Adam Jensen

Adam Jensen is the mechanically augmented protagonist of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. He is voiced by Elias Toufexis.

Early life
Adam Jensen was born in 1993. At a very young age he was one of a group of infants subjected to experimental genetic therapy treatments by White Helix, a subsidiary of VersaLife. Every other child in the group died as a result of the treatments, but Jensen survived. His birth parents, not wanting any more children to undergo the same treatments, burned down the facility where the experiments had taken place. They were killed in the fire, and the infant Jensen almost died as well, but was rescued by a kind-hearted facility worker named Michelle Walthers. Walthers gave up the baby Jensen for adoption, and at age five he was adopted by two loving parents. The rest of his youth and his adolescence were relatively normal. He grew up unaware of his origins, and believing that his foster parents were his birth parents.

However, unbeknownst to Walthers, or Jensen himself, or anyone else alive, the White Helix gene therapy had permanently altered Jensen's biochemistry. His body would no longer damage PEDOT electrodes with glial tissue buildup; instead, it would form a strong bond with the electrodes - meaning that if he were to be augmented, he would not require Neuropozyne. For the thirty years that followed the White Helix experiment, Jensen would unknowingly carry the secret of universal augmentation in his DNA.

Police career
As a young man, Jensen earned an Associate's Degree of Criminal Justice from the University of Phoenix. At the age of 21 he joined the Detroit Police Department. Four years later, he volunteered for the Department's SWAT unit, and was accepted under the command of Quincy Durant.

Jensen rose quickly through the ranks as part of SWAT Team Two, but his police career came to an end during an incident known as the Mexicantown Massacre. A young augmented boy was identified as dangerous, and Jensen was given the order to shoot to kill. He refused that order, and quit the force. The order was passed on to Jensen's commander, Wayne Haas.

At the time that he left the police force, Jensen was in a relationship with Sarif Industries neurologist Megan Reed. During their relationship Reed discovered Jensen's unique genetic traits. She advised her employer, David Sarif, to hire Jensen in order to ensure access to Jensen's genetic material.

Sarif Industries
Jensen joined SI as Head of Security. David Sarif, being a cautious man, hired a private investigator named Brent Radford to investigate Jensen's past. Radford discovered Jensen's role in the White Helix experiment and the fate of his biological parents. Sarif chose to not tell Jensen, believing that knowledge of his origins as a human test subject would be harmful to him.

Although Sarif was impressed with Jensen's loyalty and skills, Jensen was unwittingly even more important to the company as "Patient X" in Reed's research. If Jensen's genetic quirk could be reproduced in adults, augmentation could be made as simple as plastic surgery - ushering in a new age of human enhancement and destroying the market for VersaLife's drug Neuropozyne. Megan Reed's research was successful in early 2027.

On the eve of a series of high-profile augmentation hearings in Washington DC, and in response to Sarif Industries' announcement of a Neuropozyne alternative, Illuminatus Bob Page ordered an augmented Black Ops team called the Tyrants to attack the SI laboratories. Megan Reed and four other key researchers were apparently killed in the attack.

Page and the Tyrants were unaware that Jensen was the source of the announced research breakthrough, but all data pertaining to the breakthrough was lost, and in the course of attempting to thwart the attack, Jensen sustained life-threatening injuries.

Augmentation
Jensen sustained critical injuries only to his head, abdomen and left arm, but David Sarif took advantage of Jensen's genetic condition, and a clause in his employment contract, to augment Jensen to an extent which would have been impossible for any other individual. Jensen received every augmentation that Sarif Industries could produce. The result was, at that time, probably the single most extensive cybernetic modification that had ever been performed outside the Illuminati's Tyrants. Though the extent of Jensen's injuries meant that most of the augmentations had to be left initially inactive. Jensen was sent home to recuperate, but subsequently struggled to come to terms with his body's fusion with machines.

Returning to work at SI
Six months later, Jensen was taken off sick leave by David Sarif in order to infiltrate the compromised SI manufacturing plant in Milwaukee Junction, secure a prototype Typhoon Explosive System augmentation, and release hostages captured by a pro-human purist organization known as Purity First, led by Zeke Sanders.

Making his way through the plant, Jensen located the Typhoon data - although he also discovered an augmented hacker, with the appearance of a member of Purity First, attempting to steal the data. The hacker urged Jensen to help him, but then immediately committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Jensen secured the Typhoon data and proceeded through the plant - on Sarif's orders - and confronts Zeke Sanders, who had taken the plant manager Josie Thorpe hostage. Jensen attempted to discern who is behind the attacks on SI, but became aware that Sanders and his subordinates were simply pawns, being used by a real mastermind who had been controlling the augmented hacker.

Investigation of the attacks
Jensen returned to Sarif Industries HQ in Detroit and undertook an illegal mission to retrieve the dead hacker's Neural Hub from the Detroit Police Department morgue. Inside the morgue, Jensen discovered that the hacker's Hub had been modified with a wetdrive, and took the Hub back to his apartment to allow Francis Pritchard to examine it remotely. Pritchard found out that the modification had turned the hacker into a 'human proxy', allowing someone else to hack through him. The hacking attempt had originated in an abandoned factory complex in Highland Park. Pritchard also informed Jensen that a transmitter in Detroit's Derelict Row was maintaining a constant "backdoor" into the Sarif Industries network. Jensen went to Derelict Row and shut the transmitter down.

Faridah Malik airlifted Jensen to the Highland Park warehouse, where Jensen witnessed the arrival of two members of the Tyrants, Lawrence Barrett and Yelena Fedorova, as well as another appearance of their leader, Jaron Namir. Barrett said their operation was compromised, and that they have failed to retrieve the Neural Hub, despite the fact the Police Station was on lockdown by the orders of Joseph Manderley. Following the Tyrants, Jensen discovered that the warehouse it was a front, and that the lower levels housed a FEMA internment camp. Jensen stumbled upon Namir and Fedorova as they were preparing to leave, but was briefly incapacitated by Barrett before he could stop them. Namir ordered Barrett to get rid of Jensen, then departed with Fedorova. Barrett engaged Jensen in combat, and lost.

Jensen conducted a brief interrogation of the wounded Barrett, in which Barrettt indicated that Sarif Industries was not being targeted by FEMA, but by someone else, and that Jensen should go to Hengsha in order to find out who. Barrett then set off the grenades strapped to his chest, killing himself. Jensen made his way back to the surface and Malik took him back to Sarif Industries to report on the situation. Pritchard told Jensen about tunnels in the SI network that Sarif had apparently created before Jensen was hired, and that had been hidden even from Pritchard until now. Jensen crossed paths with William Taggart and Isaias Sandoval in the Sarif Industries penthouse, just as they were leaving a meeting with Sarif. Jensen and Sarif discussed Sarif's secret data-stream. Sarif indicated to Jensen - somewhat cryptically - that Megan Reed and her team were not killed because of their involvement in the Typhoon or other military augmentations, but rather because of their research that would redefine human evolution into a self-controlled process. Following the conversation, Jensen was immediately sent to Hengsha.

In Hengsha, Jensen was directed by Malik to the Youzhao district, the location of the Hengsha Court Gardens apartments. However, the building was under a lockdown by Belltower Associates, a privately-contracted security force operating through Hengsha. Jensen got through the lockdown and found the apartment from which the real hacker, Arie Van Bruggen, had operated. Van Bruggen was not there, having gone on the run. Malik suggested that Jensen speak with Tong Si Hung, owner of The Hive nightclub, as he may have information on the hacker's whereabouts. After some negotiation, Jensen was able to speak privately with Tong, who told him that van Bruggen was hiding in the Alice Garden Pods motel.

Jensen tracked down van Bruggen at the motel, but he insisited that he was simply a middleman, hired by Zhao Yun Ru to lay the groundwork for a hostile takeover of Sarif Industries by Zhao's own corporation, Tai Yong Medical. Van Bruggen also said that he stashed his evidence of this in the TYM tower in Upper Hengsha. He encoded a TYM employee card with Jensen's biometrics in order to allow Jensen to access the tower. However, Jensen's conversation with van Bruggen was cut short by the arrival of a large number of Belltower soldiers led by Narhari Kahn. The soldiers had been tasked with killing van Bruggen. The hacker pleaded with Jensen to give him a weapon, and opted to attempt to escape the attack on his own. Jensen escaped from the building and took a TYM shuttle up into the Pangu, the artificial structure between Lower and Upper Hengsha.

Jensen made his way up through the Pangu and into the Tai Yong Medical tower, where he found van Bruggen's recording from six months earlier - which showed Zhao speaking with Namir in advance of the attack on Sarif Industries. The recording revealed that Megan Reed and her team were not killed by the Tyrants, but merely kidnapped and taken to an unknown location, and that Picus TV newsreader Eliza Cassan was involved.

Search for kidnapped SI scientists
Jensen informed David Sarif of what he had discovered and headed to Zhao's office to get answers about the kidnapping. Zhao briefly played the victim, telling him that she had no choice in her actions - but as soon as Jensen let his guard down, she locked herself in a panic room and triggered an alarm, forcing Jensen to flee to the tower's helipad. From there, Malik flew Jensen to Montreal, to confront Eliza Cassan.

Jensen found the Picus TV building to be entirely devoid of people, having been evacuated and sealed by fire alarm protocols. Pritchard confirmed that the alarms had been silenced after the lockdown. Jensen made his way to Room 404 and had a brief conversation with Eliza. Eliza said that she had been observing Jensen since an occasion six months ago on which she had been was ordered to temporarily disrupt satellites over Detroit - an action which had effectively jammed the G-P-L implants in the kidnapped Sarif Industries scientists, creating the appearance that the scientists were dead. Jensen attempted to take Eliza away with him, but discovered that he had been speaking to a holographic projection. A large number of Belltower soldiers began searching the building for him.

During Jensen's escape through the Picus offices, Pritchard contacted him, saying that the projection of the hologram had been accompanied by a massive power spike originating from a sub-basement connected to the main building by a funicular elevator. Jensen descended to the sub-basement, where he found an entire suite of offices dedicated to altering, censoring, and manipulating information on a global scale. In room 802-11, he discovered that Eliza Cassan herself was actually a massive, sophisticated computer intelligence, programmed to monitor communications and data streams worldwide. Eliza's purpose was to find out what people were talking about and - if necessary - reshape the message in line with the designs of a powerful faction that she was physically unable to name. Following Eliza's conversation with Jensen, the Tyrant Federova appeared and engaged Jensen in combat, ultimately losing.

After Federova's defeat, Eliza presented Jensen with a recording which showed Sandoval and Namir discussing the removal of the G-P-L implants from the Sarif Industries scientists. Jensen deduced that the scientists would have been taken to the FEMA internment camp after the kidnapping, as the facility had the operating suite that would be required for such surgery. Eliza stated that Sarif would know why the scientists were kidnapped in the first place, but warned Jensen that everybody lies. Malik - responding to a signal from Eliza - picked up Jensen from a nearby Picus helipad and flew him back to Detroit.

Following Picus TV's release of footage which showed biotechnology companies engaged in augmented supersoldier experiments, Detroit - like many other major cities around the world - was the scene of extensive anti-augmentation riots. Sarif came to Jensen's apartment at the Chiron Building, where Jensen confronted him about the reason for the kidnappings. Sarif made vague allusions to the power of the unnamed group behind it all - and Jensen (somewhat incredulously) described them as the Illuminati. Sarif said that Megan Reed had been on the verge of an historic breakthrough - one which would have made augmentations safe and available for everyone. Jensen mentioned Sandoval's involvement, and Sarif provided an invitation to Taggart's speech at the Detroit Convention Center - but urged caution and delicacy, as Taggart's motives were questionable. At the Convention Centre, Jensen discovered that Sandoval was not attending the speech, and proceeded to Sandoval's apartment. There, Jensen discovered a hidden passage into the sewers, and confronted Sandoval in a secret room guarded by members of Purity First.

Following Taggart's speech, which shifted all the blame on to him, Sandoval became suicidal. Jensen nevertheless learned that Sandoval's involvement with the kidnapping had ended after he had failed to remove the kidnapped scientists' G-P-Ls - he had only been able to change the G-P-L frequencies to one so low that nobody would think to look for it. Pritchard told Jensen to return to Sarif Industries and report, and that he would look into tracking the adjusted frequencies. At Sarif's office, Jensen was met not by Sarif but by Hugh Darrow, the creator of mechanical augmentations. Darrow said that Sarif had urged him to invite delegates from the United Nations to Panchaea and persuade them that regulation of the augmentation industry was unnecessary. Following this conversation, Sarif appeared and told Jensen privately that Pritchard had tracked Vasili Sevchenko's G-P-L to Hengsha. Sarif indicated that he had called in a favor from the Defence Department in order to do this, meaning that the conspirators would expect Jensen's arrival.

On the approach to Hengsha, Malik's VTOL was diverted by flight control, and subsequently disabled by an EMP missile fired by a Belltower operative. Malik made an emergency landing in a suburban area near the Alice Garden Pods. Escaping from the ensuing Belltower ambush, Jensen took an elevator to street level, where he suddenly experienced a painful glitch in his augmentations. Everyone else with augmentation was similarly affected at the same moment. The World Health Organization announced a problem with a faulty biochip, and issued a mass recall, advising every augmented person worldwide to visit their nearest LIMB clinic for a replacement.

Jensen followed Sevchenko's G-P-L signal to the Harvester hideout in Youzhao district. Inside, he once again met Tong, who was wearing Sevchenko's scavenged cybernetic arm. Sevchenko himself was already dead; his corpse had been given to the Harvesters by Belltower a few weeks earlier. Tong had claimed that he didn't know about the other four Sarif employees - but would now tell Jensen more, if Jensen agreed to rescue Tong's son, who had been captured by Belltower. Jensen accomplished the rescue, but learned from Tong Jr. that the capture had been deliberately orchestrated. Tong Jr. wanted to leave Hengsha because he did not share his father's love of augmentations, and he felt that his family shouldn't put so much trust in the technology. Tong Jr. then departed with the aid of a personal cloaking device.

In exchange for the rescue, Tong Snr. told Jensen to look for clues at the Belltower dock, where several ships seemed to be loaded at night and dispatched to unknown destination. At the dock, Jensen was told by Tong to pick up a parcel containing a bomb, and detonate it in the shipping company's offices. The bomb turned out to have been set with an extremely short countdown, presumably with the intention that Jensen himself would die. Jensen escaped the blast by jumping out of a window, and in the resulting chaos he was able to sneak into a shipping crate and conceal himself in an empty cryo-pod, while Tong's son snuck aboard a ship for Hong Kong.

Several days later, Jensen awoke and emerged from the cryo-pod in an unknown location. Upon re-establishing contact with Pritchard, Jensen discovered that he was at the Omega Ranch biotech lab facility in Singapore.

On Pritchard's instructions, Jensen disabled a nearby signal-jammer, allowing location of the G-P-Ls of the remaining scientists. Jensen spoke to each scientist inside the ranch facility and recruited them into an escape plan which entailed infected the ranch's computers with a virus that Sevchenko created before his death, then staging three simultaneous serious incidents in the laboratories themselves. The virus prevented the scientists' G-P-L signals from being tracked while they escaped. Jensen proceeded to the secure wing of the facility to locate Megan Reed, but crossed paths with Zhao and Namir once again. He confronted Zhao about the biochip upgrades being another plot by the Illuminati - a killswitch intended to limit the abilities of augmented people so that they could easily be controlled. Zhao tried to use the killswitch to incapacitate Jensen, but Jensen was nevertheless able to defeat Namir in combat. Zhao escaped.

Jensen discovered Megan Reed, alive, in a secure suite nearby. Reed said that Darrow knew what the Illuminati were planning, and had tasked her with making modifications to the biochip before mass production began which would prevent the chips being used as a killswitch. Immediately after this conversation, however, a broadcast from Panchaea revealed Darrow's true intention - he had altered the killswitch signal to enable him to project terrible hallucinations into the minds of augmented people. He activated the signal, driving all augmented people throughout the world to violent insanity.

Role in the Panchaea incident
Reed urged Jensen to try to shut down the signal. Jensen agreed. The four scientists escaped in a VTOL while Jensen took Darrow's sub-orbital shuttle to Panchaea.

Most people at Panchaea had either been driven insane by the signal or been killed by those who had been. Jensen made his way to the control room and confronted Darrow. Darrow insisted that humanity had taken his gift of augmentation technology and twisted it, and he had altered the biochip signal as a way of showing that the technology was dangerous and that mankind needed to evolve without it. Darrow urged Jensen to allow his message to the world to expose the Illuminati and everything that had happened. After hearing Darrow's arguments, Jensen descended to the lowest levels of the facility to shut down the insanity signal.

At the very bottom of the facility, Jensen found the Hyron Core, a quantum computer which used human drones as living processors. Zhao appeared and connected herself to the Hyron system, intent on altering Darrow's signal for the Illuminati's benefit. However, the system rejected her biochip, and in an attempt to gain control, Zhao activated the core's defenses, turning them on Jensen. Jensen was forced to destroy the human drones and kill Zhao. With Zhao gone, Jensen accessed the broadcast control room.

Here, Jensen was contacted by Eliza Cassan, who gave him the option of sending Darrow's chosen message - or of changing it. The message could be altered to include no reference to the Illuminati, allowing them to retain control of augmentaton technology and blaming the insanity on contaminated Neuropozyne - an outcome favoured by William Taggart. Alternatively, the message could attribute the horrors that had occurred to a virus created by Humanity Front terrorists - a 'white lie' favoured by David Sarif. Eliza also offered Jensen the option of shutting down Panchaea's pressure controls, destroying the facility.

Personality
The personality that Jensen exhibits during Deux Ex: Human Revolution is fixed in many ways, but the player has the ability to shape it in various others. The game provides continuous opportunities for the player to decide Jensen's ethical/moral stance towards social behaviour and the use of violence. The player can also shape Jensen's evaluation of his own role in events which have already taken place by the time the story begins - such as the Mexicantown massacre.

The most prominent fixed element of Jensen's personality is that he is a loner. He undertakes missions exclusively alone and rarely displays strong emotion even towards close acquaintances. However, a few people in Jensen's life do provoke him to more emotional reactions. He retains strong affection for his ex-girlfriend Megan Reed. Although he has a general distrust of authority - perhaps as a consequence of his experiences in law enforcement - Jensen respects and trusts his employer David Sarif, and reacts badly when that trust is not reciprocated. He shows antipathy towards his colleage Frank Pritchard, who regards him with disdain in return - although their dislike of each other appears to be fairly superficial.

However, Human Revolution gameplay does not usually force the player to commit to a particular personality, or at least not completely. The player has freedom to be inconsistent. It is possible for the player's actions to result in the implication that Jensen is extremely manipulative, even psychopathic. Practical consequences for the game world and story are mostly determined by what happens rather than by an assessment of why the player did it, so Jensen's motivations are largely open to the player's interpretation.

Behind the scenes

 * Adam Jensen's first name may be a direct reference to Adam, described in the Bible as being the first man created by God. This would fit with JC Denton's first initials possibly being an allusion to Jesus Christ.
 * Jensen's first name may be intended to imply a parallel with Frankenstein's monster, which is also compared to the Biblical Adam. Human Revolution includes a number of other allusions to Frankenstein, particularly in reference to Hugh Darrow and the technologies he has created but cannot control.
 * Adam Jensen's last name is an homage to the game designer Jane Jensen.
 * Elias Toufexis, the voice actor for Adam Jensen, is the husband of Michelle Boback who is the voice of Megan Reed.
 * Jensen's sunglasses appear as a promotional miscellaneous item in Team Fortress 2.
 * Additionally, a mechanical left arm strongly resembling Adam's Is available to the Heavy class in Team Fortress 2.