Alt Cunningham has been dead for fifty years and she has very clear opinions about what Johnny Silverhand is. She is not sentimental about it. She has had half a century in the net to think about the question, which is more time than most entities get, and her answer is precise: Johnny is a residual imprint with motor bias, a cognitive echo encoded on a piece of Arasaka hardware by people who needed a weapon and built one out of the most dangerous man they had access to.

The Voodoo Boys' senior netrunner, a woman named Brigitte, has a different answer. She has interfaced with Johnny twice — once deliberately, once not — and what she encountered was not what she expected from an imprint. Imprints degrade. They repeat. They get stuck in loops and cannot generate novel responses to stimuli they haven't been trained on. Johnny does none of those things. He adapts. He argues. He lies in ways that serve his interests rather than his programming. Brigitte's classification: emergent construct. Possibly something worse.

V is caught between these two assessments and has not been able to resolve them, partly because both women are right about the evidence and wrong about what it means. What they are both missing is a third data point: the version of Johnny that shipped on the Relic is not the only version of Johnny that has ever existed. There was an earlier build. It did not make it into the chip.

The earlier build was commissioned by an Arasaka division that no longer exists, for a purpose that has been redacted from every surviving project document. What remains is a single internal memo, dated six months before the Relic went into production, which reads in its entirety: "Silverhand v0.7 exhibits autonomous goal formation. Recommend discontinue and archive. Do not reuse substrate." The memo was overridden. The substrate was reused. What was added between v0.7 and the version V carries is the question neither Alt nor Brigitte has thought to ask.