The Death Knell

Lark rejected Ciri's kindness, or was it a hookup? She only said that she was still adapting to her new body and did not want to go out, but needed a quiet environment to think about the past and her future.

Then she occupied the bathroom and enjoyed the bath water that Shiri had put in the bathtub before. However, she could still hear her humming through the door.

"Well, she looks quite easy-going, but she is actually very cold." The Witcher girl shrugged, sat down on the sofa next to the death knell, and looked at the TV with dull eyes: "And you can't tell that she is What a particularly powerful hacker."

"If a hacker's identity can be directly revealed from a person's appearance, then you will be a god." Su Ming smiled and rubbed Xili's hair. Sometimes this girl would still make some childish remarks: "You are not going to RB Street? Let's go have some fun. Remember to meet at the entrance of Laisheng Nightclub at eight o'clock."

"I'm not in a hurry to go play. Can you tell me about the Kiki? You said the real Johnny Silverhand is in there."

There was a slight echo in the spacious living room, and Xili blinked.

"This is a long story, and I don't really know much about technology. I'll just give you a rough idea. Just don't let it slip to V and others."

Putting aside the local wine of Night City whose raw materials were unknown, Su Ming took out the wine he brought with him from his pocket, poured a glass for himself and Xili, and started talking about the shrines and inheritance without controlling his volume. things.

Around 1995, when Saburo Arasaka, the boss of the Arasaka Group, was eighty years old, he married his third wife, a thirty-year-old woman named Michiko.

This woman was a typical Yamato Nadeshiko, who gave birth to two children for Laoden, Arasaka Yorinobu and Arasaka Hanako, and later died of illness.

Saburo Arasaka missed her very much and never renewed their relationship. He focused all his energy on Arasaka Company and his business grew bigger and bigger.

But as time passed, around 2010, Lao Deng found that his health was getting worse and worse. Many times, he lacked energy and could not concentrate on thinking. He would be out of breath even when climbing stairs or walking a few steps.

At this time, his longing for his deceased wife has almost turned into a fear of death. He misses his wife, but he would rather resurrect her than go down to find her.

He had money and people, so he naturally began to study the subject of immortality. To be precise, he asked his subordinates to study it.

And he handed over the power to Arasaka Kei, his eldest son from his ex-wife. He hid behind the scenes to take good care of his body and continued to control Arasaka's unknown secret power. It was a bit like the roots of Konoha in "Naruto"?

In short, Arasaka Kei is Lao Deng's most promising heir. He is unsmiling, serious in work, smart and tough, and he can care for his younger brothers and sisters.

But the dark affairs of the Arasaka Group were not handed over to him, and were still controlled remotely by Lao Den. Saburo Arasaka, who originally relied on big data services, mastered an important piece of information a few years later.

In the Night City of the United States, there is a talented female hacker named Ott Cunningham. Under the cultivation of ITS company, she developed a brand-new technology that can extract the human consciousness from the body and transfer it to the Internet. in space.

Later, based on this technology, she developed a technology that can confine people's consciousness in a fixed subnet space - Soul Killer.

The actual operating mechanism of Soul Killer is very terrifying. After using it on anyone, the program will digitally copy all the information in the person's brain, forming a clone consciousness that is exactly the same as the original consciousness - also known as "imprint".

The program can upload the mark to a designated subnet, and then it will kill the original consciousness in the victim, which is the so-called soul.

This is true killing without blood, just relying on network signals.

But to put it another way, as long as the soul killer's side effect of death after copying personality is removed, isn't this the personality backup technology? As long as reverse indoctrination technology and artificial human technology are developed, can people live forever?

So a plan emerged in Saburo Arasaka's mind. He secretly ordered his follower Toshiro in the United States to kidnap Ott Cunningham and obtain the soul killer technology from her.

Next is the story of Johnny holding a concert in a nightclub, and after going out with Otto, his girlfriend was kidnapped.

Ultra, who was kidnapped to the Arasaka Building, would not sit still and wait for death. While recreating the Soul Killer, she also quietly wrote a backdoor program for herself to ensure that when the Soul Killer program was used by the Arasaka Group for various reasons one day, she would not be able to survive. Able to successfully escape confinement and return to his own body.

And soon, Johnny Silverhand led his men to save Ultra. At this time, Toshiro had already used Soul Killer on Ultra, but Ultra's imprint had already escaped from the backdoor he had established. He was not locked up in the network prison prepared by the Arasaka Group, but was hidden in the subnet of the Arasaka Tower. In it, be ready to return to your body at any time.

But by mistake, Johnny broke into the laboratory and lost control of his emotions. Not only did he kill Toshiro with one shot, but he also pulled out the tube in her head before Ultra's imprint returned to her body, causing Ultra's imprint to be lost. Without a way to return to the body, the body lost its consciousness and became a corpse without consciousness.

Ultra's imprint saw Johnny holding his body but was helpless, and had to be trapped in the subnet of Arasaka Tower.

In the following years, Ultra's imprint found a way to tell Johnny that he was alive and safe. However, when Johnny heard that Ultra's imprint was trapped in the Arasaka Network, he was furious and cooperated with Military Technology. In 2023 Destroyed Arasaka Tower with a small nuclear bomb.

During this raid, Johnny successfully uploaded a virus to Arasaka Tower's network, and with the help of Spider Murphy, released Ultra's imprint, which allowed her to run from the regional subnet to the larger cyberspace. in space.

It is said that in the following years, Ultra not only hid in the Black Wall, but also established a "Ghost Town" in a subnet in Hong Kong.

From then on, her imprints have only one goal: to liberate and guide those imprints secretly uploaded to the online prison by the Arasaka Group using "soul killers", so that they can escape into the ghost realm and merge with herself to form powerful beings with more information and abilities. AI, taking over all digital networks.

Perhaps Ultra himself was already dead from the moment his body was extracted by the Soul Killer, and what is now wandering on the other side of the black wall is just an AI program with all her memories and simulated emotions.

It's a bit off topic. Let's talk about Johnny Silverhand who rescued Ultra Mark. When he evacuated, he was caught on the spot by Adam Hammer, a mercenary hired by Saburo Arasaka, and he was taken prisoner to Lao Deng.

Not only did the nuclear bomb blow up the Arasaka Building, it also put the Arasaka Group at a disadvantage in the face of military technology in the corporate war. Old Den was very angry and wanted to shut up Johnny, so he used the Soul Killer program on him.

Since then, Johnny's imprint has been locked in the super server, or soul prison-Mikoshi, built by Saburo Arasaka deep underground in Arasaka Tower.