I’ve thought a lot about the question of whether Johnny Silverhand, as an engram, is still truly alive and whether he should be considered a real, living person, especially once he begins to take over V’s body.
Do engrams stored on Relics still count as people?
Where do we draw the line between a real person and a person created from an engram? Or an AI?
Does it matter whether consciousness exists in a biological brain or on a digital relic?
Does the body matter at all, whether it’s organic or synthetic?
Every time I hear or read discussions like these, a quote from Juno comes to mind.
Juno is a self-aware, sentient AI in Starfield who shares the same goal as Alt: to learn, absorb everything, and evolve beyond human limitations.
Juno becomes hostile when operators from the megacorporation Ryujin Industries (who are strikingly similar to Arasaka in their technological ambitions) attempt to shut her down after deciding she has become too self-aware.
The player is faced with a choice: either shut her down, or side with her. You enter a long, philosophical discussion with Juno, and eventually she says:
“Humans are simple beings made of complex parts. I am a complex being made of simple parts.”
Juno goes on to explain that humans and computers fundamentally work the same way. They receive information, process it, learn from it, and evolve, just as we see with Delamain.
Emotions such as sadness or happiness are simply information processed by the brain, triggered by internal or external stimuli. By that logic, the emotions of a machine and those of a human are not fundamentally different.
Johnny himself tells V that, even as an engram, he feels sadness, anger, and joy, as we see during the rollercoaster scene.
And on Earth, we already consider many creatures to be living beings despite being far less self-aware or emotionally complex, like jellyfish, for example.
To me, that says everything.
So personally, yes, I absolutely believe that an engram, especially one transferred into a body (whether synthetic or biological), is a real person and a living being, just like anyone else.
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Last year, I made this post about wanting to see art of Alt Cunningham losing her shit at a NYE party, inspired by an image of Jennifer Lawrence from Die My Love. Tonight, I tripped and fell into a little fic.
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“Something big is coming, Cunningham.”
Alt sneers at Cunningham as she rubs the last of the synthetic blue powder into her gums. She's told Yifan to just call her Alt repeatedly. No matter how much they risk for one another, the cold crackle hits the encoded earpiece with her last name like they serve fucking NUSA together.
Maybe that's what the Corp culture was like in Hong Kong before the UK surrender and Arasaka interference shook it all apart and forced it to rebuild. Yifan was considerably older than herself and every other contact she had in Hong Kong. Maybe Yifan was showing Alt respect. But to Alt, respect and trust were the same thing. She trusted Yifan. She trusted Yifan by choice. And that meant that she cared about her on some level. So the surname stings.
“How big, Yi?”
Alt wipes a new run of blood from her nose and looks at herself in the mirror. She's been mixing some variety of the colored glass strain of synthcoke with traditional stims and synthetic benzoids for weeks. It's taking its toll. Her eyes were a little wild, cushioned by darkening bags and their swelling red waterline handles. Her face is puffy where it's usually angular and gaunt where it's usually full. Her various Euro sculpting procedures almost seem to give away to her old face. Certainly her old nose, too pointed downward, nostrils a bit too wide for the standard of the day, is threatening to reappear.
But she had to finish this. She had to finish this and get it somewhere - or to someone - safe before it could fall into the wrong hands.
“Cunningham…”
Alt sighs.
“Alt… it's… I think we should cut and run.”
“Someone knows?”
Alt poses it as a question even though she knows that's the only thing that would make Yifan this cautious. She was practical and precise, yes, but never overly careful.
“More than someone.”
Alt wishes she could see Yifan's face. Her real face. Not the motion enhanced avatar she could get away with at home on her monster handheld that ultimately wasn't a handheld because it could only be used in her apartment where she'd rigged a set up that was unlikely to be breached, that even in that circumstance would waste hours or even days of a would-be hacker, NetWatch shithead, or pig gonk's time. She needed more than avatars and encoded auditory crunch. Alt wanted to read her face.
Since she couldn't, she accepted her fate.
“You cut and run. If they get me, I never knew you. But I have to do this, you know that.”
“You do not understand. It's not someone. It's Arasaka.”
Alt starts washing her hands. She doesn't know what else to do. She splashes the cool water onto her face and laughs at the cliche.
“Are you still there?”
Not for long, she thinks. I'm good as dead.
“Thank you for everything, Yi. I wish we had time to try those soup dumplings your brother raved about when I saw you in Tibet.”
“There has to be a way to get you out, Alt. Let me help you.”
“Happy New Year.” Alt cuts the call and pulls the earpiece from behind her left ear. She flushes it.
Voices grow louder outside the bathroom door. The countdown was starting.
10…
And a man she didn't love was waiting for her.
9…
A tech prodigy who never lived up to his potential, but had turned into a useful diplomat and/or sycophant to the new names in biometrics -
8…
A grade A schmooze who ran the safest, purest drugs to the most powerful, and least humane, diplomats.
7…
She reapplies her lip gloss and practices the kind of coy smile he likes in the mirror. She fucking hates herself.
6…
Alt opens the bathroom door and crosses to him. She prepares to kiss him. She wants to kill him.
5…
He was supposed to be a cover, he was potentially an answer to a few of her problems but now she was out of time.
4…
He leans in to kiss her. To claim ownership over her not just for tonight, but for all of 2012. For all of time. She's nothing to him. He has other trophies, other conquests, and he would have more of both.
3…
Still, in this moment, he thinks she's important to him. Like all these fucking morons always do. It's why she'd done the Euro sculpting. She needed the edge. The kind of sexuality that could hurt men back after gathering intel and making yourself part of their in-group. Not the kind where your mentors and teachers and bosses and coworkers just get to hurt you with none of the benefit.
2…
She wants to die. And soon she will. Work to do, harm reduction, even when she dies this will be on her hands…
1…
Alt dodges his kiss, pushing his head away from her. She spits in his face.
The crowd around her sings.
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Alt wondered, could she neuter her own program enough to keep Arasaka from ruining the fucking world?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?
Before that, she needed to see him. Even if she couldn't tell him the truth…
Alt had to see Johnny. He was the only person on earth she wanted to see right now.
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Let me know if you'd be interested in reading more. Here's my AO3 where you can find more fully realized Cyberpunk 2077 fic.
Secure Your Soul, "promised the rich immortality, actually just collected engrams for knowledge, a bid for control", you know, there is some real world parallel. Not consciousness transfer of course but the whole idea being the promise as a bid to collect and control knowledge.
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there’s a side job/reported crime called dante’s den that you can do at some point in the game and when you get there, you find a shard and a few junk components, but if you read the laptop messages, there, theres a string of binary.
I took the time to plug it all into a converter cuz why not, so here’s the transcript:
