Soulkiller. A handy guide to Night City and Cyberpunk 2077

Johnny Silverhand will return in Cyberpunk 2077 as a "cybernetic spirit" saved on a chip installed in V's head. So, it will not be him at all, but only a digital representation of him. Without entering into philosophical deliberations about whether, and at what level of precision, the digital representation actually becomes a person, we mostly have to assume that his self has somehow been digitalized. Would this be possible in Cyberpunk 2020?

The software known as Soulkiller played an important role in Silverhand's history and the corporate war in which he died. Will it also appear in the game?

Well, the technology allows it is linked to Johnny in a quite peculiar way. We are talking about the Soul Killer program, written by Alt, the musician's fiancée (one of many). This app was developed to protect the ITS corp, for which this netrunner girl worked. The manual described Alt's program as an AI super-program for 2 million mega, which must sound impressive – especially for AI specs.

The soulkiller was supposed to instantly track the person hacking a system and copy their psyche to the computer memory, and then destroy their, let's call it, physical vessel. The clone probably couldn't count on a warm welcome on the servers of the corporation, but if the Soulkiller was used not to catch a hacker, but to save a loved one, the target of the otherwise murderous AI code would certainly be in some safe place. For example in V's head. Perhaps the "chip of immortality", which is supposed to be the cornerstone of the plot is a version of Soulkiller.

The Fourth Corporate War

We don't know how Johnny Silverhand will return, but we do know how he died (or at least disappeared). However, this requires a little more commitment than reading the Cyberpunk 2020 handbook, as it happened during the fourth corporate war. It was supposed to be a bridge between that system and its sequel, Cyberpunk 203X, and is described in Firestorm.

The motive of corporate wars is so crucial in the Cyberpunk universe that it's hard to imagine its digital adaptation without it.

At the end of 2021, there was a conflict between OTEC (Ocean Technology and Energy Corp) and CINO (Corporation Internationale Natuicale Et Oceanique). The casus belli was the liquidation of another corp, IHAG (Internationale Handelsmarine Aktiengesellschaft), whose resources both companies wanted to take over. Unable to settle the matter peacefully, they opted for both economic and military warfare. The war was initially limited to oceanic waters, but quickly moved inland, where Arasaka and Militech, employed as proxies by the corporations, threw themselves at their throats.

The course of the war was quite complicated, with another version of Soulkiller in the background. The fight, initially conducted mainly on behalf of companies, quickly became so fierce and overwhelming that it was joined by street heroes like Johnny Silverhand. The conflict was crowned by an assault on Arasaka's headquarters in order to finally destroy the Soulkiller, which at this stage was creating a strange hybrid with the digitized mind of Alt. During the raid, the Samurai frontman probably died. However, the action was successful and the building was incinerated by atomic fire, hence setting the stage for the next edition of Cyberpunk.