One of Cyberpunk 2020's Chromebooks has a nifty piece of bioware: the Distributed Heart. It's fluff and game effects are interesting and I thought I'd take a stab at making a Shadowrun conversion. Notably, I changed the fluff. The C2020 model replaces the recipient's heart with 3 simpler muscular pumps (1 or 2 chamber hearts, I forget) distributed through the torso. This removed one of the point-failure sources of the body: the heart. However, that's a bit extreme and I have a pet idea I prefer more.

This is a work in progress. In the rule section, [comments in brackets] indicate areas I'm still working on.

Feel free to offer comments and suggestions.

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DISTRIBUTED HEART (for Shadowrun)

This bioware implant replaces stretches of the user's major limb arteries (arm and legs) with two-chamber muscular pumps, a large enhancement of the existing valves and arterial muscle. With new timing cell centers, these secondary hearts work in tune with the natural heart to augment blood flow. This additional circulatory capacity is a boon to athletes, the morbidly obese, and individuals with heart disease in their primary heart. Note that a majority of official sport regulatory groups have not yet ruled on the distributed heart, and thus athletes should confirm that this implant is acceptable.

While the basic distributed heart provides a measure of resistance to massive injury because of the redundant hearts, there is potential for further enhancement of the implant. For this reason, a personal defense model [grade 2] of the Distributed Heart exists for individuals who feel themselves at high risk for violent confrontations, such as corporate CEOs and politicians. In addition to providing the benefits of the basic model, the security model includes a revised network of arterial and venous valves to control blood loss from massive injuries. Of course, this model is only available with appropriate licensing.

Recipients should be forewarned that the secondary hearts do not necessarily beat at exactly the same time as the primary heart, but tend to pump slightly after the primary. This eliminates pressure spikes and the risk of opposing blood flows in the circulatory system, but creates unusual secondary heartbeat patterns. Recipients should encourage their primary care physicians to upgrade the software of their heart monitoring equipment to differentiate the pulses.

RULES
First and foremost, the Distributed Heart (DH) is for idiots, the Shadowrunners trying to earn this year's Darwin Award.

Not that you have to be an idiot to get a Distributed Heart. An unstressed DH gives useful boost in athletic performance and is a useful insurance policy for those runners who drive motorcycles, ride without their seatbelts, or eat fast food 24/7.

However, the combat-related benefits of the DH are not as immediately useful as, say, Symbiotes (rapid recovery from almost any injury), Platelet Factory (reduced physical damage), Trauma Damper, Metabolic Arrestor, or other damage-mitigating upgrades. The DH really comes into its own with stupid runners, the ones who frequently use up all their free annual DocWagon resuscitations. The ones who blunder into ambushes, lumber around gathering clues with the stealth of an elephant in a porcelain shop, or otherwise act as bullet magnets.

The (grade 1) Distributed Heart goes so far as to allow a person to survive with total and complete failure of their natural heart (due to disease, bullets, and/or a Hamster-style Kung Fu 'Remove Heart Through Nose' punch), and gives a useful boost to athletic performance. The grade 2 Distributed Heart goes a step further with valves on blood vessels that slow blood loss through major vessels (femoral, aorta, etc.), thereby giving someone a chance to survive massive injuries (like Hamster-style Kung Fu's 'Remove Heart Through Nose' punch).

Rather than trying to sum up those fluff effects, the rule effects are as follows:

*Both grades of DH add 3 boxes to physical overflow (3 levels of Hard to Kill)
*Both grades of DH add 1 die to Athletic tests.
*For both grades of DH: Should the GM rule that the character's natural heart has failed/been destroyed due to some injury or bad health (and the character survives, and does not get a cloned replacement), then the character can continue to live with -2 dice to Athletic tests, -2 Body (minimum 1), -2 Quickness (minimum 1), and -1 Strength (minimum 1). Those four secondary hearts help, but they are secondary.
*Grade 1 DH slows the rate of overflow box accumulation, adding 1 to any multiplier for determining the rate of overflow damage accumulation. For example, with no other overflow affecting implant, the rate of overflow accumulation is doubled (x2). With angiotensin (normally x2, IIRC), the overflow accumulation rate becomes x3. This effect does add to metabolic arrestor, nanobiomonitors, etc.
*Grade 2 DH adds 3 to the rate of overflow accumulation.
*Grade 1 DH reduces by 1 the boxes of damage taken with a Deadly Physical Wound (i.e., you'd take 9 boxes from a Deadly wound). This effect stacks with all the other Idiot Implants, like Platelet factories.
*Grade 2 DH reduces by 1 the boxes of damage taken with a Serious or Deadly Physical Wound. This effect stacks with other damage reducing implants, too.

Cost: 75000 nuyen (DH 1), 150000 (DH 2)
Bio-Index: .8 (DH 1), 1.2 (DH 2)
Availability: [No opinion, yet]
Legality: Legal (DH 1), [security grade & permittable] (DH 2)

Stress...
*Light: High blood pressure. User may be distracted by the drumbeat of his own hearts.
*Moderate: High blood pressure and the hearts get a bit out of synch, causing [+1 to some tests I haven't defined yet]
*Serious: Badly out of synch heartbeats and/or failure of some of the hearts, eliminating [some? all?] benefits.
*Deadly: Life sucks, assuming your pals got you to life support machinery and emergency pacemakers in time. Some of the secondary hearts stop working, often in the "off position," depriving limbs of primary blood supplies. Others work at their own pace.

The synthcrdium provides most of the non life saving boosts, and makes the user almost immune to heart disease (IIRC), the increased overflow is nice though. This ould however make thigh and upper arm injuries more dangerous though as the secondary hearts would likely get ruptured. the ribcage provides fantastic protection all things considered. I would say a single, secondary heart, with a corresponding reduction in lung capacity on the right side of the body would be more appropriate.

Would this stack with the synthecardium? If so, how?

~J

Where are these things, exactly? I want you to imagine the result if you got kicked really hard in the inner thigh or inner arm, directly on top of the 2-chamber heart. Now, assuming that the shock and impact to a device that your body has to involuntarily keep at a given rhythm doesn't cause arhythmia, or the muscle doesn't cramp up and promptly cut off all the blood to your limb, I still don't see how this is supposed to make your life easier in case of traumatic injury... you've got these little backup hearts in your limbs pumping the blood out even harder to your limbs, making sure you've got fresh oxygen in them... and if you get a gaping wound or lose a part of a limb, that same pump is going to start dumping high-pressure blood out of your body.

Essentially, I don't get how these "anti-bleeding" valves of yours would work well in harmony with something that, by design, pumps blood out away from your core.

The original DH, IIRC, involved something like 3-4 of these double-chamber hearts secreted around your torso. Inside the ribs, out of harm's way, and still doing the same basic job... pumping blood around.

*laughs*

I just got an image of a player I used to know... he'd take ANY advantage he could to avoid dying, because he was the kind of guy who would walk out into the street with the 'Star pulling up in their APC and start spraying lead at it.

"But that heart shot can't kill me! I've got a distributed heart!"
"Oh, that's right... well, the DH keeps your blood flowing around your body, but the bullet punched through your lungs on the way to your heart, and they're filling with blood rather than oxygen. And your Alpha just clicked empty, by the way."

Given your mention of femoral valves, you should include higher risks of limb wound effects/failures. Indeed, when the DH cut the blood flow in a limb, that increases the risk of "death" of that limb.

You should also up a bit the stress effects. Random blood flow interruptions can ruin your day...

I'd like to second the idea of them being placed around the torso and inside the ribs. Also, I think that the with the grade 2 DH, heart removal/complete failure should only take away 1 from Athletics, Body and Quickness, and none from Strength. Just to make the upgraded version that much more useful than the basic model (not that heart removal is exceedingly common... but this sort of augmentation does have interesting applications with Azzie blood magic rituals...) Other than that, I think it's a cool idea.

Ditto: Putting it inside the torso seems like a better bet to me. Also: I want to say that grade two would give another die to athletics, but that's a bit much.

Game breaker: VAMPIRES. "I'm going to stake you in the heart and kill you!" "Okay, find them."

The Abstruse One

Keep in mind that you're already at a +3 (arguably +4) if your heart's been destroyed, if you're walking around or not...

AFAIK, the secondary arteries/veins are fed by the primary ones. If you block the primary ones, the secondary will bleed only until they're empty.

The lack of total efficiency of counter-bleeding from the valves would (in the way I see it) be rather due to the fact that they can't be everywhere in the circuit, and I guess that the designers would have put a security that prevents the valves from completely stop circulation for a long time (to avoid necrosis problems).