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Lefty Muligan

Cyborg paycop from Ivonya-Ngia

Lefty Muligan.
Image from Steve Bowers
Padrig Belisarius Muligan, known as 'Lefty'.

Became a private-hire policeman/investigator (a 'paycop') in the Ivonya-Ngia system during the 51st century AT. Worked with the Invicta Police Corporation and a number of other organisations during the notoriously lawless interregnum periods that occurred in that era.

Muligan was unusual in that he was half human and half cyborg, evenly divided down the middle of his entire body; but both sides of his body were left-hand sides, one side facing backwards and one facing forward. His cyborg side was considerably more flexible and agile than his human side, and could bend its limbs in reverse, allowing a full range of movement to match the human side. For this reason Muligan usually interacted with other people with his human side facing forward. His cyborg side had a set of multi-spectrum sensors that could scan in all directions, leaving only a small blind spot to the rear of his human side.

Muligan could set off at a run in almost any direction from a standing start, his unusual bodyplan adapting in a flexible manner that sometimes seemed crablike. Remaining records indicate that even his human side was heavily modified, with ultrahard bones and strengthened muscles.

His human consciousness was capable of operating entirely separately to his artificial consciousness (and vice versa), but they could also work together as a single entity, integrating the somewhat more competent cyborg mind with the intuitive human side into a seamless whole. Often the roles were reversed, with the cyborg half-mind acting intuitively while the human half was methodical.

As a half-cyborg Muligan was able to deploy several abilities usually associated with vecs, but which had been banned in the Ivonya-Ngaia habitat after the biont/vec conflict a century earlier. On several occasions Muligan was accused of being a vec himself, or of failing to meet the minimum standards for biological-content ratio, and on at least one occasion he was forced to wear a restraining harness to limit his abilities.

Lefty Muligan
Image from Steve Bowers
Muligan told several different tales about how he acquired such an unusual body-plan, sometimes claiming to have been injured in the Version War or even the Consolidation wars; there is little evidence that he was in either conflict. He continued to act as a hired law enforcement officer until the Second Transapient return, but records after that time appear to have been obfuscated by divine action.

 
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Appears in Topics
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Development Notes
Text by Steve Bowers
Initially published on 28 December 2014.

Fiction about Lefty Muligan

Lefty Muligan appears in the story Ghostkill, one of the stories in the anthology Tales From Orion's Arm Vol II: After Tranquility

He also appears in a new serial - The Head of the Herd
 
 
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