johnny mnemonic In the original short story, Jones the dolphin was also a heroin addict. Just FYI. (Screenshot: Alliance Communications) It’s hard to make the cyberpunk genre feel fresh nowadays. Its tried-and-true tenets of a dystopian future overrun by corporations and technology have, after all, been true for a while. Of course, cybernetic implants aren’t de rigeur in the real world so we can’t have secret chainsaws in our hands, but we already have plenty of technology that helps augment human abilities. We can’t stick a wire into our heads to send our consciousness into a computer to hack it, but plenty of people can hack computers from across the globe, no skull input required. When so much of the genre is real, what does cyberpunk have left to offer us?