Hans never imagined that after completing Cyberpunk 2077 yet again, an unprecedented game easter egg—one he'd never heard of or seen before—would suddenly appear on his screen.
When he controlled V to breach Arasaka's underground Mikoshi server once more, blowing Adam Smasher's corpse to pieces with a shotgun, and then gazed down at Night City as the King of the City from his flying car, a line of text suddenly popped up on the screen.
[Are you satisfied with the ending of this story, with everything that happened in this cyber world?]
[1—I'm satisfied. After all... life is always filled with regrets from beginning to end.]
[2—I'm not satisfied. If everything is destined tragedy, why did I embark on this journey?]
Satisfied?
Jackie's twin pistols gathering dust in his game room's storage, David and Rebecca reduced to nothing but cold text on a gravestone, protagonist V still having only months to live...
How could he possibly be satisfied?
Driven by this dissatisfaction, Hans pressed the second option without hesitation.
"I've never seen this easter egg before. I should reload and try this again later... maybe record it and post it online to see if anyone knows what this is."
Hans sat up, staring at the screen with interest, watching this sudden dialogue box appear in the game.
[Then, are you willing to try again, to make up for everything, to see if you can truly save a city... or burn it all to ash? Even if this time, you might have to burn yourself?
Please think carefully and give your answer. Once you make your choice, there's no going back!
Player, please make your choice.]
[1—Forget it. V is V, I am me. No matter how strong I am in the game, it's still fake.]
[2—From this moment on, ignite this small spark of mine!]
Need you even ask? Of course he'd choose the second option!
After Hans selected it without hesitation, he suddenly noticed something seemed off.
This option seemed different from the typical choices encountered in the game.
The mysterious dialogue box in the game wasn't talking to V, whom he controlled, but seemed more like... it was conversing with the player outside the game screen.
But...
Wasn't this even more interesting?
Hans excitedly took a sip of his iced cola, eagerly reading the text that followed.
[Then, please choose your beginning. Out of kindness, I've provided you with similar options.]
[Choice 1—A Bakker family nomad, a foolish hacker standing at the edge of the Blackwall out of curiosity. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.]
[Choice 2—A hacker from Arasaka Corporation's hacker training facility, ordered to dig for Old Net data in the Blackwall due to work requirements. Foolish gravedigger.]
[Choice 3—A Voodoo Boys street kid who, together with his friends, deep-dives into cyberspace, ignorantly calling upon demons. Pitiful nobody.]
After just a quick read, Hans had several thoughts.
First, all three options the game provided were related to hackers, or rather cyberspace, the Blackwall, and AI.
"Could it be that what's talking to me is an active AI?"
Hans made a relatively reasonable guess. After all, according to the game's setting, the player's identity was very likely a rogue AI, while protagonist V was just a tool controlled by the player.
As for choosing an identity, Hans found the decision wasn't difficult to make.
First, he immediately ruled out the third option—the Voodoo Boys street kid. When he played the game, what disgusted him most were the Scavengers, followed by the Voodoo Boys.
Scavengers were a group that lurked in the streets, surviving by scavenging corpses, or even directly kidnapping and killing others to harvest and sell their cyberware—organ traffickers.
The Voodoo Boys, on the other hand, were human traitors with extremely strong racial consciousness.
The Voodoo Boys were a gang mainly composed of the wandering Haitian people, primarily active in the Net, possessing powerful hacking skills and their own large server called 'Poseidon'.
They were not only extremely xenophobic but also defeatists. In the cyber world where humans and rogue AIs were irreconcilably opposed, their ultimate goal was to break through the 'Blackwall'—the firewall preventing AI invasion of the real world.
They hoped to release AIs this way, let AIs dominate the world, then serve them as dogs, becoming the AIs' top lackeys in the new AI-dominated world.
Completely inhuman.
Option 2's Arasaka background looked somewhat familiar.
In the Cyberpunk anime Edgerunners, the female protagonist Lucy escaped from there. Called a hacker training facility, it was actually a human mining rig concentration camp.
Arasaka collected children with hacking talents, threw them in there to mine Old Net data in cyberspace day and night without rest.
Starting with this background... honestly, Hans found it quite interesting.
As for option one.
The Bakker family was actually the background family when the game's protagonist V chose the nomad start. Protagonist V wandered all the way to Night City after running away from this family.
From a background perspective, there weren't any major pitfalls, and he might even be able to hook up with protagonist V...
Wait, this chat box didn't say what year it would send me to.
"Please don't send me to an even more distant future and throw me straight into the Fifth Corporate War."
However, before Hans could start making his choice, the options on screen suddenly began flashing. Before Hans could react, option one representing the Bakker background...
directly disappeared!
Now Hans didn't dare wait any longer and immediately selected option two—he'd rather be a mining rig at Arasaka than end up with a disgusting Voodoo Boys background.
As Hans muttered and pressed option two, his heart filled with both anxiety and excitement as he waited.
The computer screen in front of him suddenly jumped to the game's main menu after he made his choice, then the image began flashing constantly.
This flashing initially looked like the game's 'overclock' effect, with just red and blue flashing at the edges, but soon the entire screen's image collapsed into a mosaic.
As black and red light flashed constantly, Hans felt his vision go black. The next moment, his hearing, vision, and touch all disappeared, leaving only dead silence and darkness.
In the haze, he could vaguely see a line of text flash by.
[Infiltrating...]
.....
[Infiltration complete.]
The moment the text before his eyes disappeared, Hans suddenly opened his eyes.
No, not just Hans.
Chaotic memories of a boy named Mercer flashed before his eyes, and as severe pain struck from his mind, he instinctively reached for behind his ear.
But even such a simple action became incredibly difficult at this moment, as if his entire body was being torn apart and cooked!
"Fuck...!"
After this trembling, almost instinctive curse escaped his lips, Hans's shaking hand finally grasped a data cable behind his ear, then yanked it out forcefully.
The next moment, chaotic noise filled his ears. The room's lights flickered a few times before going out completely. The computer screen nearby and the server placed not far away exploded with a bang, emitting acrid black smoke and sparks.
In the darkness, only a few LED lights flickered with red light. Hans panicked and rolled over, actually tumbling directly off the hacker chair.
"Cough! Cough cough! Fuck..."
He struggled on the ground, trying to prop himself up with his arms, but piercing warning sounds filled his ears.
"Beep! Beep! Alert! Alert! Unknown data surge detected! Server overload detected!"
"Identified as rogue AI attack. Protection mode activated!"
Blinding red lights suddenly illuminated the room. Hans looked around in confusion, seeing only a row of hacker chairs surrounded by massive data cables.
At this moment, seven children who appeared to be between twelve and sixteen years old were removing the hacking equipment from their heads.
Besides that, right next to him on the adjacent hacker chair, another boy had black smoke rising from his head, with blood flowing from his nose, mouth, and even ears—he had died in the hacker chair.
[Welcome to the world of Cyberpunk, my friend.]
A voice without much emotional inflection, sounding like mechanical synthesis, suddenly rang in his ear.
What the hell was that sound?!
The sudden voice in his head made him feel somewhat creeped out.
Hans's mind was still somewhat foggy, but at this moment, the group of children who had removed their hacking tools were all looking at him in unison.
"What happened to Mercer?"
"Hey, are you okay?"
"Damn, the server's smoking!"
"Tony? Tony!"
"...Tony's dead."
[System reboot complete.]
[Biological monitoring back online.]
[Arasaka Mk.3 neural access pod reconnected.]
[Arasaka Type-3 RAM upgrade reloaded.]
[Arasaka...]
Hans, or rather Mercer, felt a sharp pain in his head at this moment, like someone was drilling into his brain with an electric drill—the feeling was absolutely nauseating and made it almost impossible for him to think normally.
The chaotic sounds around him made Mercer instinctively turn his head. A girl with twin ponytails was staring at him with red eyes.
Just as this twin-ponytailed girl seemed about to speak, another pale hand from outside his vision had already grasped his wrist, trying to help him up.
"Hey, Mercer, are you okay?"
Mercer turned his head and saw a beautiful girl with rainbow-colored short hair looking at him with concern.
This face looked so familiar...
Ah!
Lucy!
Mercer's eyes widened slightly as he immediately recognized the girl before him—that pretty face and distinctive rainbow-colored short hair were exactly like Lucy, the female protagonist from the anime Edgerunners!
"Lucy!? I'm still... okay..."
After responding almost instinctively, Mercer suddenly felt dizzy, and nausea and vertigo made him collapse to the ground again. This time, he completely lost consciousness.
Vaguely, he could only hear a few sentences spoken in a cold, inhuman tone.
[Code name: FF:06:B5 operation successful.]
[Can this really change everything?]
[I'm not certain.]
[But this is already the best choice.]
[Then load the program.]
[Understood.]
[Initiating operation.]
[Operation code name: Ragnarök.]
.....
[From this moment on, ignite this small spark, my friend.]
The voice in his ear gradually faded, leaving only pitch-black silence.