To be honest, because the player who did it really enjoyed leaving important NPCs alive as worthless husks. This same character had a Biotech skill explicitly so he could remove an opponent's cyberware after defeating him, without killing him, then implant him with 5.98 Essence worth of used datajacks, then dump the twitching, blind, limbless body in a back alley with the rest of the hobos.

As a GM, he'd do the same thing to players all the time - playing a Mage in one of his games was pretty much a guaranteed ticket to getting kidnapped and stuffed full of 5.98 Essence worth of completely useless cyberware.

Sounds lke the guy has some serious problems in his real life...

His name is Hiro Protagonist, and he's the main character in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Read it.

Well, read it if you like cyberpunk satire, at any rate.

Indeed... Man, I've always wanted to play a bad-ass Cyberzombie with a cranial nuke wired to my EEG.

Wouldn't they have gone off when he was using toxins himself?

1. Different equipment at different moments
2. The guy was practically a pornomancer-template in real life, with a specialization in Fast Talk. He was exceptionally good at diverting attention and thought down the channels he wanted people to think along, and then laying massive and humiliating bear-traps for them at the end. As a result, the GM was lucky to realize such things, except for well later, at which point he'd just horse-laugh that he'd got the GM to fail to realize the weakness or the blatant cheating.

Sounds like a guy I'd kick out of my games really, really fast.

Eh, you tend to let things slide when you're the only six gamers in your High School. It's been 15 years now, and I've since got a lot pickier.

It's still masochistically fun to reminisce, though.