Never Fade Away: Death and Dying in Cyberpunk 2077, Part II

By Benjamin Rose

With my own eyes I saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a bottle and, when the attendants asked her what she wanted, she replied, “I want to die.“

—Petronius, The Satyricon

“The Sybil”

The Hyacinth Girl

Dazed and bloodied, V crawls out of a dumpster through mud and shit as the blue static of the Relic flashes across her field of vision. Passing out from the effort, she sees two blurred shapes approaching in the distance and comes face to face with Goro Takemura, now-former bodyguard of Saburo Arasaka, and Dexter DeShawn. “Heavier than she looks” Dex gasps after carrying her to dry ground, then blurts out, “Look, dawg, I have done exactly what you asked. So how’s about you and me settle this and” and he is immediately shot in the head. “Arasaka-sama, I’ve found your father’s murderer” Takemura says to Yorinobu on the holo. V cries out “fuck” and is promptly smacked in the face. It’s been a bad day for Goro, and a worse one for V. So begins Act 2 of Cyberpunk 2077.

Fifteen minutes later, V has narrowly survived an ambush by an Arasaka hit squad, been rushed half-dead to Viktor’s clinic, undergone multiple surgeries, and learned that the nightmares she had while she was out, of Johnny Silverhand, Soulkiller, and Arasaka Tower, are memories. Silverhand’s ornery, chain-smoking, asshole construct is now grafted onto her brain and stripping away her soul. She has mere weeks to live. As introductions to the main questline of a video game go, especially compared to, say, Geralt’s stay in Vizima in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the opening of Cyberpunk 2077 is shockingly bleak.  As ever, Cherami Leigh’s voice work is impeccable, cycling through shock, rage, and helpless despair at a clip, which serves to introduce a useful aside.

A long running debate on Reddit comparing the voice work of Leigh and Male V’s Gavin Drea tends to revolve around the precise emotional inflection that’s needed here. Is Drea’s stoic delivery more authentic to the character as the player conceives V, or is Leigh’s vulnerability, her straightforward recognition that she is shit outta luck and terrified, the more plausible response? Ultimately the player must resolve this for themselves, as there’s no right answer, only stronger or weaker arguments, but I hold to my previously expressed preference for Leigh in this regard. It’s not a matter of gender but the willingness to reckon with vulnerability that should shape the performance. V has literally just “died” and then nearly died again multiple times. They have been through horrific pain and terror. The essence of trauma, as Bessel Van Der Kolk explains in The Body Keeps the Score is not mere exposure to terror and violence but being forced to suffer these things from a position of helplessness.

Thus if some read the desperation in Leigh’s voice as a distinctly feminine (or weak) response to the day’s events, and Drea’s more restrained acting as inherently “masculine” or strong, I challenge them to reconsider. Everyone’s unflappable till they get shot in the head. It’s an over-correction to assume even a hard man would remain stoic in such circumstances. But there’s no time for self pity. As Goro says, “The bell has tolled. You must re-enter the ring”. V has been “The Fool” wide-eyed and naive in her desire to be a legend in Night City. Now the reaper’s come for her, and death is no longer “something I dealt to other people”. Her number is up.

The Corpse You Planted

Enter Johnny Silverhand. As my colleague Luis Navarro has previously traced in intimate detail, Johnny Silverhand is a marvelously complex figure, despite being nothing more on the surface than a colossal prick. Part traumatized war veteran, part wounded Romantic, Johnny by his time of death had devolved into a self-righteous murderer whose quest for liberation from Arasaka was buried beneath narcissism and vengeance. Less calculating cynic than self-absorbed manchild, Johnny was the archetypal counter-cultural rock star: so brilliant and in love with his own self-regarding mythos that ultimately the man and the myth became inseparable, every act of violence and cry for liberation masking an indifference to collateral damage and an appetite for self-destruction. This was as true of his personal relationships as of his anti-corporate crusade. When confronted by an Arasaka worker over his nuclear bombing (!) of the first Arasaka Tower, Johnny’s only reply to her statement that he murdered her husband is to respond “I didn’t want him to die” then defend his atrocity as justified “to put an end to the madness you wreak”. 

The first time I heard this line in Cyberpunk 2077 I couldn’t suppress a chuckle, given its conspicuous melodrama. But as with so much else, when 2077 is being loony, ridiculous, or melodramatic, that’s often the point. By 2023 in-universe, Robert John Linder had become a parody of himself, a walking cliche of first wave punk-style platitudes against corporate excess and colonialism masking the hollow shell of a man living for hedonism, hate, and vengeance. Interestingly, on Reddit, Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith has gone so far as to call Johnny a functioning cyberpsycho who has built up a dissociative identity called “The Hand” for which he blames his most extreme acts of violence. While this aspect of Johnny is omitted in 2077 (which fucks with some of the tabletop lore and timeline), the game makes clear that, whether subject to a cybernetically-induced mental illness, or a mere personality disorder, or not, Johnny is bad news. 

When we first meet him in V’s bullet-riddled skull, and before he even begins his nuclear 9/11 against Arasaka, he punctuates a Samurai gig by shooting a random member of the crowd from the stage. Now that this self-involved borderline psychopath is in V’s head, his first plan is, of course, to kill V. When that doesn’t work, he makes a peace offering. Slowly, they’ll begin to come to terms. In “The Haunted Ghost of a Samurai”, Luis explored the existential and ethical questions raised by Johnny’s “resurrection”. Is a soul preserved in code the same man or woman, or a mere facsimile, a sort of hybrid AI? Is it capable of ethical action without actually being human or the person from which it was copied? Can it be redeemed? Does it need redemption? Or does redemption even matter? There’s a strong claim to be made that Johnny is the deuteragonist of Cyberpunk 2077, and that as V’s character arc rests upon acceptance, wisdom, and the ultimate rejection of easy ways out in favor of personal responsibility and selflessness, Johnny’s “redemption” arc is really  a mirror image of this process. 

By empathizing with Johnny, V helps Johnny own and eventually transcend what a bastard he is, while his own example and decision to depart with Alt at the end gives V six months more of life and the courage to face death. But as No-Ho Hank said in Barry (a great example of recent media, and radical in its depiction of a failed redemption arc), “Forgiveness has to be earned”. Many things will transpire between Johnny and V’s first dustup over a bottle of pills and their path to glory, and with that let’s turn to the first major story beat of Act II, the hunt for Evelyn Parker.

Over The Tumbled Graves

We knew Night City was a hellhole based on violence and exploitation, but the most chilling encounters with these themes begin once V leaves Tom’s Diner and rings up Judy to track down Evelyn. This leads her to the upscale brothel Clouds, where a very unsettling conversation with a doll-chipped prostitute forces V to encounter the full scope of her own repressed existential horror. For the first time in her life, V is afraid, But “You’ve never backed down from anything before in your life” the doll tells her, and even if she has to burn half the city down, she must push on through. From here the player is left to resolve the Clouds situation in order to reach Oswald “Woodman” Forrest and, regardless if one uses violence or stealth to breach the VIP area of the club, it ends with V either offing Woodman and discovering his rape and abuse of Evelyn, or returning later with Judy to finish the job when the facts come to light. 

Next V and Judy pay a visit to Jig-jig Street ripperdoc and likely sex offender Fingers, beat the shit out of him for info, then, deducing Evelyn’s location from clues in an illegal braindance, track her to Charter Hill where she’s being held in an abandoned factory and sexually exploited by the Scavs, the vicious Night City Russian gang that makes its living off of murdering hostages and selling their implants (Not-so-loosely inspired by actual Russian gangs, namely the Russian Army. Slava Ukraini, you fucks).  Load mags, cue gunfight, bang-bang, roll credits. Evelyn is freed. But her mind is broken and interrogating her for leads proves impossible. After scrolling a braindance from her memories, V nonetheless has a lead: a gang of Haitian netrunners called the Voodoo Boys paid Evelyn to record a braindance of Yorinobu and, seizing the opportunity, she went beyond her remit to plan the Relic heist that has left so many dead. “Well, looks like I’m going to Pacifica.” She calls in a favor from the elusive Mr. Hands and preps to track down Anders Hellman while she waits. But not long after, a call comes in. V heads back to Judy’s apartment and walks in on Evelyn, dead, her wrists slashed in a Roman-style bathroom suicide. They carry her bloodied corpse to the bedroom and attempt to make sense of it all.

The Change of Philomel

In ancient Greco-Roman literature, there was a myth that after the sister of the king of Thrace was raped and made mute by her brother-in-law, and that she wrote her abuse on a tapestry and was avenged before being changed into the nightingale, whose song to subsequent generations of Western poet’s has been associated with sorrow. At once referencing and perhaps attacking this association,  T.S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land:

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.

An inviolable voice, crying nonsense to dirty ears. I argued in “Fly Me To the Moon: How Edgerunners Saved Cyberpunk 2077” that it was Edgerunners‘ sincerity, as opposed to 2077’s callousness, that created a deeper investment in their shared universe. Maybe this is true. I still hold to the notion that at times, when 2077 seeks to be profound, it blunders. There is a strangely unprocessed element to Evelyn’s trauma in this string of Act II quests.

We are never given an inside psychological view of the suffering Evelyn has endured, nothing comparable in empathic sting to when one of the orphan boys of Crookback Bog describes to Geralt his family’s murder in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In the The Witcher, perhaps ironically for a game centered on killing, the victims of violence in times of lawlessness and war are consistently humanized. Trauma is not unspeakable. To a large degree, speaking of it (in a clinically controlled setting at first) is among the only ways to recover from abuse, a fact I can attest to through both firsthand experience and knowing others who have suffered. But Evelyn cannot speak, or feel, and so she flatlines, and this narrative decision, while the inverse of The Witcher‘s, is perhaps equally powerful.

Judy and V feel shock and anger at her suffering and her suicide, but they cannot understand it emotionally even as they comprehend it, and this speaks to the aporia the traumatized confront when seeking to relate and process their experiences to themselves at first, much less explain them to others. Words are not enough. “There are some things that time cannot mend, some wounds that have gone too deep. That have taken hold” Frodo says near the end of the filmed Return of the King. Evelyn’s death is the horrific fate of a traumatized individual who can neither be seen nor heard, and yet in the end, while its cause is obvious, her pain remains unarticulated to others and thus inscrutable. Is this all that is possible in Night City, where everyone is alienated from each other and a potential betrayer? Is recovery even possible in a society so depraved and convulsed with cruelty and fear?

Maybe not. “Thanks V” Judy said just before this second nightmare started to unfold. “You’re a good person”. No, she isn’t. But V has her own sense of honor; and, slowly but surely, as she is forced to confront the bullshit of her former dreams and the desperation of her case, she may come to realize that if she must leave this world bloodied and alone, perhaps the community she finds along the way may give her the strength Evelyn lacked, and the courage not to submit, but walk bravely into the night, gun in hand. Luckily, she’s got this one choom who’s already dead.

Never Fade Away: Death and Dying in Cyberpunk 2077 has been expanded to an 8-part series and continues next time with an in-depth look at the nomad quest line through the main plot and beyond. Tune in Saturday to catch V and Panam become Queens of the Highway, and don’t flatline in between! Peace, choombas.

Photo credits in order: Featured Image, IGN; Image 1, Game Rant; image 2, Eurogamer; image 3, Cyberpunk Wiki/CD Projekt Red; image 4, PC Gamer; image 5, Cyberpunk Wiki.

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