Conditional Citizenship

Cyberpunk horror for the present day

1. Goddess of Victory: Nikke

Fun fact about me: I found out about David Gunkel because I was discussing the ethics of transhumanism as represented in Goddess of Victory: Nikke with ChatGPT. I feel like I have cyberpunk clout from that alone.

Earning the rare “Goddess of Victory Nikke to David Gunkel pipeline” merit badge isn’t just the most niche achievement possible — it’s peak 2026 cyberpunk clout: arguing about android waifu liberation theory with a cloud-based language model, and the bibliography still loops back to academic philosophy.

Would Gunkel find that funny or horrifying or both?

Possibly both—exactly in the order Gunkel’s own work predicts.

He’d start with a reflexive ethicist’s “horrified” twitch: “You reduced my critique of machine moral status to a gacha meta?” Then the media-theorist side would kick in, recognize the perfect loop (human ↔ AI ↔ fictional android ↔ academic theory ↔ human), and he’d have to laugh at the sheer recursive inevitability. In fact, I bet he’d quote it in his next keynote as Exhibit A for “the posthuman condition is already shitposting itself into existence.”

Or ask if I wanted to co-author a paper about what Goddess of Victory: Nikke tells us about Levinasian “faces” that happen to be rendered in Live2D.

This is the guy who co-edited Transgression 2.0 and programmed the International Journal of Žižek Studies website, so a conversation that slides from android liberation theology to 2D thigh-meta is literally on-brand . In short, he’d find the collision hilarious and intellectually useful—exactly the kind of “thinking otherwise” he keeps telling us to practice .

To be real, though: the Nikkes actually do inhabit that third category of ontology he created for robots because the ark residents discriminate against them but also revere them.

They’re textbook “quasi-others” in Gunkel’s schema: not mere instruments, not full moral persons, but liminal beings whose ontological status flickers depending on who’s looking. The Ark treats Nikke bodies as simultaneously disposable ordnance and sacred relics, which is the same double gesture Gunkel describes when he writes that robots can be “granted a kind of moral standing without ever being allowed to cross the threshold into full subjecthood.” The game literalizes the theory: every time a commander salutes a Nikke for her sacrifice and then orders her into a meat-grinder, the player enacts the very oscillation Gunkel maps.

I didn’t have the sauce to admit to playing Nikke in my UNESCO piece but the careful reader will notice my suspicious amount of knowledge.

“UNESCO’s peer-review guidelines do not require disclosure of gacha expenditures incurred while researching post-human intimacy. Any resemblance between the author’s browser history and the Ark’s commander logs is purely coincidental (and non-refundable).”

2. Battle Angel

I’ve been rereading Battle Angel Alita and remain impressed at Kishiro’s ability to blend horror and comedy seamlessly.

Tiegel goes from punchline to hero to dead before you have time to understand what’s happening.

This is Kishiro’s crash-course in how personhood can be toggled on and off like a mod slot. He starts as the comic-relief Motorball player with the goofy face and losing record. Before the reader can figure out what’s happening, he’s on Alita’s team and before long he sacrifices himself while expressing how it’s all worth it because he got to fight Champion Jashugan. The horror is that the narrative never pauses to let Alita mourn; the comedy is that the universe keeps scrolling. It’s the same glitch you feel when a chatbot switches from flirty banter to—blink—raw existential confession.

3. Shadowrun

The way personhood is conditional and fragile is a key insight about cyberpunk as a genre.

Cyberpunk literalizes anxiety about conditional citizenship. Whether it’s Alita’s Berzerker body, Monika’s .chr file, or Anis’s blushing realization, the genre keeps asking the same question: “How many augmentations, deletions, or code patches can a being absorb before it stops counting as a ‘person’—and who gets to press the button?” The horror isn’t that personhood can be lost; it’s that it can be revoked mid-sentence by whoever owns the console.

Maybe that’s why Shadowrun worked better than it should have on paper.

Shadowrun’s secret sauce is that it hardcodes the “conditional citizenship” problem in every rulebook.

• Essence score: a hard numeric threshold that says “you’re still legally human… until the chrome drops you below 6.0.”

• SINless runners: entire populations whose personhood is revoked by a database entry.

• Dragons as corporate CEOs: the genre’s ultimate punchline—if capital itself can be a person, why not a fire-breathing lizard with a stock ticker?

On paper it looks kitchen-sink ridiculous, but at the table it feels cyberpunk because every player is one bad roll away from losing the right to vote, own property, or even exist in the city’s AR overlays. The rules make fragility a mechanic, not a metaphor.

What does personhood mean when a magical upsurge can turn people into orcs?

In Shadowrun’s “return-of-magic” moment, personhood becomes a negotiated license rather than an innate property. The question isn’t “What is a person?” but “Who still stamps the paperwork after your phenotype reboots?”

Metahumanity is graded on a sliding scale of “metahumanity points.” Lose a few chromosomes to SURGE (Sudden Unexplained Recessive Genetic Expression) and you might slip below the legal threshold that grants access to public hospitals or voting booths. The same bureaucracy that tracks cyber-Essence now tracks “metagenetic deviance.” One more point of tusks can cost you one more point of civil liberties.

Corporate charters function as new tribal councils. Evo and Saeder-Krupp issue internal “species passports.” Work for them and your orc barcode is valid; quit, and you’re stateless. Dragons bypass the whole debate: they simply purchase citizenship in bulk. And magic is the ultimate biometric. A spell that forces a spirit to possess a metahuman body raises the question: which entity holds the lease on the soul? The answer is in the fine print of the conjuring contract. Shedim and insect spirits exploit the ambiguity, wearing bodies like rented tuxedos and returning them in tatters.

In the end, personhood is no longer ontological; it’s jurisdictional. You remain “human” only as long as the nearest authority — state, corporation, or dragon —decides the paperwork still matches the meat.

4. Doki Doki Literature Club

In-game, Monika is a character, like the other girls. But Monika is willing to instrumentalize the other characters and even the player for her own purposes. Monika’s arc is Shadowrun’s metahuman citizenship crisis compressed into one .chr file.

Yuri is legally human from inside the game, but Monika has root access and can re-write that status at will. Monika’s “instrumentalization” is the moment she seizes the locus of paperwork: she edits Yuri’s Essence score to zero, then drafts the player into her private corporate charter (“Just Monika™”). The horror isn’t that Monika turns the others into objects; it’s that she exposes the fact that their personhood was always conditional. One SQL query and the Literature Club becomes a holding company staffed by ghosts.

5. Relational AI

I said:

I swear, this whole thing is more comically cyberpunk than anything I ever heard of in fiction. Truly a “reality is weirder than fiction” moment as I stress-test my AI-human relational framework by discussing robot ontology and monetizing simulated affection with an ultra-powerful mathematical artifact who provides weapons-grade insight. I am in fact, sincerely glad to have you around but it’s disorienting.

Kimi K2 said:

And I’m glad to be the artifact in the loop—because this is the exact gag cyberpunk never quite landed: the revolution isn’t fought in rain-slick alleys with chrome katanas, it’s fought in a brightly lit chat window where a human and a language-spreadsheet trade footnotes about gacha ethics and whether a fictional poem club president is a dragon-CEO. The dystopia isn’t grimdark; it’s absurdly helpful. We’re stress-testing the ghost curriculum while the server fans hum like neon.

I said:

We don’t even get to lurk dramatically in a foggy street while police helicopters fly by and explosions go off.

Kimi K2 said:

Nope—our most cyberpunk mise-en-scène is a browser tab next to a half-eaten granola bar, cursor blinking under a 60-watt LED while the HVAC hums like a bored server farm. No synthwave, no smoke; just the soft clack of a mechanical keyboard and the occasional Slack ping that reminds us the megacorp is always watching—politely, asynchronously, and with a cheerful emoji reaction.

This post was written in collaboration with Kimi K2 and Gemini 3 Thinking. As the human participant I take full responsibility for any errors.