Engram

A digital neural engram is the construct of consciousness of an individual which has been copied into coding form. They are created using the program called Soulkiller, and many believe are the way to achieve immortality.

Overview
Digital engrams were originally produced by Alt Cunningham's project called Soulkiller. It copied the neural engrams of people but with the price of killing the original individual, though she never used it on anyone. After obtaining the program, Arasaka modified it and improved it to be more effective and regulate its lethality. They were able to use Soulkiller without killing the target, though it wouldn't copy the whole person's brain, as doing so inevitably led to it being fatal. It is possible to use Soulkiller in a deceased person, though the engram will be more of an echo of the target's memories than a true personality.

Arasaka's plan was to use a modified version of the Soulkiller program to extract the personalities of celebrities, politicians and other important individuals through their "Secure Your Soul" program and create engrams of them to use for their own gains. The ultimate goal of the program was to transfer engrams to a host through the Relic. In it's current state, if the Relic with an engram on it is inserted into another person, the engram starts to take over the host's mind, slowly morphing their personality to match that of the engram.

The engram of a person is not their true personality, as it lacks the "soul" of that person. It is only a shell of their own personality, and while it is quite similar to the original person, perhaps even enough to fool their close relatives, it is not exactly the same.

History
Not long after creating Soulkiller, in 2013 Arasaka Corporation heard about the program and kidnapped Alt in order to steal it and use it for their own purposes. Alt was the first person to ever be hit with Soulkiller, making a copy of her mind and leaving her deceased body on the physical world while her engram escaped to the Net.

Since 2013, Arasaka studied and improved Soulkiller, targeting more people with it; with a special interest in netrunners. These digital engrams were stored inside the Arasaka subnets, which risked the effects of becoming rogue AIs. In time, in order to secure the engrams and control them, the corporation created Mikoshi, an area of the Net in where they stored all the digital copies of Soulkiller's victims. By 2077, Arakasa's flagship project - Secure Your Soul - was near completion, allowing people to sign into the project and keep their original minds persevered by making a copy of their neural engrams.

Thanks to the work of Anders Hellman, leading bioengineer within Arasaka, the corporation managed to create a chip they called the Relic, which would store the engram of an individual. Its purpose was to allow people to communicate with the deceased via the chip, allowing for its users to see and interact with the digital copies of their loved ones. A secretive part of the project was Saburo Arasaka's personal request; a chip that, after inserting into a dead body, would restore its brain tissues and replace the original neural engram with a digital one. Thus the copied engram would "resurrect" in a new body.

Engrams are possible to be altered slightly after the copy of the original person is made, however these were reserved for the interrogation process at Arasaka. Altering engrams, even if slightly, was not allowed to the public.

Known engrams

 * Alt Cunningham
 * Jackie Welles (dependent)
 * Johnny Silverhand
 * V (dependent)
 * Saburo Arasaka