Cybernetics Eat Your Soul

If you are going to munchkin out in cyberpunk you have to cyber yourself up to the maximum... Some games try to penalize this with the half-hearted penalty of "losing your humanity", a concept that is in no cyberpunk literature and just exists as a feeble attempt to prevent munchkinism.

—The Munchkin's Guide to Powergaming

In many popular Cyberpunk Tabletop Games, cybernetic implants cause "humanity loss", reducing your social traits and essentially making cyberware into a form of Body Horror. Too many implants may reduce your character to catatonia or (far more often) Ax Crazy on steroids. If these settings also feature Psychic Powers or Functional Magic, cyberware often reduces your ability to use those as well. This trope usually accompanies the broken lesson that only cyberware inflicts humanity loss—sure, getting that Arm Cannon will dehumanize you, but not deliberately committing actual atrocities, getting hooked on hard drugs, learning Black Magic, having a mental illness that is not fictional, or other expected sources of insanity. It is also a Broken Aesop when Ridiculously-Human Robots are depicted as more...um...human.

It does of course make a huge logical difference whether it is just limbs and other body parts being replaced, or if sections of the brain itself are being replaced with equipment which may perform inferiorly to, or merely differently than the original. Characters who are getting encased in a mobile life support coffin usually suffer this not from having parts replaced, but being put in large, scary and clumsy or destructive bodies.

This trope can be considered a form of Competitive Balance gone bad, as game designers originally used humanity loss to keep player cyborgs in line—without any drawbacks, any Munchkin worth his salt would load himself down with Kill-O-Matic 3000s slaved to his neural systems so he could kill with a thought while his brand new shiny titanium limbs ripped battleships in half. In practice, this wasn't a good balancing mechanism; to a true Munchkin, having your character become a drooling Ax Crazy psychopath only made it easier to justify all that senseless carnage. It's also notable that this trope happened in few (if any) of the original Cyberpunk novels that inspired most of these games.

Of course, if the cyborg was dead prior to the cybernetics being installed, and it is mentioned that parts being reactivated have side-effects or don't work like the original, this is a case of Came Back Wrong.

In works of fiction, the "humanity loss" is often shown by the character turning evil, becoming emotionless or "hollow", or possibly even losing their memories.

Compare with Magic Versus Science, Science Is Bad, Pro-Human Transhuman and The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body. See also Psycho Serum, Body Horror, Transhuman Treachery and Our Souls Are Different. If the "humanity loss" from cybernetics is seen as something desirable, see Machine Worship. See also Creative Sterility.

Examples of Cybernetics Eat Your Soul include:

Anime and Manga

  • It was averted in Astro Boy. In one story, a terrorist organization steals dogs and grafts their brains in mechanical, humanoid bodies in order to create loyal and utterly obedient soldiers. However, in the prologue of the story, Osamu Tezuka argued as far as he was concerned, the soul or spirit of the being always endures, even it if is mechanized.
  • In the Afro Samurai movie, Sio implies that this has happened to Kuma, saying that he's been repaired so many times, there's hardly any human left at all, just a mindless "samurai doll."
    • He later proves her wrong, by giving up his life in defence of Afro during the battle with his clone/cyborg father (who might be another example of this trope).
    • In the series he's pretty Axe Crazy after becoming a teddy-bear Vader although this might be because he blames Afro for every all the bad that happened to them.
  • Reversed in Appleseed. Briarios, a cyborg the size of a small car, tends to be calmer and more collected than his unaugmented partner Deunan. Artifically regulated hormones might be one factor, but he was the much more calmer partner of the duo even long before he became a cyborg. However, he does worry that his increasing degree of mechanization puts a strain on their relationship. But the manga strongly implies that Deunan does not mind.
  • The big issue in Ghost in the Shell. However, the commonly accepted answer is "No, it doesn't." Even when nothing but parts of the brain of the original body remain, a person still remains oneself. The much more pressing question is, if a machine, that never was biological to begin with, can produce a Ghost (soul) on it's own.
  • Bubblegum Crisis calls this "Boomer Syndrome", comparing it to the eponymous androids that occasionally go on rampages when their brains roll snake-eyes.
  • 8 Man has cyborgs who routinely run rampant because the cybernetic link to the nervous system along with the massive boost in strength unhinges most people's minds. Eight Man, being a (Bishonen) Phlebotinum Rebel with "good cybernetics" is able to escape these effects and battle the evil Mega Corp producing them.
    • The OVA Eight Man After discards this trope in favor of Drugs Are Bad - it's not the cybernetics per se that drives the users crazy, but the massive quantities of Psycho Serum they have to take to use the implants effectively. Eight Man makes do with good-old Super Serum.
  • Galaxy Express 999 takes this all the way. Like, literally to the end of the line.
    • "Machine-humans" slowly become depressed, neurotic, and eventually much worse over a period of decades as their human emotions and drives drift further and further out of whack with the realities of their cybernetic existence. In a sense they become mentally sick from "overliving" the way one might become physically sick from overeating.
  • Both played straight and averted in Macross Frontier. The Big Bad and her Dragon are both cyborgs. The former goes completely A God Am I by the end of the series, while her former Dragon undergoes a Heel Face Turn out of love for his newly refound sister. Though the latter is briefly interrupted by said Dragon being Brainwashed and Crazy, he shakes it off in the Grand Finale and even rejects the Big Bad's Assimilation Plot on the basis of human emotion.
  • Subverted in Cyborg 009, where Albert/004 is the one in the Cyborg Team with more machine parts (due to having almost half his body torn in an explosion), but is one of the most developed characters in the whole series. Somewhat played straight, too, since he constantly worries about the possibility of losing his humanity as time passes or about people seeing him as a monster, and at least two episode ("Tears of Steel" and "Man or Machine?") are fully dedicated to his struggles.
    • And there's also 0011, the main enemy in "Tears of Steel", who plays the trope straight by being at first a Tragic Monster who only wanted to have his family back, but later was Brainwashed and Crazy and lost all of his remaining humanity. 004 had to kill him in the end to stop his rampage...
  • The Mikura in the Karas OVAs, all youkai (traditional Japanese supernatural creatures), who require human blood unlike their counterparts.
    • Made especially apparent by the robots in Robo Assyl where not only have they been taught by Ping to be human, but also to lie cheat and gamble along with their own religion.
    • Even greater is the Anomoly team which are composed entire of nanomachines... and ended up becoming living breathing organisms that function just like real ones. Even complete with a robot penis.
  • Mazinger Z: The Iron Mask and Iron Cross are Cyborgs Big Bad Dr. Hell created by grafting cybernetic implants in the brain of corpses (many of which he, his Co-Dragons or his Humongous Mecha had murdered). Not only they are not allowed rest in peace but they have been mindwiped and programmed to be mindless slaves. One of them even gloated to Kouji Kabuto he was glad of no longer being worried about pesky things such like thinking, hesitating, worrying or fearing death and he was a perfect soldier. Of course, Kouji was not impressed:

Kouji: "You idiot, such a thing wouldn't even be human!"

  • Sasori from Naruto claims to have thrown away his emotions when he turned his body into a puppet, although this isn't really true.
  • Texhnolyze includes a cult known as the Union, who are against the titular cybernetic technology on the grounds of this trope. Their leader claims to know this since he has a Texhnolyzed arm himself, but the limbs themselves have never shown to be harmful. at least until their main power source shuts down, which leaves characters with cybernetic limbs unable to move properly.
  • Bartolomew Kuma aka PX-0's fate in One Piece. Also played for laughs when Luffy accuses Franky of being a case of this.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha works from Striker S on give this trope the finger. While Axe Crazy and robotic-acting cyborgs both do exist, the former are recognizably garden-variety sociopaths rather than it being a result of being a cyborg and the latter had their personalities chop-jobbed by the sociopaths. Both are the result of having been raised by a lunatic. They are comfortably outnumbered by sane, well-adjusted cyborgs who were also raised by that same lunatic, to the point one wonders if cybernetics don't actually make you more sane.
  • Gunslinger Girl is made of this trope. The entire plot is about girls who have been given cybernetic implants and turned into assassins. Entire episodes are devoted into exploring the is-it-a-machine-or-a-human-being problem. The girls also lose their memories and have a short life span due to repeated stress on their cybernetic bodies and brainwashing.


Comic Books

  • The "Big Wheel" issue of Global Frequency had a half-dead soldier who'd been basically turned into a walking killing machine by cybernetic alterations. Then he saw his reflection and decided to live up to the role.
    • And one of the members of the team sent to kill him before he could spread his killing spree was a partial cyborg who emphasized to her teammates the Body Horror inherent even in just the grinding, inhuman feel of an artificial arm (and the anchoring necessary to keep it from ripping off her shoulder).

Member 436: Try to imagine. You're a multiple amputee who's been flayed alive. You can't feel your own heartbeat. You can't feel yourself breathe. You can feel metal rubbing against your muscles and organs. And you don't recognize the man in the mirror.

  • Dekko from Zot is a textbook example. Although cybernetics don't seem to be inherently bad in Zot's world, the trauma of having his terminally-ill body replaced a piece at a time turned him into a Mad Artist.
  • Hart Whitcraft was afraid of this happening after receiving an artificial heart in the Acclaim version of Magnus, Robot Fighter. The series, and entire line, ends before we can find out.
  • After becoming a Technopath thanks to the Extremis process, Tony Stark's friends and colleagues start to suspect this. Turns out the information overload is just making him a little loopy - the rest is his own normal paranoia and borderline-masochistic work ethic cranked up to 11, thanks to his new efficiency. And Skrulls, but you find that out later.
    • And at one point the cybernetics just plain eat him, overwriting his body and mind for a few issues, turning him into Girl Ultron.
    • Its now a Inverts thanks to said Anal Skrull Tony lost his Extremis powers, he's now a shell of his former self.
  • Played straight and subverted in the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog series; the roboticization process created by Dr. Robotnik/Eggman normally results in a loss of free will, while the cybernetic enhancements of the Dark Legion actually don't result in a significant change of personality (though it's still considered by the mainstream public to be "unnatural"), and their status as "evil" is more from their methods of fighting for their right to continue their lifestyle, than the lifestyle itself.
  • Hank Henshaw, AKA Cyborg Superman, looks like a straight example, but it's a bit more complicated. Originally part of a pastiche of the Fantastic Four Gone Horribly Wrong, he was turned into an energy being/ghost that could possess machinery after his body decayed away. It wasn't until he was rejected by his wife and wandered around space for a while that he became a hardcore villain (and even more hardcore Death Seeker). So, this is more a case of his soul eating cybernetics.
    • He eventually found himself in a clique with the Anti-Monitor and Superboy Prime, both of whom had every intention of destroying everything that existed, including him. It didn't stick, much to his regret.
  • Subverted in Transmetropolitan, where one issue is dedicated to the concept of "foglets": humans that have turned themselves into clouds of nanomachines. When Channon's former boyfriend Ziang decides to join them, she thinks that this trope is in full effect and reacts like Ziang's going to kill himself. Spider, knowing better, gets them invited to Ziang's downloading. While Spider practically had to drag Channon there, she changes her mind when she meets Tico, who is charming, well-adjusted and unmistakably human.
    • Then played straight in another issue when Spider describes "mechanics": synthetic drugs that can be taken both by humans and by A Is. Both get high, and in the meantime the AI gets control of your DNA...and promptly starts turning bits of you mechanical.
  • Played straight in Iron Man: Rapture mini-series that had Tony implanting himself with a new heart after his heart attack. He ended up getting addicted to cyber enhancements and locked himself in his lab for a week. Before revealing himself as a cyberbeing named 'Stark 2.0.
  • ROM Spaceknight subverts the trope, being an extremely human and noble character despite looking like a walking suit of armor—but he fears this happening, and he loathes his metallic shell. Played with when his girlfriend Brandy becomes a Spaceknight as well—at first her personality is unaffected, but when her entire home town is murdered by the Wraiths, she succumbs to a state that Rom says he has seen in Spaceknights before: an overwhelming hatred that physically changes her armor to look more vicious, and she remains a cold-hearted killer until she's removed from the armor and becomes human again.


Fan Works

  • The Homestuck fanfic "Tenth Life", where one of the characters has a robot body made for her after her death, but the cybernetic body robs her of all imagination and creativity. Her friends eventually decide to just end her life.
  • In the Service, building on the Lyrical Nanoha example above, posits that cybernetic enhancement is neither necessarily good nor evil: it reinforces existing traits. Mentally healthy people converted to cyborgs will withstand huge amounts of emotional trauma and stress without ill effect. People who are not mentally healthy...won't.


Film

  • In Spider-Man 2, Dr. Otto Octavius is driven to madness by feedback ("voices") from his trademark robotic tentacles after a lab accident destroys the neural control chip meant to prevent this, and becomes obsessed with finishing his failed experiment at any cost. The arms could have been mindless, and the voices belonged to his subconsciousness.
    • Played straight. Octavius answers a question before the presentation that kills his wife confirming that the chip prevents the arms from controlling or influencing him.
  • Except for Jean-Claude Van Damme, cyborg conversions didn't go too well in Universal Soldier, either.
    • It's worse than that. Van Damme was able to overcome his programming and have a normal life. The villain didn't but he was pretty screwed up to begin with. Now, Redux features JCvD's friend being converted to a soldier and allowing herself be blown up because, as she tells him, it's "too late for her" even though a living, breathing proof that "no, it isn't" stands right in front of her.
      • Plus they didn't turn evil because of the cybernetics, they turned evil because the AI that's controlling them turned evil-ish (it didn't want to be shut off).
  • In Kamen Rider the First, it is explained that all Shocker agents must undergo periodic blood transfusions to stop their bodies from rejecting their cybernetic implants, forcing their loyalty to the organization. Though Takeshi Hongo/Kamen Rider 1 oddly doesn't experience this, Hayato Ichimongi/Kamen Rider 2 does. This eventually leads to his death at the end of Kamen Rider the NEXT.
  • Averted in the RoboCop movies. While limited by his programming, Murphy remains a man inside. Similarly, the psychopathic Robocop 2 was a scumbag drug lord before his conversion.
  • Star Wars: Darth Vader. "He's more machine now than man; twisted and evil."
    • Never mind that he was pretty twisted and evil a good while before getting cybernetic implants (well, save for the arm - but he wasn't exactly evil after getting that either - that happened later).
    • Well, kind of. In an episode of Star Wars: Clone Wars, in a sequence reminiscent of Luke's experience in the cave on Episode V, Anakin has a vision in which a warrior loses his arm in battle, and replaces it with a mysterious shiny, black one with great power. At first he is able to defend his home and friends with the power of the arm, but soon it reaches out and kills a bunch of stuff without him meaning to, eventually including his wife. It could be though. The parallel to the loss of his own hand is clear, and it is certainly tracks to his own tragic fate and reliance on the power of the Force to protect the ones he loves.
    • Also, Anakin's first foray into the Dark Side - slaughtering a Tusken Raider tribe to avenge his mom - occurred shortly before getting his arm cut off.
    • Partially averted with Lobot, Lando Calrissian's aide. He may seem rather soulless in the movie (the fate of many Star Wars extras), but he retains a great deal of his humanity and actually became a more upstanding and noble person after the augmentation. However, a malfunction with his implant can cause him to lose the rest of his humanity and go berserk.
    • Played with with Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi, where his cybernetic hand point out all too clearly what he was about to become if he finished off Vader. Cybernetics saved his soul.
    • Played completely straight with General Grievous. He has a Freudian Excuse like Vader, minus any redeemable qualities.
    • Of course, the fact that some of the most personable and sincere characters in the films are robots would tend to argue against this trope's underlying "machine = heartless monster" premise.
  • In Back to the Future Part 2, Marty is warned that the cyborg asshole Griff "has a few short circuits in his bionic implants." (In fairness to this trope, though, Griff does descend from a long line of bullying Jerkasses, so it's quite debatable how much - if any - of his Jerkassness can be blamed on cybernetics.)
  • Inverted in Repo Men, in that Remy only becomes conscious of the horror of his profession after his real heart is replaced by an artiforg one.
  • Averted in Bicentennial Man. Andrew invents cybernetic organ replacements that the human population universally embraces, as it eventually makes people essentially immortal. Though Portia does object, saying that people are meant to die eventually, and she wants to.
  • Subverted by Tony Stark. When he's completely flesh and blood, he's an arrogant playboy genius with no consideration for the consequences of his work. It's not until he has to place the miniature arc reactor in his chest that his more noble nature emerges.


Literature

  • The Tin Woodsman from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz claims to be an example of this, since he literally has no heart—or any other organs, for that matter. The Wicked Witch of the East cursed him to repeatedly accidentally injure himself with his axe, so eventually his whole body (including his chest, where his heart used to be) had to be replaced with tin. Now he's just a thinking, moving suit of metal with no internal organs at all, but any idiot can see that he doesn't need a physical heart to have a spiritual heart. When he accidentally crushes a bug beneath his foot on the Yellow Brick Road, he cries so hard that his jaw rusts shut.
  • In the BattleTech novel Operation Excalibur, one character, whose husband recently had a limb replaced, mused that the sex the night before proved that cybernetic limbs at least don't remove a person's tenderness or passion, and thinks that the only people who tend to go coldly murderous when they have cybernetic prosthetics installed are people who tended towards that sort of behavior anyway.
    • The World Of Blake's massively cybernetically modified Manei Dominei soldiers are merciless killers, but that's more likely due to their indoctrination rather then a side-effect of their cybernetics.
    • Played (somewhat) straight with the Word of Blake's VDNI and Buffered VDNI, in that they cause insanity and brain damage after ten years or so (with medical treatment).
      • Played...bent, by Clan Enhanced Imaging technology; it does not eat your soul, but will eventually result in crippling neuromuscular degeneration despite constant treatment, and arguably a lot of the hard-core Crusaders who would use it were pretty soulless anyways. The version used as a control system for protomechs carries with it no inherent penalties different from the usual one, but due to its use as Unusual User Interface with the protomech, in which the pilot essentially becomes the machine while it's active, it can result in a "God Complex" insanity.
      • Though in the case of the psychological problems caused by EI technology the fluff mentions that social interaction, particularly with other members of their protomech unit, outside the cockpit can limit this. So apparently they only eat your soul if you're a loner.
      • Played with regarding Myomer implants, which act as electric powered muscles that can vastly augment one's strength and endurance. Despite the large alteration the procedure generally does not result in psychological problems. However patients usually become dependent on pain killers afterwards and that in itself can lead to a host of issues.
    • On the flip side, Redemption Ark describes the effects of a prosthetic body (plus a physics-altering energy field) on a Conjoiner villain: "Her thoughts shifted and coalesced with frightening speed, like clouds in a sped-up film. She flickered between moods she had never known before, terror and elation revealed as opposed facets of the same hidden emotion.".
  • In To Hold Infinity by John Meaney, the plexcores with which the inhabitants of Fulgor augment their brains don't eat your soul so much as change it into something rather inhuman. The antagonist of the book is a hundred times more augmented than his peers, ultimately enabling him to survive death, in a fashion, and become a mind-eating planet-conquering godlike being. He maintains much of his human emotion, but has a tendency to consider other humans as obstructions or prey.
  • In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, cyborgs aren't really any more or less likely to go psychotic than anyone else, but there's a bit of Fantastic Racism towards those who've had more than a limb or an eye replaced.

Phanan: "There's no mechanical replacement for a future, Face. And every time I take a hit, and they have to cut away another part of me and replace it with machinery because I'm allergic to bacta, every time that happens I seem to be a little further away from the young doctor who had a future. He can't come back, Face. Not all of him is here anymore."

    • The extent to which Phanan's issues are directly related to the cybernetic implants is debateable, however. The nature of his injuries and his allergy to bacta mean that his facial injuries are highly visible, unpleaant to look at and nearly impossible to disguise. He might well have had similar problems adjusting to life with extensive facial scarring and the loss of an eye.
    • In another instance Wedge is fitted with fake prosthetics on his arm and head to get him through customs, in the hope that nobody would look directly at his face and recognize him as a well known rebel commander. And it worked perfectly.
    • In one novel Tenel Ka loses one arm. She refuses to replace it cybernetically due to family values. Luke supports her decision and explains that while he prefers to have his arm replaced, he always keeps in mind this is a step in direction of Vader - "half human, half machine".
    • Also one argument why Vader was irredeemable was that he was "more machine than man".
      • The comic Star Wars Legacy plays with this. An Imperial Knight was badly wounded so they gave her a "Vader" Life Support system. One of the healers was worry about making another Vader, however the other pointed out that Vader turned evil before being put in his suit. She's still mostly the same, but since she was fine with dying before and now can't touch anything without feeling pain she's pissed.
    • The Dark Forces Saga has robotic Darktroopers; supplemental material mentions that the prototypes were aging veteran clone troopers who had around seventy percent of their bodies replaced with cybernetics. Combining the weight of their experience with stronger, faster, more damage-resistant bodies made them extremely effective in combat, but no one had consulted them beforehand. That's why the project switched its focus to droid troopers - droids don't gape in horror at what they have become and kill themselves or just act really recklessly in battle, wasting good credits and tech.
    • One of the Imperial Grand Admirals, Teshik, was known for being humane and compassionate, moreso than the others. After he failed Palpatine, he was sent on a suicidal mission, survived, and came back, but so badly wounded that a good seventy-five percent of his body had to be replaced with cybernetics. This put him in the NonhuMan category; in that 'verse, bacta therapy is so effective that cyborgs are seen as weak and inferior. As a result of this, Teshik grew cold and distanced himself from his emotions. But his soul hadn't been eaten; a construction worker saved him on Endor, reawakening his true nature, and he fought on until his Star Destroyer was captured. Then the New Republic executed him for atrocities he, the least evil Grand Admiral, never committed; his mechanical laughter at hearing his sentence is said to be the saddest thing those who witnessed it ever heard.
    • At the end of The Truce at Bakura:

Luke: Alliance surgeons can do wonderful things with prosthetics. They'll treat you at Endor.
Dev: Prosthetics? Sounds like entechment.

    • Because it relies on two different kinds of technology, one even more esoteric than the other, possibly the ultimate example of this has not really had a chance to be explored—having oneself using a refined version of the entechment process (mentioned above) to have one's "spirit" place into a replica droid of oneself. The only person known to try it was already evil when he went for it, but it didn't seem to affect his personality any.
    • Tanner Sack, a secondary protagonist in The Scar and all-around nice guy voluntarily undergoes Remaking to become more amphibious, as his new home is a floating city.
  • Orson Scott Card discusses this in Robota, eventually concluding that non-visible augmentations are perfectly safe psychologically. Making yourself look like a robot, on the other hand, is generally connected to rejection of humanity, and hence to Transhuman Treachery. (Incidentally, this setting has no Ridiculously-Human Robots, so robots that embrace emotion ignore this rule.
  • Played with horrific psychological subtlety in Damon Knight's short story "Masks". A man has been saved from certain death by having his brain and nervous system woven into an otherwise robotic body. Though he's retained all his memories and sense of self, his lack of human senses and physiology has left him with only one emotion: nauseating disgust and hatred for the organic life that surrounds him.
  • Walter Jon Williams's Hardwired plays a variation of this trope; a person who replaces too much of their brain-matter with implants becomes "white-brained", detached from the world and other people, obsessed with mathematical abstractions, and losing much of their emotions in the process. However, it only happens to those who are inclined towards abstract thinking to begin with - those who use their cybernetic implants to intereact with physical objects like vehicles, and expand their abilities in the realms of physical talent like martial arts rarely suffer from these effects.
  • Justified in Android Karenina, where the mechanical "Face" that eventually transforms Alexei Karenin into the nightmarish Tsar With No Face was specifically designed for exactly that purpose- as part of a scheme for world domination by the Honoured Guests.
  • Quantum Gravity: Lila worries that this will happen. In something of a twist, it's not that she's worried about her human parts being replaced by more mechanical ones (at first), it's that her organic and inroganic parts are slowly integrating—she's told her AI and her brain will stop being separate soon. And then the magic metalloid fleshoid stuff starts growing to encompass more of her body, and she frets even more because she is losing all of her human body.
  • Max Barry's Machine Man addresses this with Dr. Charles Neumann. After becoming a Man in the Machine, he begins talking to his artificial parts and referring to himself as "we". He gets better... Sort of.
  • Grigari nano-cybernetics do this in the Star Trek novel Federation, although it doesn't affect the personality so much as the stuff below it - essentially Flanderizing the user. Also, the guy whose soul was being eaten was a psychotic Optimum agent obsessed with Zefram Cochrane and a physically impossible "warp bomb", so it's quite possible everyone would have been better off if it did take out the emotions.
  • Strongly implied to be the eventual fate of the cyborg starlet Deirdre at the end of C.L. Moore's novella "No Woman Born."
  • Dark Future: Dr. Threadneedle, himself significantly cybered-up, addresses this topic with Jessamyn shortly after having installed huge amounts of cybernetics and bio-augmentations in her. One of the reasons he was fired by GenTech and Dr. Zarathustra cancelled his projects was to do with the high levels of psychosis that many of his subjects suffered. He himself has been experiencing a significant lack of interest in the rest of humanity and a general feeling of detachment from the world, manifesting in trances and spending hours simply testing how long he can balance himself on his fingers or hold a significant weight.
"I can do almost anything with this body, but...when you're superhuman so little seems worth the bother."
—Dr. Simon Threadneedle, Krokodil Tears

Live Action TV

  • In Doctor Who, the Cybermen are said to have lost their ability to feel emotion during their transformation, as a species, from biological entities to cyborgs, either deliberately or as a byproduct of their cybernetics (depending on who wrote the story). In the new series, which presents Cybermen as Body Horror, emotion-inhibiting firmware is used to prevent the forcefully-cyberconverted individuals from killing themselves upon realizing what they've become.
    • Similarly, the Kaleds of the planet Skaro who suffer the mobile life-support coffin variety in becoming the (in)famous Daleks. It's never made clear if it was the accelerated mutation or the placement in the mechanized armor that causes the genocidal insanity all Daleks share.
      • The Daleks' creator Davros. His further descent into Ax Crazy land is punctuated with the steady decay of his body and growing dependence on Dalek-like replacement parts, making a poster for this trope.
  • The Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In Star Trek: First Contact, they assimilate Data by putting organic components into him.
    • The Borg were once planned to be robotic insectoids at the end of the first season, until budget and other behind-the-scenes problems wound up only vaguely hinting at them. Of course, the Borg we all know and (no longer [1] ) fear showed up in the second season.
    • In the Expanded Universe Star Trek: Destiny series, it's revealed that the Borg aren't evil because of their cybernetic nature or because of their Hive Mind, but because the first assimilation process went horribly wrong, and subordinated the minds and bodies of its victims to an alien entity who had faded away entirely save for an all-consuming hunger.
      • This was hinted in one earlier novel.
  • Deep Space Nine played with this trope with Vedek Bareil. After slowly dying, Kira tried to keep him alive by replacing his body with cybernetics. After half of his brain was replaced with a positronic matrix, the sudden change in sensation (which he describes as being like an echo of what he once felt) is enough for him to want to die instead of going further and Dr. Bashir, the attending physician, agreed with that sentiment. He remained himself throughout the procedure (though in increasing pain and disorientation), but Bashir admitted that the unprecedented last step needed to save his life, trying to replace the other half of his brain, not only was nigh impossible but, if it worked, wouldn't leave him as Bareil anymore.
  • Generally, Star Trek mistrusts such replacements. Picard's replacement heart malfunctions and nearly kills him in "Tapestry" (Q points out that a normal heart would not stop in such a situation), Geordi's Visor is abused a couple of times by Romulans, Nog's leg hurts until he realizes the pain is entirely psychosomatic, etc.
    • Christine Chapel's ex-fiancé Roger Corby uploaded his mind into an android before his death. The resultant android is an ends-justify-the-means sociopath, who suffers a My God, What Have I Done? moment when this is finally made clear to him.
    • On the other hand genetically augmented humans aren't much better (Khan), not to mention Jem'Haddar...
    • An ironically poignant lampshade of this phenomenon was given by Data, of all people, in the second season episode "The Measure of a Man"; in response to the prospect of being disassembled and studied for a mass-production experiment, he voiced his concerns over being damaged in the process by comparing the memory transfer he'd undergo - and the subsequent loss of the "essence" of those memories - to the difference between reading about playing poker in a textbook and actually playing it in real life. To sum up, he theorizes that it's the loss of context, the subtle details about an experience and the events surrounding them that makes the experience memorable and familiar, that prevents people from accepting a robotic life or truly understanding and appreciating an event being told to them second-hand.
  • In the short-lived 2007 The Bionic Woman reboot, the protagonist's Ax Crazy predecessor, Sarah Corvus, apparently became psychotic as a result of her bionic implants.
    • The fact that said implants are malfunctioning and that she is possibly near death may have something to do with it, though.
  • The original Six Million Dollar Man had Jaimie Sommers have a similar problem when her body started rejecting her implants, causing her maddening pain that drove her berserk and forcing Steve Austin to restrain her for emergency surgery that she seemingly didn't survive.
  • In Hyperdrive, Sandstrom is an "Enhanced Human" cybernetically connected to the ship's controls, who has a personality somewhere between Commander Data and the Enterprise computer. One episode has her "replaying" the events immediately before her enhancement, revealing she was a cheerful (if somewhat dim) young woman.
  • Even though she was probably joking, Kilo invokes this trope in the finale of Dollhouse. She is part of a team of cybernetically-enhanced vigilantes who can download specialized skills to their brains and store them on thumb drives. When asked what she takes out of her head to make room for the extra knowledge, she holds up a thumb drive labeled "MERCY" and grins.


Music

  • In the folk music/prog rock/metal Rock Opera album 01011001 by Ayreon, the main characters are a race of fish aliens that rely on machines to keep them alive, and as a result, they lose their emotions and ability to really experience life. They try to regain them by creating and living vicariously through humans. It works, and in the end, after humanity destroys itself, they stop the machines so that they can die. Probably. Ayreon is kind of a Mind Screw.
  • Nine Inch Nails' "The Becoming" is all about this:

That me that you know used to have feelings
 But the blood has stopped pumping and hes left to decay
 The me that you know is now made up of wires
 And even when I'm right with you I'm so far away

  • Papa Roach's Singular Indestructible Droid is this trope.
  • In the Vocaloid song series "New Millenium" (consisting of Risoukyou Utopia, A Faint Wish, and Shinseiki New Millenium), all of humanity suffers from this. The couple from the beginning is put into robot bodies and lose their love for each other, and a pair of twins are the only ones left with souls, until one of them dies. The other, however, manages to change history so that the mass-Cybernetics Eat Your Soul and the war that prompted it never happens.
  • The Soul Doctors from Fireaxe's 4-hour Food for the Gods.


Tabletop RPG

  • Decisively averted in Eclipse Phase. Your mind is software and can be "resleeved" into anything from another human form to an uplifted octopus or even a futuristic tank. If for some reason you want to keep your old body, you can still deck out it with an array of cybernetic and biological modifications, without any limitations whatsoever.
    • The closest thing being some temporary stress when re-sleeving (especially when the character remembers dying).
    • However, the Jovian Junta firmly believes in this trope, the only starting morphs available to characters with the "Jovian" background are unmodified "Flats" and minimally modified "Splicers".
  • An option for cybernetics in Atomik Cybertek.
  • Transhuman Space makes the question of whether or not Cybernetics Eat Your Soul the central question of the game. Different factions debate (again and again) whether A Is, uplifted animals, and bioroids have souls at all. Ditto for modified humans and especially uploaded intelligences. Several factions, especially bio-chauvinists and some preservationists, believe that Cybernetics Eat Your Soul, while others like Christian Hyper-evolutionists think that enhancements are necessary to advancement.
    • There are no game mechanics to prove either side right, but depending on where you life, what you are or what enhancements you've received might limit your civil rights.
  • Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020: Even worse than most - getting wrist blades or reinforced knuckles was 3d6 Humanity Loss, but getting your whole arm replaced was only 2d6!
    • Actually wrist blades or reinforced knuckles decreased Humanity by 1d6. The problem was that essentially primitive (i.e. mostly mechanical) implants like hydraulic legs or augmented arms decrease Humanity by 2d6 while coprocessors (essentially computers implanted into one's brain with optional false memories, capable of overriding cognitive and neurobiological functions) incur measly 1d6 decrease. No cyborgized firefighters and combat paramedics for you.
    • Possibly justified as deliberately turning yourself into a walking weapon might make you a bit less human - a limb, fine, but one with a built in shotgun? Going waaay above and beyond humanity there...
    • Made even worse for 'Borgs. Many full body conversions have a human brain as a plug-n-play Wetware CPU. They are like the Servitors of Warhammer 40K, but the brains can be put into another body. One conversion, the Dragoon, combines this trope with And I Must Scream. The cyberware and the drugs keep the thing (barely) controlled. It acts almost like a dumb robot. But your character can recover some humanity loss by moving into another body. Just now he/she has horrible nightmares and flashbacks from being was a 7 foot tall killing machine.
      • A major theme, especially for police characters, are full borgs who have gone psycho, running amok in their 500-pound metal bodies wreaking havok with heavy weaponry. The task of dealing with these nutjobs falls to a police force's C-SWAT (Cyber-SWAT) team who are often extensively cybered as well and use heavy gauss rifles and anti-vehicle weapons to take the psychotic borgs down. If they manage to catch the perp alive, he gets send straight to the clinic, gets his cyberware removed, and then spends a long time in a recovery ward (on top of serving prison time for his crimes, obviously).
  • Cyberspace
  • Fading Suns: Mostly averted, as this trope only happens if you take the "Cybernut" disadvantage. Then again, the resident Church Militant declares you soulless if more than 64% of your body has been replaced, but that's really them going nuts, not you.
  • Feng Shui has two major ways to enhance yourself with cybertech:
    • "Arcanowave" implants are icky Mad Scientist tech that are made of demons and Black Magic. Here, the danger is not so much losing your humanity in the typical cyberpunk sense the more you get cybered up, but having bent magic sent into your system like a virus whenever you use it. Use it too much, and you start mutating into something horrific and run the risk of becoming an abomination, one of those altered demons that the government of 2056 uses to fight its wars.
    • Conversely, those who use hardware schticks are rather well-adjusted, averting the trope, though hardware schticks do have their own little drawbacks (mainly being bulky as hell and nigh-unconcealable, particularly if you get the whole package). The people who primarily use the stuff, the Jammers, run the gamut from Well Intentioned Extremists to batshit crazy people who just want to blow everything sky high, but that's mainly a personality thing and not an effect of the cybernetics.
  • Obsidian: The catatonia option on steroids. To be fair, you can also lose Humanity for other horrible things, like binding demons or getting hit by Brown Note powers that reduce your Humanity.
  • Shadowrun: Getting cyberware drops your Essence, which comes with a corresponding drop in Magic ability; however, even the non-magically active should fear dropping too low in Essence, as if one's Essence runs out, they die. However, it is possible, through a combination of powerful blood magics and technology, to keep somebody with below-zero Essence alive as a "cyberzombie". It's not pretty, but nothing in Shadowrun is. The 1st edition game hinted at "cyberpsychosis," whereby characters become increasingly violent and irrational as their essence goes down; however, no rules system was ever given for this, and it was entirely dropped by 2nd edition.
    • There is a minor compensation: since cybernetics have been "paid for" with essence, magic which treats living and non-living things differently will treat cyberware as if it were living tissue.
    • Shadowrun's Essence attribute, in Third Edition, is a measure of how much the thought patterns of a given individual resemble natural patterns of their species. Installing cyberware, at least in fluff-theory, does not cause instant Essence loss, but rather learning to use said cyberware. This inevitably changes how the individual thinks, and so Essence goes down. From the metaphysical side of things, it also determines if someone's soul still considers them alive - if Essence drops to zero, the spirit flees the apparently-dead husk.
      • Fourth edition refers to essence as "(...) a measure of life force, of a body's wholeness. It represents the body's cohesiveness and holistic strength." It's worth noting that drug abuse can also reduce your essence (which can be really bad for drug-addicted PCs with low essence).
        • About Cyber Zombies: While being the only example of That One Boss in a Tabletop RPG may seem great, you quickly learn otherwise, as your soul is now effectively incompatible with your body, leaving what's left of your organic being to be constantly riddled with cancerous growths and necrosis. Not to mention, every now and then your soul tries to drift away (because, again, it no longer considers your body alive), and has to be forced to stay put via a cybernetic implant that instantly triggers a Flash Back of a powerful (usually painful) memory. It...hurts.
          • See the Hatchetman reference further below.
    • Cyberpsychosis is back in 4th edition, as a negative quality characters with real low essence can take. If they critically glitch on a social test, they enter an Unstoppable Rage.
    • Cybernetics is actually only one of the things that can damage a character's Essence. Magically active characters can suffer magic loss due to amputations, life-threatening injuries, carelessly performed medical procedures, and pharmaceuticals.
    • Then there's "used" cyber enhancements which have once been in somebody else's body, pretty horrible stuff even for cyber enhancements. And likewise the body rejects the enhancements and can fluff wise drive you crazy or interfere with your body, like Neural modifications for instance can make you permanently crazy.
    • One chapter of the 3rd Edition soucebook Cybertechnology has a heavily-cybered mercenary named Hatchetman tell his life story. He says killing was easier once he got cybereyes because it was like watching everything he did through a TV.
      • Hatchetman's story is a very well-written piece of narration, so it's worth exploring this further for the sake of this trope: After going through an extremely risky medical/magical procedure called "Cybermancy" that allows him to "cross the threshold" of his human body and mind, having more metal in him than pretty much every other street samurai and only being held back from terminal psychosis by various quirks programmed into his cybernetic brain.

I asked [the doctor] if I was going to stay alive.
He said yes, as long as I remembered.
Remembered what, I asked.
Remembered that I was alive, he answered.

  • The Old World of Darkness mostly averts the trope. Although there are a few implants that cause humanity loss, those involve removing parts of your brain. The vast majority of cybernetics have few disadvantages, and the most overt and powerful ones simply add to one's Paradox. In WoD, cybernetics gain their balance because a skilled Mage can emulate them just as well with spells-since they're all magic in the end anyways. They also have another issue, that any skilled life mage can cause a body to reject them.
    • On the other hand, the Glass Walkers, a tribe of techno-shaman werewolves, had a faction known as the Cyber Dogs, dedicated to fighting the Wyrm by blending their war forms with cybernetics. Due to making the Weaver stronger, that... did not go so well.
  • In the Genius: The Transgression fan supplement for the New World of Darkness, getting cybered is a sin against Obligation, as with all other transhumanist developments.
    • This is because Obligation represents the ability to empathize with normal humans as something other than raw material. The nature of Inspiration means a Genius always has wonderful, terrifying ideas like turning the entire human race into mechanical supermen or how cool it be to fly around as a biotech dragon; even small starts ("I'll just upgrade my arm!") can provide the necessary starting point to rationalize their way down a very slippery slope. You can have very nice, benevolent reasons for wanting to transform the human race, kiddo, but you're still an Obligation 0 madman.
      • It may be worth noting that the Obligation loss is a risk, not a guarantee. One can make it out of the process entirely unscathed.
  • Similarly, Exalted also mostly averts this trope with the Alchemical Exalted; in 1st edition, only the most inhuman enhancements for Alchemicals (death tentacles, massive brain modification, spider legs) caused any degree of humanity loss. Even then, a low-humanity Alchemical isn't crazy, just cold and detached.
    • In 2nd ed, they get the justified version of the trope with Voidtech, Charms which draw on the metaphysical disease that's killing their god-world. An Alchemical who goes too far, accumulates too much Void-taint, soon descends into murderous psychopathy. There are also ways for Creation's Exalted to implant Voidtech, letting them join the fun.
    • There's another justified 2nd ed version—Clarity. As an Alchemical's Essence rises, they run the risk of becoming more mechanical in mind as well as body, bordering on Straw Vulcan behavior.
  • Rifts treats this as a psychosomatic matter instead of a literal truth. Any loss of humanity is due to the individual 'Borg's feelings and reactions, and how they are usually perceived' by the society around them, rather than an inherent drawback to cybernetics or bionics. This varies between regions and nations around the planet, largely influenced by the prevalence of cybernetics there. In North America, cyborgs are considered normal, if uncommon in places. In Germany and Japan, cyborgs make up a sizable chunk of the nations'armed forces and are considered selfless heroes who have made sacrifices to serve their country. In the technologically advanced sections of Japan, the natural abundance of manga and anime makes cyborgs even more socially acceptable and popular than just about elsewhere in the world. Russia has a unique environment where giant, bionic soldiers make up almost the entirety of the front-line troops for each of the factions fighting to gain control of the region. To be a cyborg in Russia is a mark of prestige and each faction has a signature style of cyborg, each considered Elite soldiers and revered as heroes. Either way, characters who get replacements/augmentations rolls a save vs. insanity. Those who start at cyborg classes presumably have gone through this already.
    • Significant cyborgization and many brain implants diminish Inner Strength Points (psionic reserve), full conversion removes completely. A single lesser implant without brain links doesn't necessarily affect ISP, but 2-3 or a limb do. There are exotic "mind over matter" (body functions augmentation) and psynetic (adding or replicating Psychic Powers) brain implants, but they are prone to driving the subject crazy more than the others (chance of insanity for each implant).
    • Magic is "part of nature", so implants don't mix well with it - they not only reduce PPE reserves and spell power for magic-users, but lower efficiency of magical healing for anyone. Conversely, 'borgs are somewhat resistant to hostile magic as well. Techno-wizard bionics does exist, but it means walking a thin line and thus is rare even compared to other TW devices. Implants/transplants that consist mostly of living tissue are magic- and psychic- compatible, though they don't offer augmentation like "mechanical" ones.
  • In Star Wars Saga Edition, cybernetic replacements reduce your Use the Force check. Earlier Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPGs reduced the benefit from spending Force Points. In any case, within the rules this only really applies to Force Users; it's even possible to become a full cyborg hybrid like Grievous or Durge without becoming a bad guy, though you have to nearly die in order to do so. Droids, even sapient ones, have zero penalties except cost for bolting gadgets to themself.
    • The old West End Games Star Wars RPG mechanic for this was "More Machine Now Than Man", introduced in the Sourcebook Galladinium's Fantastic Technology and it increased the number of Dark Side points gained substantially when you had more cybernetic replacements and upgrades. Upgrades counted double for calculating how many cybernetic parts your character had, as opposed to replacements necessitated by injuries.
  • One of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual supplements introduced "half-golems", which are about as close to cyborgs as a fantasy setting gets. Having limbs replaced with golem parts can restore function and increase strength, but requires a Will save, which gets more difficult as the number of replacements increase. Failure on the save switches the victim to a Neutral Evil alignment and changes their type to Construct, engendering a murderous hatred of the living.
  • Various Warhammer 40,000 examples play this trope straight, most notably the Adeptus Mechanicus, who replace parts of their brains with computers. Similarly, Servitors and Arco-flagellants are soul-eaten by their cybernetics. However, the majority of the 'verse avoids the trope, since cybernetic alteration, augmentation and replacement is common, and generally doesn't cause major problems. It's one of the few tropes the universe doesn't play as grim and dark as it possibly can. We can only assume the coolness of cybernetics makes up for it.
    • Arguably, the straight examples of this aren't due to the cybernetics, but to extenuating factors. The dehumanization of high-ranking Adeptus Mechanicus members is as much from their own personal philosophy as it is from their implants; the Cult Mechanicus encourages leaving behind the weaknesses of flesh and human thought process for the strength of metal and the cold logic of electronic circuits. Servitors also don't lose their humanity from their implants—they're routinely lobotomized before any cybernetics are installed. Arco-flagellants and suchlike also are heavily brainwashed and/or get several gallons of crazy-juice injected straight into their brains.
    • Titan machine spirits are described as so full of rage and desire to destroy that only the strongest minds can master them, and even the hidebound Obstructive Bureaucrat Adeptus Mechanicus are willing to take any human from anywhere who can handle it into their ranks. Lesser men are frequently driven mad or killed by trying to connect to a Titan. That's implied to be mostly consist of imprints left by the previous crews (titans are not churned out every day, it's more like building a small, but high-end spaceship, so most are quite old).
    • Space Marine Dreadnoughts are a cybernetic lifesupport sarcophagus hooked up to a Mini-Mecha frame, so that the near-dead warriors can still fight on. They mostly remain themselves, and Librarians are given a variant which allows them to still use psychic abilities, but Dreadnoughts are kept in stasis between the battles, not just left around awake.
    • One might make an argument that this is what happened to the Necrons, though it may have to do more with their soul-eating gods. Based on the 5th edition rulebook, all Necrons have souls, and every time they 'die' the repair chip eats away a small part of their souls until only the basic program is left, mixing this with a little Came Back Wrong. Lords, who don't die as much and have better repair systems, are just driven insane from the the millions of year in stasis: some think they're gods, some customized their armies to be different etc. (Yes, that's right, Games Workshop has managed to take a race of omnicidal zombie robots and make it more GRIMDARK.)
      • The Codex has went into it better. It was the C'tan that ate their souls, however their personalities remain for the noble born, the common born were either lost in the transfer to robot bodies or deliberted so the nobles can have the perfect army (or both).
    • Obliterator virus — since it was created by (or with some help of) the Warp entities, soul-gnawing during conversion is the main purpose. Here is an Apocalyptic Log (with bonus Body Horror) from someone turning into an Obliterator:

"The process of absorption fascinates... [unclear] one's body might somehow swallow the item, like unto a serpent or the surface of some [viscous?] fluid. Yet it doth seem a mutual [process]. For not only doth the body absorb the [weapon] but also [doth the] weapon, in some strange way, seem to [absorb] the body...[RECORD CORRUPT] as the weapon becomes like unto my flesh, so doth mine flesh... [unclear] like unto the weapon. Indeed, I trace this [stylus] upon mine arm, and the shape and form of the weapon appears under [my touch?]. It doth not appear in mine hand so much as mine hand doth arrange itself so as to become the weapon... [BREAK IN RECORD] capakhity of mine new form to abkhorb weaponsh ish akhtonishing... [unclear] a whole lakhgun! But I do shtart to lokhe zhe shenshation in mine shkin. Mine jawkh are [hardening?] and mine ribkh are protruding from mine [chest]. Zhey are of a dull, metallic sheen and tekhts show zhey are a mix of [bone?] and shome metal I cannot identify... [BREAK IN RECORD] thsi wil be mmmylsat [RECORD CORRUPT] cannnnnnnnnnnot useth esse febel mahcinsse aaaaany log;ner [RECORD CORRUPT] tothe eyeof the larybinht the hearto fthe maichnettttto the pppplaceo f... metalll..."

    • Sandy Mitchell has great fun playing with this trope in his Ciaphas Cain and Dark Heresy tie-in novels; of the four techpriests who receive any real character development in these books, one is an obnoxious zoobiology Otaku who has to be babysat by Cain's patrol, one is a Genki Girl with "no head for theological matters" ( and whose career would have probably not advanced as far as it did had she not played a key part in one of Cain's missions), one loves to eat junk food, and one is a Deadpan Snarker.
    • Dark Heresy takes this literally with Obliviates, who are cyborgs implanted with a device called an "Oblivion Volitor", a Heretek device that actually destroys the soul, turning the unfortunate into a zombie-like creature. Or maybe it's just a sloppily copied process of servitor conversion.
  • Alternity uses Cybertech that not only costs 10 skill points to have installed (but everything else costs skill points too...) as well as 'Cyber Tolerance' points based on your constitution score. If you run out of these, you die. Installing a reflex chip requires a Will check to resist insanity. The resulting madman NPC is a Cyko-Tek (get it? It's a pun) who want nothing more to graft more and more cybernetic hardware and go on homicidal rampages against those squishy pure organics. Can you say Ax Crazy with a literal vibroblade handaxe?
    • Not quite. Filling up the cybertolerance score does not equal death (and there are pieces of gear you can purchase to actually increase this score), although installing the reflex and/or fast chip will more than likely result in insanity. The part about cykosis (yes, the puns abound) is dead on, though.
  • In Deadlands: Hell on Earth, a distinction is made between cyborgs (undead with cybernetic parts) and scrappers (living humans with cybernetic parts). While cyborgs suffer no ill effect because the power for their cybernetics comes from the soul of a demon spiritually shackled to their heads, scrappers have their Spirit die type reduced (or their total dice if they're already at d4) when they replace major body parts. This is because they power their devices with their soul: battery-powered devices are available, but expensive; and in a pinch non-vital systems can be turned off to increase their dice again. This is all well and good, fair and balanced, except for one thing: the Spirit die type is used primarily for magic rolls, faith rolls, and guts rolls. Apparently having your super-powered buzzsaw arm running makes you more likely to run away?
    • Its also worth noting that Cyborgs are actually more mentally stable than normal Harrowed as their manitou are chained up in the basement next to the boiler not running around the bedroom with a knife. What makes cyborgs crazy is their asshole onboard AI's that have arbitrary rules of engagement that they force the cyborg to follow. With no AI or an AI with no idiot rules cyborgs are more sane than normal people... because armor 8 means you can face down anything in the waste and laugh.
  • The Bubblegum Crisis tabletop RPG has a mechanic for this trope which is derived from Cyberpunk's. However, there are mild subversions. First of all, it is explicitly stated once in the writeup of the Humanity stat that cybernetics are not the only way to lose Humanity. Second, counseling can help out quite a bit. Other than this and a certain lack of explicit psychic or magical loss, both being foreign to the setting, the trope is played straight, especially since counseling is only guaranteed to succeed if the patient has removed all cybernetics.
  • Yawgmoth, The Big Bad of the entire "Dominarian Saga" of Magic: The Gathering, was obsessed with the mechanics of the body. He lords over the evil machine plane of Phyrexia, where he and his followers used its mechanical wonders to improve ("compleat") their bodies, at the cost of their own humanity. In the mechanics of the game, artifact creatures (usually machines) are generally unaffected by black spells that destroy creatures.
  • Averted with the Therians, of AT-43. Despite being the Big Bad of the setting, they are not very warlike or evil (in fact, they have long ago forgotten how to fight, making them rely on MMORPGS for tactics). They just don't seem to get why the other races keep shooting up them for trying to blow up their solar systems in order to make Dyson Spheres in order to save the universe form dying of old age...in 25 billion years. So its more like Cybernetics makes you a Cloudcuckoolander. (Except for their Warrior Guild, who all Leeroy Jenkins.)
  • The Munchkin's Guide to Gaming encourages exploiting this mechanic as its a free power up coupled with a roleplaying justification for your normal behavior.
  • All Flesh Must Be Eaten provides rules for Essence loss from cybernetics and "cyberpsychosis" in its All Tomorrow's Zombies supplement... but made it clear they were optional for two reasons. One was that such rules went against the Rule of Fun that AFMBE embraces (who has time for moral dilemmas when there are undead to kill?!?); the other is that when there are undead wandering around, the question of where the line between humanity and inhumanity lies is already pretty much answered, so it's not exactly relevant.
  • The Dark Future supplement Dead Mans Curve introduced rules for cybernetics and for psychosis caused by the stress and trauma of the life of Renegades and Ops. Cybernetics increased your base level of psychosis.
  • Stars Without Number got the usual cyberpunk version downplayed. Implants inflict permanent System Strain, and some also temporary on activation; only one point for things like remote drone interface, more for those with large affected area or actively messing with neural system or metabolism. Strain is capped by Constitution score, thus cyberware leaves less "room" for taking Strain from other sources, such as healing, stimulants (more so for powerful nanobot pharmaceuticals and psitech stuff) and body altering psychic powers (both healing and augmentations) — each point is a step closer to "oops, the stim that would fix you enough to walk on your own just failed".

Trading Card Games

  • The Yu-Gi-Oh cards "Giga Gagagigo" and "Gogiga Gagagigo" show the character Gagagigo after being cybernetically reconstructed. The flavor text on the first mentions that the cybernetics caused him to lose his heart and redemption, and the second's says that his soul has long since collapsed, and that his body continues recklessly in a quest for more power.
    • Even more Gagagigo is the evolved form of Gigobyte, a very cute mon.
  • Magic: The Gathering has Esper, part of the Shards of Alara block. Every creature in Esper has some amount of aether-infused metal grafted onto their body. This is okay unless they replace their whole body, after which they become twisted fiends called aether-liches. Then there's Phyrexia...
    • Phyrexia's worse.
    • Ashnod's Transmogrant.


Video Games

  • In Deus Ex Invisible War this trope is what the Templar believe, but it isn't true, as the augmented main character can have just as much sanity as anyone else.
    • Played straight in the first Deus Ex. Paul Denton's the only "normal" augmented person. JC and the P-series augments have as much emotional depth as a doorknob, Walton Simons is a ruthless member of the Ancient Conspiracy, and Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann are both deranged psychopaths.
      • JC's can be attributed to lackluster voice acting, as he does wax philosophy and does get indignant or snarky a couple times. Series P agents, however, are intended to appear soulless.
    • This is somewhat inverted in Deus Ex Human Revolution: mechanically augmented people tend to become mentally unstable yes, but this isn't due to the augmentations themselves but due to side effects of the anti-rejection drugs they must take. The tie-in novel Icarus Effect also reveals that Gunther was a psycho even before he got augmented.
      • Adam himself muses on this in the ending. If you chose to murder your way through the game, he generally agrees that, yes, cybernetics DO eat your soul. If you were mostly pacifist, he states that cybernetics offer many new options, but also comes with a severe side of temptation to use those cybernetics as shortcuts. Whether or not those shortcuts are justified depends on the ending you choose.
      • And Military Mech Augs simply can't enjoy the thrills of self destructive hobbies anymore like smoking and getting completely hosed.

I want the burn of smoke and nicotine in my lungs. But all I feel is the Sentinel Health System automatically counteracting the damage. Even Self-destruction's no fun anymore.

  • In the Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri expansion pack, Alien Crossfire, the Cybernetic Consciousness faction suffers from slower reproductive rates, since its followers no longer "get" the ideas of love or sex. In addition, the "Cybernetic" future plans cause your workers to be replaced by machines, which in turn leads to higher social unrest. (This can apparently be averted if you occupy said workers with managing the Planet's Internet—provided your faction was the one that built the network backbone.)
  • Played with but ultimately Subverted in EVE Online, where cybernetics by itself won't eat one's soul, but misuse of brain interfacing technology can have various unsightly consequences, to wit:
  • Space Siege: The only storyline effect that augmenting yourself with cybernetics has is the end scene (assuming you declined an offer that appears late game; if you took that offer, you'd get a third ending even if you're fully human). The enemy "Cybers" are just mind-controlled. However, augmentations will reduce your "humanity" score, which can be used to unlock some powerful skills later on in the game. The game also makes distinctions on what affects your humanity - getting a cybernetic eye won't reduce it much, but getting a cybernetic brain sure as hell will.
  • Although not focused at all in it's story, Supreme Commander makes a fair job depicting cyborgs. The Cybran nation is implied to be formed of normal people like anyone else, only much smarter to have their brain completely interfaced with a computer. The ones who actually lose their humanity are the ones enslaved by a program by the UEF, and are enslaved precisely because the UEF philosophy is that they lost their humanity. That means they only become less of human because the ones who consider them less than human makes them less than human. Dr. Brackman, the oldest character in the SupCom universe, is a Cyborg more than a thousand years old, but his personality seems to be still very human, for a scientist, even after being reduced to pretty much a brain in a jar by the time.
    • Still, the UEF at least believe the Cybran deserve to be live, as long as they live like machines. The Aeon, an entire faction of Knight Templar , consider the Cybran an atrocity and are more than happy to commit genocide against them at every chance instead of converting. Of course, this depends on the player considering the enslavement as being or not a Fate Worse Than Death.
      • Funny that, considering that the very Commanders of the Aeon (as well of the other factions) are completely interfaced neurally with their Armored Command Unit (pretty much a giant mecha that can make more giant mechas).
      • Aeon Commanders are not neurally interfaced, specifically because of religious reasons. Instead, Aeon commanders wear distinctive facial makeup to make it easier for their helmets to analyze the commander's facial movements and interpret commands-The Way lends them strong enough self-control that they can literally use facial expressions to command their forces, in addition to hand-input commands.
    • With the UEF treating the Cybrans like slaves and the Aeon and Seraphim trying to purge the galaxy of unbelievers, the Cybran nation easily comes off as the nicest faction in the setting. They just want to be left alone and only fight to defend against Aeon genocide or to rescue the Symbionts who are still controlled by the UEF.
  • In the Mortal Kombat series, the cybernetic conversions that the Lin Kuei perform on their ninjas in the third installment has the effect of robbing them of their souls. Only Smoke was strong enough to retain his soul after being converted.
    • Though it is worth noting that Cyrax regains his a couple of games later and Sektor, while not the sanest guy in the world, is able to return enough to try to Take Over the World. Meanwhile Smoke is now nothing but an uncontrollable slave to Noob Saibot.
  • The SOP nanomachines of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots are an intentional version. They suppress emotional responses in their users, turning them into soldiers who feel no pain, anger, fear, or guilt in the name of increased battlefield efficiency. As you might guess, the sudden removal of this system from soldiers is incapacitating, and in some cases lethal. Plus, insta-PTSD!
    • The SOP nanomachines forms part of the system of total control, they can both calm soldiers (lessening the usual atrocities of war) or do the opposite and turn the soldiers into merciless monsters depending on what is most fitting at any particular time.
  • City of Heroes seems to deconstruct this. Heavily cybernetic villains do seem to be monstrous and/or soulless and/or crazy, especially the Clockwork King, Freakshow, and Nemesis. It's not because of the cybernetics, though; Nemesis was an evil racist powermonger back during the Civil War, the Freakshow are on drugs that allow them to use the cybernetics, and the Clockwork King was crazy before he stuck his brain in a jar.
    • And of course, PCs can be as cybered up as they like.
    • And there's Malta's Titans, cyborgs with systems specifically designed to "condition" the brain controlling them.
  • Cybernetic chimeras make up the majority of random battles in Mother 3, originally being content, happy animals that were "reconstructed" by the Pig Mask Army. However, the biggest example has to be the Masked Man, who was originally Claus. Lucas' brother and happy, energetic, outgoing child. He was mortally wounded by a "reconstructed" Drago, and was himself reconstructed; into a cold, silent, obedient general in "King P"'s army. The process almost completely destroyed his humanity, to the point where he is described as having "no heart", as opposed to good or evil.
    • Though this is intentional, as the cyborgs and chimeras are intended to be ravenous destructive monsters and the Masked Man was intended to be just what he is; even the Ultimate Chimera is more a case of Gone Horribly Right.
  • Now that you mention it, the roboticized animals in the early Sonic the Hedgehog games can fall under this.
    • In the games the animals were just cheap power sources, it was the cartoon adaption that had them made cyborgs as hamster wheels didn't make sense.
  • The cybernetic Agents of Crackdown aren't directly dehumanized by their augmentations, though the world in which they live is pretty dehumanized itself.
  • The Man-at-Legs boss in Pikmin 2 is described as being born fully organic, but at some point down the road it is forcibly fused to (possibly sentient) machinery, causing the normally peaceful creature to become a literal killing machine.
  • Averted in the SNES Shadowrun game. The main character eventually becomes a Dog Shaman every bit as powerful as Fujiko Kano, one of the premier spellcasters in the Shadowrun universe, despite being loaded down with dermal armor, wired reflexes, and other invasive pieces of cyberware.
    • Possibly justified, depending on the edition rules you're going by, as the Dog spirit takes it upon himself to impose a few hefty Geasa on Jake to make up for his disconnect from the spiritual world, which could potentially send his Essence up to levels where the Cyberware isn't an issue.
    • But played straight in the Genesis version because it follows the table-top source material more closely, albeit in a less complicated way than what is described above. Less essence means less magic, but the game won't let you kill yourself by installing too much. You need to have the essence to pay for it.
  • Played with in BioShock (series): the cybernetics have been replaced by the much more visceral "plasmids," and given that they're an offshoot of a highly unstable gene-modifying substance, the dehumanizing power of the stuff is justified. Overuse of Plasmids, Gene Tonics and other ADAM-based products causes addiction, gross deformity, and insanity; as such, the first people in Rapture to succumb and transform into splicers were people who'd overused its cosmetic variants, and the rest did so in an attempt to defend themselves against the Splicers- to quote one of the recordings: "There's an arms race on here in Rapture. It's about who can become less of a man and more of a monster." That said, there are people who can maintain their humanity in spite of their modifications: the protagonists of both games, for example.
    • That and the Big Daddies, musn't forget about them. Most of them used to be criminals that were sent in for "testing."
  • A certain kind is used in Mass Effect 2. If Shepard becomes more of a Renegade, his/her cybernetics will be more obvious visually, including scars and glowing red eyes. This Trope is also lampshaded and inverted in the beginning, where Shepard asks Jacob do his/hers implants cause anything to where the man responds that Shepard's mental state and personality are just like before the operation and only the body has been modified and repaired.
    • This is mostly averted in the rest of the series: cybernetics are ubiquitous, especially amongst biotics, who need them in order to control their powers. They're never treated in a negative manner (The cybernetics, not the biotics).
      • Well the early versions did cause a variety of mental side effects, from headaches to insanity. These kinks have been worked out as the tech progressed, though, somewhat inverting the trope.
    • It's averted in Shepard's case as well. You can be just as much a Paragon in ME2 with the implants as you were in ME1 without them. It's your personality that messes up your cybernetics; not the other way around.
    • Played straight with the Collectors and Saren, though, but considering who designed them, the soul-eating may well have been intentional in this case:

Mordin: "No glands, replaced by tech. No digestive tract, replaced by tech. No souls... replaced by tech"

  • Combine Advisors from Half Life. Thanks to their dependence on technology, they've evolved into large slug / larva like creatures, their only remaining appendage being a long snaking tongue which they use to feed.
    • Likewise The Consul, who was a predecessor to Breen before getting cut. Over the course of the game, the Consul was going to slowly implant himself with more and more Combine life-support technology, eventually becoming immortal. All this would be unbeknownst to player until the end of the game, only seeing his unaltered face in the meantime.
    • Normal Combine soldiers have been gutted and have most of their jaw removed. They can't even eat, they probably just get fed intravenously. All of them volunteered for this, which makes their dependence on the Combine and loss of humanity particularly symbolic.
  • Traffic Department 2192 justifies this—cybernetic technology is new, and it hasn't been perfected yet. In particular, replacing damaged sections of the brain, as is done to the main character, causes migraines, hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, and eventually lethal deterioration of the brain's organic parts.
  • The Beetleworx enemies in Epic Mickey are often made by converting toons into robotic slaves, including Captain Hook and members of his crew, though the process is reversible by filling the four conversion machines with paint.
    • Or irreversible by filling the machines with thinner.
    • Or just ignore them to begin with.
  • Heavy Rain has By-The-Book Cop Norman Jayden using ARI sunglasses, the high-tech tool for crime forensics. However, each time he uses it, he would be sick. That's why he has Triptocaine to relieve from the effects. Norman thinks what the butler from the ARI is talking about the drug that is not be indulged. Later, he is talking about the ARI, and if Norman overuses it, he will die.
    • The ending, "Uploaded" has Cowboy Cop Carter Blake putting the ARI on. He first enjoys the virtual reality; that is until an illusion of Norman shows up scaring him, implying that he will be haunted by him even without the ARI.
  • In the 90's cyberpunk game "Bloodnet", the main character and streetgangs frequently argue about whether cybernetic implants destroy or enhance the user's humanity. A number of characters have had their brains fried by a combination of designer drugs and cybernetic implants -it is set in the futuristic New York ghettos and the modifications are typically illegal and unmoderated - but a cybernetic implant is helping to prevent the main character becoming a vampire and others are being used to cure a variety of mental illnesses. So, it's a combination of this trope and A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
  • Literally, in The Dishwasher series. The engineer of the dystopian setting's transhumanist movement engineered the cybernetics this way. Cyborg bodies even poison the soil, somehow, causing the dead to stir.
  • Variation in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: Ghor is already a cyborg (having only 6% of his original body left, in fact), but while he's usually a nice guy, his personality changes when fusing with any larger machine, becoming cold and aggressive.
  • The Star Fox series has the Aparoids, who are an Expy of Star Trek's Borg, as the main villains of Star Fox Assault.
  • Amber of Project Eden is said to have become increasingly withdrawn and machine like as the years go by.
  • Inverted in E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy. Several cybernetic implants are actively useful - indeed, practically required - for psychic characters.
  • As much as Viktor of League of Legends uses hextech rather than cybernetics, he invoked the trope - intentionally locking himself away and replacing most of his flesh with machine parts to create something no one could steal from him, but also precisely to get rid of his emotions, which were bugging him since a fellow scientist claimed the glory for his achievements. It didn't exactly work, as he still hates his 'rival' a bit. He's also obsessed with making everyone be like himself, and speaks in an emotionless manner.
  • Armored Core V has the Zodiacs, thirteen AC pilots and their Operator, Angie. The pilots are heavily implied to have undergone some sort of integration with their Armored Cores, while Angie seems to be based in some sort of network shared by Zodiac's support helicopters. Since the war they were created to fight is long over, their only purpose appears to be to destroy. Angie and Zodiac 1 seem to have gotten the worst of this in different ways as neither can think beyond their original orders anymore: Zodiac 1 is a mindless killing machine, while Angie seems to have lost a great deal of her humanity and original personality after her integration according to Zodiac 8.
  • Gengi in Overwatch originally hated himself after being turned into a full cyborg by Overwatch (although they did it to save his life), believing he had become something terrible and inhumane in the process. He came to his senses when he defected from the organization and met Zenyatta. There is no sign of cybernetics having any psychological ill effects in general in the Overwatch universe, with examples of very sensible and nice characters among the cybernetically augmented and complete psychopaths without any cybernetics.

Web Comics

  • The "Pocket President" chips in A Girl and Her Fed. Originally designed to give federal agents unblockable, untraceable instant communication ability, they instead turned nearly all of them into virtual shells of their former selves (just going through the motions of life) or permanently depressed lumps who tended towards suicide. The exceptions being those agents who already had pronounced Psycho for Hire tendencies. And then we find out, the chips could do much much more... and the folks that made them knew it. The psychological issues were intentionally induced as a Restraining Bolt
  • Last Res0rt avoids this trope pretty handily for a Cyberpunk work—yes, the emotionally sensitive Daisy Archanis has a robotic leg, but there's also a robot murderess who claims she's really a glorified Brain In a Jar...
    • Then again, nobody cares whether or not Cybernetics Eat Your Soul when there's plenty of other creatures willing to eat it for you.
  • Averted in The Intrepid Girlbot, where its transformation into a cyborg made no change to the raccoon apart from having to deal with its newfound destructive capabilities.
  • Yuri of Spacetrawler was always a little, weird, but she seems to be getting more and more bloodthirsty as she gets upgraded. Though many in comic believe she developed an "organic inferiority" complex as part of the Post-traumatic stress disorder from the torture session that cost her her limbs (the Eeb brain tissue she also had implanted probably doesn't help considering that Eebs turned out to be natural psychopaths).
  • Averted in 21st Century Fox with Tora Scobee, sure he became more of a Jerkass after the accident that cost him most of his body but it's believed to be PTSD rather than "Borg rage".
  • Defied, spat on, and given the finger in Dresden Codak. If anything, Kim seems to have been humanised by the mishap that necessitated her robotic arm, leg and eye. Not surprising, given that the writer is an avowed transhumanist.
  • In Darths and Droids this is General Grievous' rational for retaining some of his original organs despite his near total cyborg conversion...sort of.

Without a heart, how am I to feel love?
Without love, how am I to feel hate?
And without hate, how am I to feel the exquisite sensation of mild annoyance?


Web Original

  • SCP Foundation-217 melds this with The Virus.
  • Played straight with the Dragonstorm experiments in Darwin's Soldiers.
  • Cyborg assassin Deadlock from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe has replaced the emotional center of his brain with a computer system that allows him to "jack in" skill files. When he needs martial arts, he inserts a martial arts chip, and so on. He is incapable of feeling any emotion and has become cold and merciless and inhuman.
    • Robotman, a superhero who is essentially a Brain In a Jar (where the jar is a powerful robot body), believes that his total body replacement has done this to him. But it hasn't.


Western Animation

Batman: You really think you're Robert Vance, don't you? But he was flesh, and you're just binary. They don't go together!

  • Completely averted and defied in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. Niko's Series 5 implant enhances her Psychic Powers, to the point where the Rangers, as True Companions, can channel their implants' power through her for impressive effects. Zachary Foxx has had more than half his body replaced by cyberware, but it hasn't stopped several magic-based enemies from finding him Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious.
    • It should be noted, however, that this trope is partly the reason why Zach is not all that comfortable with his bionics. ("Rogue Arm")
  • Usually averted by Teen Titans, where Cyborg is arguably the most lively, spontaneous and "teenage" member of the team, but it does arise in one Cyborg-themed episode. In an increasingly obsessive effort to boost his speed and intellect enough to compensate for a villain's Doppelganger Attack, he keeps upgrading and overclocking his neural processor until he eventually decides to shut down his brain's emotional center to further boost its efficiency. At this point he's talking pure Spock Speak in a deadened, soulless voice, and the rest of the team's left shaken by a conversation with him...

Beast Boy: Cyborg's always had chips for brains, but he's turning into the one thing I never thought he could be... a robot.

    • Inverted with Season 3's Big Bad, Brother Blood. He was already evil, and the fact that he voluntarily allowed most of his body to be destroyed so he could be fitted with the same kind of implants Cyborg has just showed how far he was willing to go to grab power.
  • Inverted on Gargoyles with Jackal and Hyena. They were Ax Crazy before deciding to become cyborgs—rather, this was a sign of how screwed up they are. Their teammate Wolf is similar, though he chose to be genetically engineered into a wolf-man instead.
    • Also averted with the cyborg Coldstone; Goliath seems to think this at first, but his mental instability is really due to anger at first, and then later from the circumstances of having three souls (one of whom was evil) sharing one body. The closest he ever really came to this trope was when Xanatos used a computer program to brainwash him for a while; it messed with his mind, but his "soul" remained fine.
  • The unproduced Invader Zim episode "10 Minutes To Doom" implies that the Irkens physical bodies are just shells for the cybernetic Paks on their backs.


Real Life

  • Pacemakers are essentially cybernetics, implanted for purposes of electrically reinforcing a weak or unsteady heartbeat signal, and they don't eat your soul. All they do is give you a cut through the security line at airports.
    • Recently, mechanical hearts have been implanted in people (that is, a complicated pump replacing the entire organ), and have worked. They don't add any obvious soul-missing factor to their owners, nor do they leave the patients "heartless," in a poetic sense, although recipients have commented that it feels a bit strange to have a steady whirring inside in place of a pulse.
      • Note that while they don't eat your soul, these mechanical hearts aren't nearly as healthy as having a real heart - they're intended as temporary measures to help keep people on heart transplant waiting lists alive longer than they would be with their natural hearts, but they still won't last longer than a few years without a transplant. They also require nightly recharges via a wire that comes right out of your body.
        • Fully implantable artificial hearts do exist. They can be charged trough the skin, resulting in a smaller risk of infection. Not having wires coming out your body is also a plus on itself. Crank: High Voltage actually has something that has at least its roots in reality.
      • There has been a medical record of a patient with a weak heart who received a temporary mechanical heart to which her arteries were bypassed to buy time for a replacement heart ot be found. Some 18 months later and no compatible heart found, doctors were stunned to find that this year and a half of not needing to pump any blood had given rest to her heart and it had healed itself accordingly, functioning normally again once the arteries were reconnected.
  • Brain implants have also been experimented with in primates, rats, and insects. Though the implications terrify some humans (particularly with "roborats" whose behavior can be controlled by an implant in their pleasure center, and a few roboroaches that can apparently directed completely by remote control), it's not clear whether the critters themselves feel any different. Of course, we can't exactly ask them. In the interests of potentially freeing stroke victims, it's worthwhile research.
    • Experimental brain implants have already been installed on Alzheimer patients in clinical tests with positive results. They're still very simple, but prove once and for all that simply having silicon in your nervous system won't make you inhuman.
      • It's not like anyone seriously fears the extreme case ("having silicon in your nervous system" makes you psychotic or robotic). However, modern science still has a long way to go before it can disprove the more moderate case, that extensive use of cybernetics in one's body can change one's outlook.
    • And implants also work with Parkinsons. A French man who was unable to hold a glass of water without the implant was fully independent and able to keep his job with those.
    • Note that "roborats" aren't actually operated like a remote-control device. Their implants can provide a pleasurable sensation only, under circumstances (like searching a collapsed building for trapped survivors) where giving the rat a food-reward isn't possible. Conventional training is still necessary to get the rats to do what their handlers want.
  • Powered exoskeletons (not quite giant robots yet) and powered body parts also exist, potentially helpful for amputees. The coolness factor currently appears to overwhelm the Uncanny Valley factor, since those devices do not even try to look like flesh and skin.
  • The most ubiquitous form of true cybernetics (a mechanical device that mediates a sense or function) now used is aural implants—i.e., artificial ears. They don't eat your soul at all and in fact offer very interesting insights into the nature of perception given that you can literally switch how and what you hear with a software change. However there is a substantial Deaf subculture who tend to ostracize (at best) members who get implants.
  • This study indicates that people will be able to handle unusual alterations to their body without being hit with full-on Body Horror, making it even less likely that cybernetics will eat anyone's soul.
  • It should be noted that the most commonly depicted symptom of soul-lessness, loss of emotion, is possible as emotional reactions are brought on through various chemicals, (neurotransmitters, andrenaline). Even something as simple as an antidepressant can make a person less emotional or even downright Straw Vulcan with a sufficient dose. Cybernetics have the potential to affect the production of these chemicals.
    • Indeed. If the cybernetic implants replace neural tissue, it could mean that neurotransmitters and hormones have less or no effect on the person with the implants.
      • Although hormones are also the most well-understood aspect of the brain-functions, at the moment. Simulating their effect shouldn't be impossible when neural implants become viable, and it could give the extra benefit of eliminating problems like depression, while still allowing a normal, healthy range of human emotions.
  1. ↑ unless you play Star Trek Online
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