Do corps pay cyborgs for their service? From what I can tell in Arsenal and Augmentation, cyborgs are sold and are expected to follow their owners orders like automatons with their only payment being life-sustaining drugs and maintenance. A cyborg is essentially its owner's slave. Does the "common man" know about this and just not care, is it a sort of open secret that corps reveal to select customers? I imagine that even the corporate court would frown upon some corp selling slaves. PR disaster and all that. So how corps deal with this?

let's say you are purchasing the services of a cyborg. you pay corp A for the services of said cyborg. you would then just assume that corp A is paying said cyborg... after all, why would *you* pay the cyborg directly?

also, i would point out that while actually making the cyborg a slave would be frowned upon, charging them all kinds of fees (starting with their cloning, if applicable, then training, raising them, the surgery, the hardware, etc...) such that the cyborg starts off with hundreds of thousands of nuyen in debt with no realistic way to pay it off in the lifespan available to them. not to mention the fact that legally speaking, clonal brains are presumably minors (if they even have that legal status) and the corporation could very well be their legal guardian... which means the money would be held in trust by the corporation until the cyborg comes of age... a tricky proposition for a cyborg, to say the least. assuming they're even alive, they would be absolutely crazy most likely, and the guardian (ie the corporation that owns them) would presumably retain control over the financial assets of the cyborg to be managed in 'the best interests' of the cyborg. furthermore, given the megas get to make their own laws, it is entirely possible that the cyborg's estate would automatically revert to the guardian (ie the megacorp).

truth is, it's probably not very hard to make it look like the cyborg you just hired is actually getting paid for the work it is doing, even if it isn't ever going to see so much as 1 nuyen of the money it has official earned...

It's probably the second, moreso. I don't think that cyborgs, as such, are really common knowledge. Either way, though, I imagine that most of them are people who would otherwise be dead, and probably are, in fact, on the record as such. Otherwise, there are the cloned brains, and those aren't actually people.

It's new enough and rare enough that there's probably a hundred civil rights loopholes that the corps and their teams of shark-lawyers could circumvent. I don't even know if a cyborg counts as a sentient being, elligible for citezenship, SINs, and associated rights.

And of course, there's always "all your base are belongs to us" style waivers. Hell, I was in hospital and had a simple angiogram procedure, where they inserted a catheter into my femoral artery and put it up inside my heart. I'm pretty sure (I was on a fair amount of pain-killers and other drugs at the time) that I had to sign a waiver relieving them of responsibility in the remote possibility that there was complications or fatality.

I met a builder at a lunch who was shot in the ribs with a nail-gun in a ricochet accident with a 7 inch nail. The doctors had no idea how he was still alive, but the nail had bent slightly when it bounced and was curved just enough to circumvent his heart and lungs. As they had him on the stretcher racing towards the operating room they were handing him forms to sign relieving them of responsibility in the likely event of his death.

So in the sixth world, I imagine that corps have all sorts of rights, bolstered with legal loopholes and air-tight waivers and clauses. Not to mention the biggie, which is extra-territoriality. If a cyborg is corp property, on extraterritorial corp land, who cares?

Many brain-a-jar cyborgs are created using force-grown clone brains and force-grown clones are already spare parts according to every law in every civilized country.

The process of sticking a normal person's brain in a jar doesn't leave subjects entirely sane and most would not legally by able to care for themselves. More than likely, the corporation gets legal guardianship and power of attorney in these cases.

Hitler's preserved brain, however, has full legal rights and is being fitted for a heavily armed and armored death machine as we speak.

Also remember the answer from Robocop and Robocop 2. Easy enough to get a brain from a corp lifer or a SINless (or someone like Hatchetman) than psychotropicly condition it into their own flavor of loyal oblivion. Then chop him up and Plug N' Play. The corps have a history of using people for whatever they want. With SINless, there's really no need for legal loop holes. It's not liek the cyborg is gonna sue 'em when they're done.

He might crush you with his new death machine though.

Hey, out of curiosity, has SR released any artwork of what the Tomino and MadCat are supposed to look like?

Well a Mad Cat is a 85 ton bipedal mech that typically has dual LRM racks on the-
Er wait... wrong setting.


@Sir_Pscyho= That's why you drop them in a simsense facimile and run scenarios until your fairly comfortable that it'll perform as expected.

Then you finish implanting the kink bombs.

... sure, but WHY NOT!? So, to start with we've got a vehicle with a Body of 10, 15 Armor, a Strength of 17 and an Agility of 7 (Handling +3; Acceleration 5/15; Speed 45).

It's a Walker with two Mechanical Arms. Each Arm has a Heavy Weapon Mount with a Gyro Link, and then the main body has two additional Heavy Weapon Mounts.

Each arm mount typically carries either a GE Vanquisher Heavy Autocannon, a GM Heavy Cannon, a GE Thunderbolt Heavy Gauss Cannon, or an Ares Firelance Laser.
Each torso mount typically carries a Mitsubishi-GM Outlaw Missile Launcher, or a Fleche Hail Barrage Rocket Launcher.

Sure, it's 1/10th the scale, but otherwise... sound about right?

*Pilots his MadCat over your piddly drone toy*

I like that idea. Indentured servitude through debt. After all, nothing's free. The corp does all this to make money.

Thats 75 tons of pure walking awesome. Also, you forgot the ER Lasers!

As to what those things look like, I always thought of the assault suits from the first season of GitS:SAC. They are about the right size at the very least.

I would think most cyborgs use force-grown wimp brains, thus they're not really "people" so it's fine.
When they use adult brains it's a company man who has signed something, so it's fine.
It's when they use the top-performing childrens' brains that they have to keep it secret. They probably just claim it's a wimp brain.

It would be odd if the corps that control the world didn't have the ability to gain legal custody over people. Jarheads are actually best made from children, and children are not that hard to get, being defenseless and all. I'm sure that corps are able to legally adopt children and use them how they want. Considering the life that a child sold into slavery might otherwise have, society would probably view life as a mighty cyborg soldier to be humane. But regardless, due to extraterritoriality, the corps don't need to worry about law so much as they need to worry about public relations. It might be easier to justify their actions after the fact than to actually respect human rights in the first place.

In terms of freedom, the maintenance requirements ensure that cyborgs don't go very far. And you can bet they're equipped with various failsafes in case they go insane or malfunction, so they won't find it easy to escape even if they have someplace to go that can take care of them. And really, what would a cyborg do with money? Many of them are likely soldier models without any touch sensors, they have no real human sensations from their bodies. Their pleasure would probably come in chip form, and that would be rationed to prevent them from becoming unglued chipheads. There might be some few humaniform cyborgs that live and work as humans (maybe), but even those would not require food or comfort, so what do they buy? Shinies that look nice in their optical viewfinders? Seems pretty hollow. I'm sure that once they amputate your entire body, there isn't much to live for except for the thrill of being a living machine in a world full of squishy humans.

That's why an escaped jarhead is a lot like a Bladerunner replicant. In their bid for independence, they are denied the maintenance that would allow them any longevity. Imagine a skilled and heavily modified Otomo, or even the child-sized assassin drone, going AWOL. I wouldn't be surprised if they turned to serial killing in their frustration. Might make an interesting run or story arc.