Cyberpunk 2077 Story Explained: The Relic, Mikoshi, Johnny and V's Condition

Dex sends V, Jackie and the netrunner T-Bug to steal the Relic from Arasaka. Inside, they witness Yorinobu Arasaka kill his father Saburo and make it look like poisoning. T-Bug and Jackie die in the escape, and the Relic's case is damaged, so V slots the chip into their own head to keep it safe.

Dex shoots V to tie off the loose end and dumps the body. V wakes up in a landfill, still alive. Lesson one of Night City: the job that pays too well is the job that kills you.

Goro Takemura, Saburo's bodyguard, suspects Yorinobu and kills Dex. He rescues V because V can prove what happened. Ripperdoc Viktor Vektor then explains the chip: it holds Johnny Silverhand's engram, a digital copy of his mind, and it revived V.

It is also overwriting V. Johnny's personality is taking over, and V has a limited time left. Johnny is hostile at first, then agrees to help find a cure, because he wants a shot at Arasaka. Our read: the best part of the setup is that neither of them gets to choose the other.

V follows two leads. One is Anders Hellman, the Relic's creator, whom V captures with Panam Palmer and the Aldecaldos nomads. Hellman cannot help, and V later hands him to Takemura. The other is Evelyn Parker, who commissioned the heist.

With Judy Álvarez, V learns Evelyn was hacked and sold to Scavs, who harvest cyberware from people. Her braindance memories show she learned of the Relic from the Voodoo Boys, netrunners who wanted Johnny's engram so they could reach past the Blackwall, the firewall that holds rogue AIs away from the rest of the Net.

Table tip: running this plot in a tabletop game, steal this act. A cursed object, a betrayed client and a gang with an agenda is a full campaign.

Through the Voodoo Boys, V relives Johnny's past. In 2013 his girlfriend Alt Cunningham built Soulkiller, a program that copies a mind into cyberspace and destroys the brain. Arasaka used it on Alt and held her in Mikoshi, their digital fortress. Johnny's later nuclear attack on Arasaka Tower freed her, and she escaped behind the Blackwall as an AI. Johnny was killed and uploaded by Soulkiller.

Arasaka's "⁠Secure Your Soul⁠" program and the Relic both come out of that technology. V reaches Alt beyond the Blackwall and strikes a deal: give her access to Arasaka's subnet and Mikoshi, and she will separate V and Johnny. Opinion: this is where the game stops being a heist story and becomes a ghost story.

Takemura and V capture Hanako Arasaka, Yorinobu's sister, to prove his guilt. Arasaka soldiers ambush them, and afterward Hanako offers V a deal: help oust Yorinobu in exchange for her help. Johnny hates the idea.

In the final act V can storm Arasaka Tower, take Hanako's deal, or end it all. The assault can be done alone, with Rogue (Johnny takes V's body), or with the Aldecaldos. Siding with Hanako removes Yorinobu, and Arasaka then removes and destroys the Relic. Every path except suicide ends with a fight against Adam Smasher. Our endings page covers each result.

The chip's damage cannot be reversed. After this long with the engram, V's body is tailored to Johnny, and V has a shorter life in it. What happens next depends on the ending: V uploads to Mikoshi to wait for a new body (the Hanako deal), lives on in the body while searching for a fix, or gives the body to Johnny and goes beyond the Blackwall with Alt.

Phantom Liberty adds one more outcome, a surgery that removes the Relic and erases Johnny entirely, at the cost of a two-year coma and permanent damage to V's combat ability.