That's definitely an option to keep open, and it'd allow borrowing from the Matrix as well.

I've been looking for a Mud that fits this style for a very long time, with no long-term success. It always amazed me that no one had really attempted it, despite how many works have been published in the Sci-Fi genre. One of the series I've thought about trying to transition into a Mud setting was the "Reality Dysfunction" trilogy, despite how lame the the ending was.

Make sure to post if you do end up getting this off the ground.

Most sci-fi settings rely heavily on ranged weapons and space ships, which make the most sense if you have some kind of rich spatial representation. Most MUD codebases are very simplistic in their spatial representations, making it difficult to meaningfully engage in ranged combat. You end up treating blasters just like swords, which kind of defeats the purpose and makes things less interesting. So I'm not wholly surprised that there haven't been many MUDs in this kind of setting.