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V as Code Injection

Title Screen - Cropped

This line of research will attempt to show that the game is a memory module we find mid-corruption due to buffer overflow.

Quick Aside

There's some interesting color notes we can borrow from color research 1 and color research 2:

  • We know that the title should be represented in yellow and cyan. But, at the time of the title screen we have not met Johnny yet who brings blues and yellows. As a result, the title can only be rendered as blank/black.
  • The bottom left quadrant of the title screen emulates the low-health effect of V in-game. We know this should be magenta, but again we don't have Johnny yet to blend in blues and thus it can only render in red or cyan. We see it in cyan.

We can also see that the character name is scrambled, with a character level of 18 (the numeric 18 is in the chip to the left of the name, barely visible in red).

What Is A Buffer Overflow?

Buffer Overflow

A buffer overflow is a programming error that occurs when a program writes more data to a block of memory, or buffer, than it was allocated for. This can cause the program to overwrite adjacent memory, leading to unexpected behavior, crashes, or security vulnerabilities.

If you can reliably force a buffer overflow, you can potentially execute arbitrary code or gain control of the program's execution flow. One such example is when a user programmed flappy bird into Super Mario World by playing the game in a specific way (source).

The Starting Memory Buffers

Title Screen

Displayed prominantly in the center of the screen are 4 data buffers scrolling downward and two cyan arms seeking up and down as if looking for something. By pressing any button, we can "breach" into this system.

The Payload

When we land on the title screen with no save files, and during character creation, we see a different set of streams. This time a deep violet upload stream is animated going upwards instead of downwards - symbolic of us uploading our character into the system instead of staying inside of the available buffers.

New Character Code Injection Violet upload buffers on the title screen. Violet upload buffers in background when creating a character. Our characters data is already overlapping with Johnny's here, shown by tapping the fingerprint a few times. After we've uploaded the character and background into the system, we find ourselves in front of a protocol mirror. The symbols in the top left strongly hint at two-way data transfer

The Ending Memory Buffers

When we finally reach the end of the game, we are once again presented with the same memory buffer - but this time the color is blended between the red of the title screen and the violet of our own character upload in a strong magenta showing.

By going even further into Phantom Liberty, the magenta begins taking over the entire screen, and not just the provided memory buffer.

It's also worth noting that the ending slides have 2 buffers missing, which coincides with losing half of our character's data through sacrificing V or Johnny.

Ending Memory Buffers The red title screen buffers have been influenced by the violet character upload to present us with a blended magenta buffer at the end of the game. Phantom Liberty's credits go even further, showing that the magenta has now taken over the entire system.

Recap

Some Clues On What's Happening

Buffer Overflow Hacking Glitch

In rare circumstances, we can see a glitch occur in the game where these memory buffers are represented through our Kiroshi scanner. Normally you'd see this behind the UI, but if you catch it there is a single frame before the UI is rendered that reveals the glitch fully.

Kiroshi Scanner Glitch

Screen Breakdown: On the left side of the screen you can see the buffer lines each have what appears to be a time and two decimal numbers afteward - one compact and one spaced. There are too many whitespace characters on some lines, causing the following lines to become shifted. In addition, it appears that the bottom-most line has been split, with the overflow wrapping around to the top-most line. If we were to attempt to clean the alignment of the lefthand buffer, we see a pattern of missing data. This data could also contribute to the alignment being off in the buffer. The right side of this image appears at first glance to be a sequence of 1's and 0's, but if you look closely you can see that there are actually 2 pipe | symbols (yellow) that split the data. This is interesting, as files and software are generally split into 2 parts: the header and the data. The header contains metadata about the data, such as its size and type, while the data contains the actual contents. It would appear that data (pink) is overflowing (gray) and overwriting the header (white).

Arasaka Tower 3D

Arasaka 3D

The "exploit" in Arasaka 3D is that the scoreboard totals are registered as hexidecimal values instead of decimal. Where we would expect a max score of 999,999, we see that Polyhistor's entry exceeds this limit. The PLHSTR score line results in 16,713,397, which results in 15,713,398 more points than should be possible. This means that the remainder of the score that doesn't fit into the normal memory allocation is being written to the next memory location, essentially corrupting and overwriting the game data.

This kind of buffer overflow hack for the arcade game is probably what allows us the user to visit the -10 level (much like the minus world in Mario). It allows accessing memory locations that otherwise would be out of bounds - leading to all kinds of glitches as the game loads data that it shouldn't.

Seeing magenta in the arcade game is one such-likely side effect of this buffer overflow hack, as the arcade cartridge attempts to load the now-corrupted data and make sense of the hexidecimal value.

Visualizing Corrupted Memory

Corrupted Memory

Signs of Memory Corruption In Game

Much like the magenta and minus world in Arasaka Tower 3D, we'd expect to see some form of telltale signs of memory corruption in the game. One could argue that much like the arcade, this would take the form of magenta appearing in the game world - being an overflowing amount of character upload data (violet) going into the memory buffer (red).

Quest Corruption

Corruption Through Quests Meeting Panam: A small hint of corruption where a single headlight is colored magenta. Kerry Jamming: A fever dream of reds and purples, with V's corner alone bathed in magenta. Kerry Talking: Magenta on full display

In the correllary, we can also see a change throughout the scene transitions in the game:

Scene Transition Corruption

Corruption Through Transitions This transition effect occured after carrying Evelyn Parker's body out of the electric company. The average color on-screen is rgb(28, 1, 8) or #1c0108. This transition, much later, occured after taking over clouds with Judy. The average color on-screen is rgb(34, 9, 19) or #220913 - A noticable increase in red, green, and blue lead to a decrease in available blank space.

Don't Fear (The Reaper)

This quest is often talked about for its strange experience. Despite Rogue claiming that an all out assault from the front door is impossible, that's exactly what we do.

  • There's a chance to get at least 8 keycards when you need only 1.
  • When going to the back of the lobby, there's 6 guards if you activate time dilation, but 2 vanish into thin air very quickly.
  • A mech falls from the sky ala "The Heist" quest when entering the elevator.
  • One elevator is labeled as "-2 Parking" as if we're at the megabuilding, despite taking us to netrunner operations.
  • Despite not having received the shard from Alt (or the engramatic data of Alt), we magically have the shard to slot her in - and the choice to do so is optional blue instead of required yellow.
  • There are elevator panels clipping through walls
  • There's a locked -10 door with a mirror and unusable laptop behind it, random movie posters and a half eaten sandwich.
  • Back in netrunner operations are scannable objects such as vents that make no sense and explosives clipping through computer kiosks.
  • There's missing floorplans on terminals and an unreadable journal shards.

The entire area is a mess of glitches and clipping issues.

But that might be the point. If our violet upload is interacting with the red data buffer, and we were to overstay and build new memories that overflow the existing buffer, we might just find ourselves in a corrupted sea of data where Johnny and V can take down Arasaka solo. It's possible that "Don't Fear (The Reaper)" is a liminal space created by corrupting the memory buffer. It could very well be the "-10" level of the game. We might have been seeing the hidden minus world all along.

That begs the question, though - can we reach the end without corrupting the buffer and oversaturating the system with new or corrupted memories? Or is it yet to be implemented and a story for another time?