V (Cyberpunk 2077)

V is the mercenary the player controls in Cyberpunk 2077, a merc trying to make a name in Night City in 2077 who takes one job too big and wakes up with a dead rockerboy in their head. The game lets you choose V's body, voice, background and much of their personality, but the plot around them is fixed: V steals the Relic from Arasaka, the chip starts overwriting V with the engram of Johnny Silverhand, and the rest of the story is a race to survive it. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The three lifepaths: where V comes from#

V's background is the first real choice, and each one opens with a different prologue that ends with V meeting Jackie Welles. After that the three paths merge, though each keeps its own dialogue options for the rest of the game. (Cyberpunk 2077)

• Nomad. V grew up with the Bakkers clan and left the family life behind. Back in the Badlands, V's first job is smuggling cargo into Night City with Jackie, which ends in a chase when Arasaka-linked agents are waiting over the border. (Cyberpunk 2077)
• Street Kid. V was raised in Heywood. V's prologue starts in the El Coyote Cojo bar and sends V to steal a car for a fixer, Kirk Sawyer, where V runs into Jackie trying to steal the same car. Both are caught by the police, and V wakes up in an alley. (Cyberpunk 2077)
• Corpo. V worked counter-intelligence for Arasaka under a boss called Jenkins. When Jenkins's power play against his superior, Susan Abernathy, falls apart, V loses everything in a single afternoon and walks out onto the street with nothing but a contact, Jackie. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The game then skips six months in a montage. V and Jackie work jobs together, V rents a flat in Megabuilding H10, and they meet fixers, ripperdocs and the regulars at the Afterlife bar. The real story starts when that montage ends. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The heist at Konpeki Plaza#

The fixer Dexter DeShawn hired V and Jackie, with the netrunner T-Bug, for a job set up by Evelyn Parker: steal an experimental biochip, the Relic, from Yorinobu Arasaka's suite in Konpeki Plaza. They got the chip, but before they could leave, Saburo Arasaka arrived and his son strangled him. Yorinobu covered it up by blaming intruders, and the hotel locked down. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Heist")

T-Bug was killed by Arasaka netrunners. Jackie was badly wounded, and the Relic's carrying case was damaged, so V put the chip into their own head to save it. Jackie died in the back of a Delamain cab on the way out. Dex, panicking about the heat on him, shot V in the head and had the body dumped in a landfill. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Heist"; "Playing for Time")

What the Relic does to V#

The Relic is an Arasaka biochip built to store a human mind as an engram and write it into a living brain. The bullet should have killed V, but the chip's repair systems rebuilt V's brain around itself. The mind on the chip was Johnny Silverhand, a terrorist who had been dead for fifty years, and the chip began to overwrite V with him. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Goro Takemura, Saburo's bodyguard, pulled V from the dump. The ripperdoc Viktor Vektor explained the problem: the chip couldn't be removed without killing V, and in a matter of weeks there would be nothing left of V but Johnny. Johnny shows up soon after as a hallucination who argues with everything V does. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Playing for Time")

Act 2 is V's search for a fix. V chased the Relic's designer, Anders Hellman, with Panam Palmer; tracked down Evelyn through Judy Alvarez; and went to the Voodoo Boys, who used V to reach Alt Cunningham, an AI living beyond the Blackwall. Alt confirmed that only Arasaka's own engram vault, Mikoshi, could reverse the process. (Cyberpunk 2077)

How V treats Johnny along the way matters. Through side jobs like "Chippin' In" and conversations with him, the two can become friends or stay enemies, and that relationship changes which endings are offered. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Chippin' In")

How V's fate depends on the ending#

The final choice comes on a rooftop at the end of "Nocturne Op55N1". V decides who to trust for the last push into Arasaka Tower, and that call decides how V's story ends. The options below depend on side jobs being done first. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Nocturne Op55N1")

• The Devil. V accepts Hanako Arasaka's help and the Relic is taken out in an Arasaka orbital station. The operation fails to save V, who has about six months left. V can sign V's mind over to Mikoshi or go back to Earth to die. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Where is My Mind?")
• Temperance. On any route through Mikoshi except the Devil, V can let Johnny keep the body. V's mind crosses the Blackwall with Alt, and Johnny leaves Night City to live a second life. (Cyberpunk 2077, "New Dawn Fades")
• The Sun. V goes in with Rogue Amendiares (with Johnny driving V's body for the assault) or alone. V keeps the body, becomes an Afterlife legend and takes a job in space from a figure called Mr. Blue Eyes, still with months to live. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Path of Glory")
• The Star. V goes in with the Aldecaldos. V keeps the body and leaves Night City with the clan, heading for Tucson. Needs Panam's quest "Queen of the Highway" done. (Cyberpunk 2077, "All Along the Watchtower")
• (Don't Fear) The Reaper. If V and Johnny are close enough, Johnny suggests V walk into Arasaka Tower alone. If V wins, it leads to the Sun or Temperance outcomes. If V dies, it's game over. (Cyberpunk 2077, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper")
• Suicide. V can refuse every option and end it on the roof. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Nocturne Op55N1")

The cure V wants, a body free of the Relic with a long life ahead, isn't in any of these. Alt tells V in Mikoshi that the chip has changed V's brain too much to live more than six months, whatever happens next. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Phantom Liberty and the Tower ending#

In Phantom Liberty, Songbird, a netrunner working for the president of the NUSA, offers V a cure in exchange for help in Dogtown. V works with the FIA agent Solomon Reed and has to decide, late on, whether to help Songbird escape or hand her over to Reed. (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty)

Handing Songbird to Reed, either straight away or at the spaceport, opens the expansion's ending, The Tower. NUSA doctors remove the Relic and V survives, but wakes from a two-year coma with a brain that can no longer handle cyberware. The merc career is over, Johnny is gone, and V's friends have moved on without them. It is the only ending where V is truly cured. Getting Songbird all the way onto her shuttle rules it out and leaves only the main game's endings. (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty)

What V's choices change elsewhere#

V's romance options depend on body type and voice. Judy is open to a V with a feminine body and voice; Panam to a masculine body; River Ward to a feminine body; and Kerry Eurodyne to a masculine body and voice. A partner adds scenes to the endings that suit them. Small choices also shape who survives, from Takemura and Hellman to the Peralez family and the Mox, which is why no two playthroughs end the same way. (Cyberpunk 2077)