NBA Players Demand Right to Replace Legs with Cyberlimbs

by Skip DeKades

October 20, 2028 — National Basketball Association players are threatening to go on strike within the month if the league continues to deny them the right to replace their legs with enhanced prosthetic limbs.

The NBA Players Association’s representatives will meet next Tuesday in Chicago to discuss whether to recommend a strike or other actions to break their impasse with the owners over the prosthetic-leg issue.

“Anyone can go out on the market and buy themselves an artificial leg or arm,” said Dewey Walcoff, general counsel for the players’ union. “It’s unfair to deny these players the same freedoms. It’s tantamount to tellng them they can’t shave their heads or get tattoos.”

League executives disagree. They say the prosthetics would create an unfair disadvantage for players who choose to keep their real legs.  And they warn that the computerized legs are also vulnerable to the Crazy Legs virus, which could cause the players to start dancing uncontrollably in the middle of a game.

According to noted futurist/historian Alvis Brigis, the iRobot / Stryker co-manufactured lower legs first hit the market in the early teens as a replacement for the damaged limbs of human athletes, soldiers, accident victims and people whose bones had simply worn down. But as the general public came to appreciate the tremendous running, jumping and long-distance transport abilities that these so called Add-ons enabled, a growing number of perfectly healthy citizens decided that they too could benefit by upgrading their limbs through elective surgery.

Then, on Nov. 21, 2016, the Crazy Legs virus struck. Perpetrated by anonymous white hat hacktivist “Marty McFly”, Crazy Legs took advantage of a vulnerability in the Ubuntu Body System short-range encryption signal. The blue-tooth signal connecting the artificial legs to the Brain-Ware was compromised and replaced with new instruction codes. As a result, every human outfitted with the iRobot/Stryker ver. 2.2 lower limbs started dancing uncontrollably.

The manufacturer quickly uploaded a patch for the millions of prosthetics that had been hacked. But sales of the artificial legs plummeted as citizens realized how truly vulnerable they were. 

Yet over the last five years, consumers who were too young to remember the incident or have just erased it from their minds through anti-trauma nano-drugs started flocking to the Add-ons again.

Athletes at both the collegiate and professional level have been barred from competing with artificial limbs, and that has created tension in a variety of pro sports leagues – particularly the NBA and the National Football League.  Players say the path to enhanced performance is a basic human right.

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