The future is insane.
You Can Be a Cyborg When You're Older is a Young Adult Literature Cyberpunk Affectionate Parody by Richard Roberts.
In the bleak future of West Angel City, Vanity Rose is having a great time. She has a loving robot caretaker, a fake elf for a sister, and she roams the walls of West Angel's endless skyscrapers every night, thanks to her precious gravity shoes.
What Vanity doesn't have are money and adventure, but she has a plan to get both. She's going to walk the dark side, joining the thieves and mercenaries who get paid to do all the little jobs that make a corrupt city go around. She'll only have to deal with killer robots, vengeance-crazed and not very bright computer programs, cyborg vampires, telepathic capybaras, mean girl mech pilots, and have every homemade weapon in the city pointed at her.
Fourteen is old enough for that, right?
Contains examples of:
- Affectionate Parody: Of the Cyberpunk genre. Our protagonist is a Plucky Girl heroine trying to save her orphanage in a dystopian neon hellhole with every single trope of the genre combined into one single location.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Ms. Understanding is a wonderful caretaker but most AI slowly go insane due to boredom as well as misuse. Some have even turned violent.
- Alpha Bitch: Maricel, the Squad Leader is arrogant, elitist, and beautiful. She's also a Child Soldier who doesn't seem to realize being a mech pilot involving killing people at her age is wrong (even if they aren't innocents).
- Arc Words: "All we wanted to do was love you!" is what robots say when they go hopelessly insane.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: The rich come across as this to Vanity Rose as she struggles to survive. This is especially true of the people behind the Enchanted as they have funded gang wars between elves and cyborgs.
- Benevolent A.I.: Ms. Understanding is a caretaker robot that is one of the few AI that hasn't gone insane. This is implied to be the fact she's able to give the excessive and all-consuming amounts of love that most AI are programmed to feel toward their charges but also receive it in return from her children in return.
- Big Bad: Fry Smiley eventually becomes this after Vanity makes an ill-conceived attempt to delete him from all SPUD systems.
- Blessed with Suck: As a machine telepath, Vanity has a lot of special abilities as well as numerous side effects that she has to take medication for.
- Body Horror: The cyborg skeletons that have removed all humanity from themselves to be "undead."
- City of Adventure: West Angel City is full of crime, intrigue, and technology gone mad. It is also where our heroine is growing up.
- Corporate Warfare: The various corporations employ mercenaries to rob others blind.
- Cult: The Enchanted are a cult that spends massive amounts of money bio-sculpting and cybernetically altering its members to look like fantasy creatures.
- Crapsack World: The world has degenerated into an environmentally and politically devastated hellscape with most of the world's AI having hone insane as well as a weird Cult having emerged around cosplaying as fantasy characters. That doesn't get our heroine down, who thinks The World Is Just Awesome.
- Did Not Think This Through: Vanity sneaks into the car of the SPUD agents that come to visit her orphanage to find her but can't get into the home legally in order to spy on them. This means she's away from the orphanage and they can just get at her directly.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Not only is the Enchanted cult one of World of Warcraft but their fighting really is reminescent of real world gangs. It's just much-much sillier but no less lethal.
- Expy:
- Darksiders are this for Sprawl Trilogy street samurai and Cyberpunk 2020 Edgerunners.
- The Enchanted are this for World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons races.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Vanity successfully traps Fry Smiley in her SPUD as well as earns a fortune for getting rid of him that she donates to the orphanage. She also gets her own cybernetic tail at last. It is after, however, a huge amount of suffering.
- Fictional Disability: Vanity is a machine telepath and this comes with a large amount of delibitating side-effects.
- Jumped at the Call: Subverted. Vanity is incredibly excited at the prospect of becoming a mecha pilot. She almost immediately ditches the idea when she finds out it involves killing civilians.
- Lost in Character: A very common problem among the Enchanted who seem to genuinely believe all their fantasy personas are real.
- Mascot: Fry Smiley is this for SPUD computers and is universally loathed by all users due to his annoying personality and user-unfriendly activity.
- Ms. Fanservice:
- Marisel walks around in a fur-lined bikini due to the fact her body is all but indestructible.
- The Deep Elves wear little more than bat and spider-themed pasties as "armor."
- Narrative Profanity Filter: Vanity Rose has an actual, built-in profanity filter which prevents her from swearing any time that she tries to in her narration, or in the actual story itself.
- Orphanage of Love: Ms. Understanding's orphanage is full of love despite the fact it is underfunded and barely keeping above water. The fact it is one by one of the few sane AI left in the world helps make it a place of love as she is literally programmed to give the children unconditional love in a Crapsack World.
- Parody Religion: The Enchanted seem to be a religion entirely devoted around biologically modifying yourself to live like World of Warcraft characters.
- Post-Cyberpunk: While containing the Crapsack World and Street Samurai of the classic Eighties cyberpunk, the protagonists are all Young Adult novel heroes and heroines trying to save their Orphanage of Love. The job of being a corporate mercenary and status of being cyborgs is also treated as being awesome by the protagonist.
- Saving the Orphanage: Vanity Rose gets involved in cyberpunk corporate warfare and high stakes theft (at age fouryeen) to prevent this happening to Ms. Understanding's orphanage. Unfortunately, she's misread the situation and it was unnecessary.
- Serious Business: The elves and the necromancers are both just cosplaying cultists but are fully willing to throw down at the drop of a hat in gang fights.
- Sitcom Archnemesis: Fry Smiley, a Mr. Potatohead-esque Mascot for SPUD computers is Vanity's most hated foe. It becomes less sitcom-like when he puts a bounty on her head.
- Sufficiently Advanced: The Enchanted use advanced technology to live out their High Fantasy lives. The thing is that they can afford to do it and its fantastically rich members fund its poorer members to live like elves and undead.
- Street Samurai: Called Darksiders serve as mercenaries and hackers for the corporations, performing corporate espionage as well as sabotage. It is a very popular and romanticized job by teenagers who dream of using it to escape poverty. Being as she's only fourteen years old, Ms. Understanding the AI is less than pleased at Vanity Rose wanting to become one.
- Thou Shall Not Kill: Vanity is extremely excited at the prospect of being a mecha pilot but drops the chance immediately upon hearing that it would involve killing people (specifically innocents).
- Transhuman: A very common activity for those who can afford it. There's bio-sculpting, cybernetics, and even whole-body prosthetics.
- Vapor Wear: The deep elves dress in something that barely qualifies as clothing according to Vanity.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Even AI used for advertising is more human in this world than the actual people.
