One creepy little detail in Cyberpunk 2077 rivals anything in the scariest horror games. There are plenty of secrets hidden away in Cyberpunk 2077, but tonally, they’re all pretty distinct. Some of them touch on earlier quests in the game, recontextualizing some of Cyberpunk‘s most important decisions. Others reference works that inspired the game, or prior releases from developer CD Projekt Red. A few of them are just plain terrifying.
Thankfully, the scariest Easter egg in Cyberpunk is one that doesn’t require the Phantom Liberty DLC to find. Players can come across this one, regardless of whether they’ve purchased the DLC, almost from the very beginning. It only requires a little foreknowledge, and a willingness to travel off the beaten path. However, it can provide some important details that tie into one of the DLC’s most prominent characters: the groundbreaking Netrunner Song “Songbird” So Mi.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City Is Way Older Than You Think
Night City was founded in the early 1990s, but that was not the moniker its founder and original citizens had in mind to call the metropolis.
How To Find Cyberpunk’s Children Of The Ark Cult
There’s a mysterious, suicidal cult in Cyberpunk 2077, and players can visit its headquarters on the outskirts of Night City. In order to reach it, they’ll have to start at the Fuel Station in the south of Night City – this also makes an easy fast travel point if coming from far away.
After spawning in, drive slightly northward before veering off the road to the east. Continue in this direction until a pair of satellite dishes are visible; they’re more easily recognizable at night, as they’ll be lit up in red. Correct course to face them, head toward the trailer they’re mounted on, and eventually, V will stumble upon a clearing full of trash, dirty mattresses, and dead bodies. The location of the cult compound can also be seen in the map screenshot above.
Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the bodies are strung together by thick wires. At night, junctions along these wires also glow red. The ganglion of wiring eventually leads back to another body: a Netrunner in a yellow jacket, the only one sitting upright in a leather chair. There’s a little bit of loot scattered around the compound, but the best of it is found in this NPC’s inventory. It usually contains a couple of Legendary Quickhacks, some of the best in Cyberpunk 2077, a handful of eurodollars, and a Datashard called “The Children of the Ark – A Testament.”
Cyberpunk 2077’s New Metro Is Only Missing One Thing
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Opening and reading this Datashard reveals a lot more about who these people are, and how they ended up dead out in the Badlands. It’s a religious doctrine, briefly outlining the belief system of the Children of the Ark. Its adherents believed that an ultra-powerful AI (or a group thereof) lurks behind the Blackwall, where it’s simply waiting for its chance to pounce on humanity. On an upcoming judgment day, the AIs would go rogue, quickly taking over the entire world.
Since humans are comparatively underdeveloped, the Children believed, the AI would either enslave or kill them to prevent them from slowing the march of progress. And in order to avoid this, the Children of the Ark took their own lives, uploading their consciousness to a sort of interstellar afterlife in which they believed they’d live out blissful eternity on a spaceship called the Ark. This is eerie enough on its own, but what makes it even stranger is that the Children of the Ark were half right.
What Is The Blackwall in Cyberpunk 2077?
And How Does It Relate To Songbird?
The Blackwall is an important conceit in the treasury of Cyberpunk lore, and factors heavily into the plot of the Phantom Liberty DLC. It was first invented in the early 2020s, shortly after a series of viruses nearly destroyed the entire net in an event called the DataKrash. These viruses, advanced AIs dubbed the Roving Autonomous Bartmoss Interface Drones (or RABIDS for short), were the brainchildren of the now-legendary Netrunner Rache Bartmoss. Bartmoss programmed the viruses to activate after his death, at which point he hoped they’d crack open all corporate Datafortresses, revealing thousands of bytes of industry secrets to the masses.
But there was one problem: when Bartmoss’ physical body died in 2020, his consciousness remained alive within the Net. He stayed that way for two years, at which point the RABIDS were deployed. They worked as intended, but Netwatch, an organization dedicated to controlling and policing the Net, was quick to respond. In order to prevent anything like the DataKrash from happening again, they conceived of a security system called the Blackwall: a nigh-impenetrable firewall that would block the rogue AI from accessing the rest of the Net.
Naturally, every Netrunner worth their salt immediately began looking for a way around the Blackwall. But by 2077, shockingly few have been able to do so. In the meantime, the RABIDS AIs stuck behind the Blackwall have taken on a mythical status for many. Netrunners see them as political liberators, and seek to revive Bartmoss’ original dream of publicly available information. The Children of the Ark see them as demons, destined to break out and destroy the world as they know it. And megacorporations, along with world governments, see them as a potential source of power.
And for that reason, President Rosalind Myers of the New United States of America keeps a Netrunner in her employ. That’s Songbird, an independent-minded hacker whose specialty is reaching behind the Blackwall, and a major character in the Phantom Liberty DLC. This gives her incredible power: at times, it seems she’s able to alter reality itself. But at the same time, the more she surpasses the Blackwall, the more damage she does to her health. The rogue AIs beyond the Blackwall can influence Netrunners’ minds, as can be seen in one of Cyberpunk 2077‘s endings. Thankfully, Songbird is later able to cure herself in some of Phantom Liberty‘s endings.
Unfortunately, there’s no quest to find out anything else about the Children of the Ark, and there don’t appear to be any surviving members elsewhere in Night City; their only presence in the game is limited to their brief, postmortem appearance in this creepy Easter egg. In the end, it’s just a terrifying little detail for players to find, with some fascinating implications that tie into Cyberpunk 2077‘s wider lore.
Cyberpunk 2077
Based on the 1988 tabletop game, Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person action RPG game set in a dystopian cyber future developed by CD Projekt Red. Players will tackle the streets of Night City as customizable protagonist V, who struggles to keep their memories intact after receiving a strange cybernetic implant that slowly overrides their memories by a deceased celebrity known as Johnny Silverhand, played by Keanu Reeves.
- Franchise
- Cyberpunk
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 4 , Xbox One , PlayStation 5 , Xbox Series X/S , Microsoft Windows
- Released
- December 10, 2020
- Developer(s)
- CD Projekt Red
- Publisher(s)
- CD Projekt
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG , First-Person Shooter
- Engine
- REDengine 4
- ESRB
- M
- Platforms
- PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows, Google Stadia
- Publishers
- CD Projekt RED, CD Projekt
- Mode
- Single-player
- Rating
- 7/10 Steam; 9/10 IGN
