Engram

A digital neural engram (also known as digital construct, Soulkilled Pseudo Intellect (SPI) or ghost) is the digitalized consciousness of a human being which has been copied into coding form. They are created by 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 subject, though she never used it on anyone. After obtaining the program in 2013, 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 on a deceased person, though the engram will be more of an echo of the target's memories than a true personality.

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.

It is said by some individuals that a someone's engram 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, 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, corporate enemies and rivals. These digital engrams were stored inside the Arasaka subnets, which risked the effects of becoming rogue AIs.

In the decades since the Fourth Corporate War, many of these digital "ghosts" were able to find each other and gather in the Net, creating sanctuaries around deserted mainframes and city systems abandoned by their citizens and corporations. These ghosts usually wanted a safe place to live in peace. By 2045, it is rumored that Alt Cunningham has created a number of "ghost towns" in hidden areas of the Old Net.

Over time, in order to secure the engrams and control them, Arasaka created Mikoshi, an area of the Net in where they stored all the digital copies of Soulkiller's victims. The corporation's plan was 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. By 2077, Arakasa's flagship project of Secure Your Soul was near completion, allowing wealthy clients to sign into it and keep their original minds persevered in Mikoshi 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.

Cyberpunk RED

 * Aisha "Ai" Tang

Cyberpunk 2077

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