Do Severed Souls Dream of a Two-Headed Calf?

Who are you, really?

A few weeks ago, when I finished playing Cyberpunk 2077, I had two thoughts: “I am going to be obsessed with the character Johnny Silverhand as played by Keanu Reeves for the rest of my life,” and “That was a really lovely ghost story.”

Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot of problems, from overworked developers to toxic fanboys to a crazy amount of glitches to the inherent orientalist nature of the cyberpunk genre, but the story is something that has, well, bewitched me body and soul. It’s hard to explain on paper but I’ll do my best:

You play as an aspiring mercenary in Night City (clever, I know), taking on a job with your friend to steal a microchip-type thing from the heir to a megacorporation. You break into the guy’s hotel suite and grab the chip, only to watch him kill his father and cause all hell to break loose. With guns blazing you make your escape, but at the cost of your friend’s life. He entrusts you with the by injecting it into your body (humans are like computers in this world, don’t think about it too much) and you finish the job. Except, when you go to deliver the chip, the person who hired you shoots you dead.

This is where the title sequence begins.

The next thing you know, you have a dream taking place fifty years ago, where you’re in the body of a different mercenary breaking into the headquarters of the same megacorporation you just stole the chip from. The you in the dream blows the building up with a nuclear bomb, but gets caught and tortured by the now-former now-dead head of the company. As punishment, the dream you is tortured and has his consciousness download onto a chip. The chip you stole.

You wake up from the dream – the real you, V – after having been rescued by the former head of security for the megacorporation, who takes you to your doctor friend to patch you up. Here’s where the bad news comes: you’re dying. The chip contains someone’s consciousness and personality in it – a “construct” – that is now acting as a virus and overwriting your own construct. There is no cure. You are possessed. You are slowly being erased.

The dream you reveals himself to be Johnny Silverhand, a former rocker turned corporate anarchist and a modern day legend for his terrorism. Understandably, you two hate each other and vy for control over your body, but over time you come to a tentative truce in order for you to find a way to survive and for him to take down the megacorporation once and for all. A lot of things happen in this interim, including a memorable sequence where you meet Johnny’s ex who was also turned into a ghost but became a cybernetic god, living in cyberspace, beyond caring for the lives of mere mortals. She agrees to help you remove Johnny from your body only if you can get her to the megacorporation’s megacomputer for plot reasons I’m skipping for brevity.

Throughout most of the game, you suffer from bloody coughing fits and dizzy spells as your body starts to turn against you, accompanied by moments where you can see and converse with the ghost in your head. You can choose to be mean to him, or you can choose to hear him out and learn more about him. Eventually, he will confess to you about his past life and personal failings and you can help him make amends with his friends and play one final gig before he dies for good.

In the end game, you and Johnny break into the megacorporation together and hack your way into the main computer, where Johnny’s ex does what she promised and separates you two — except it’s too late. The damage has been done. Your body no longer recognizes you as its true owner and now belongs to Johnny; if you went back, you’d have months to live. Here, you’re offered a choice: to live in cyberspace as an immortal ghost, giving Johnny a second chance at life, or to return to your body and live out the rest of your short time as a living legend who took on a whole company by herself. Either way, you’re dead.

If you pick the second option, Johnny is pleased. You’ve become his friend, and he wanted you to have your body back in the end. He’s already dead too. You go back to Night City and your life is a little lonelier now that you know exactly how much time you have left, but you’ve got nothing to lose. You’ve been dead since the beginning.

If you pick the first and enter cyberspace, Johnny tries to stop you. He protests the entire time, trying to convince you to live, but you tell him you’re tired. You’re already dead, and someone should make use of your body. Who else but the friend who helped get you here? In your body, Johnny leaves Night City, but not before stopping at a memorial for you to pay his respects. He thanks you for everything and promises he will never forget you, least of all because he’ll always be wearing your face.

Consciousness isn’t a new topic for video games, but it is one I am always interested in. The closest comparison to the “constructs” here would be what happens to the characters in Soma (which is a good game and you should skip this paragraph if you want to play it). In short, you (Simon) had your brain scanned and installed into the body of a reanimated human, just shortly after a global extinction event. The only people around you are robots, most of which are convinced they’re genuinely human. Your goal, with the help of another brain-scanned-consciousness (Catherine), is to send an ark (called the ARK) of brain scans of a number of humans into space to ensure survival of the race.

At a certain point in the game, you need to transfer to another body. Catherine does this for you by copying your consciousness into the second body, but this still leaves the first one. There is no way for the old body to go forward with you, so you’re left with the decision to either kill your(old)self or to let him/you die an unknown death later on while you’re gone. Even though this person was you just moments ago. At the end of the game, Catherine copies both of your consciousnesses into the ARK and launches it, leaving the Simon still controlled by you the player on the dying planet. In a way, you’ve survived but in an equally real way, you’re doomed.

Dual consciousness is also not a new topic. In The Prestige, Hugh Jackman discovers David Bowie’s human cloning device and uses it in a magic trick. The magic is teleporting, but the trick involves the original dying and the clone taking his place — every night. Every night, he dies and is replaced by himself, who is going to die the next night.

My friend Alma (whose Substack is here) calls V’s body a haunted house. There’s no better way to describe it — in the end, it is no longer V’s body, but a vessel for a ghost. Sure, it technically becomes Johnny, but he will never see it as anything other than a possession for as long as he has it. But if V try to take it back, it destroys itself in its attempt to exorcize them from their own home. For the majority of the story, however, there are two people occupying the same space, violently or amicably.

Others may disagree but to me, there exists a difference between a possessed boy and a haunted body. For example, between Regan MacNeill from The Exorcist and Benson from Carmen Maria Machado’s excellent short story Especially Heinous (seriously if you haven’t read it go read it now, it is amazing and I am constantly chasing the high I felt when I first read it). In the former, a demon has fully taken over Regan’s body and is controlling for the majority of the movie, occasionally self-harming its host to inflict pain on others more than Regan herself. In the latter, there is a brief period where ghosts actively use Benson’s body for their own purposes but for the most part, they cohabitate with Benson and let her take the reins while trying to nudge her in the direction they want. Benson’s body suffers because chosen her to haunt — not to just follow around, but to cause an effect on in order to ensure an outcome. You can have a possession without haunting and a haunting without possession, the two have different purposes and effects.

The big effect is on what happens after — for Regan, there are minimal repercussions as her body heals as soon as the demon leaves and she retains virtually no memory of the events; for Benson, she is essentially a whole new person even after the last of the ghosts have left her.

Some of V and Johnny’s discussions prior to the endgame can revolve around the exact nature of his takeover of them. What the microchip is doing to them body is overwriting their personality until it’s Johnny’s, but in practice it acts like it is merging the two constructs together to the point where neither can tell where one ends and one begins. In the beginning, V asks Johnny whether they’ll notice that parts of themselves are disappearing or whether they’ll even realize they’re gone. Johnny mentions something along the lines of finding it hard to differentiate his memories from V. Johnny starts using V’s turn of phrases and vice versa. Towards the end, conversations between V and Johnny get so muddled to the point where the body voices aloud both parts.

The burning question is, how much change was the person, and how much was the haunt?

Right after I finished Cyberpunk, I started watching Severance on Apple TV. I won’t spoil much because I think it’s worth a watch, at least visually if not thematically, but the conceit is that a major corporation (hmm, I am sensing a theme here) has perfected technology that allows its workers to literally sever their work lives from their home lives. Essentially, a whole different person exists at work and retains those memories, and all you remember is going into work and then leaving. In the opening scene, a man is shown breaking down sobbing in his car (later revealed to be because he’s still grieving his dead wife), but as soon as he gets into work, he stops and acts positively jovial with his coworkers.

The severed workforce have a number of rules and regulations they’re required to follow and, presumably, it should be easy to follow them because they’ve known nothing but work in their entire lives but of course, there are unforeseen consequences. A newly severed employee absolutely hates the fact that she has no memory of her life and repeatedly tries to flee, only for the “real” version of her to return their body back to work every time. It comes to a point where the “real” employee sends her severed self a video saying that she will never quit her job, and that the severed version isn’t even a real person.

In the second episode, you see how the severance process works — the operation in the brain that permanently separates your consciousness into two — but that explains nothing. Each severed person is essentially a blank slate and yet they each have so much personality. Ostensibly, their first memory is waking up in an empty conference room, but there is so much they know. The newly severed has no memories of not being at work and yet knows this place is a prison, as much as her warden (herself) denies her release. Two severed fall in love, although there is no way they’ve experienced it before. They know their company handbook forbids something but how did they know what they’re doing is what’s forbidden? What is the thing inside of them that tells them this is what love feels like?

Fictional amnesia has a couple of staples as a genre, one being that the amnesiac hero has some inexplicable knowledge of certain things even if they can’t remember their own name. Take the Bourne series: the titular character doesn’t know why he knows how to kill but the second he’s put in danger, he knows exactly how to get out. What’s the part of him that knows? The body? Some kind of muscle memory? Part of the subconscious leaking through?

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, like Severance, is about specific memory removal, characters have their memories removed but fall right back into the same habits anyway. Joel forces himself to keep a piece of Clementine in his memory to find her again, whereas Clementine has been romanced by Elijah Wood in the exact same way she was romanced by Joel, making it questionable whether her memories were ever really able to escape her mind. But what about Kirsten Dunst and that doctor guy? Did she force herself to remember bits and pieces to keep the romance alive even after she’d forgotten it? Did the continued proximity to him keep her from truly forgetting what had transpired between them? Or did she just fall in love all over again?

Severed employees are occasionally given psychiatric evaluations where they are told things about themselves that they, as severed, wouldn’t know of and are expected to respond neutrally to. They are then instructed to sculpt something from clay. One of the characters doesn’t react to the statements, but creates something reminiscent of his “real” life. Where is that memory coming from?

Identity is a tricky thing. So is memory. In the argument for nurture vs nature, memory is a very important thing. So, without their memories, are the severed different people from their “real” versions? I’ve been putting “real” in quotations because they’re commonly referred to as “outies” — as in, they exist outside of the confines of work. Does this mean that neither are truly “real”? Sure, the outies can exist anywhere they want but they specifically don’t exist within their workplace. A whole piece of them is missing and has become an entity separate from them, with what appears to be their own feelings and ideas and, of course, memories. Does the fact that they exist in more places make their existence more valuable, even if they’re missing a huge chunk of their lives? 

The show explores these questions, along with other mysteries, but in a more existential sense, the questions remain. What makes a person, them? 

There is an option for you in Cyberpunk 2077, based on your interactions with Johnny, to tell him that he isn’t the real Johnny Silverhand because he’s just a copy of the man’s construct. He’s just a program designed to be like Johnny, but that’s all he is — a program. If you say it enough, he believes it and describes himself as such, but what does that mean? Is he not really Johnny, even though he has all his memories and personality? What about The Prestige? Which Hugh Jackman is the real Hugh Jackman? Is there even a real Hugh Jackman anymore since the original one died long ago?

A friend of mine took a Myers-Briggs test before and after they were prescribed antidepressants. Before they were an INTJ and after they were an ESFP. Is this proof that they’re now a different person because they see the world differently than they once did before, or did they just change themselves and how they perceive things? Or did they just take the test wrong?

In conclusion, yes. Yes, I think Severance is kind of a ghost story. They’re being haunted by themselves.