Soulkiller

Soulkiller is a Black Program written by Alt Cunningham during her employment at ITS, and was later stolen by the Arasaka Corporation. 2000s - 2010s When Alt began work on the program that became Soulkiller, it was a storage matrix intended to contain artificial (non-human) personalities. However, during its development, she was awed to realize that this matrix could also be used not only to store the minds of living persons, but to transfer these digitized engrams to and from physical bodies seamlessly. Alt envisioned it as a form of immortality; a tool to preserve the consciousness and memories of dying individuals.
Alt's employer, ITS would eventually assume control of the data matrixs' program and renamed it Soulkiller, using her foundational work to "build a killer". By the 2010s, Soulkiller had become an incredibly powerful anti-personnel program, capable of tracing and extracting the mind of an intruding netrunner in seconds. The program had such a notorious reputation that even non-netrunners knew of what it did as "the closest thing to Hell on Earth". However, due to its enormous size and complexity, this version of Soulkiller could only operate within the systems it was installed.
In 2013, Alt was abducted by Arasaka executive Toshiro Harada and, under duress, wrote an improved version of the program from scratch, capable of freely traversing the Net. Once complete, Toshiro used this new Soulkiller to eliminate Alt, unaware she had secretly coded into it a Controller override. After being digitized, Alt used her command over Soulkiller to eliminate her guards and assume control of the Arasaka mainframe and security systems. However, as she prepared to reunite her engram with her body, an ill-timed rescue attempt led by Johnny Silverhand resulted in her physical form being disconnected from the machines. Johnny left with Alt's unconscious body, unaware her digital form was now stranded inside the Net, and the most dangerous version of Soulkiller ever designed had entered Arasaka's possession.
2020s During the Fourth Corporate War, Arasaka iterated on the new Soulkiller, employing the 2.5 version to kill key targets whilst preserving their engrams for later interrogation. Prior to the AHQ Disaster, Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand, among others, were tasked with wiping out Soulkiller from the Arasaka mainframe, successfully destroying traces of the 3.0 version. Despite this, they only pushed Arasaka's investigation a few years back.
Arasaka continued to work on Soulkiller, storing engrams in one of their databases called Mikoshi.[5] After Johnny Silverhand's death in 2023, his soulkilled engram was eventually put in Mikoshi, however how it was placed there is unknown.
The unleashed R.A.B.I.D.S. during the DataKrash were based on a twisted version of Soulkiller, and were designed to resemble Rache Bartmoss himself
2040s Hanako Arasaka begins work on a new version of Soulkiller. Focused on Alt's original vision of using the program to preserve a person's consciousness and transfer it into a clone body. In contrast, previous versions of Soulkiller were used by Arasaka as a weapon. This later became the "Secure Your Soul" program.
While early versions of Soulkiller transferred the original personality away into its matrix, leaving a mindless husk that eventually died: Later versions allowed engrams to be created without killing the individual if need be.
2070s In the 2070s, information regarding Mikoshi access points or technical specifications was classified, and any request to know about them was denied, however, access points could be found in every major Arasaka Tower HQ found worldwide
Arasaka, with the help of Anders Hellman, created the Relic project, where they would store the engrams of soulkilled individuals and where they could interact with them. The main purpose of this project was to successfully transfer the mind of an engram into the body of a person, though the only aim of this project was for Saburo Arasaka's sole use.
In 2077, after multiple Relic 1.0 failures, Anders Hellman decided to try out the 2.0 experimental version due to pressure from Yorinobu Arasaka and his investors. With a long list of VIP engrams ready to be used due to Soulkiller being tested in secret, Hellman decided to put Johnny Silverhand's engram on the new version of the Relic due to belief that the experimental version would fail and would destroy an undesirable engram like Johnny Silverhand in the process.
Alt Cunningham appeared after V breached the Blackwall to ask about the Soulkiller program. It was revealed that she was not fully Alt but an A.I merged with her remaining consciousness, continuing to use her engramic data as a new entity. For 50 years she held onto the image of Alt to ensure she did not get turned into complete data like other AIs. She states to V that if they go through with the deal: She can use Soulkiller to separate V and Johnny, however that while their consciousness, neural engrams would be uploaded that the rest would cease to exist.

Secure Your Soul

The Relic is a series of Arasaka biochips allowing the storage and manifested reading of digitized human psyches known as engrams. At least two separate versions of the biochip prototype were developed by 2077, according to the summarized internal report assembled by the former director of the Relic project, Anders Hellman, upon turning coat for the benefit of Arasaka's rival corporation, Kang Tao.
The first version was intended for the commercial market and advertised as a means for wealthy elites to store their psyche in form of an engram capable of basic communication with their loved ones. The form itself would have consciousness but lack true self-awareness. In spite of its limitations, Relic 1.0 has managed to enter the market and the lives of Night City residents, giving hope by providing a notion of immortality truly approaching human reach. Arasaka logs on the other hand reveal that the Relic's initial purpose was of a more capitalist nature - using Soulkiller on celebrities, important cultural icons, and artists in order to create engrams for commercialization purposes.
The second version of the biochip was a top secret project, personally commissioned and supervised by Saburo Arasaka. It was intended for internal use within the corporation only, never to be sold. Unlike the original biochip, which was only used to communicate with pre-saved engrams with artificially integrated limitations, Relic 2.0 contains a system which was meant to install and activate the engram in a new organic body. The core idea of the project was to implant a digitized psyche into a new host, although only after the body had all neural and cardiac functions terminated, at which point it would automatically expand into the host's brain using nanotechnology. In short, a person who copied their mind onto Relic 2.0 and then died could be restored to life in a new body using the chip, effectively granting them immortality. Internal testing of Relic 2.0 showed promising results, but Arasaka scientists had difficulty preventing the personality construct from becoming emotionally unstable after re-implantation, and the biochip eventually failed in every trial. The Arasaka Corporation also confirmed that Relic 2.0 would not activate if implanted in living individuals who were on the verge of death. The project had not progressed past the trial phase until an unplanned undertaking of the process by a living individual. Examination of the Relic's advancement proved that, despite keeping the subject alive, it was continuing its functional expansion and taking over the motor and psychological functions of the host.
Technical Details of Transport and Storage The Relic biochip must be stored and transported in stable thermal conditions and in an appropriate neural environment. Even momentary exposure to temperatures falling outside the recommended range could result in permanent damage to the technology. The state of the art of research on the technology in 2077 recommended to store the Relic device in Arasaka laboratory-certified isothermal containers to ensure a stable storage temperature within 2-8 degrees Celsius (35.6-46.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Soulkiller vs Cynosure

Cynosure was a Militech project created to counter the Arasaka Soulkiller program.
Project Cynosure, as it was known, was a great undertaking in AI research. It involved using neural adaptive technologies to capture presumed rogue AIs that lurked beneath the sanitized surface of the old NET, and to harness and utilize their capabilities for Militech's own goals. If Soulkiller worked to kill and capture the engrams of netrunners brave (or foolish) enough to take on Arasaka, Militech's Cynosure would do something similar — to capture rogue AIs, utilizing advanced neural networks and use their adaptive capabilities to wreak havoc on both the real world and cyberspace. The project continued in secret in an underground facility known as Cynosure Site C, located beneath Night City's Pacifica district, where experiments were conducted in honing this tool for Militech-affiliated netrunners to utilize in the depths of the NET.
Unfortunately for Militech, the first major setback occurred in the form of the DataKrash, which wiped out much of the old NET's infrastructure and unleashed many of the rogue AIs Militech hoped to capture into the fragments of cyberspace.
2060s - 2070s The DataKrash was not the end of Project Cynosure, even though Militech on the surface shuttered the old research facility beneath Pacifica. In the mid-late 2060s, Militech began working on a possible reactivation of the program. The people tasked with this operation were Dr. Evan McRay, Lisa Smith, the twins Aurore and Aymeric Cassel, among a few others. Complications stemming from the Unification War, the possibility of an international/intercorporate incident between Arasaka and Netwatch, made Militech's goal of reactivating Cynosure extremely difficult, if not outright impossible. The dangers that this project could posses ultimately led to the cancellation of the operation.
The radically altered nature of the post-DataKrash NET changed Militech's modus operandi; given that rogue AIs ran amok beyond the NetWatch-sponsored Blackwall (which in itself, was an AI of dubious loyalties), reactivating Project Cynosure to harness the power of the Blackwall itself would have been a breach of extant corporate treaties alongside international laws designed to keep rogue AIs from spilling out across the new NET. This did not stop individuals of various affiliations from searching for the remains of Project Cynosure, whether it was Militech itself, the New United States government, or even Kurt Hansen's BARGHEST. Despite the obvious ethical concerns, probing the outer reaches of the Blackwall using the remains of Cynosure as a launchpad continued, with not much success for the interested parties