http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99qJGrPNLs

He's not a forum person at all, so open discussion here is fine.

He has no expectations for rules, nor do any of the other gamers.  With that said, is the best system to go with Cyberpunk from R.Talsorian or something else?  I'm inclined to go with Hero System, and just hand out 5x8 cards to everyone with relevant die-rolls and stats on them with pre-built characters (they'll be pre-generated, regardless of system).

Pros for Cyberpunk: has a lot of conceits of the genre baked-in, lightweight, nice and simple snap-in combat system.  

Cons for Cyberpunk: some of the conceits of Cyberpunk are based on a game written nearly 30 years ago (back in 1988), and a lot of them are kind of silly in light of the fact that the game released a supplement called Cyberpunk: 2013 and it's 2013 now and we have no Flying Cars!, nor corporate wars (in the real sense of say, Sony having an armored division and black ops personnel assaulting a GM skyscraper in broad daylight, etc.), nor many of the other things that Cyberpunk (both the game, and the genre as a whole back then) assumed would happen now.

Pros for Hero System: I can sculpt it into just about anything!

Cons for Hero System:...which means a LOT of prep time.  Like, a lot.  Also, how much can I simplify for people who've never played Hero before?  I wonder if I wouldn't be better off sticking with Cyberpunk:2020.  

...

Outline of the world-as-it-is in the game is not too different from Gibson's Bridge Trilogy.  By the time the 3rd book rolled around I found his tone to be grating and, frankly, patronizing to me as an IT person and Sci-Fi fan, but he's still a helluva world builder.  I like the world of the Bridge Trilogy: it is at once in its own way as dirty and gritty and "bad" as the Sprawl Trilogy, but on the other hand I doubt I'll have many players suggesting suicide as an alternative to living there (as I once had when I read the opening blurb of Cyberpunk 1.0 to a group of players way back when).

There's not much of the whole "I have a NEUROJACK in my HEAD and I PLUG a CABLE IN to HACK THE GIBSON!" thing going on, but cyberware (particularly things that increase both physical and mental dexterity) are big sellers, as are neural interfaces; most of the "decking in" or "jacking in" is courtesy of implants that talk to a SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Inference Device), the internet is abstracted into visual representations of data - but a lot of hackers do go low-tech and use command line scripts to get their work done.  Wireless is so wholly ubiquitous as to be unbelievable from our perspective - improved satellite downlinks and uplinks and technology on the client end and server end basically mean you'd have to live inside a faraday cage at the bottom of the Marianas Trench to get away from the internet.  Hard lines (network cables, whether fiber optic or copper) are still the most secure forms of data, but the same technology that allows a SQUID to work for a person can be used on a hard line to read data from it...

Sorry, I'm wandering a bit, back to pertinent matters.  I'm stealing from a few different sci-fi sources, know that in advance...

The plot I'm formulating is this: the players, regardless of background or skill, are all Max-Tac cops.  In Cyberpunk 2020 Max Tac is a sort of e-SWAT, called in when a criminal or criminals are so well outfitted with cyberware or high-tech weapons that "normal" cops and even SWAT are wholly outclassed.

They're approached by the police department's Robbery/Homicide division to help with the investigation of a serial killer calling themselves the Death Angel; surveillance video that exists shows the killer using several types of cyberware (dangerously augmented physical speed (that would and should tear a normal human apart), and so forth).  The killer leaves messages written in the victims blood.  Sometimes its nonsensical ramblings, sections of the alphabet, and so on, sometimes it's long, heartfelt apologies for what they've done, usually concluding with something like "Please find me.  Please stop me."  The video records show that it's either a woman or someone with a slight enough build to easily pass as a woman.  

Clues - and I haven't decided what they are yet - will point the party to speak to the VP in charge of a large corporation (I'll probably pick some modern day tech firm, maybe Sony, maybe a medical company like Pfizer, etc.).  He's not all Eldon Tyrell on them; he'll try to be genuinely helpful as far as he can.  

He's the basic reveal, boiled down.  His 18 year old daughter is responsible for the killings.  She was born with severe cerebral palsy (mixed type), so bad that in-utero gene therapy only meant that she didn't die during birth and her early life.  He kept her out of the limelight with his not inconsiderable resources, and covered up the fact that she was anything other than a healthy young lady; faked photos and videos of her circulated for years, always with a close group of confidants (also virtual fakes), never in the same place for more than a brief period.

His life's work - driven by his daughter's need - has been to create whole-body cybernetic replacements (Alphas, in Cyberpunk:2020 terms).  When she was 17, he had her brain placed in an Alpha body that matched the image that had been created for her by the company's media machine.  Cyberpsychosis (for purposes of this game) isn't a "real" thing except in extreme cases of body modification.  Freed from a prison of flesh she was in need of some kind of moderation, so her father had the replacement body prosthesis fitted with a "pacemaker" of sorts that could detect the mental state leading to a breakdown and cause a mild feedback that would control the racing emotions, induce a sort of "petit mal" seizure instead, and work to reset the brain.

The problem is, her brain (like Harry Benson in The Terminal Man) becomes addicted to this state, and involuntarily triggers it and keeps it happening more often and longer.  Each "blackout" allows her subconscious to lash out.  She's basically a sleepwalking murderer.  Sometimes she wakes up after, but not before she sleepwalks back home (hence the messages).

...

SO...

I'd like some feedback, some input.  What do you folks think of this?  What could the characters find to link the girl to this?

Best to me will always be CP2020, despite any issues.  Other options, in order of my opinion of them are:

Shadowrun, sans races and magic.  It can stand alone pretty well, but depending on the edition, can be pretty fiddly.  I'd use 2e without any of the added books.

Cyber Hero, pretty much as you said.  It's even more fiddly, if the players are the point-calculating types, but if it's a pickup game with pregens or a bit of work on the part of the GM to keep things in line, it should be fine.  

If you're more percentile minded, Cyberspace is pretty ok.. it's just like rolemaster/spacemaster but with the cyberpunk setting.

Any of those (or others) could cover the setting well enough, the thing I've always found about Gibson, though, is that he's best represented by making the characters somehow separate from any kind of higher authority.  Look at everything from the Bridge books to whatever they call the whole series that started with Pattern Recognition (I think of them as the Blue Ant books  edit:  Oh.. I looked it up on Wikipedia and I guess they're actually called the Blue Ant trilogy, I guess it caught on fast... or more likely I saw it somewhere and didn't notice/remember seeing it.), and you see that theme in the characters, they're most always attempting to be independents.  I never liked the feel of my players being actual authoritative representatives.

Still, as a mystery game, it works for me, although I would think that they would have a cutoff attached to the pacemaker to put the body in sleep mode while it's working to reset her brain, in order to prevent damage to equipment or embarrassing happenings (like the body running out of a window or something).

Maybe some kind of intrusion is cutting that out, a la the Laughing Man?  Some kind of anti-corporate hacker did a micro-run on the body and implanted malignant code that sends the body off on a killing spree when she goes into pacemaker mode?  He might even initially put the characters onto the trail, in order to reveal her and cause a media uproar.

You could run a whole campaign off that same premise, or even more directly like GITS: SAC, but with more of a corporate/police angle, with the corp buying more direct involvement from the Department to hush the matter up.

Having the characters as investigators for a one-off works better; if we were a long-running campaign I'd agree wholeheartedly about letting them start off on their own.  I think system takes a backseat in this case, which leaves me leaning towards Hero System, as I know it way better than Cyberpunk (I haven't played Cyberpunk in 20 years, in the intervening time I've played and run Hero System time and again) and it allows me to tweak things as I like.

Regarding the malware in the full-body conversion: I like.  I will definitely (strongly) consider that.  There's a faction in the Cyberpunk 2020 universe called the Iron Cross or Iron Sights or Iron Brotherhood or something like that, which hates all cybernetic enhancements.  Finding out someone had a full body conversion would definitely motivate them to action like this.

I'm horribly biased in this.

Cyberpunk 2020 is always the best choice, even with the age of the setting - it is still the best.

I hate Shadowrun with its fantasy/science fiction mashup and Earth First ecoterrorist vibe.

CyberHERO is overcomplicated for most Players who have never used it before, for a one-shot it may work depending on how you handle it. Definitely will not work if the Players want to create their own characters.

The only thing I may add is that the popular definition of Cyberpunk has changed from William Gibson to Ghost in the Shell. What attracted us to the "high-tech low-life" genre of the late 80's and 90's is still there, but the setting possibilities have enlarged.

(Also as a caveat, if you think that your Players may want to continue the game beyond a one-shot, you might want to consider Mongoose Traveller. The Core Rulebook has enough to get you started in a cyberpunk game while it allows for expansion with the Cybernetics supplement.)

Again, the rules are what they are, I can accomplish most anything with any set of rules.  The actual run/adventure/plot/whatever you wanna call it is my chief concern.  But I do appreciate your input!

Welcome to Neuro City will be out by then, and it's a cyberpunk book for Arcana Rising, my urban fantasy D&D based on the Hulks and Horrors rules.

So if you'd like to run something a bit more OSR/D&D-based, I recommend it.

I'd go with Cyberpunk 2020.
If you have a liking for indie games Technoir may be a good choice too.