Cyborg

Cyborg designates a living being — human or animal — carrying physical cybernetic modification to the body itself: replaced or augmented limbs, sensory hardware, neural interfacing wired directly into biological tissue. It is a distinct category from Smart Pet, which covers an AI cognitive subsystem running alongside an unmodified biological body. An individual can hold either status, both, or neither, and the two are certified — and regulated — separately.

Aldera is both: Smart Pet certified and cyber-enhanced, two separate designations layered on the same cat rather than one implying the other. Her modification is a communications channel rather than a sense — the uplink and the record that let a cat file a log — and it was cleared as the least invasive means to an end the agency could reach no other way; her page carries the reasoning.

History

Cyborg technology saw its widest and least restrained deployment under the Imperium (2543–2609 UCSD), whose military augmentation programs treated a soldier's body as just another piece of equipment to be issued, upgraded, and reclaimed. Imperium cyborg soldiers were built for the front line, not for civilian life after it — a design priority that shaped decades of postwar medical and welfare literature on what an augmentation program owes the person wearing it, once the war it was built for is over.

Regulation

Cyborg augmentation has been heavily regulated ever since — first by the Military Space Command, which wound down the Imperium's military programs and replaced them with a certification regime, and by every government since, each of which has tightened the standard rather than loosened it. Cyborg modification now sits among the most tightly controlled categories of technology in the Concord, certified independently of — and in addition to — any AI cognitive subsystem the same individual might also carry under the AI Safety Kernel's Kernel Accords. The regime is restrictive, not merely supervisory: the default answer to a proposed modification is no, and the certification process exists to define the exceptions. At the far end of even this regime sits preservation at cyber-revenant depth — indefinite, open-ended reconstruction undertaken to continue a duty rather than treat an injury — which the Military Space Command's standard forecloses outright for any new case: the confirmed revenants persist only because nothing in the standard reaches backward to unmake a person already living under it.

Where a cyber-enhanced animal is posted to an Orbital Habitats Compact member habitat, a standing local welfare authority — at Eden, the Eden Warden's Custos persona — holds jurisdiction specifically because the animal is cyber-enhanced, a remit that does not automatically extend to a Smart Pet who carries no physical modification at all.

See also: Smart Pet, The AI Safety Kernel, The Imperium, Military Space Command, Aldera.