The Internal Organs of a Cyborg (1998)

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The Internal Organs of a Cyborg (1998) is an interactive narrative on CD-ROM tells the story of two characters whose lives and identities collide in a hospital emergency room. The story is told in the form of a science-fiction-style comic strip using stock photographs from PhotoDisc’s «Health and Medicine» and «Modern Technologies» archives. The user can scroll through the parallel narratives of the two characters: Donald P Nym, the successful managing director of a large bank and Chrissy Hastings, a young woman who takes part in drug tests and implant experiments to fund her own purchase of black market biotech surgery including a microchip on which she has downloaded her personality. Both the characters end up in the emergency room, Chrissy when a repo-man shoots her after she fails to make payments on her new microchip implant and Donald after collapsing with a heart attack. Donald is given the full resources of medical science but Chrissy, who has no medical insurance, dies after being denied life-saving surgery. Her heart is donated to Donald but as her biological body dies her virtual self is activated in the form of the implanted personality chip. Chrissy’s virtual self starts sending Donald biochemical messages and he starts to have strange memories and feelings and then a post-human love affair begins when he starts to receive email messages from Chrissy’s virtual ego…

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