Why are Johnny’s Arasaka Tower memories unreliable?

The most suspicious moment in Johnny Silverhand’s Arasaka Tower memory is a cut. Adam Smasher catches him inside the building. Before that confrontation is resolved, Johnny is back on the roof, racing for the helicopter. Playing through the sequence gives V an experience of the attack without explaining how its pieces fit together.

Johnny’s memories are unreliable, and their damage has an explanation beyond his ego. That still leaves a second question: does a missing Morgan Blackhand mean Johnny has Blackhand’s memories? The evidence for those two claims is different.

Smasher in Johnny’s remembered escape. Game footage by 스탯, 09:22. © CD PROJEKT RED. Image source ↗

What the flashback actually shows

In Love Like Fire, Johnny plants a bomb in an elevator, continues through the tower and encounters Smasher. The sequence jumps to the escape on the roof. Johnny falls from the helicopter, faces Smasher again, and is subsequently shown being wheeled away and questioned by Arasaka’s chairman.

The interrogation matters even before comparing the flashback with another account. Saying that the game shows Johnny simply dying in the helicopter fall leaves out the memory’s own ending. The recorded game sequence continues beyond it.

That is a description of what V sees. It does not authenticate the interrogation, the escape, or the missing interval as an objective account of 2023. A scene can exist in Johnny’s memory while remaining unreliable as history.

Alt challenges a different visit to the tower

During Transmission, V can defend Johnny by saying that V saw his memories and that what happened to Alt was an accident. Alt rejects that defense. She describes a subjective, warped version of events that Johnny has repeatedly replayed.

The immediate subject is the 2013 attempt to rescue Alt, experienced in Never Fade Away. Alt is answering V’s defense of Johnny’s part in her fate. She is not walking V through the 2023 bombing and identifying which person supplied each missing scene.

That context limits what her answer can establish. It gives V a direct reason to distrust the apparent certainty of Johnny’s recollections. It does not, by itself, explain every discrepancy in the later raid. Nor does she identify Blackhand as a second source of memories in this exchange.

Alt challenges V’s reliance on Johnny’s memory. Game footage by GamerAT69, 09:06. © CD PROJEKT RED. Image source ↗

The creator identifies damage to the record

Mike Pondsmith’s direct explanation of the two attacks supplies a separate account of 2023. The operation had Militech’s backing and involved Morgan Blackhand. Johnny joined to recover Alt, who had been trapped again. The wider operation has people and purposes that Johnny’s personal recollection does not make visible.

Pondsmith also identifies two reasons that Johnny’s recollection of that day is scrambled: radiation damage to his body and the process of recording his engram. He adds that he and CD PROJEKT RED agreed Johnny was an unreliable narrator.

This is firmer ground than assigning the entire discrepancy to narcissism. It establishes damaged recollection, but it is not a technical account of how each false or missing detail was produced. It does not specify a procedure that combined Johnny with another person.

Bomb placement in Love Like Fire. Korean game footage by 스탯, 06:05. © CD PROJEKT RED. Image source ↗

Why that does not settle the Blackhand theory

The theory has an understandable starting point: Blackhand belongs to the wider operation, yet the playable recollection makes Johnny its central figure. A reader can suspect that roles have been reassigned. Establishing whose memories were recorded, where they were stored and how they became combined would require further evidence.

Neither Alt’s exchange nor Pondsmith’s comment provides that chain. Their silence also does not prove that a merger was impossible. It leaves Blackhand-memory merging as an interpretation, rather than the demonstrated mechanism behind the flashback.

The useful distinction is between a memory’s contents, its reliability, and a theory explaining its errors. V really experiences Johnny planting the bomb, being attacked and facing an interrogation. Those experiences do not make V an independent witness to the events they depict. The attack has been filtered through a participant whose surviving record cannot be trusted to preserve the whole story.

The device carrying that record poses a different problem for V. Why V still faces about six months after separation from Johnny follows the Relic’s effects on the body.

Game images © CD PROJEKT RED. This is an unofficial fan work and is not approved or endorsed by CD PROJEKT RED. The credited recordings supply only the stills needed for this commentary.