Cyberpunk 2077’s Relic — the biochip containing Johnny Silverhand’s engram — overwrites V’s neural architecture and slowly replaces them. The game’s main story is V’s attempt to remove the Relic before the replacement is complete. Most players understand this as the premise.
What the Relic’s technical logs — accessible through a specific Brain Dance sequence in the Arasaka Tower mission — contain is a full engineering history of the engram technology. The logs include Saburo Arasaka’s voice recordings, archived from before his death, in which he describes Mikoshi — the soul-storage system — as ‘a prison disguised as immortality.’
Saburo built the system that his own family uses as their primary asset, and his private recordings describe it as a trap. The engineering logs are not on any quest marker. They require triggering the Brain Dance at a specific moment in the Tower mission and manually scrubbing through what appears to be a maintenance record.
CD Projekt Red embedded the game’s central philosophical critique — that Mikoshi is imprisonment not preservation — in Saburo’s own private notes, accessible through an optional Brain Dance in the endgame. Most players accept the game’s framing of Mikoshi without accessing the founder’s own condemnation of it.
Didn’t realise how much was hidden under the surface. Makes me want to replay it with fresh eyes.
This is why I always check every corner. You never know what’s been left for the observant player.