Why Did David Martinez Go Cyberpsycho?

David Martinez went cyberpsycho because he kept adding military-grade chrome to his body, copying his dead mentor Maine, and refused to downgrade even when his ripperdoc warned him it would kill him. He held it off with suppressant drugs for a while, but Arasaka's prototype cyberskeleton finally broke him. That's the arc of the second half of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

A kid with a rare tolerance#

In the first episode, David's mother Gloria dies after Trauma Team leaves her on the road, and among her things he finds a military Sandevistan she'd taken off a dead cyberpsycho. With nothing left, he has the ripperdoc Doc put it in. It speeds up his reflexes so the world seems to slow down. It should have been too much for a kid with no other chrome, but David handles it. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

That tolerance is what gets him noticed. Maine's crew takes him in partly because of it, and later Doc compares David's heavily modified body to Adam Smasher's, warning that he could become "Adam Smasher 2.0". David brushes it off. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Maine shows him where it leads#

Maine is the man David wants to become. But Maine refuses to downgrade too, starts having episodes, and in one of them tears off Kiwi's cyber jaw. In "Girl on Fire" he loses touch with reality completely, kills Dorio and blows himself up in front of MaxTac, telling David to get out. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

David walks away carrying Maine's arm and his ideas about how to live. A fair reading, and it is a reading, is that this is the real cause: David takes the wrong lesson from Maine's death and copies the man, chrome and all, instead of learning from how he died. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Refusing to downgrade#

After the time skip, David leads the crew. He wears Gloria's yellow paramedic jacket and has been rebuilt with Maine-style gorilla arms and a projectile launcher. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

It starts to show in "Stay". David kills a secretary who reminds him of his mother, freezes on a job and collapses at home. At the clinic Doc tells him a downgrade is the only way out. David refuses and asks for the drugs instead, and Doc warns that they only buy time. Before long Rebecca is injecting him with suppressants between fights. When Lucy confronts him about his chrome, he refuses again and suggests they break up. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

The Edgerunners Mission Kit, a tabletop box set for Cyberpunk RED, turns his implant into rules. David's experimental Sandevistan costs Humanity every time it's switched on, and a user whose Humanity is already below zero is thrown into extreme cyberpsychosis. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit)

The cyberskeleton breaks him#

The fixer Faraday captures Lucy and uses her voice to get David into a prototype Arasaka cyberskeleton, a field test set up for Arasaka's benefit. David wipes out a Militech force with it, but each fight takes a bigger toll on his mind. By the time he reaches Arasaka Tower, he's slipping in and out of sanity, and Lucy can only bring him back for moments. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

In "My Moon My Man", Smasher rips the cyberskeleton apart and shoots David in the head, while Falco drives Lucy away because David asked him to. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Why didn't he stop?#

The show gives his reasons through what he says and does. He wanted to live up to Maine, to protect his crew, and to get Lucy to the Moon. Every time someone told him to slow down, he answered by adding more. That's why most viewers read his cyberpsychosis as a choice he kept making, not bad luck. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

For how the condition works across the whole setting, see cyberpsychosis. David's full story is on his character page. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)