Cynosure

Cynosure was a Militech project created to counter the Arasaka Soulkiller project.

Overview
The main goal of Project Cynosure was to capture and contain Rogue AIs from the Net, and later use them in various applications. Militech, NetWatch, and EBM were involved in the project.

2013 - 2020
During the height of the pre-DataKrash Net, Militech and Arasaka were locked in a hostile and at times lethal rivalry for technological dominance. The release of Soulkiller, Arasaka's flagship digital superweapon and virus, spurred Militech to attempt to create something similar in impact but with a different set of specifications in mind.

Project Cynosure, as it was known, involved using neural adaptive technologies to capture presumed rogue AIs that lurked beneath the sanitized surface of the old NET, and to harness and utilize their capabilities for Militech's own goals. If Soulkiller worked to kill and capture the engrams of netrunners brave (or foolish) enough to take on Arasaka, Militech's Cynosure would do something similar — to capture rogue AIs utilizing advanced neural networks and use their adaptive capabilities to wreak havoc on both the real world and cyberspace. The project continued in secret in an underground facility known as Cynosure Site C, located beneath Night City's Pacifica district, where experiments were conducted in honing this tool for Militech-affiliated netrunners to utilize in the depths of the NET.

Unfortunately for Militech, the first major setback occurred in the form of the DataKrash, which wiped out much of the old NET's infrastructure and unleashed many of the rogue AIs Militech hoped to capture into the fragments of cyberspace.

2060s - 2070s
The DataKrash was not the end of Project Cynosure, even though Militech on the surface shuttered the old research facility beneath Pacifica. In the mid-late 2060s, Militech began working on a possible reactivation of the program. Complications stemming from the Unification War, the possibility of an international/intercorporate incident between Arasaka and Netwatch, made Militech's goal of reactivating Cynosure extremely difficult, if not outright impossible.

The radically altered nature of the post-DataKrash NET changed Militech's modus operandi; given that rogue AIs ran amok beyond the NetWatch-sponsored Blackwall (which in itself, was an AI of dubious loyalties), reactivating Project Cynosure to harness the power of the Blackwall itself would have been a breach of extant corporate treaties alongside international laws designed to keep rogue AIs from spilling out across the new NET. This did not stop individuals of various affiliations from searching for the remains of Project Cynosure, whether it was Militech itself, the New United States government, or even Kurt Hansen's BARGHEST. Despite the obvious ethical concerns, probing the outer reaches of the Blackwall using the remains of Cynosure as a launchpad continued, with not much success for the interested parties.

Trivia

 * The name "Cynosure" in Greek translates to the "dog's tail"; in antiquity it was used to refer to the star Polaris. It can also refer to a focus or center of attention; this name hints at both the purpose of Project Cynosure (to lure rogue AIs for the benefit of Militech) as well as the Cerberus motif of main facility also seen in the Erebus and Canto items.
 * Additionally it can be seen as an inverse to Dogtown on the surface; Cynosure being the "Dog's Tail" beneath Dogtown.