An Angsty Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Headcanon (also spoilers): Despite what the cueball DOT EXE member says in game before trying to recruit him*, the death of the crew’s leader affected him a lot more than he would like to admit.

* = (at least from the impression I got, he sounded very… not-bothered by it)

More rambling under the cut!

For ease of reading, I’ll refer to the DOT EXE leader and cueball member with my headcanon names for them: 8-ball and Cueball respectively.

So basically, Cueball not coping well with 8-ball’s death during the main game is what leads him to leave DOT EXE and be willing to join up with BRC in the post game. Maybe even throw in some particularly-not-handling-this-well in the form of Cueball outright making fun of 8-ball’s death (“What a noob to get wasted like that LOL”). Which leads to the other DOT EXE members getting understandably mad at him for it, thus kicking him out.

(I would like to think they all can still reconcile later, hopefully after Cueball gets a better handle on his feelings and apologizes to the others for not coping with it very well. But I digress.)

Additionally, this got me thinking, “Wait, what if 8-ball survived that after all??” And I would think, no, Cueball and probably the other DOT EXE members would still be traumatized by what happened, at least to some degree.

I like to think that “full-cyber” people like DOT EXE (and by extension, anyone with a cyberhead) do have the option to “back up” their minds. If you can copy a mind from a flesh head into a cyberhead, like you would copying a large file from one computer to another, then you can probably make back-ups of them too.

But this is either very expensive, a very long process, or otherwise just very prohibitive for the general public to handle on their own. Only the richest people (or otherwise those who have the resources to set up and maintain their own equipment and servers for the back-ups) would be able to afford to do so regularly, if at all. Heck, maybe most people wouldn’t bother, sort of like a philosophical or spiritual “I cheated death once already, so I think the next time I wouldn’t mind if it’s permanent” kind of way.

So if 8-ball ends up restored from a backup and a rebuilt body, there’s still the possibility he might be missing, say, a month’s worth of memories. Maybe even more than that, depending on how vigilant DOT EXE is about backing themselves up in case of emergencies.

Who knows, maybe that kind of thing ends up bothering Cueball way more than he would have expected. So again, he’s not handling it well, maybe even this time making fun of 8-ball over what happened to his face, and then getting kicked out of the crew shortly after.

(Again, I would still like to imagine they all get to talk it over and reconcile later at least.)

Not to mention, the way I personally see it, someone being brought back to life doesn’t erase the trauma of seeing them die in the first place, yeah? At worst, Cueball starts seeing 8-ball almost like a undead monster or something. He can’t get the image of 8-ball just after getting shot out of his head, which is kinda what I was going for with the pic above, tbh.

Angst bonus, 8-ball refers to Cueball as his bro in game. I’m going to intentionally choose to interpret that as them being actual brothers, not just a bro-as-in-friend kind of way. Maximum angst, you see. 😈