V History & Cyberpunk 2077 Plot
Dec. 19th, 2037 05:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bodyoftheseusTimeline of the cyberpunk universe.
Note -- V uses he/him pronouns for himself even as a child before his transition, so the below reflects that.
V was born and raised in Heywood, growing up in Vista Del Rey among the turf wars of the Valentinos and 6th Street gangs. His mother was a single mom who never spoke of his father and would always change the subject if he was ever brought up. They lived in the combat zone of Night City - a veritable war zone of gang wars and general violence - and were homeless, without any sort of proper shelter, always having to find places of relative safety to spend the night. They never stayed very long in any one place, food came every other day when things were good (with mom generally eating once a day to ensure V had enough), and life was overall just very difficult. Mom worked evenings and well into the night and spent most of her money just securing food for herself and little V.
By the time that V was 6, he was starting to get into things and steal food and items to help mom so that money wasn't quite so tight, and he also started figuring out how to repair the clothes they wore to make them last longer. In addition to this, he also took side jobs from a big-time fixer. They were small jobs - mostly safe and without much danger for a kid - but hhe excelled at them, so they continued. Things were as good as could be.
Mom didn't come home one morning not long after V had turned 10. He did as he promised mom he would do: he waited a couple of days, then he knew he would have to take care of himself. He let his curiosity get the better of him, however, and did seek out the truth as to what happened. He eventually found her body, and then he found out that his mom had gotten caught in some crossfire between some Valentino boys and the 6th Street guys. As unfortunate as it was, this was the way of life in the combat zone. He did his best not to be consumed with it and move on.
He was still working under the same fixer since he was 6 and, after the death of his mother, considered him as close to a father as he could. A couple of weeks after his 14th birthday said fixer was killed when an incendiary device went off in his apartment and V found himself once again alone. Without a relationship with any other fixer in town at this point, he turned to the only other work he knew: walking the streets. It beat having to steal to survive and he may as well monetize what the men kept wolf whistling him over. He started drinking to deal with his grief and with, well, the work, and it wasn't long until he couldn't recall what it was like to be sober.
When he was 16 he fell in with a Valentino boy named Gabriel Mendoza Ruiz. The two hit it off and it wasn't long before V was dealing drugs for him and maybe sharing a little bit of the product with him too. They grew close over time and it wasn't long before the two of them were dating like a match made in heaven. As they, dated V started to feel that being Valerie just wasn't right for him and Gabe helped him transition into the Vincent we know today - in more ways than one. Not long after Vincent turned 19 Gabe drugged him and had plans to sell him into the trafficking business but due to some upgrades he'd gotten alongside his testosterone implant, he metabolized through the drugs faster than expected and woke up. V realized that the only person he could trust in Night City was himself, and so he killed Gabe and the entirety of the crew and left.
He finished transitioning and worked hard to create relationships with the other fixers in town, especially the fixer in his stomping grounds of Heywood - Sebastian "Padre" Ibarra - to create a larger, more steady income that meshed well with his evening work. He did jobs, he walked the streets, he studied hard to become a netrunner - no small feat for a streetkid with absolutely no education. He eventually felt that he had done everything he could in Night City and heard from some people passing through that Atlanta, GA was the next great place to be - an up and coming Night City, if you will. So, in 2075, he went.
Atlanta was much of the same: gang violence, fixers with drugs to move, people to kill, corpos to screw over. It was more humid and more run down, less dazzling than Night City. He fell in with a group of netrunners that liked to fight with NetWatch and learned all he could from them about programming, hacking, netrunning, and the like. He sunk money into getting some of the top of the line hard and software for himself. He better learned how to break ICE and write ICE, and all about the Black Wall that NetWatch had put up. Eventually, however, the call for home grew too much and he left Atlanta and went back west to Night City.
--- Game Plot & Spoilers Ahead ---
Arriving back in Night City in late May/early June 2077, V makes his way to the El Coyote Cojo in Heywood. He's mugged on the way, but makes it back in, setting his nose while the bartender Pepe, a friend from before he left, explained he was in debt to a slimey new fixer, Kirk Sawyer. V offers to help and strikes a deal with Kirk: steal a Rayfield Aerondight S9 from some corpo asshole, clear the debt. On the way to the site V meets back up with Padre, who gives him a ride there and reconnects. V explains that he had just arrived back in town and Padre promises to call with jobs and spread the word he's back. V attempts to steal the Rayfield, only to be stopped by a man named Jackie Welles, who also wishes to steal the car. The two are captured by NCPD and ordered to be killed. The NCPD rough the two up and dump them in the slums of Heywood, where Jackie feels the two seem to get along well and offers to take him home for some dinner. Over the course of the next 6 months V and Jackie do jobs together as a pair of solos, working alongside T-Bug, a highly skilled netrunner. V becomes part of the Welles family, with Mama Welles essentially adopting him. With their wild success V eventually gets himself an apartment in the Watson District in Little China.
In December of 2077 Jackie is contacted by Dexter DeShawn and told that he has a job for the two of them. V and Jackie are to steal a mysterious biochip known as the Relic from Arasaka Corporation. V set about doing the footwork of investigating about what the Relic is and why one Miss Evelynn Parker wished to have the chip stolen. Evelynn Parker gave important information about the mission to the Relic, including a braindance with the layout of the Relic's owner's suite. With all of the information that he needs for this, V meets up with Jackie to retrieve a Militech bot nicknamed the Flathead from a gang known as the Maelstrom. V and Jackie barely make it out with the Flathead, but they make it out none the less. With all of the information they need at the Flathead, they meet up with their netrunner T-Bug and Dexter at The Afterlife. With everything in place the two go to the location to steal the Relic.
During the heist things go terribly wrong as Yorinobu Arasaka kills his fater, Saburo, and triggers a lockdown in the hotel. T-Bug is killed by Arasaka's netrunners, V and Jackie try to escape but the enclosure for the Relic is damaged. Jackie inserts the Relic into his cyberware, but as the two work on escaping the hotel, Jackie is fatally wounded. V inserts the Relic into his own cyberware and make sit out of the hotel to meet up with DeShawn. V lies and says that the Relic was destroyed on the way out and DeShawn shoots V in the head and dumps V's body in a landfill.
V eventually awakens in the landfill and is haunted by the digital ghost of Johnny Silverhand, who had died in 2023 when he nuked Arasaka Tower. Goro Takemura, Saburo's bodyguard who was blamed for Saburo's murder, recovers V and takes him back to Night City after a vehicle chase and fire fight, which leaves V quite wounded. Once V comes to, his ripperdoc Viktor Vektor explains that V's death triggered a resurrection nanotech on the Relic, which triggered an irreversible process where Johnny Silverhand's memories and personality will overwrite V's. The biochip cannot be removed due to the damage to his neural systems, and V needs to figure out how to remove Silverhand and survive.
V begins to see Johnny's memories through the biochip and malfunctions and figured out that Johnny's then girlfriend Alt Cunningham had created a program called Soulkiller. Soulkiller was able to copy netrunners' minds through neural links, but the process destroyed the target's brain. Arasaka had kidnapped Alt and forced her to create an alternate version of Soulkiller to store minds in an incredibly secure Arasaka data farm called Mikoshi. Johnny fails to save her before Arasaka used Soulkiller on Alt, so he nukes Arasaka Tower. Johnny is captured and Arasaka uses Soulkiller on him as well.
With this realization, V understands that the "Secure Your Soul" program is a repurposed version of Soulkiller that they advertise publicly as a way for the rich and famous to live forever and that Johnny was something of a prototype.
V ultimately allows Johnny to take over his body in order to execute another operation against Arasaka Tower. V convinces the now super AI that was once Alt Cunningham to infiltrate Mikoshi and use Soulkiller on himself, remove Johnny, then re-inject V back into his own body. She agrees, with the condition that V/Johnny himself have to upload a daemon of her writing to drop Arasaka security into Mikoshi because she cannot infiltrate it herself.
Johnny, controlling V, runs through the operation with Rogue and Weyland, and together the three storm Arasaka Tower. They fight their way into the server room and destroy Arasaka security to allow Alt in and she clears the path for V to enter the server required to execute Soulkiller so that he can enter Mikoshi himself. Before they can enter the Soulkiller room Adam Smasher - who has since been hired by Arasaka as security - arrives to kill Johnny again and finally kill Rogue. He succeeds in killing Rogue, but Johnny kills Smasher, and retrieves Rogue's gun. From here Johnny enters the room and jacks V's body in and allows Alt to execute Soulkiller.
Within the net Johnny finds V and the two sit and chat for a few minutes while they wait for Alt to finish off Mikoshi's netrunners and continue to run Soulkiller. Alt eventually joins the two and has bad news: she had not taken V's organic body into account and the DNA reconfiguration had progressed too far; the body's immune system is attacking its own neurons and no matter what she does V will die. The biochip had irreversibly changed the host body so that it no longer belonged to V and saw V as an actual intruder, while Johnny was the correct owner. V and Johnny discuss it: V had already agreed that, if it came to it, he would give Johnny the body so that Johnny could have another chance at life. Johnny argues that they were friends, Johnny wouldn't fuck V over like that, and V disagrees.
Johnny ultimately moves away from the well that would return him to V's body and, instead, attempts to cross the bridge to join Alt. V appears and violently protests against Johnny's choice, going so far as to beat the bits out of him. V eventually backs off, apologizing for being hot blooded. V explains to Johnny that despite Johnny being a dickhead he didn't deserve to die. When Johnny tried to cross the bridge to give V another chance at life V actually stopped him and shoved him into the well to return to the body. V went with Alt to end his own life and be part of something bigger.
Note -- V uses he/him pronouns for himself even as a child before his transition, so the below reflects that.
V was born and raised in Heywood, growing up in Vista Del Rey among the turf wars of the Valentinos and 6th Street gangs. His mother was a single mom who never spoke of his father and would always change the subject if he was ever brought up. They lived in the combat zone of Night City - a veritable war zone of gang wars and general violence - and were homeless, without any sort of proper shelter, always having to find places of relative safety to spend the night. They never stayed very long in any one place, food came every other day when things were good (with mom generally eating once a day to ensure V had enough), and life was overall just very difficult. Mom worked evenings and well into the night and spent most of her money just securing food for herself and little V.
By the time that V was 6, he was starting to get into things and steal food and items to help mom so that money wasn't quite so tight, and he also started figuring out how to repair the clothes they wore to make them last longer. In addition to this, he also took side jobs from a big-time fixer. They were small jobs - mostly safe and without much danger for a kid - but hhe excelled at them, so they continued. Things were as good as could be.
Mom didn't come home one morning not long after V had turned 10. He did as he promised mom he would do: he waited a couple of days, then he knew he would have to take care of himself. He let his curiosity get the better of him, however, and did seek out the truth as to what happened. He eventually found her body, and then he found out that his mom had gotten caught in some crossfire between some Valentino boys and the 6th Street guys. As unfortunate as it was, this was the way of life in the combat zone. He did his best not to be consumed with it and move on.
He was still working under the same fixer since he was 6 and, after the death of his mother, considered him as close to a father as he could. A couple of weeks after his 14th birthday said fixer was killed when an incendiary device went off in his apartment and V found himself once again alone. Without a relationship with any other fixer in town at this point, he turned to the only other work he knew: walking the streets. It beat having to steal to survive and he may as well monetize what the men kept wolf whistling him over. He started drinking to deal with his grief and with, well, the work, and it wasn't long until he couldn't recall what it was like to be sober.
When he was 16 he fell in with a Valentino boy named Gabriel Mendoza Ruiz. The two hit it off and it wasn't long before V was dealing drugs for him and maybe sharing a little bit of the product with him too. They grew close over time and it wasn't long before the two of them were dating like a match made in heaven. As they, dated V started to feel that being Valerie just wasn't right for him and Gabe helped him transition into the Vincent we know today - in more ways than one. Not long after Vincent turned 19 Gabe drugged him and had plans to sell him into the trafficking business but due to some upgrades he'd gotten alongside his testosterone implant, he metabolized through the drugs faster than expected and woke up. V realized that the only person he could trust in Night City was himself, and so he killed Gabe and the entirety of the crew and left.
He finished transitioning and worked hard to create relationships with the other fixers in town, especially the fixer in his stomping grounds of Heywood - Sebastian "Padre" Ibarra - to create a larger, more steady income that meshed well with his evening work. He did jobs, he walked the streets, he studied hard to become a netrunner - no small feat for a streetkid with absolutely no education. He eventually felt that he had done everything he could in Night City and heard from some people passing through that Atlanta, GA was the next great place to be - an up and coming Night City, if you will. So, in 2075, he went.
Atlanta was much of the same: gang violence, fixers with drugs to move, people to kill, corpos to screw over. It was more humid and more run down, less dazzling than Night City. He fell in with a group of netrunners that liked to fight with NetWatch and learned all he could from them about programming, hacking, netrunning, and the like. He sunk money into getting some of the top of the line hard and software for himself. He better learned how to break ICE and write ICE, and all about the Black Wall that NetWatch had put up. Eventually, however, the call for home grew too much and he left Atlanta and went back west to Night City.
--- Game Plot & Spoilers Ahead ---
Arriving back in Night City in late May/early June 2077, V makes his way to the El Coyote Cojo in Heywood. He's mugged on the way, but makes it back in, setting his nose while the bartender Pepe, a friend from before he left, explained he was in debt to a slimey new fixer, Kirk Sawyer. V offers to help and strikes a deal with Kirk: steal a Rayfield Aerondight S9 from some corpo asshole, clear the debt. On the way to the site V meets back up with Padre, who gives him a ride there and reconnects. V explains that he had just arrived back in town and Padre promises to call with jobs and spread the word he's back. V attempts to steal the Rayfield, only to be stopped by a man named Jackie Welles, who also wishes to steal the car. The two are captured by NCPD and ordered to be killed. The NCPD rough the two up and dump them in the slums of Heywood, where Jackie feels the two seem to get along well and offers to take him home for some dinner. Over the course of the next 6 months V and Jackie do jobs together as a pair of solos, working alongside T-Bug, a highly skilled netrunner. V becomes part of the Welles family, with Mama Welles essentially adopting him. With their wild success V eventually gets himself an apartment in the Watson District in Little China.
In December of 2077 Jackie is contacted by Dexter DeShawn and told that he has a job for the two of them. V and Jackie are to steal a mysterious biochip known as the Relic from Arasaka Corporation. V set about doing the footwork of investigating about what the Relic is and why one Miss Evelynn Parker wished to have the chip stolen. Evelynn Parker gave important information about the mission to the Relic, including a braindance with the layout of the Relic's owner's suite. With all of the information that he needs for this, V meets up with Jackie to retrieve a Militech bot nicknamed the Flathead from a gang known as the Maelstrom. V and Jackie barely make it out with the Flathead, but they make it out none the less. With all of the information they need at the Flathead, they meet up with their netrunner T-Bug and Dexter at The Afterlife. With everything in place the two go to the location to steal the Relic.
During the heist things go terribly wrong as Yorinobu Arasaka kills his fater, Saburo, and triggers a lockdown in the hotel. T-Bug is killed by Arasaka's netrunners, V and Jackie try to escape but the enclosure for the Relic is damaged. Jackie inserts the Relic into his cyberware, but as the two work on escaping the hotel, Jackie is fatally wounded. V inserts the Relic into his own cyberware and make sit out of the hotel to meet up with DeShawn. V lies and says that the Relic was destroyed on the way out and DeShawn shoots V in the head and dumps V's body in a landfill.
V eventually awakens in the landfill and is haunted by the digital ghost of Johnny Silverhand, who had died in 2023 when he nuked Arasaka Tower. Goro Takemura, Saburo's bodyguard who was blamed for Saburo's murder, recovers V and takes him back to Night City after a vehicle chase and fire fight, which leaves V quite wounded. Once V comes to, his ripperdoc Viktor Vektor explains that V's death triggered a resurrection nanotech on the Relic, which triggered an irreversible process where Johnny Silverhand's memories and personality will overwrite V's. The biochip cannot be removed due to the damage to his neural systems, and V needs to figure out how to remove Silverhand and survive.
V begins to see Johnny's memories through the biochip and malfunctions and figured out that Johnny's then girlfriend Alt Cunningham had created a program called Soulkiller. Soulkiller was able to copy netrunners' minds through neural links, but the process destroyed the target's brain. Arasaka had kidnapped Alt and forced her to create an alternate version of Soulkiller to store minds in an incredibly secure Arasaka data farm called Mikoshi. Johnny fails to save her before Arasaka used Soulkiller on Alt, so he nukes Arasaka Tower. Johnny is captured and Arasaka uses Soulkiller on him as well.
With this realization, V understands that the "Secure Your Soul" program is a repurposed version of Soulkiller that they advertise publicly as a way for the rich and famous to live forever and that Johnny was something of a prototype.
V ultimately allows Johnny to take over his body in order to execute another operation against Arasaka Tower. V convinces the now super AI that was once Alt Cunningham to infiltrate Mikoshi and use Soulkiller on himself, remove Johnny, then re-inject V back into his own body. She agrees, with the condition that V/Johnny himself have to upload a daemon of her writing to drop Arasaka security into Mikoshi because she cannot infiltrate it herself.
Johnny, controlling V, runs through the operation with Rogue and Weyland, and together the three storm Arasaka Tower. They fight their way into the server room and destroy Arasaka security to allow Alt in and she clears the path for V to enter the server required to execute Soulkiller so that he can enter Mikoshi himself. Before they can enter the Soulkiller room Adam Smasher - who has since been hired by Arasaka as security - arrives to kill Johnny again and finally kill Rogue. He succeeds in killing Rogue, but Johnny kills Smasher, and retrieves Rogue's gun. From here Johnny enters the room and jacks V's body in and allows Alt to execute Soulkiller.
Within the net Johnny finds V and the two sit and chat for a few minutes while they wait for Alt to finish off Mikoshi's netrunners and continue to run Soulkiller. Alt eventually joins the two and has bad news: she had not taken V's organic body into account and the DNA reconfiguration had progressed too far; the body's immune system is attacking its own neurons and no matter what she does V will die. The biochip had irreversibly changed the host body so that it no longer belonged to V and saw V as an actual intruder, while Johnny was the correct owner. V and Johnny discuss it: V had already agreed that, if it came to it, he would give Johnny the body so that Johnny could have another chance at life. Johnny argues that they were friends, Johnny wouldn't fuck V over like that, and V disagrees.
Johnny ultimately moves away from the well that would return him to V's body and, instead, attempts to cross the bridge to join Alt. V appears and violently protests against Johnny's choice, going so far as to beat the bits out of him. V eventually backs off, apologizing for being hot blooded. V explains to Johnny that despite Johnny being a dickhead he didn't deserve to die. When Johnny tried to cross the bridge to give V another chance at life V actually stopped him and shoved him into the well to return to the body. V went with Alt to end his own life and be part of something bigger.