There's great satisfaction in completing a big game and walking away feeling like the storylines are all neatly tied up and you've overturned every last nugget of plot. But there's also something to be said for an enduring mystery, a portion of the story that has plenty of hints but no real concrete answers. It can keep you thinking about it long after you've played, and send you digging around to see what other players have discovered.
We've met powerful characters in video games before who skulk around behind the scenes, pulling strings and manipulating events in the world. G-Man from Half-Life. The Illusive Man from Mass Effect. Excitingly, Cyberpunk 2077 may have its own mysterious puppet-master: Mr. Blue Eyes.
Mr. Blue Eyes, named for his perpetually glowing blue eyes, is a shadowy and mysterious character, and it's entirely possible to finish the game without even encountering him. And even if you did meet him, you still may have missed a lot. Let's take a look at the mystery surrounding Mr. Blue Eyes, and what players have uncovered so far.
Major story spoilers from here on down!
It's not that unusual to see people with glowing eyes in Cyberpunk 2077. When people take phone calls on their implants or jack into a terminal, their eyes will glow, as they will when they're electronically transferring money into your bank account.
But you also see glowing eyes when conversing with a "doll," who is essentially a person being used as sort of a PA system for someone else. Don't want to attend a meeting in person? Send a doll and communicate through them. Glowing eyes can indicate that the person you're looking at isn't really the person you're talking to. But is that why Mr. Blue Eyes has glowing eyes?
You get to meet Mr. Blue Eyes when you complete a certain ending of Cyberpunk 2077, where he hires V to perform a heist to steal data from a space station. But sharp-eyed players have spotted Mr. Blue Eyes earlier in the game, during a mission called Dream On.
The mission, one of Cyberpunk 2077's best, involves helping out Jefferson Peralez, who is running for Mayor of Night City. It turns out his apartment has been secretly under surveillance, his mayoral run is almost certainly being manipulated from behind the scenes, and worst of all, Jefferson's brain is being tampered with, akin to brainwashing and reprogramming. This is probably because he's refused to work with the corporations that want to influence him and is, as far as we can tell, a decent guy.
Johnny Silverhand's theory at the end of this mission is that a rogue AI is taking over Jefferson's brain, changing his behavior and even his beliefs. It's also possible some shady yet completely human cabal wants to control the mayor by rewriting his personality. We don't really find out the truth, though in some Cyberpunk 2077 endings Jefferson wins the mayoral election and calls V during the credits, saying he thinks his wife Elizabeth is in on the plot to control him, too.
Back to Mr. Blue Eyes. At the end of the Dream On quest, while on your way to meet with Jefferson in a public park, V receives a threating and mysterious phone call from an unknown person telling him to back off. Everything goes black and V falls to the ground—indicating that the caller is able to mess with V's head wirelessly. That's troubling enough, but when you meet with Jefferson moments after that alarming phone call, you can spot Mr. Blue Eyes observing your meeting from some distance away:
That's a very G-Man move, Mr. Blue Eyes. If you happen to have a mod that lets you fly in Cyberpunk 2077 (as I do), you can fly over and have a look at Mr. Blue Eyes up close, though you can't kill him or even hurt him. After the meeting, Mr. Blue Eyes is nowhere to be seen.
You also may notice (I didn't at first) that Mr. Blue Eyes is wearing an interesting ring on his right index finger:
Know who else is wearing a ring with the same emblem on their right index finger? Jefferson Peralez, the brainwashed mayoral candidate you've just been harshly warned about spilling the beans to:
That's interesting, too. Are these two just a part of some fraternal organization? Is the ring a component of the brainwashing? Is this how Mr. Blue Eyes marks his brainwashing victims—or is Mr. Blue Eyes himself under control of the same rogue AI that's slowly rewriting Jefferson's brain?
A few more characters have been spotted wearing similar rings, which might indicate it's simply an asset that pops up from time to time. But it could be more than that. If you're on the corpo lifepath, a similar ring is worn by the Arasaka agent who interrupts your very first mission and essentially ends your career as a corpo, setting you on your path for the rest of the game. (This is one of the first pictures I took in Cyberpunk 2077, and I never noticed the ring on that guy's finger.) Another guy wearing a similar ring was spotted at a table in a scene where you have to sit and talk to Johnny during a mission. Maybe it's just a random NPC, or maybe he's keeping tabs on you. Either way, the ring is getting some attention from Cyberpunk 2077 sleuths.
There's one more character whose been spotted wearing a ring with the same emblem, and he's probably not the type you'd guess. Outside Misty's shop, there's a seemingly deranged guy named Garry the Prophet who shouts conspiracy theories as you walk by. He's wearing the ring, too:
If you've stopped to talk to Garry a few times, you know his conspiracy theories always seem to circle back to beings from Alpha Centauri who control the politicians. "You can recognize them from their cold blue eyes," he says, adding that they're covered with synthetic skin to look human. Of course, Garry says a lot of shit.
However, it may just be that Garry is misinterpreting a few things. Garry says he has a malfunctioning chip in his head, and that he hears alien transmissions that are communicated using older technology. According to Johnny Silverhand, the monitoring device at Jefferson's apartment was using older transmission tech as well, to avoid being intercepted by modern equipment. Maybe Garry has just been driven mad by hearing these garbled transmissions. Mr. Blue Eyes does have some dealings in space, as shown at the end of the game with the orbital station heist, so what Garry thinks are alien spaceships might just be human space stations.
If you talk to Garry about his various conspiracies, you eventually get a quest to recover a mysterious chip which is being delivered by Maelstrom members to a clandestine duo who are listed as John Doe and Jane Doe when you scan them. Hmm. But when you return to Garry with the chip, he's gone. According to one of Garry's acolytes, he's been abducted by agents in black suits with... glowing blue eyes. That's the end of the quest. The chip, if decrypted, contains a reference to something called Project Oracle.
But why is Gary wearing a ring like Mr. Blue Eyes and Jefferson Peralez? Is Garry just a plant, an actor put in place to get you to disrupt the Doe's plans to acquire the chip? Maybe the whole thing was staged and he wasn't really abducted at all? It could just be another string being pulled from behind the scenes.
The mystery of Mr. Blue Eyes may even tie into V's first real job in Cyberpunk 2077. A netrunner working for Night Corp named Sandra Dorsett is captured by Scavengers, and V and Jackie Welles are sent to rescue her. They find her floating in a tub full of ice (her eyes flickering blue) and bring her to safety. Later, another job involves recovering one of Dorsett's data shards, which contains details about Night Corp brainwashing employees and controlling them using a rogue AI. Sounds a lot like what Johnny suspects is happening to Jefferson.
Mr. Blue Eyes could also tie into another major character from Cyberpunk lore: Morgan Blackhand, who was Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith's player-character in the pen and paper RPG. Morgan Blackhand doesn't appear in Cyberpunk 2077, though dataminers have discovered that the game files mark Mr. Blue Eyes as... Morgan Blackhand. (MB and MB, get it?) And just because Blackhand hasn't been seen since 2023, it doesn't mean he's not still lurking around somewhere. Johnny Silverhand came back from the dead, so why not Morgan Blackhand?
The whole thing makes for an enjoyable mystery filled with lots of loose threads and speculation—which is honestly great for Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe Mr. Blue Eyes is a human inhabited by a rogue AI, or maybe he's not human at all but some sort of AI-controlled android, or even an alien, as Garry suspected. Or, maybe he's just another creepy, powerful dude playing puppet-master with Night City. Hopefully we'll find out in future DLC. For now, it's just fun to wonder.
