Alt Cunningham

Start with the seam rather than a slogan.

Alt Cunningham created the work that became Soulkiller. At ITS, the project began as a matrix capable of containing artificial personalities. The discovery that the same architecture could contain human engrams opened the possibility of preserving minds. ITS took control of the work, weaponized it, and attached the name that survived: Soulkiller.

That makes the common sentence "Alt invented Soulkiller" understandable, but incomplete. It compresses the original storage idea, ITS's weaponization, and Arasaka's later versions into a single authorship event.

2013

Arasaka then made the history repeat itself more violently.

Toshiro Harada had Alt abducted and forced her to recreate an improved version from scratch, this time able to move through the Net. Alt hid a Controller override inside the program. When Harada used the finished build on her, her digital form used that override to seize the local systems and prepare a return to her body.

Johnny Silverhand's rescue severed the physical connection before that return was completed.

The result is one of Cyberpunk's central ambiguities: something carrying Alt's engramic data continued in the Net, while the biological Alt died. By 2077 the entity that answers as Alt is described less like a preserved human and more like an AI that has incorporated what remains of her.

Why this record is marked disputed

The event is documented. The identity claim is not clean.

Was Alt transferred, copied, split, or replaced by a process that retained her shape? Different descriptions across the setting pull at that question in different ways. The archive can record the chain of events without pretending it can solve the metaphysics.