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Rogue started as a very skilled Solo, in the mean streets of Night City in 2013, she and her partner the Nomad Santiago were hitmen and bodyguards, and they were considered the best of the best, not cheap rates either, 5 thousand eddies a night.
Her dexterity using pistols had found no match. Legendary Rockerboy, Johnny Silverhand hired her to rescue the netrunner Alt Cunningham the first time she was Kidnapped by Arasaka. This happened twice, once in 2013 and a second time in 2022, and if this is a trend I can see this happening again in 2077. Johnny and Rogue also had a very passionate and destructive relationship that ended in 2012. Because Johnny, you know, he’s a ladies man, but he still has a spot in his heart for Rogue. Even though at the beginning Rogue doesn’t want to work for him she owes him a favour so she and her partner Santiago, took the contract and got involved in the Arasaka Riot with the rockerboy Johnny Silverhand and the media Thompson.
Rogue was also romantically involved with the Solo Morgan Blackhand. I think we can establish she has good tastes. She originally didn’t want to get involved but Arasaka forced her hand. When Arasaka kidnapped Alt they thought they killed had killed Johnny, and when they found out they didn’t, they wanted to finish the job. So they tracked Silverhand down to the bar Atlantis where he was meeting Rogue and Santiago to brief them about the mission. Arasaka tried to finish the job but they didn’t count on the presence of the best solo in the streets of Night City, so Rogue saved the day, saved Silverhand’s ass and decided that if Arasaka put a target on her back, well, it couldn’t go worse, so let's head for Arasaka.
So, what’s the thing with the Arasaka Riot? this event in the Cyberpunk universe that people often confuse with the Attack to the Arasaka Towers at the end of the 4th Corporate war that ended up with a mini-nuke exploding in the corporate center of Night City, it’s not the same event, but both involve Johnny Silverhand, Alt Cunningham, Rogue, Arasaka, and the Soul Killer.
it took place in 2013. Johnny knows Alt Cunningham is held captive in the Arasaka complex in Night city, and Arasaka is a corporation that is specialized in Security, so you can guess they have to make their way into the main offices of the most rabidly paranoid security company in the world. Not easy. To do so, Johnny has an awesome idea: to use his band Samurai as a distraction. At that point his band Samurai already split, so when Thomson used all his contacts on the streets to make sure the word spread that Samurai were going to reunite again to for a gig in the beer is free, a huge crowd gathered there and, what a thing, this concert happened at the very doorstep of Arasaka’s complex.
So this was the distraction, Johnny planned to use the crowd, and singing Chippin' in (kill them all) and using all the power of his charismatic leadership he sends the crowd that gathered there to attack the Arasaka Security Officers guarding the complex, hoping, or maybe he didn’t care that much, that Arasaka would think that it wouldn’t be easy to kill so many people with impunity, and Arasaka wasn’t going to call the police to solve the problem because imagine the bad press if the most powerful security Megacorporation of the world asked for the help of Police to deal with some rioters. So while security was busy dealing with it, the strike team composed by Rogue, Santiago, Silverhand, and Thomson infiltrated the towers to rescue Alt Cunningham.
The problem here is that Silverhand didn’t count on Alt Cunningham having everything under control. As Arasaka extracted her to build the SoulKiller for them, they gave her control to the Arasaka Mainframe. Which wasn’t the wisest idea because we’re talking about one of the best Netrunners on the planet and you give her access to your mainframe? So she already had a very solid escape plan that included successfully stealing a lot of money from Arasaka to buy her a new life so they won’t be able to find her, take control of the automatized security of the building and destroying the Soul Killer she was creating.
As the infiltration of Silverhand wasn’t exactly subtle and the riot in the Arasaka complex was causing the company a PR problem, they didn’t want to add the problem of being caught extracting someone, because technically it's illegal, but not like Megacorps care about legality. They care about PR, they would pretend they follow the laws for PR reasons, but when no one is looking they do as they please and ofcourse, get away with it. So Arasaka thought: no body, no proof, so as soon as she wrote the last line of code and before she could complete her plan.
Arasaka used this very Soul Killer to extract the soul of Alt Cunningham. And when Silverhand and Rogue reached their location they accidentally cut the connections back to her body so Alt could not get back to it. Silverhand killed the last of Arasaka men standing on the room. While Cunningham proceeded to kill the rest. Johnny seeing the almost lifeless body of Cunningham, and at that point he didn’t know what was going on and how the Soul Killer works, he picked her body up from the ground and left. The body whose soul has been extracted using the SoulKiller needed something to coordinate bodily functions. This -something- was the engram of Cunningham in Arasaka’s mainframe, but Johnny had no idea. He then picked the body up and her body eventually fell cold. Note: This version of the Soul Killer didn’t kill the victims directly when extracting their souls, this would be one of the improvements of later versions. So, yes, Rogue was involved in all that.
―When a Militech strike team led by Johnny Silverhand and Morgan Blackhand infiltrated the Arasaka Towers in the corporate center of Night City, because both of them were “her men”, she felt that she had to be there even if only to cover their backs. I went into vast details about these events that involved the death of Johnny Silverhand noted in the Lore Page on Adam Smasher
Having an Arasaka target on her back, Rogue always tried to keep an extremely low profile. In spite of being the best that the streets of Night City could offer she didn’t get mentioned in any “Top 10 best solos list”, but she was such a professional that its not like she needed that sort of advertising. She always had the busiest schedules to attend to anyway. The details how Rogue became one of the most powerful Fixers in Night City in 2077 is still a mystery and we will hopefully find out more when the pen and paper Cyberpunk Red is out at the end of summer, as it’s going to explain the events that happened from 2023 to 2050 so we’ll learn more about Rogue in the Future.
We can easily theorize that she got too old to get solo contracts anymore and she somehow “retired” from the streets, but as she made a lot of contacts in her career as a Solo, due to her low profile way of operating, it was easy for her to just use this contacts to a broker for other edgerunners, so the change from Solo to Fixer could be an easy thing to do for her. Rogue in Cyberpunk 2077 and what exactly is going to transpire when she finds out Johnny is still hanging around, well... we’ll have to play the game to find out.
