Diksha Sundriyal
Arasaka’s greed and hunger for new, more powerful tech continue to create more Chaos in the second season of Netflix’s ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.’ The story begins in the streets of Night City, where a 12-year-old boy named Roman films everyday life and ultimately captures the moment a crew’s leader goes into cyberpsychosis as he leaves an Arasaka facility after stealing a high-tech chip. This unfolds a series of events that lead to even more shocking revelations about the megacorp. Roman traverses this journey with D, who has come to Night City to avenge the massacre that wiped out his clan. Not surprisingly, it all comes back to Arasaka. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Arasaka’s Secret Project Led to D’s Catastrophic Loss
D, whose real name is David, comes to Night City looking for the ones responsible for the murder of his people. He comes from Snake Nation, a nomadic clan that was not particularly threatening to anyone and had no enemies to warrant the way it was attacked and essentially wiped out. The only reason D and his friend Omi survived is that, at the time of the attack, they were not in the camp. They were out having fun somewhere else, with no idea of how their people were brutally killed. Given how things turned out, even if D and Omi had been there, they wouldn’t have been able to do much. In any case, when D returned to find all of his family and friends dead, he vowed to find the perpetrators and give them a brutal death.
Eventually, he figures out that a gang named Maelstrom was involved in the massacre, but he doesn’t understand why a group of hired hands would suddenly attack his people. He knows there is a deeper conspiracy in this whole thing, which eventually brings him to a shocking discovery. It turns out that Maelstrom had been hired by Arasaka executives, particularly Tanaka, to go to the Snake Nation camp. Their objective was to find and capture D, but the gang had no idea that the subject was not in the camp at the time. Had it been anyone else, they’d probably have shown restraint, staying back until D showed up and captured him as discreetly as possible. But Maelstrom is a group of fanatics who indulge in violence for the fun of it.
So, they likely thought that if they killed their way through the camp, they would eventually find the boy. This led to a battle that Snake Nation did not survive. Arasaka hadn’t ordered Maelstrom to kill them all, but it was on their, or rather Tanaka’s, orders that Maelstrom was hired. At the end of the day, the gang’s violent approach led to a bloodbath, ending in the near eradication of D’s clan. As he continues his search for the truth, D discovers that Maelstrom was sent to extract him in the first place because of Project Capricorn. Arasaka had been looking for individuals with high tolerance to chrome implants, and D happened to be one of them, alongside David Martinez and Talia. The idea was to insert a chip into D’s brain, let the AI construct Capri, take over his body, and reach its full potential.
It would have been a significant step forward for Arasaka, but things didn’t turn out as expected. The bloodbath, along with the failure to secure other viable candidates, led Arasaka to shelve the project. They tried to bury it, and it would likely have remained so had D not come looking for revenge and opened Pandora’s box of their secrets, setting Capri free in the process. As for revenge, he doesn’t get it because it turns out David Martinez and his crew already beat him to it when they captured Tanaka and ended up killing him in the process of extracting information that never really existed in his brain in the first place. With the main perpetrator already dead, D’s revenge quest comes to an anticlimactic end. However, the journey does lead him to meet great friends who teach him a lot about life and love.
Read More: Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Why was Capri Looking at the Sky? Why did She Point at the Satellite?
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