Soulkiller

Soulkiller is not one clean machine with one clean behaviour. It is a lineage of software built around a single dangerous capability: a human mind can be represented as data.

The foundation came from Alt Cunningham's work at ITS. Her matrix was meant to hold artificial personalities and opened the possibility of preserving a human consciousness. That discovery did not stay a preservation project for long. The technology was taken, weaponized and turned into the thing Night City remembers by one name: Soulkiller.

What it actually does

At the useful level, Soulkiller is the capture layer.

It reads a person's neural information and produces an engram: a digital personality construct that can be stored, interrogated, copied as data, executed inside a compatible environment, or later placed on other hardware.

That distinction matters because Soulkiller is often used as shorthand for the whole immortality system. It is not the whole system.

Mikoshi is where Arasaka keeps constructs. Secure Your Soul is the service Arasaka sells around engram creation and preservation. The Relic is the biochip line that gives those constructs a local interface — and, in its experimental second generation, a route back into flesh.

The part Arasaka changed

Earlier Arasaka versions were lethal to the subject. By 2077, the commercial process is no longer presented as a guaranteed death sentence; Secure Your Soul medical records show repeated procedures where clients survive, alongside anomalies, failed constructs and one recorded death attributed to a medical complication.

That does not make the technology safe. It means Arasaka learned how to make personality extraction operational.

Once that happened, Soulkiller stopped being only a weapon used against netrunners. It became the intake system for a corporate afterlife.

Why the name still fits

The setting never gives the continuity problem an easy answer.

If the construct thinks like you, remembers what you remember and insists that it is you, the data can be convincing. But a convincing construct is not proof that the biological person crossed the gap with it.

Arasaka can measure matrix coherence. It can measure memory, behaviour and emotional conformity. The archive can trace where the data went.

None of those systems can certify a soul.