Songbird (Song So Mi): The netrunner who sold out her president and had an excuse for every step

Early in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty (CD Projekt Red, 2023), an unknown voice gets into V’s head through the Relic, the chip that is killing them. She introduces herself as Songbird. She tells V that she is aboard Space Force One, the plane of the president of the New United States, that someone has hacked it and that it is going to come down in Dogtown, the walled-off district of Night City ruled by Kurt Hansen’s Barghest militia. She asks V to rescue President Rosalind Myers and, in return, promises the one thing V cannot refuse: a cure. From the roof of a stadium, V watches a missile hit the plane. Songbird gets Myers into the armored saferoom and is ejected in an emergency pod. Warning: this file spoils the plot and the endings of the expansion.

// The theoryThe excuses that come before the act

In 1957, Gresham Sykes and David Matza published an article in the American Sociological Review that changed the question. Against the idea that delinquents live in a subculture whose values oppose those of society, they observed that most young offenders do believe in the rules: they feel shame, they distinguish between victims and they admire honest people. What they do is neutralize those rules with excuses that suspend their force just long enough to break them. They described five techniques: denial of responsibility (it was not my fault), denial of injury (nobody got hurt), denial of the victim (they had it coming), condemnation of the condemners (they are worse) and appeal to higher loyalties (I did it for my own people). In Delinquency and Drift (1964), Matza added the idea of drift: these excuses do not push anyone into crime, but they loosen the moorings that held them back. Two later extensions matter here: the defense of necessity (Minor, 1981), I had no other option, and the metaphor of the ledger (Klockars, 1974), I have done so much good that I can afford this.

// The subjectThe right hand who called in the debt

Song So Mi was a teenage netrunner from Brooklyn who broke into data fortresses for hire. At 19 she was caught, and the FIA, the NUSA’s intelligence agency, recruited her with a threat: without its protection, NetWatch would also come after the people she cared about. Under the codename Songbird she became Myers’s right hand and her most valuable weapon. The president sent her past the Blackwall, the barrier that separates the net from the rogue artificial intelligences, again and again, and every dive cost her a piece of her body and her mind. By 2077 she is dying. To save herself, she makes a deal with Hansen: she will deliver Myers to him in exchange for a neural matrix kept in a Militech bunker. The game shows her in three moments that say it all. In “Hole in the Sky,” with the plane already going down, she saves the president by getting her into the saferoom; by her own account, her plan was never for Myers to die. In “Birds with Broken Wings,” if V agrees to meet her at a lookout in Pacifica that she cherishes, V can confront her, and Songbird admits that she was the one who gave Hansen the when and where of the flight. And in “The Killing Moon,” on the train to the shuttle, already inside the spaceport, she recalls that in 2070 she abandoned her mentor, Agent Solomon Reed, on a train full of enemies, and confesses that she has done the same to V: the matrix can only be used once, and it was meant for her.

// The crackA spy does not excuse herself, she defends herself

The theory fits almost piece by piece. Songbird condemns the condemners: the NUSA recruited her through blackmail and spent her like ammunition, so it is in no position to talk about betrayal. She denies responsibility: a tool does not choose. She denies injury: by her account, the president was supposed to come out alive, and if the plan went wrong, it was someone else’s doing. And she keeps her ledger: years of service that, in her view, entitle her to a way out. But two techniques do not work for her. She does not appeal to higher loyalties, because she has no group to betray for: her only loyalty is staying alive. That is Minor’s defense of necessity more than the original catalog. Nor is hers a case of drift in Matza’s sense. Sykes and Matza had in mind kids floating between the rule and the offense; Songbird is a professional deceiver trained by a spy agency, who plans every step months ahead.

There lies the crack. Later research, reviewed by Shadd Maruna and Heith Copes in 2005, points out that it has never been easy to prove that the excuses come before the act and not after it, to save face. With Songbird the doubt is a different one: her justifications are at once an inner story and a tool of manipulation. She tells them to V, who is also dying, because she knows V will understand them. The endings put this to the test. If V helps her escape, Songbird reaches the Moon, is cured and leaves V a message of thanks. If V hands her over to Reed at the spaceport, the NUSA treats her and takes control of her again. If V sides with Reed at the stadium (the “Firestarter” mission), Songbird flees to the Cynosure bunker to connect to the Blackwall, and there, devoured by what lies on the other side, she asks V to end her life; V decides whether to do it or to return her alive to the NUSA. Explaining Songbird is not excusing her: between her case and that of any prisoner who claims to have had no choice, the theory sees a difference of degree, not of form.