Cyberpunk 2077 — How Much Reason Do You Need to Want to Live?

※ This essay discusses major scenes and endings from Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion, Phantom Liberty.

Where the Dead Become Drinks

I settle onto a barstool at the Afterlife and say one short word: the name of a dead mercenary.

Here, the name of anyone who meets a spectacular end becomes a cocktail. Fame bought with a life turns into alcohol lingering on the tongue, and the survivors willingly order that name to remember the dead.

While I drift into thought, the bartender Claire mixes a drink with practiced hands and sets it before me. Beyond the beads of water on the cold glass, the legends of Night City shimmer quietly from one corner of a worn menu.

Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 is a fine capitalist city where everything, from organs to memories, comes with a price tag. The player becomes a mercenary named V, scraping for jobs on this barren market floor, deciding whom to stab in the back, and struggling to build a name.

Unfortunately, the surest path to recognition around here is not a long and healthy life. Quite the opposite. It is dying at exactly the kind of spectacular moment people will remember.

The Afterlife, the mercenaries’ favorite haunt, was once a morgue. It has since changed trades, becoming a place where big-name fixers and hulking mercs knock back drinks, but anyone hoping to leave behind a signature cocktail with their name on it must first stop breathing. An inspired bit of marketing.

Every night, the bar stages the farce of perfectly living people shouting the names of the dead into thin air. It is loud for a funeral parlor converted from a morgue, but at least it knows how to turn a wake into a bar tab.

When the Man Behind the Name Was Still Alive

Back then, Jackie Welles was alive and breathing. Even as he and V clawed their way along the bottom of Night City, he kept looking up at the penthouses and made no effort to hide his fantasy of spelling his own name in neon.

The first day he planted himself at the Afterlife’s bar, he bragged as though dying a legend were the finest retirement plan around. He even handed the bartender Claire the recipe for the cocktail that would bear his name: vodka on the rocks, lime juice, ginger beer, and a splash of love. He had not even set foot in the major leagues, yet he had already mixed the toast for his induction into the hall of legends.

What brought them to that polished mercenary bar was a job to steal an Arasaka chip. Sneak into the luxury hotel Konpeki Plaza, lift the goods, and slip back out—a refreshingly straightforward recruitment notice for a suicide squad. If they pulled it off, they would have more money and fame than they had seen in their lives.

Jackie grabbed the lifeline, convinced his chance had finally dropped from the sky. What neither of them had accounted for was Night City’s warped sense of humor. That strong, gleaming rope from above had thoughtfully arrived already tied into a noose fitted neatly around his neck.

Behind the cold walls of the Arasaka hotel, a son who held power strangled his father and passed it off as poisoning. From that moment, everything began to go off plan.

When the case holding the chip broke, Jackie slotted it into his own head. They fought through a hail of bullets and made it into the Delamain cab, but the bleeding would not stop. Jackie pulled out the chip and handed it to V.

The partner who had been talking about the future only moments earlier became an unanswering body, and Delamain asked where he should take him. Only the chip, still carrying Jackie’s last warmth, remained inside V’s head.

At the Afterlife, Claire mixed vodka, lime, and ginger beer, added the “splash of love” Jackie had asked for, and set down the glass. Jackie Welles. In precisely the way he had longed for while alive, his name became a drink.

People will read the menu, call his name, and chew over old memories. The things he liked simply remain. But his name cannot bring back the future he would have seen had he lived.

Under the lights of the noisy bar, I look again at Jackie’s name, bound forever to the menu. The chip he handed to V is now silently eating away at the future of the one left behind.

V Still Didn't Want to Die

Because of the biochip Jackie passed on, the ghost of a rockerboy dead for decades moved into V’s head without so much as knocking. When the fixer trembling at the thought of Arasaka put a bullet through V’s skull and dumped the body in a landfill, the chip seemed like a remarkably good first-aid kit. It patched the hole in V’s brain and returned a would-be corpse to active mercenary duty.

The problem is that this damned lifesaver has no interest in saving V. The Relic is evicting V’s consciousness to make room for its new tenant, Johnny. Leave the chip in and V is erased; pull it out too soon and V becomes a corpse on the spot.

The doctor’s verdict gives V a few weeks at most. The machine that saved V from the bullet is now a timer gnawing away at the life it preserved.

And so the mercenary who dreamed of becoming a legend takes on the least profitable job imaginable: saving their own life. V hunts down the people who designed it, bows to corporate bastards, and digs through every corner of the city.

V simply did not want to die.

There was no grand plan to survive, become someone great, or save the world. Even a miraculous recovery would not suddenly make a ruined life exceptional.

Everything else could come later. Why should the instinct to live need a résumé and a cover letter?

Phantom Liberty places a woman dying just as surely as V before this irritating question: Song So Mi, codenamed Songbird.

To survive, she opens with a scam sweet enough for V to take the bait. Rescue the president from the plane that has crashed in Dogtown, she promises, and she will cure the Relic inside V’s head.

Someone Else Who Wanted to Live

For as long as the lie held together, Songbird was always on the other end of the line. She was the one who knew the route, the cure, and the next move. But when escape was finally within reach, V was the one holding up the woman who had promised to save them.

Leaning on V’s shoulder, So Mi was too spent to walk on her own. It was the price of forcing open yet another crack in the Blackwall to break through the spaceport cordon. She was President Myers’s right hand and the NUSA’s finest netrunner, yet each time she connected beyond that barrier to the old Net, where rogue AIs roamed, her mind and body crumbled a little further.

V, with the Relic eating through their nerves. So Mi, used as an instrument of the state while she is driven out of her own body. Believing her promise, V had secured the neural matrix said to be capable of saving them both, and brought her this far.

When V laid her on the cold metal seat of the train bound for the shuttle, a belated confession slipped out between ragged breaths. The device that was supposed to save them both could save only one person. With the shuttle gate already in sight, she placed her own chance of survival in V’s hands.

When I heard that confession, a strange pity rose in me before the sense of betrayal.

If she had kept silent to the end, she could have gone to the moon with V’s help. But at the last moment, So Mi put her own life on the line and confessed the lie. The person who had deceived me to survive was now telling me why I might leave her behind.

That choice cannot erase the deaths along the road behind her. V had forced their way through this quagmire of a job on the hope of surviving, and Reed was waiting in front of the shuttle.

Hand So Mi over to the government, he offered, and they would cure V. Reed believed it was the only way to save his broken subordinate. For So Mi, it was a road back to life as a tool of the Blackwall. For V, it was the last chance to save their own life.

V kept the gun trained on him but could not pull the trigger for a long while. Reed did not step aside. Only after the shot rang out did the way open.

I could not fully digest the fact that I had been deceived, or the sacrifices that deception had caused. Even so, I wanted this woman, now so small she seemed ready to break, to board that shuttle and make it all the way to the moon.

The shuttle’s heavy doors closed. V watched the craft rise with the roar of its engines. As the weight pressing down on V’s shoulder lifted, the hands that had held her had nowhere left to go. Even as V watched the flames recede, the Relic was still eating through their nerves.

Before the Glass Again

Vodka, lime, and ginger beer mingle one after another in the cold glass. When the final splash of love falls in, I lift it and speak Jackie’s name. There is a sorrowful but unmistakable comfort in calling out to an empty seat with the name of the man who once roamed the streets beside me.

In memory, he is always dreaming of the chrome-bright major leagues, flushed with excitement before the huge job that will change his life. His face as he imagines the drink that will bear his name, insisting that everything will be different once this one score is done.

No one can know whether he would have kept chasing that dream or begun to long for an entirely different life; those possibilities lie beyond the moment where his time stopped. The people left behind can only repeat his old jokes and the things he said that now sound like last words, over and over.

On the bar at the Afterlife, clear beads of water gather on the outside of the glass that bore his name and run down. The man to whom the drink truly belonged would never sit in this seat.

If he had lived to hold that cold glass, what silly thing would he be saying today, breaking into that booming laugh of his?