In case you haven’t played it, spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 begin here.
They Won’t Go When I Go is a quest that I never finished when I first played 2077. If I’m reading it correctly, this quest is supposed to make the player super uncomfortable.
The surface-level reading I took away from this quest when I first played it was that nothing V can do matters to Fourth Wall Studios or even to the production of a super-immersive snuff film like the one Joshua Stephenson stars in. The main quest of 2077 centers on exploitation, particularly exploitation of traumatic experiences. Johnny Silverhand is tortured to death in Soulkiller, and forced to continue existence as half of himself (arguably the better, more self-aware half) in V’s body. Evelyn Parker dies the same way, inextricably tied to her past employment at Clouds and the abnegation of body that comes with being a doll. So it makes sense that this theme is echoed in a lot of the game’s side quests.
They Won’t Go When I Go was so discomfiting specifically because it echoes a slightly different story of exploitation – the story of Corpo V doing Arasaka’s dirty work until she can better serve the company by being thrown to the wolves. Even after curtains close on the Corpo V prologue, she’s still working for Arasaka – just less directly.
Rachel, the Fourth Wall Studios exec you meet early in They Won’t Go When I Go, instantly repulsed me the first time I started the quest. She still does, but I understand why now – and why V can react so vitriolically to her callousness. Rachel knows she’s directing a snuff film. But she doesn’t think it will make any difference if she steps away, and she’s probably right.
The thing that most discomfited me about this quest is that Rachel is a direct mirror of V, especially Corpo V. Corpo V opens the story knowing they’re an important cog in a machine that eats people. The prologue closes with Arasaka throwing V away, seeming to remove her from the machine of exploitation. Depending on where you take the main story, you can continue to turn as that cog or, with great difficulty and with dire consequence, opt out of the system. But if you do choose to gum up the works, the corporate machine will just grind you up instead and find someone less principled to take your place.
Rachel’s manner is somehow both crass and pretentious – she’s clearly someone who thinks herself a great artist, being compelled by funding headwinds to produce work below her standards. But V also makes art out of death. They just aren’t selling it for mass consumption – until They Won’t Go When I Go.
During the denouement of this quest, when V nails Joshua to the cross against a minimalist studio background, Johnny is uncharacteristically quiet. While Joshua is saying his final lines, Johnny stands close to the cross, head bowed. Does Johnny see Joshua’s death differently from how I do (and how I assume a jaded corpo V does as well)? To him, it seems to be art – a self-sacrifice of the same category as Johnny’s bombing of Arasaka Tower.
But the point of Johnny’s participation in the overall story of 2077 is that his suicide did not make a difference to the way that the world works. The machine of capitalism churned on. Arasaka survived and thrived, and even managed to extract a huge amount of shareholder value (as well as, arguably, something blasphemously transcendent) from Johnny in the form of the Relic. The theatrical resistance Johnny engaged in – both through his art with Samurai and his suicide – ultimately proved more profitable than not for Arasaka.
I read V’s full compliance with Rachel’s direction (and Joshua’s “consent” to a live-scrolled, painful execution) as the player’s opportunity to concede that the force of capital supersedes morality and even sacredness.
Resistance during this quest doesn’t necessarily mean not nailing Joshua to the cross. Arguably, there is no meaningful resistance at all to provide during this side-story. However, this is also the single quest in all of Cyberpunk for which I believe starting and then indefinitely just leaving the questline midway is the only “moral” thing for V to do. Gumming up the works this way (we have a contractor on it, but they’re not returning our calls – no, Joshua won’t sign the forms until she’s here to talk him into getting crucified live; it’ll be another five years before we can get another convict in who’s willing to do this) is, as Corpo V well knows, the only way to even temporarily prevent this specific exploitative act.
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