters. Being Corporate, you know he'll get away with it. Turning your wife and daughters into your own personal sexbots could even become all the rage among the overclass, just like in Ira Levin's Stepford...

And of course you'll see rich women doing that to men. Human sexbots made out of dangerous criminals could become a hot commodity among Corporate women.

Sure enough, science fiction has dealt with this, even before The Stepford Wives. But now we're already living in the cyberpunk universe; so much of what we take for granted today was science fiction then. And most of science fiction has dealt with the dark side of technological advance. What makes the dark side so dark is that there are people the dark side strongly appeals to. Nuclear war? Generals masturbate over it. Panoptical surveillance? The voyeur's wet dream. Rapebots and human sexbots? Hentai manga's already running away with this kind of stuff.

You know I'll throw it into Spanner sometime...

Spanner: Scientism and the Mechanists

Relatively few people in the US know about Doctor Who (British and American official sites), the most famous British science fiction series and one of the longest running TV shows in history. Me, I've only seen a few episodes in their entirety, and not a single entire serial, and that was years and years ago; more recently, I've caught fragments of episodes from the Tom Baker era. But no one who has seen the series can forget the series' most iconic villains, the Daleks, whose creator Terry Nation, who grew up during World War II and experienced the terror of the London Blitz, envisioned them as "cosmic Nazis". Now take the Dalek out of its salt-shaker shell and implant it into an anime mech. The result is the "Mechanists" of Spanner. The name designates a faction centering on a cult similar to Warhammer 40,000's Adeptus Mechanicus. This faction holds to an interpretation of the "Law of Social Darwinism" different from that of the ruling Corporate aristocracy: where the Corporates believe corporations to be humanity's successors, the Mechanists insist that posthumanity will be entirely mechanical. They strive to create true cybernetic organisms ("cyborgs" for short) that are superior to mere intelligent carbon-based lifeforms in every way. If the Corporates' religion is, of course, Corporatism (a political ideology transformed into a cult), the religion of the Mechanists is Scientism: the cult of science. The ever escalating strife between the Corporates and Mechanists ultimately helps bring the Corporate Empire down.

Political Horror, or Governments as Living Gods and Corporations as Hostile Alien Lifeforms

In the third of my posts on collective villainy, I'll talk about genre. Now, you might read a whole lot of books and articles about political crimes and governmental shenanigans, but no matter how all-powerful they get you've probably never thought of them as literal gods. You might read all the business publications in the world and still never conceive of even the most predatory corporations as hostile alien lifeforms. Is the Federal Government of the United States of America a berserk Titan? Is Enron a collective vampire? Is Nazi Germany the manifestation of one of the dreaded Elder Gods? It may or may not be true in the real world (but see the last two posts), but the answer is a definite yes in the new genre of fiction I'm creating, a hybrid I'm calling political horror.

When I say "political horror", many of you probably think of such dystopian novels as 1984, Brave New World, and Darkness at Noon. They are indeed the forerunners to political horror. But I have something different in mind.