Never Fade Away: Death And Dying In Cyberpunk 2077: Part I

“Major Crimes“

By Benjamin Rose

We’re Only Here Once

“See you in the major leagues, Jack.” At about nine hours into Cyberpunk 2077 (assuming you cleared all those “NCPD Scanner Hustle” fights in Watson first), V says these words to her long time best friend/literal partner-in-crime Jackie Welles just after he’s bled to death in the back of their limousine. Touching his shoulder in parting, she goes to deliver the “Relic” biochip they’ve just stolen from the Arasaka megacorporation to fixer Dexter DeShawn and is promptly shot in the head and dumped in a landfill for her trouble, awakening the digital ghost of terrorist dad rocker Johnny Silverhand (Keanu) and setting in motion a desperate quest for survival. Through reliving Silverhand’s memories, V learns her only hope is to infiltrate Araska Tower in the heart of Night City and enter and destroy the digital fortress of Mikoshi, a prison of souls in which the rich have signed away their digital consciousnesses in the hopes of everlasting life only to become the slaves of the Arasaka patriarch Saburo’s twisted attempt to cheat death. Alternatively, she has the option of selling out; of aiding Hanako Arasaka in her corporate civil war with heir-apparent Yorinobu, resurrecting Saburo, undergoing a desperate surgery, and when it fails, gambling whether to become a biochip construct herself or refusing in order to die a natural death on her own terms.

 The latter option, except for the choice that allows V to commit suicide before the climax of the game, is the bad ending. There are several “good” endings to Cyberpunk 2077, and fans will continue to debate which one is the best. None, according to CD Projekt Red, is exclusively canonical, but one stands out for the way it resolves the themes of death and dying in Cyberpunk 2077 better than all its comrades, all the more so if the player opts to foolishly trust Songbird in Phantom Liberty beforehand and learn, in devastating fashion, the moral bankruptcy of trying to live at any cost. “There are some things a man ought to die rather than do”, wrote Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (a moment of silence for the late, great T-Bug), and in Songbird’s craven willingness to sacrifice anything or anyone to escape the NUSA and survive, V receives the ultimate mirroring of the will to live, or the will to not die,  in all its tragic perversity. That image, in the mind of an intelligent roleplayer, will haunt her for the rest of her fast-fading days.  

As V, the game gives you the choice to do something radical in the Cyberpunk universe, a universe beset by hypercapitalism, hyperindividualism, and the carnivorous cynicism and existential despair arising out of both.  It lets you choose, as Justin Clark of Gamespot puts it in this brilliant articlehttps://www.gamespot.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-breaking-the-cycle-in-phantom-libertys-ending/1100-6520037/, to “Break the cycle” of fuck-or-be-fucked, kill-or-be-killed nihilism that drives Night City. In Phantom Liberty, Songbird doesn’t deserve your help, much less your sympathy. It’s perfectly valid to hand her over to Idris Elba’s Solomon Reed, even though the fate awaiting her as an enslaved NUSA superweapon is certainly worse than death. But not today. Not this time. There has been too much death and too much betrayal and V, I think, is exhausted with it. And when the time comes to make her own choice on how to meet her end, V will remember. She will not make Songbird’s mistake.

Is There No Way Out?

Everyone plays Cyberpunk 2077 differently. Some play V as a male. Some do that thing called “quick-hacking” instead of, you know, growing some balls and dropping more bodies with rifle and pistol or  sword and sandevistan than John Wick-meets-David Martinez (fucking nerds). Netrunners…

To each their own. Much of V’s character development is malleable to the player. Some isn’t. But in this  series of articles I propose that there is one path  for V and one ending that surpasses all the others; one narrative arc congruent with what Cyberpunk 2077 and its spin-off Cyberpunk Edgerunners articulates about their most important themes, death and dying.

This is the  “secret” ending, “Don’t Fear The Reaper”, unlocked by correctly pursuing V’s conversation with Johnny in the oil fields outside Night City, the place where his blaze of glory, after being murdered by Arasaka, met its ignominious end. But more than a standard “do this, not that” type of piece, Never Fade Away: Death and Dying In Cyberpunk 2077 is an examination of what Cyberpunk 2077 has to say about mortality and why, when the time comes to bet it all on one last mad assault on Arasaka Tower, V cannot, should not, take anyone with her, nor sacrifice her friends, such as they are, out of a selfish desire to live at all costs. She must bear the burden of her fate, and either “become that legend”, or fall into her grave “gun in hand and on fire” alone.¹

V’s had a rough road. The scion of a corporate family from Charter Hill, Night City, she enlisted and was trained as an intelligence officer for Arasaka right out of high school or college (details are somewhat murky), and quickly made a name for herself as a capable operator, albeit one plagued by stress and, by some measures, ill at odds with the ruthless cynicism demanded by the corporate world even as she mastered it. She had wealth, security, confidence, and power. As V later barks when accosted by the bouncer at Lizzie’s in the main quest, the same bar where her corporate dream had earlier come crashing down, she’s been there before. “I  didn’t come in through the front door.”  But the days of cruising above Night City in an AV are long gone by then, her career destroyed by the backroom politics of her superior Arthur Jenkins, “backroom politics” in Cyberpunk referring to an order from Jenkins to hire Jackie Welles to murder Jenkin’s boss Susan Abernathy. In the end, as Jackie pointed out, V was always a pawn, a disposable piece on the corporate chessboard where the only man who counts is the Emperor, 150 years old and still intent on ruling as a god.

Maybe it was a blessing. Jackie seems to think so. And yet ironically, as she embarks on a life as a low-rent mercenary following her termination, V doesn’t look back. Better to be a thug on your own payroll than the evil empire’s warrior princess, I suppose. But Jackie is bluffing. He’s spent his whole life in the shit, grime, and bullet-ridden filth of Night City, burying his brothers and burying his rage. When he stepped in that Delemain he knew it was over. His ticket out, the fucking major leagues. Jackie Welles dies aged 30² and, in a particularly cruel twist of fate, if the player sent him to Victor to spare his mother the trauma of seeing his mangled corpse, winds up as an engram V will see one last time after defeating Adam Smasher and reaching Mikoshi. He saved V, for a time at least, when Arasaka’s agents came to kill her that night in Lizzie’s Bar. But he himself was beyond saving.

Life’s Short

In the book of Isaiah it is written:

4 Every valley shall be lifted up,

And every mountain and hill shall be made low;

And the rugged shall be made level,

And the rough places a plain;

5 And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,

And all flesh shall see it together;

For the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.’

But as the traditional article of faith in Judaism formulated by Maimonides states, “I believe in the Messiah, though he delays”, it is hard to find anything resembling social justice, let alone God in Night City, and don’t hold your breath waiting. By “God”, I do not mean divine intervention, miracles, or the supernatural per se, but some sense of collective human struggle for a life lived righteously in community, religion as an endpoint or practice rather than a fairy tale. There is no spiritual life in Night City less because Cyberpunk as a genre is inherently atheist (though there’s that), but more so because there is no “we” in Night City. 

Beyond the somewhat goofy and exaggerated satire of Cyberpunk 2077‘s hyperindividualism and hypercapitalism ( the “Greed is Good” aesthetic of the Reagan-Thatcher era which 80s cyberpunk literature relentlessly lampooned)  Night City is in all seriousness a place of misery. Beneath the style-over-substance glamor and the kitsch of neon lights and billboard T&A, NC is a hellhole. The motto of Cyberpunk 2077 is not “Burn Corpo Shit”³. This game is a $60 Triple AAA product that cost over $400 million (No, that’s not Polish money) to develop and…uh..redevelop. It is “Corpo Shit” in the best sense of the word, and the whingering of left-wing critics that a game about “rebellion” is insufficiently tantamount to the “Decolonising”, Free Palestine, Socialist Pro-Hamas crap they were begging for is pathetic and laughable.

Setting aside the fact that there would be no money to be made in railing against half their audience in the pursuit of praise from the House Progressive Caucus’s Twitter account (they’re too busy fulminating over Gaza to notice anyway), CD Projekt, to their credit, makes no attempt in Cyberpunk 2077 to offer an original or substantive critique of 21st century property relations and class conflict while chasing the almighty dollar at the same time. Nor are they, in the manner of Grimes or William Gibson, seeking to deal conceptually with the societal implications of advanced technology.

In Cyberpunk 2077, all these genre elements are, on a thematic level, essentially metaphors for the powerlessness of the individual in the Dark Future, and by extension the powerlessness of the individual in the present in the face of death. In a world in which God is absent, one must confront the brutal fact that in the end, when the reaper calls our names, each of us is inexorably alone. What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? In the end, as one commentator put it, Cyberpunk 2077 is not very interested in what it means to have robot arms or advanced hacking capabilities synced directly to your brain. It’s interested in what all literature arguably boils down to: reckoning with what it means to be human in an uncertain, and possibly hostile, cosmos.

Why Does It Take So Long?

In this context, V’s all-out quest to save her own life has a sort of bathos. She is not out to save the world. She is not even out, by the end of the game, to become a legend. Faced with “the Horror of the shade”⁴, she is very much afraid of death and being erased. And in her refusal to accept the inevitable there is something at once heroic and yet a little pathetic. In an impromptu therapy session with a joytoy while on the hunt for Evelyn Parker, V admits as much. She knows that as a merc in Night City, she could die any day, almost at any moment, even hit by a stray bullet while waiting for a cab. (Wait, there’s Uber in Night City?! Where?! Moving on.) Yet death was something she dealt to others, not suffered herself. V was strong, and in a bit of allusion that might satisfy T-bug, “the strong do as they will, the weak suffer what they must.”⁵

But now, suddenly, V is desperate, and in her desperation and terminal decline, weak. Still a tough-as-nails mercenary, chipped as fuck and capable of slaughtering the Voodoo Boys in revenge or scaring off a crew of Scavs from the Aldecaldos on menace alone, she has seen and felt the menace of the years contracted into an instant, and at last she knows fear. There is no happy ending for V. But if she cannot change her fate, she still may rise to meet it⁶, and in the next few articles in this series, I’ll explain exactly the choices the player should make to surmount her egotism and fear, storm the gates of Hell, and pass into legend.

That’s it for Part : Major Crimes of Never Fade Away: Death and Dying in Cyberpunk 2077. In my next article in this series, I’ll be talking side quests and the main questline up to the start of Phantom Liberty, followed by Part III on Phantom Liberty and Part IV on Don’t Fear The Reaper and the game’s endings. Stay tuned, Choombas.

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Footnotes

1. “If I gotta die, I’d rather fall into my grave gun in hand and on fire…”-V, in “Don’t Fear The Reaper”. “Just yesterday a punk kid pushing XBDs for a quick buck. Go on, become that legend, or whatever the fuck you mercs do.”-Doc, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Ep. 8 ↩︎
2. https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Jackie_Welles?so=search#cite_note-CG-2 ↩︎
3. There was a particularly petulant article released awhile ago, probably at The Gamer, that revolved around this in-game phrase and that amounted to nothing more than an extended political screed against Cyberpunk 2077 for being insufficiently “progressive”. Go find it if you wish. I don’t link to nonsense. ↩︎
4. “Beyond this place of wrath and tears/ Looms but the Horror of the shade/ And yet the menace of the years/ Finds and shall find me unafraid”-William Ernest Henley, “Invictus” ↩︎
5. From “The Melian Dialogue” in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War ↩︎
6. “We cannot change our fate, but we can rise to meet it.”-Mononoke Hime [Japanese version] ↩︎