How Did Johnny Silverhand Get Into the Relic?

Johnny Silverhand got into the Relic because Arasaka turned his mind into an engram with Soulkiller after the 2023 raid, stored it for fifty years, and then the Relic's project lead, Anders Hellman, loaded it onto the experimental Relic 2.0 chip. That chip is the one V ends up carrying after the Konpeki Plaza heist in 2077. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Step one: captured and Soulkilled in 2023#

The game shows the start through Johnny's own memory, in the mission Love Like Fire. After the raid on the tower, Johnny makes it back to the roof, gets knocked loose from Rogue's grip as the helicopter lifts off, and is shot by Adam Smasher. He wakes up as Arasaka's prisoner. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Saburo Arasaka interrogates him in person and has him put through Soulkiller, the program Alt Cunningham wrote that copies a mind and destroys the original. His body is buried in the oil fields outside Night City, where V can later find his dog tags in the side job Chippin' In. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Step two: fifty years in Mikoshi#

The engram goes into Mikoshi, the data fortress where Arasaka keeps the minds it has captured. Johnny's sits there for more than fifty years. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Step three: Hellman picks Johnny for the Relic 2.0#

The Relic is Arasaka's biochip for storing and running engrams. The commercial Relic 1.0 lets families talk to a copy of someone who has died. Relic 2.0 was a secret project Saburo commissioned for himself: once a host's brain and heart had stopped, the chip was meant to spread through the brain and install the stored engram, so a dead man could wake in a new body. (Cyberpunk 2077)

It never worked. Anders Hellman, who ran the project, reports that every trial failed. For the prototype, he loaded Johnny's engram from Arasaka's store of soulkilled minds, betting the trial would fail too and destroy an engram nobody at the company would miss. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Step four: the Konpeki Plaza heist#

By 2077 the prototype was in the hands of Saburo's son Yorinobu at Konpeki Plaza, packed in a case built to keep it cold. The fixer Dexter DeShawn hired V and Jackie Welles to steal it. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Heist")

The heist goes wrong when Yorinobu kills his father in the suite. Escaping the hotel, Jackie plugs the Relic into himself to keep it safe. He's badly hurt, and before he dies in the Delamain cab he hands the chip to V, who slots it in. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Heist")

Dex then shoots V in the head. V should be dead. Instead the Relic does what it was built for: it repairs V's brain and starts installing the engram it carries. That's how Johnny wakes up inside V. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Why it's killing V#

Relic 2.0 was meant for an empty body. V's mind is still there, so the chip keeps rewriting V's neurons to fit Johnny's engram, and V's own personality loses ground. That's the clock behind the whole main story, and the endings guide covers how it plays out. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The tabletop version#

Cyberpunk RED tells Johnny's death differently, so its account of the engram is different too. There, Smasher kills Johnny in the labs with an autoshotgun. Before the survivors escape, Spider Murphy slots a chip that Alt had given her years before into the back of Johnny's skull. The books don't spell out what was on it, and they never mention Mikoshi or a Relic. (Cyberpunk RED)

Cyberpunk 2077 also warns that Johnny's memory of 2023 isn't reliable, and Alt tells V that an engram is data acting like a person. Whether the Johnny on the Relic is really Johnny, or an echo, is left for the player to decide. (Cyberpunk 2077)