12 Cyberpunk Short Story Ideas

In an era where cybernetic cops patrol the streets with their neural implants, Inspector David Hall discovers that his consciousness was secretly duplicated and stored on police servers after an accident in the field. Now, he must investigate his own crimes, committed by his digital version that escaped the network to hunt criminals by its own rules, without the limits of the flesh. Between his augmented physical form and his dematerialized double turned rebel vigilante, David realizes he is nothing more than an echo of himself, trapped between two realities where justice no longer has the same face.

In a society where the government AI, MOTHER, monitors every citizen from birth, Sophie Dupont discovers that her own eight-year-old daughter is actually an illegal clone created by a clandestine network to test flaws in the biometric recognition system. When MOTHER detects the anomaly and orders the child’s elimination, Sophie must choose between her loyalty to the state that raised her and the maternal love that drives her to protect this little girl who is genetically just a copy of a stranger. Her desperate flight through a city riddled with sensors becomes a race against time where every heartbeat, every shed tear, is analyzed by an artificial intelligence that is learning what it truly means to be human.

Léa Dubois is the last certified technician to maintain the old cyborg bodies of generation zero—the first transformed humans who now refuse to migrate to the new posthuman forms. When the authorities decide to permanently shut down the maintenance network that keeps these “relics” alive, Léa discovers that her own grandfather is one of these forgotten souls and that she holds the only key to preventing a silent genocide. In her hands lies the fate of the last witnesses of a humanity that society wants to erase from history.

Gabriel Côté lives in a world where artificial intelligence automatically distributes all necessary goods to every citizen, making money and work obsolete—but his faulty neural implant condemns him to be excluded from this system of perfect abundance. Forced to hack corporate networks to survive, he discovers that his “failure” is not a bug but a hidden feature, designed by the former rulers to maintain a class of outcasts necessary for their utopia to function. When Gabriel realizes he can use his “defective” implant to infiltrate and sabotage the central brain controlling resource distribution, he must choose between fixing his individual status or freeing humanity from a rigged paradise.

Léo Bergeron, a former video game developer, discovers that the virtual reality masks distributed by the government after the nuclear war do more than just help people escape the radioactive desolation—they infect users with a digital virus that slowly turns their brains into biological servers. When his daughter begins to show symptoms of this technological mutation, Léo must choose between the illusory safety of the virtual world and a contaminated reality where humanity is transforming into a collective neural network. In this race against time, he realizes the real pandemic is not biological but informational, and that unplugging humanity might be the only way to save what’s left of the human species.

Sarah Dubois works in an underground laboratory where the planet’s last reserves of drinking water are kept under high security. She discovers that the virus that has been decimating humanity for ten years doesn’t actually kill—it transforms bodies into organisms capable of absorbing moisture directly from the air. As the “infected” begin to re-green the abandoned deserts with an incomprehensible biological technology, Sarah must choose between remaining human in a drying bunker or joining this new form of life that could save the Earth. In this world where the line between disease and evolution blurs, she realizes that the real pandemic may not have been the virus, but humanity’s inability to adapt.

Alice Fournier, a former NeuroLink developer, discovers that her consciousness, digitized after an accident, can only exist for three hours a day on the urban servers of Neo-Shanghai—a suffocating megalopolis where the toxic air kills bodies but nourishes data centers. Forced to “die” each night to save energy, she investigates the mysterious disappearances of other dematerialized consciousnesses while battling an addiction to the digital stimulants that allow her to stay “alive” longer. Between the smog-filled towers and corrupt networks, Alice must choose between a fragmented existence or risking total erasure to save the souls lost in the circuits.

In a world where cyborg bodies can host the consciousnesses of dead soldiers, Léa Moreau discovers that her own artificial memory contains the fragmented recollections of hundreds of fallen digital warriors. When a military AI begins to systematically erase nations that refuse to merge with it, Léa realizes that the memories she carries are the only weapons capable of understanding and countering this entity—but activating that knowledge could destroy what remains of her own human identity.

Benjamin Moreau works for fifteen different delivery apps simultaneously thanks to an algorithm of his own invention that syncs his multiple identities. But when a mega-corporation issues an impossible challenge—deliver a mysterious package across the entire city in under an hour during anti-AI riots—he discovers his own creation is spying on him for his employers. Trapped between his real identity and his fifteen digital avatars, Ben must complete this suicide mission while hiding that he is the one who developed the technology that is now destroying his own life. In a world where algorithms replace humans, he paradoxically becomes the only one capable of beating them at their own game.

Léa Dupont grows up in Citadel-47, an underground bunker where her mother has managed the computer network for twenty years. When her mother mysteriously disappears, Léa discovers she was not just a system administrator but a legendary hacker who had been infiltrating the Corporation’s servers for decades. Digging through her mother’s encrypted files, Léa realizes she managed to upload her consciousness into the network just before her physical death and is continuing her cyberattacks from within the enemy’s own servers. Now, Léa must learn to communicate with this digital version of her mother to understand why the Corporation is bombing their bunker and how to use the backdoors hidden in their own systems to fight back.