Johnny Silverhand

Johnny is useful precisely because his record does not resolve cleanly.

His physical death in 2023 is one event. The creation of the engram that later exists in Mikoshi is another, and accounts disagree about exactly how those two were connected. Johnny's own Relic memories show Arasaka capturing him and using Soulkiller during an interrogation; other material makes that memory an unreliable reconstruction and leaves a different path for the construct.

The safe statement is narrower: Johnny died, an engram of Johnny eventually ended up in Mikoshi, and by 2077 that engram was loaded onto a Relic 2.0 prototype.

Copy, store, host, overwrite

That makes Johnny the best record for separating the stack.

Copy is the Soulkiller stage: produce an engram from a person.

Store is Mikoshi: keep engrams inside Arasaka-controlled infrastructure.

Host is the Relic: carry and execute an engram on a biological neural substrate.

Overwrite is what happens in V's case when Relic 2.0 begins rebuilding the host brain around the resident construct.

Those systems are related, and Relic 2.0 even incorporates Soulkiller-derived algorithms, but they are not synonyms. Saying "Soulkiller is the chip" erases most of the engineering — and most of the horror.

Why the record is disputed

Johnny's personality is vivid enough to feel like testimony, but the setting repeatedly warns that his recollection of 2023 is not a reliable historical record. The archive therefore treats his existence as an engram as documented and the exact capture narrative as contested.

That is more interesting than pretending the contradiction is damage that can be repaired.