Michael Zelazny

Michael Zelazny is a character who appears in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. He is a former Belltower operative, and is involved in the Talion A.D. sidequest.

Biography
Zelazny is a natural-born American citizen, but his father was a Polish immigrant. A religious and patriotic man, he enlisted in the United States Army at 18, and excelled due to his exceptional intelligence and strategic skills. As the USA deferred many of its counter-insurgent operatives to Belltower at the height of conflicts in the Middle East, Zelazny transferred to the PMC when offered twice as much pay as the U.S. Army gave him. Here he climbed the career ladder swiftly, both due to his natural talents and augments.

He and his team were outfitted with experimental mechanical augmentations by Belltower, including a neural chip that could manipulate memory centers in the brain, effectively controlling what they could and could not remember. After a couple of operations, Zelazny's chip started to malfunction and he began to experience memory shifts, remembering bits and fragments of past missions, slowly realizing that they could not have been logically orchestrated by the government.

Eventually he found out that he and his peers were being used by the corrupt officials in the American and Chinese governments as a private kill team. He confronted the project director, and had him disconnect his and his team's memory implants, before killing the director. Going through the director's contacts, Zelazny found the list of the corrupt people that used him and his men, then proceeded to hunt them down, seeing it as justice.

While hunting down another target in Hengsha, China, Zelazny and his team used the basements in the back of a small butcher shop in the Youzhao district as their base of operations. During this time, Zelazny contacted Dr. Wing Hui of the local LIMB clinic, as his men's augmentations needed repairs. Belltower managed to slip a double agent into his team to leak them intel on the team's plans, but Zelazny discovered the traitor and had him killed. They then relocated to the sewers under the Kuaigan district, near the Alice Garden Pods.

Eventually, Adam Jensen, returning to Hengsha as part of his search for the missing Sarif Industries scientists, is asked by Dr. Wing to locate Zelazny and his team, saying that they have gone rogue and pose a danger to the citizens. Jensen has the option of either letting him go or fighting him and his men. If Jensen decides to let Zelazny go, he contacts Jensen soon after with the information that he got in touch with some of his former associates at Belltower and got them to lessen the patrols throughout Hengsha.

Trivia

 * The word "Żelazny" literally means "Made of Iron" in Polish.
 * Roger Zelazny was a Hugo and Nebula award winning Sci-Fi and Fantasy author. He was alluded to in the original Deus Ex via a username/password combination found on a datacube in Paris - RZELAZNY/SHADOWJACK.