Technology Profile: Cybernetic Augmentation

Cybernetic augmentation is the deliberate alteration of an organic entity's structure via the introduction of synthetic non-organic structures, as opposed to the introduction of synthetic organic structures in biomechanical augmentation. Cybernetic augmentation could range from the simple replacement of a toe in a Human with a prosthetic to the replacement of an entire damaged hemisphere of a brain with a computer.

Because of the danger to individuals caused by the lack of absolute cryptosecurity in modern computers - thus, the possibility that any implants can be infected with a computer viruses that can disrupt trans-cyber-neurological signals, causing potentially extensive damage to the body's neuro-biological systems - computer-inlaced cyber augmentation is highly stigmatized, and although originally seen as the catch-all solution for the future of Human civilization, cybernetic augmentation steadily declined in popularity over the centuries within the United Systems' Federation, with operations to apply cybernetic augments becoming illegal at the Federal level.

With advancements in the science of producing perfect clones of lost or defective body parts, gene therapy, and gene modification, cybernetic augmentation was quickly overtaken in popularity by biomechanical augmentation, and with time, the idea of grafting alloy and rubbers to a being's living flesh became generally stigmatized by the masses of modern interstellar civilization.

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Synthetic transapient entities - as computational organisms - may network with standard sapients that have computationally-based cybernetic augments and assume control over the victim, in the most extreme cases, linking up and organizing with other corrupted augments; essentially forming cults, referred to by Federation operatives as 'cyber cults'.

The most extreme example of a so-called cyber cult was the 'Grand Ordo Conexus'. Better known to the public simply as the 'Cult of Kondros' (disguised in Federation public dispatches as a psychotic pseudoscience cult), originating within the Kondros System, all of the organization's following were forced to be implanted with a bare minimum of neurological implants and were summarily infected with a bizarre software program that detrimentally altered neural processes, inducing a subconscious hypnotic state by which afflicted members would be consciously unaware of their assimilation but would still act in ways the cult's networked mind ordered them to. The group grew out of control into a fully-fledged secret society spanning several sectors. The Mazori Insurgency was in truth incited by colluding planetary leaders that had been assimilated into the Grand Ordo Conexus.