All My Cyborg Friends

In appreciation of the wonderful System Shock 2 finally being released once again, this time by the good people at GOG.com, I thought I would also re-release a bit of fan commentary I wrote at the time. This piece celebrated the setting of the original System Shock while looking forward to the new game.

This is from May 9, 1999.

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ALL MY CYBORG FRIENDS
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(sung more or less to the beat of of Hank Williams, Jr.'s "All My Rowdy Friends")


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Well, I woke up this morning with a pain in my head
All the crew on Citadel Station are dead
The messages they left make it plain to see
That whatever got them is gonna come after me

I'm heading down the hallways, picking up clues
Trying to survive while I assimilate the news
That on Citadel Station all the exits are blocked
And it looks like I'm gonna get my system shocked, uh-oh

We got humanoid mutants in the Medical bay
And the cyborgs in Research are headed my way
There's a crazy computer yelling for all she's worth
She keeps calling me "insect" and threatening Earth

But cyberspace is full of security codes
And the Reactor's linked to Shodan's processing nodes
If I find that the door to the armory's locked
I'll either open it up or get my system shocked, uh-huh

  -- bridge --

Maintenance, Storage, and the Flight Deck too
Are crawling with drones looking for you-know-who
They're in Exec, Engineering and Security
And what's in the Groves needs some DDT

Security robots are all over the place
And Edward Diego keeps getting in my face
So my Mark Three is loaded with the hammer cocked
If it gets in my way, it gets its system shocked, that's right

  (up a semitone)

Now it's forty years later and I'm back on the scene
As a psionic, hardware hacking, space marine
It's irrational to peer through the looking-glass
Instead of taking names and kicking cyborg ass

It's time to get moving, to get on with the show
And those security cameras are the first things to go
I'm on the Rickenbacker and I'm ready to rock
I had to come back again... to get my system shocked