A Different Choice (Cyberpunk 2077)

When I wrote this fic I hadn't done more than finish the Heist. That was such a powerful moment I felt an urge to drop it and story ahead. The only thing I knew about the later game was spoilers and suchlike. This amusedly helped me get better in the headspace of my V, because I had no more idea about what the future would bring than she did.

But that was last month and this is this month, so I have now completed every ending in the game - some more than once. And in hindsight, my observations on my V's decision:

* The Arasakas are even worse people than I'd already thought at the time I originally wrote this, and I'd already thought them to be horrible people indeed. Every Arasaka, including Hanako.
* My V's ability to persuade Hanako to better choices in the future is notably lower than she estimated... but is still not zero. She might be an evil ice princess but she's motivated by filial piety and pragmatism, which is hardly great but still a definite step up from Saburo's racist megalomania.
* On the plus side, my V has already done the world it's greatest service possible by short-stopping Saburo Arasaka's cybernetic immortality. Saburo's engram might already be in Mikoshi, but Relic 2.0 was a failed project until the unique accident of V dying with an already-damaged biochip inside her head somehow sparked it into working where it never had before. With V's brain to examine and reverse-engineer from Dr. Hellman was capable of reproducing the success in the 'Devil' ending... but since nobody ever slotted the biochip at all in this timeline, Hellman will never get the fluke success to give him the clue.

So overall, this timeline isn't necessarily better than canon - in all non-Devil endings, Arasaka not only loses Relic 2.0 technology but the entirety of Mikoshi and teeters on the edge of bankruptcy - but it's still not bad. It certainly isn't the disaster of 'Congratulations, you just helped Saburo win everything forever' that I'd feared might be possible.

Also, given how long the game has been out by now, anyone who bought it anywhere remotely near launch day has almost certainly already finished it. And the story itself doesn't spoil anything past the end of Act One anyway, and the whole world knows that part by now. So I'm removing the spoiler tags.