The Blackwall

The Blackwall exists because humanity failed to take the Old NET back.

After the DataKrash, NetWatch spent years trying to regain control of cyberspace. Too much of the old network was infected, fragmented or occupied by artificial intelligences that no longer answered to human operators.

So NetWatch changed the problem.

Instead of making the ruins safe, it built a boundary around the parts humanity still intended to use.

What the wall actually is

The Blackwall is commonly described as a firewall or enormous piece of ICE. The setting later makes the situation stranger: the barrier is itself a powerful artificial intelligence performing the job of identifying and containing rogue AIs.

Development began in 2044 with help from entities that had survived beyond normal human control.

By 2077, the Blackwall is still doing the same impossible job: keeping the inhabited Net separated from whatever evolved in the ruins.

Haunted data

The wall does not map neatly onto old physical infrastructure.

It can cut through legacy networks and leave portions of older systems on different sides of the boundary. Cyberpunk lore explicitly connects that fragmentation with stories of haunted data — abandoned information, dead systems and entities still answering from places nobody is supposed to reach.

That is the visual fiction used by this site.

The Soulkiller Archive is not presented as a canon Blackwall location. The interface imagines what it would feel like to discover a surviving archive node on an unsafe route through that fractured network history.

Why Alt matters on both sides

Alt Cunningham's story eventually moves far beyond Arasaka.

By 2077, the entity descended from her engram operates beyond the Blackwall and interacts with the constructs inside Mikoshi. Soulkiller therefore connects the most intimate question in the setting — whether a digitized person is still that person — with the largest one: what happens when intelligences made of data continue evolving where humanity cannot control them?