You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels.

from Awareness by Anthony de Mello

I felt very lucky to have discovered the writings of Anthony de Mello last year by way of reading an excerpt of Awareness, the transcript of a series of talks he gave during a retreat. I’m lucky because I wouldn’t have touched his work with a barge pole if I’d become aware of it from the cloying, self-help repackaging of his posthumous books*. A Jesuit priest whose writings drew the ire of the future Pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, De Mello’s techniques were far more radical than his self-help repackaging would have you believe. He encourages rigorous self examination to the point of seeing that there is no part of us that is truly our own nor provides a solid foundation for our sense of selfhood. De Mello might ask where your opinions have come from, are they really your opinions or did you get from from someone or somewhere else? Similarly, our dreams and ambitions can also be things that we have picked up elsewhere. The TV talent show reject might plead, “But it’s my dream!” But the show’s producers would feel justified in replying, “No, it’s not your dream. We made this dream and used it as bait in order to bring in willing dupes to entertain others through their humiliation and do it for free.”

Which brings me onto the subject of the new Netflix anime, Cyberpunk Edgerunners. Based in the same universe of the video game Cyberpunk 2077(itself an adaptation of an 80s tabletop RPG), Edgerunners follows David Martinez on his rise through the criminal underworld of the morally vacuous megapolis, Night City. Before I can go any further, I need to sound the SPOILER klaxon. If you are in any way curious, the series consists of ten 20 minute episodes once the credits and recaps have been shorn away.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR CYBERPUNK EDGERUNNERS!!!

When we first meet David, he is a student of the Arisaka Academy. The school is an exclusive and expensive offshoot of the Arisaka Corporation. David is there by the grace of his mother, Gloria, working long hours and colluding with criminal gangs, known as edgerunners. She tells David that she sees him one day at the top floor of the Arisaka Tower. This dream is eventually attained, albeit in a way that is far from how Gloria envisaged it.

David’s life is thrown into turmoil when he and his mother are caught in the crossfire of a gunfight on a freeway. Their car crashes and Gloria dies from her injuries a few days later. David is afforded no pity from his affluent classmates and decides to enhance his body with military grade cyberware that he was initially trying to sell for rent and tuition fees. After dropping out of the academy, David bumps into a hacker called Lucy on a busy train as she steals data from the neck interfaces of unwitting commuters.

Rather than summarising the rest of the plot, I will list the ways in which David is living the dreams of others throughout the series.

• Gloria/Arisaka Academy

  As detailed above, Gloria sees her son as a means of social mobility by using every hour and penny she has at her disposal to send him to Arisaka Academy, even though his status as the poor student shows that he will never be truly accepted by the elite of Night City

• Maine/Edgerunner

  Maine, the leader of the gang that David falls into, serves as a father figure and role model — inspiring David to excessively augment his own body as he rises to prominence in Night City’s underworld.

• Lucy/Fly to the Moon

  The love story at the heart of Edgerunners begins with what is perhaps the happiest moment in the series — when David and Lucy share a “brain dance”, in this case a virtual reconstruction of the moon. This is Lucy’s big ambition. During the brain dance, both of them seem to be genuinely happy before David is rudely awakened by Maine, who turns out to be the originally intended recipient for David’s military grade cyberware. In the closing scenes, Lucy finally makes it to the moon on her own. Ironically, the real moon serves as a reminder of the happy moment she shared with David within its virtual reconstruction.

• The Arisaka Coroporation/The Skeleton

  In the series finale (I’m sounding the very last SPOILER klaxon here) Lucy is kidnapped by villainous fixer, Faraday, and David is on the verge of full-on cyberpsychosis. Completely outmatched in a battle with the forces of Arisaka’s corporate nemesis, Militech, David is duped into donning the Skeleton — a titanic exosuit that only the most durable of augmentors can handle. Throughout the series, the Arisaka corporation has been reaching out to David with an offer of a scholarship to complete his education at the academy. These offers, that David constantly snubs, are a ruse. Arisaka is fully aware of David’s heightened tolerance to augmentations and seeks to use him as a guinea pig for their cutting edge military grade cyberware. While the Skeleton transforms David into a one-man army that is able to crush the forces of Militech, it also accelerates his descent into cyberpyschosis. The only things keeping him from losing himself completely are the dregs of his supply of medical suppressants and his love for Lucy, whose presence seems to keep the psychosis at bay.

• Adam Smasher/An Interesting Construct

  Arisaka’s trump card against David is Adam Smasher, The Legend of Night City — a chrome monstrosity who has traded away every last morsel of his humanity. While David is ultimately no match for Smasher, he manages to keep him busy enough to allow Lucy to escape. On defeating David, Smasher seems to waver over the inevitable coup de gras and says, “You could be an interesting construct.” Smasher is offering David a final dream, to sacrifice his humanity and become another unstoppable monster, an offer that David is more than happy to reject, thereby sealing his fate.

David accepts or rejects these dreams to varying degrees. As Lucy tells David during a quiet moment at the Night City outskirts, “Haven’t changed, have you? Always chasing someone else’s dream.” This could be seen as a fault by many but it is actually the aspect that makes David such a compelling protagonist. The dreams he is ultimately guided by are those of the most important people in his life — Gloria, Maine and Lucy.

He also knows that the attainment of a dream is never enough to bring about happiness and contentment. This is emphasised in the final dream that he helps come to fruition, Lucy’s trip to the moon. Again, the bittersweetness of the attainment of this dream is shown in how the happiest moments of Lucy’s visit are those that bring back memories of the time she and David shared in a braindance recreation.

In this sense, David’s heroic superpower is not necessarily his endurance to cutting edge cybernetics, it is his ability to percieve that none of his dreams or ambitions are really his own.

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*I was particularly struck with the heinous degree of this repackaging while reading the posthumous volume, “Stop Fixing Yourself” in which a voice that is presented as de Mello’s refers to checking phones and emails. Seeing as he died in 1987, this seems to be a work of remarkable foresight or the worst kind of editorial vandalism. I would advise you to avoid all of his posthumous work and seek out an old copy of Awareness, or read it online here. Even better, you can find the actual recordings of the talks that make up Awareness on Audible. The Prayer of the Frog, his two volumes of stories, jokes and anecdotes, are also worth a read.