Although the corporations have by and large won the Cyberpunk Revolution, the cyberpunks themselves have not rolled over and died. Even those who, feeling the onset of age and the timeless pull of procreation, hid their guns in the closet and begin punching clocks instead of corporate guards, have not truly sold out.
While the general public rejoices in the new-found corporate prosperity, the cyberpunks, the true edgerun-ners, see the dark future for what it really is. And though they are a little older, a little slower, and have kids, most of the cyberpunks still hate the corporations they work for.
When the Carbon Plague swept the nation’s youth, the children of the cyberpunks were affected as well. And, as they have with all children, the corporations and government put their heavy hand in. And this, my friends, is what set off the latent cyberpunk psyche which has lain dormant these seven years. Parental instinct and street-honed reflexes came together as never before. The old hands oiled their guns, dusted off the armorjacks, and ran through the martial arts forms a few times to work out the stiffness. Then they left the corporate flat, stepping over the slowly-cooling corpses of the corporate guards, with the infected child dragging behind, gripped firmly in a cyberhand.
These returning cyberpunks have formed what hey call the Edge, which is an attempt to return to the street culture of the early part of the decade. The Edge is made up of cyberpunks who have abandoned their corporate prosperity for the sake of their children. They take these kids and teach them everything they know about survival on the street, to help them stay out of the corporate clutches.
In the face of corporate aggression against the children, the Edge has been able to reform the webwork of support that used to define the street. They move quickly in response to any grapevine word of an afflicted child or corporate movement. They will help extricate former comrades and their kids from any situation, risking their life constantly for the sake of the children. This means, of course, that the Edge almost never comes after BeaverBrats, Goldenkids, or others towards the upper end of the social spectrum_ edgerunners never advanced far in the corporate world, so they don’t have many connections among the managerial set. They do, however, go after Glitterkids, because often these are the offspring of or have connections to the edgerunners.
The Edge treats the kids very well, if a bit roughly. After all, most of the people in the Edge had poor parents, if any, and surrendered the kids to corporate nannies rather than learn the difficult task of parenting themselves. They tend to consider kids to be half-pint adults rather than children. Nevertheless, although rough and abrasive, they have an honesty which their children can sense on an instinctive level, and although their metal hands are cold, they also carry the weight of power and authority. In a lot of ways, the kids understand the members of the Edge; they too, are misfits and restless rebels.
The agenda of the Edge does not go much further than pulling the kids out. This is a symptom of why the cyberpunk revolution lost against the corporations; the goals of the cyberpunks were generally short-sighted. The individual cyberpunk concerned himself with survival, and, beyond that, with bringing a corporation down. They knew they wanted change, but they weren’t sure exactly what they wanted in its place. This sort of vague idealism has led to the Edge, and to a recreation of the street culture, but the Edge has no goals beyond pulling the kids out of the corporate clutches. They know they want the kids to be free, but they don’t know what they want the kids to do with their freedom.
Usually, they end up trying to get the kids involved in the same sort of things they did; gun-running, drug smuggling, data piracy, sabotage. It’s what they know. And now that many of them have actually spent time with their kids for the first time, they are loathe to let them go.