Character · Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
David Martinez
A scholarship kid in Night City bolts stolen military hardware into his own spine and calls that a plan.
In Otakana the clue reads: Night City teenager who installs a military implant
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
David Martinez attends Arasaka Academy on his mother's wages and is treated exactly as well as that suggests. A crash leaves her without the medical coverage that would have saved her, and he loses her and the tuition in the same week. What he takes from the wreck is a Sandevistan, military chrome that lets its user move while the world stalls, and he installs it because nobody is left to stop him.
The Sandevistan is not free. Cyberware in this setting eats the mind that carries it, and every upgrade David adds to keep pace with harder jobs pushes him nearer to cyberpsychosis. The show is honest about the arithmetic from the first episode. Everyone in Night City knows the price and takes the deal anyway, which is the argument the series is actually making.
Studio Trigger animated the ten episodes for Netflix in 2022, with Hiroyuki Imaishi directing and Akira Yamaoka scoring. It sits inside CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 rather than beside it, and its release pulled a large number of lapsed players back into the game. Zach Aguilar plays David in the English version.
Spelling DAVID
DAVID is five letters that open and close with the same one, which is a useful anchor: find a D and you have probably found both. No romanisation problem, since the name is Spanish and American rather than Japanese, and the tiles want the given name instead of Martinez. The middle is AVI, one vowel on either side of the V.