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Watch the video I linked (at 3:27 - Steam removed the timestamp I guess), the electricity is affecting real objects. And how do you unwittingly leave "residue" behind in the real world that can only be picked up digitally? What is the mechanism for that?
And again, we literally have a gun in the game which says its rounds are "infused with the dark energy from beyond the Blackwall."
Yet, the dialogue makes it very clear that the manifestations are digital traces. Electricity can be explained, again, by hacking.
I agree that the Erebus' weapon description is confusing, but, the in-game lore says that the gun is housing a rogue AI from beyond the Blackwall, therefore its rounds have a chance to upload hacks to enemies (which is how it actually works gameplay-wise). Which is a good enough explanation for me personally.
So simply by touching a random railing or floor Songbird is automatically "hacking" it somehow? How do you hack a piece of metal or concrete? You have to see how this kind of explanation doesn't make any sense.
Everything that's happening, including objects being moved by it (3:27 timestamp), residue within the real world, and a gun's rounds being 'infused' indicates that there's some kind of actual energy involved. Trying to come up with solely digital explanations simply doesn't match.
I can chalk it up to it just being a gamey thing, but with everything else I can usually suspend my disbelief - I think about this at all though and it falls apart.
"The fruits of their labor resulted in a weapon that uses artificial intelligence to hack the combat cyberware of the targets it shoots."
I mean, if you really wanted to somewhat rationalize it, you could theorize about how the Blackwall isn't just a normal AI-powered firewall, but some new form of digital tech using a formerly unknown energy, but then you've created a classic scifi magic system.
Or it IS just V hallucinating due to the link with Songbird and that's how she "perceives" using the Blackwall, but this wouldn't explain the effect on non-digital objects
You have to picture how stupidly dense and stratified technology is in the Cyberpunk world.
Everything we see hides an electronic subsystem, more o less. On the Net, the data transfer is dozen if not hundreds of time more dense than our internet. It is why true netrunning needs a braindance like technology to be done, connected straight to the brain. And why for example, we can find pistols with AI.
In short, in the Cyberpunk world, the electronic structure is everywhere, chronic collateral of the human civilization. Permeating every aspect of our creations.
The virtual, is a thousand time wider and deeper than base reality. It is tens of thousand time faster and with million more data carried every instant.
The Ais Songbird is channeling beyond the Blackwall see all of this, at the same time, and can interact with every aspect of it, included those parts the DATAKRASH erased or put beyond human use.
Can they bend concrete? No.
But manipulating the gas pipeline beneath the slab of concrete, creating a focused explosion and producing a similar effect? Quite doable. It is just a matter of calculations. And they are good at it.
Short-circuiting an entire redundant subnet of an old and abandoned bunker, just to produce a very specific sound? Done and done.
You’re dealing with inhuman intelligences controlling everything electronic. And in the cyberpunk world, everything is at least electric, and much is also electronic.
A lot of it can be chalked up to just V having the Relic in their head of course, but not all of it, I would argue. Misty's readings of the arcana we find being so applicable to what's happening can really only be physically explained away by chalking it up to coincidence and confirmation bias.
Which isn't terribly different from tarot in real life - you have your dyed in the wool believers in it, and people who dismiss it entirely as just that, even when it seems to eerily nail things. Or, as some theorize, you could attribute the arcana to some trace of Jackie's consciousness being unconsciously filtered through V's mind or what have you, due to his having carried the Relic before his death.
The Black Wall itself is said to have created "haunted" data, for example. One isn't forced to take that literally of course, but the point is, there's a ton in the game (and in Cyberpunk lore) that clearly tries to evoke mysticism or metaphysics in terms of how characters think about and perceive and describe things, even if we as the player might rather explain them away more rationally or technologically or what have you.
That's why we hear the invocation of words like "soul" or "ghost" used interchangeably with things like engram etc. It's also not unlike other works in the cyberpunk literary or film tradition where you have a technological potential basis for things, but the characters discuss or perceive them (or it's presented to us for artistic reasons) as being mystical, or pseudo-mystical. Or at least metaphysical.
The simplest way to explain it away for suspension of disbelief purposes though if you want a strictly physical realism explanation, is what Mander said above. And, I would add, combining that with the possibility that certain of those processes are happening unconsciously potentially, or in ways that simply aren't intuitively perceived by us. That doesn't mean they aren't happening. Just that V's experience of them (remember that everything we experience in the game - which isn't always honest or reliable - is happening within V's perception) may not explicitly include them.
That's how I deal with it, at least.
There's quite a lot metaphysical leanings in the game - the idea that the "soul" or mind can venture into the Net separate from the body, digitized psyches that can reanimate a neurally dead body, it's all pretty fringe to me.
That said, the Blackwall itself is an AI designed to seek-and-destroy other AIs, which, given how the game treats the idea that AI can be sentient comparable to human, means the Blackwall, once entering the CNS through a person's cyberware, could kill anyone or any AI. The weird residue left over is something I thing only V can see, like the tarot graffiti.