Players Invade Cyberpunk

"On our whole street, or rather... half the people in the entire city were doing drugs, and the streets were full of those zombie-like walking corpses."

"The kind of people trapped in drug-induced hallucinations, acting like lunatics, can’t speak, can’t walk straight, can’t even coordinate their own limbs, one after another in rags, skin and bones..."

David thought back to the Night City of the past; back then he’d gotten used to living there and felt it was perfectly normal, nothing out of the ordinary.

But thinking about it now, what difference was there between that place and Hell?

"Sometimes someone in our building would overdose and die, and we only realized it when the body started to stink up the room. My mother’s job was collecting corpses at the hospital, and sometimes I’d see them doing it."

The eyeballs would drop out from maggot-eaten sockets, corpse fluids flowing and soaking the entire room.

The worst time, David saw that the bedsheet in the room was black.

At first he thought that was just the color of the sheet.

Not until the body collectors and cops came closer.

The flies were startled and took off, wings beating, swarming through the room like a cloud of locusts.

That "black" bedsheet was nothing but flies soaked with corpse fluid covering the entire bed; only after the flies lifted off did the swollen corpse beneath show itself.

A few cops puked on the spot.

David couldn’t eat for three days.

Just hearing him describe it made Henry and the others feel queasy. They’d messed with Black Mewtwo, which bragged about being hardcore, but at the end of the day that stuff is edited; they’re never actually going to show you something that disgusting.

The worst they’d seen in person was a live dismemberment, which still hadn’t pushed them to their physiological limits.

"But isn’t it all their own fault for doing drugs? If they’ve got no willpower, who else is there to blame?"

Dylan was still clinging to his own line of reasoning, and the others felt he had a point.

They did take drugs themselves, but they had professional medical teams maintaining their neural health; as long as they didn’t overdose in one go, there was no so-called physical danger.

So they had no way of really understanding how much drugs tear a body apart.

"Do you know those dealers stake out community colleges, forcing the food vendors to lace what they sell with ecstasy and ketamine?"

"Do you know those food factories add addictive ingredients to instant food?"

"Do you know that at Huang Ban Academy, there are students selling drugs to others?"

"Do you know that construction company bosses deliberately lure workers into drugs and gambling so they can claw back the wages they just paid out?"

David fired off question after question, leaving them speechless.

The reality was much worse than what he’d just said; in the towers of those big corporations, even the air reeked of cocaine.

"Three years ago, I remember it was raining that day. The rain was heavy, it was cold, and there were a lot of homeless people on the streets..."

David’s voice was shaking as he spoke.

I could have endured the darkness, if I had not seen the sun.

"I was on my way to school. Because of roadwork, I had to take a back alley that almost no one used. There was someone sitting by the trash cans in the alley, a woman... she wasn’t much older than me, she was very thin, almost no flesh on her body.

It was only when I walked past her that I realized she was holding a baby in her arms. But they were both dead, their bodies already stiff.

Do you know what that feels like? Do you? You’ve never seen it, so you don’t understand!"

David jabbed a finger at his own chest; in there burned an endless fury toward drugs.

"I used to be just like you, thinking the world was simply like this. But someone told me it isn’t; the world could have been better! They showed me how so many people once threw themselves into the fight for a better world, and they really did change that old world. So why can’t there be one more of me?"

The group fell silent.

The world David spoke of was a stranger to them.

At banquets, in the high skies of the city, in their own villa districts, they had never seen any of this—or even if they had, they’d subconsciously ignored it.

They wanted to say something.

To say that this is just how the world works, survival of the fittest.

That was the education they had always received.

But right now, standing in front of David, they couldn’t get a single word out.

On some instinctive level, they felt something: is the world really supposed to be the way they thought it was?

In the process of growing up, something gets planted into humans by instinct.

The most basic sense of morality.

Even in the madness of the Nazis and the Japanese Army in World War II, there were still people in the ranks who chose to resist the insane doctrines of their superiors, who would rather commit suicide after delivering supplies to the National Army as a statement of defiance.

Even when Rommel commanded in North Africa, he still strictly adhered to the Geneva Conventions, refused to run concentration camps and torture prisoners, and even within the Nazi headquarters there were more than a few plots to assassinate XTL.

As for those rank-and-file Soldiers, most of them didn’t truly believe in that insane ideology; they were just brainwashed by propaganda into enlisting, then crushed and swept along by the bullying culture inside the army until their beastly side was forced out, their entire mental state warped.

Any Japanese Army or even United Nations troops captured by TG—nine out of ten of them wanted nothing to do with fighting once they went back, and some even changed sides on the spot.

The armies of the Five Eyes Alliance imposed a strict blackout on what they did in the Middle East, even going so far as to assassinate journalists and muzzle the media, precisely because they knew that if this stuff got back home it would trigger a massive anti-war wave.

So is doing drugs right?

Of course not.

Then is manufacturing and trafficking drugs right?

Of course not either.

So what does that make those Europeans fighting this anti-drug army?

And what does that make us?

The rich boys, who hadn’t yet entered the corporate conglomerates and still had some scrap of conscience left, felt deeply unsettled.