Adam Jensen

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

Early life
Born in 1993, Jensen was part of a military project testing genetic therapy treatments on infants at White Helix, a subsidiary of VersaLife. As part of the experiment, every other infant in the same cycle was killed, but Adam survived, and somehow his genetic makeup was altered. But his birth parents, not wanting another group of infants to undergo the same treatment Adam did, burned down the facility at White Helix laboratories. Both were killed in the fire and baby Adam nearly died as well, but was rescued by a kindhearted worker named Michelle Walthers.

However, Jensen's biochemistry was altered - his body does not damage PEDOT electrodes with glial tissue buildup, but instead bonds to them intensely, making Neuropozyne treatments unnecessary. For the next thirty years, Jensen unknowingly carried the secret to universal Augmentation in his DNA.

Walthers gave up the baby Jensen for adoption, and he was eventually picked up by two loving parents at age 5. He then went on to lead a relatively normal life, earning an Associate's Degree of Criminal Justice from the University of Phoenix. He then joined the Detroit police force at the age of 21. Four years later he volunteered for its SWAT division, and was accepted under the command of Quincy Durant.

Jensen rose quickly through the ranks of Team Two, but his career came to an end during an incident known as the Mexicantown Massacre. The criminal was a young but dangerous augmented boy, and Jensen was given the order to fire. He refused and quit the force, and the order was passed on instead to his commander, Wayne Haas.

At the time, Jensen was in a relationship with Sarif Industries neurologist Megan Reed, during which Reed discovered Jensen's unique genetics. She thus advised her employer, David Sarif, to hire Jensen as head of company security in order to ensure access to Jensen's genetic material.

Though Sarif was pleased with Jensen's skills and loyalty, his true position at Sarif Industries was as the mythical Patient X. If his genetic quirk could be reproduced in adults, augmentation would become as simple as plastic surgery, heralding a new age of human augmentation - at the cost of VersaLife's Neuropozyne market. Megan Reed achieved her goal in 2027.

Jensen does not know of his past and thinks of his adoptive parents as his true parents, but Sarif, being a cautious man, hired a private investigator named Brent Radford to dig up his past. Radford discovered both that Jensen's adoptive parents are not his biological parents, and that his true parents were killed in the White Helix fire. With these bits of information as well as Megan's research, Sarif was able to piece together Jensen's past, but chose not to tell Jensen for his sake.

2027
In 2027, Adam Jensen was preparing security plans for Sarif researchers during augmentation hearings in Washington D.C. when Bob Page responded to Sarif Industries' announcement of a Neuropozyne alternative by ordering an augmented Illuminati black ops team, the Tyrants, to attack Sarif' research labs. Megan Reed was killed along with four other key researchers, all research pertaining to the project was lost, and Jensen sustained life-threatening injuries.

However, Page was unaware that Jensen was the source of the breakthrough, which enabled David Sarif to save Jensen's life through an otherwise-impossible degree of augmentation. While Jensen only sustained critical injuries to his head, lower torso and left arm, Sarif decided to take full advantage of Jensen's mutation(and employment contract) to perform a rare full-body enhancement, fitting Jensen with every augmentation Sarif Industries could produce. The final result was perhaps the single most extensive cybernetic modification performed to that date, though the extent of Jensen's injuries meant that most of these had to be initially left inactive.

Jensen was sent home to recuperate afterwards, struggling to come to terms with his body's fusion with machines. Six months later, Jensen was pulled out of the sick leave by Sarif to the SI manufacturing plant in Milwaukee Junction, to secure the prototype of the Typhoon Explosive System augmentation, and release the hostages captured by a pro-human purist organization known as Purity First, led by Zeke Sanders.

Making his way through the factory, Jensen eventually found the room where the Typhoon data was being stored. In there, he also found an augmented hacker, who appeared to be a member of Purity First, attempting to steal the data. Upon being discovered, the hacker committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, but not before urging Jensen to help him. Jensen secured the Typhoon afterwards, and continued through the plant to find Sanders, upon Sarif's orders. Once he finally caught up, he negotiated the release of the plant manager, Josie Thorpe, whom Sanders took hostage. Jensen was able to reason with Sanders, revealing that the hacker was augmented, and the whole plan was for Sanders and his group to die in the plant. After freeing Thorpe, Jensen let Sanders go, hoping that it would lead him to the mastermind behind the attacks on Sarif Industries.

Upon returning to Sarif HQ in Detroit, Jensen was tasked with retrieving the dead hacker's Neural Hub from the Detroit Police Department morgue. At the police station, Jensen met up with fellow ex-member of SWAT Team Two, Wayne Haas, who was demoted to a desk sergeant after the Mexicantown Massacre, following the order that Jensen refused back then. Jensen managed to square the matter with Haas, and made his way to the morgue. Once there, Jensen learned that the hacker's Hub was modified with a wetdrive, and took it back to his apartment for Francis Pritchard to examine it remotely. Pritchard found out that the modification turned the hacker into a 'human proxy', allowing someone else to hack through them, and traced the origin to an abandoned factory complex in Highland Park. He also informed Jensen that there was a transmitter in Derelict Row, a district of Detroit, which kept an open backdoor to the Sarif Industries network.

Jensen made his way there, and shut the transmitter down, after which Faridah Malik took him to the Highland Park warehouse. Shortly after, 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 the 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 them into the factory, Jensen discovered that it was a front for a FEMA internment camp, located on the lower levels. In one of the storage rooms, 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 and escaped with Fedorova during the fight, which Barrett ultimately lost.

After a brief interrogation, he said that Sarif Industries wasn't targeted by FEMA, but someone else, and said to go to Hengsha to find out who, before setting off the grenades strapped to his chest, killing himself in the process. Afterwards, Jensen made his way back to the main level, and Malik took him to Sarif to report on the situation. Upon his return, Jensen was informed by Pritchard about the tunnel network that Sarif created before Jensen was hired, and the fact that it was hidden even from Pritchard until now. Shortly after, Jensen crossed paths with William Taggart and Isaias Sandoval in the penthouse, just as they were leaving after meeting with Sarif. Once Jensen and Sarif squared the matter of Sarif's data streaming, Jensen was promptly sent to Hengsha, with a cryptic message from Sarif that Dr. Reed and her team weren't killed because of the Typhoon or other military augmentations, but rather because of their research that would redefine human evolution into a self-controlled process.

Arriving in Hengsha, Jensen was directed by Malik to Youzhao district, where the Hengsha Court Gardens apartments were located. However, he found the building locked down by Belltower Associates, who were contracted as the police force for the entire Hengsha. Jensen managed to get inside however, and found the apartment from which the real hacker, Arie Van Bruggen, operated. However the hacker himself was not there, and on the run. Malik suggested to speak with Tong Si Hung, owner of The Hive nightclub, as he may have information on the hacker's whereabouts. Jensen eventually found his way inside and spoke with Tong, who told him that van Bruggen was hiding in the Alice Garden Pods motel, and Jensen made his way there.

Once there, Jensen found and spoke with the hacker, who said that he was simply the middleman, hired by Zhao Yun Ru as a part of hostile takeover of Sarif Industries by Zhao's own corporation, Tai Yong Medical. He also said that he stashed the evidence of this in the TYM tower in the upper Hengsha, and encoded a TYM employee card with Jensen's biometrics to allow him access there. The meeting was interrupted by the Belltower soldiers, led by Narhari Kahn, who attacked the motel, tasked with eliminating the loose end that Van Bruggen was. The hacker pleaded to Jensen to give him a weapon before hiding in one of the capsules, while Jensen himself slipped out of the building, and headed for the TYM shuttle that took him to the Pangu, the artificial structure between lower and upper Hengsha.

Jensen made his way through the structure and eventually into the Tai Yong Medical tower itself, and found Van Bruggen's recording, showing Zhao speaking with Namir before the attack on Sarif Industries, six months earlier. It turned out Dr. Reed and her team weren't killed, but kidnapped by the Tyrants, and transported into unknown location. After passing the information to Sarif, Jensen headed to Zhao's office to get answers regarding the kidnapping. She played the victim, telling him that she had no choice in this, but as soon as Jensen let his guard down, she triggered an alarm and locked herself in a panic room, forcing Jensen to flee. Once he made his way to the helipad, he had Malik fly him to Montreal, to confront Eliza Cassan, who was also mentioned in the hacker's recording.

Malik dropped him off at the Picus TV building, and he made his way inside, finding it devoid of people, and sealed by fire alarm protocols. Pritchard confirmed it, but also said that the alarm's been silenced after the lockdown. Jensen made his way to room 404 and spoke with Cassan briefly. She said that she had been observing Jensen for some time now, ever since she was ordered to temporarily disrupt the satellites over Detroit six months earlier, effectively jamming the implanted G-P-L devices in the kidnapped scientists, and leading people to believe they were dead. When Jensen attempted to take her away, it was revealed that she was a holo projection, and alerted the Belltower soldiers to his presence.

While Jensen made his way through the offices, Pritchard contacted him, saying that the holo projection was accompanied by a massive power spike, originating from the sub-basement room 802-11, connected to the main building via a funicular. Jensen managed to reach 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 Cassan was actually a massive, sophisticated AI program, engineered to monitor communications and data streams worldwide, to find out what people were talking about, make sure it was discussed according to the designs of the Illuminati, and reshape it if need be. Shortly after, Fedorova revealed herself, and Jensen was forced to fight her.

Once Fedorova was defeated, Cassan presented Jensen with a recording, showing Sandoval and Namir discussing the removal of the G-P-L implants from the Sarif scientists. Jensen deducts they were taken to the FEMA internment camp after the kidnapping, as the facility had a full operating suite required for such surgery. Cassan also mentioned that Sarif would know why the scientists were kidnapped in the first place. And warned him that everybody lies. Afterwards, Malik picked him up from the adjacent helipad, upon being contacted by Cassan, and flew him back to Detroit, which had fallen into chaos, following the anti-augmentation riots erupting across the world, after Picus released a footage showing biotech firms performing experiments on augmented super soldiers.

Since access to the Sarif building was impossible due to the riots in the plaza, Sarif decided to meet Jensen in his apartment at the Chiron Building. After confronting Sarif, and getting the clarification that it was indeed the Illuminati that kidnapped Dr. Reed and her team, Jensen questioned why. Sarif said that Dr Reed was on the verge of a historic breakthrough - of making augmentations safe and available for everyone. Jensen then said that he knows of Sandoval's involvement, and Sarif gave him an invite to Taggart's speech at the Detroit Convention Center, but urged him to play this delicately, since Taggart's own involvement was questionable. Making his way to the convention center, Jensen was able to talk Taggart down during his speech, and got the information about Sandoval's location from him afterwards. Taggart also asked Jensen to give Sandoval a chance to explain himself, as he was less radical than his brother, Ezekiel Sanders. At Sandoval's apartment, Jensen discovered a hidden passage leading to the sewers, and Sandoval's secret room, guarded by the members of Purity First, including Sanders.

Following the speech given by Taggart, which shifted all the blame on Sandoval, he subsequently tried to kill himself, but Jensen was able to persuade him otherwise. Sandoval said that his involvement with the kidnapping ended after the failure to remove the G-P-Ls - he was only able to change their frequency to one so low that nobody would think to look for it. Pritchard told Jensen to return to Sarif HQ and report, and that he would look into tracking the frequencies. However, upon arriving at the penthouse, Jensen was met by Hugh Darrow, the creator of mechanical augmentations, rather than Sarif. Darrow said that Sarif urged him to invite the UN members to Panchaea, and convince them that the industry regulation of augmentations in unnecessary. Shortly after, Sarif appeared in person and wanted to speak with Jensen outside, saying that Pritchard tracked Vasili Sevchenko's G-P-L implant to Hengsha. Sarif also said that he had to call in a favor from the D.O.D to do this, meaning the conspirators would know about Jensen's arrival.

During the second approach to Hengsha, Malik's VTOL is diverted from the original course by the flight control, and subsequently fired upon by a Belltower operative. The EMP blast disables the craft's systems, forcing Malik to make an emergency landing in the suburban area near the Alice Garden Pods, while Jensen jumps out at the last moment. After fending off the Belltower strike team and ensuring Malik's safe escape, Jensen took an elevator to the street level, and shortly after experienced a painful glitch in his systems, much like every other augmented person present. He learned that the World Health Organization announced a problem with a faulty biochip, and issued a mass-recall, advising every augmented person to visit nearest LIMB clinic for replacements.

Jensen then followed Sevchenko's G-P-L signal to the Harvester hideout in Youzhao district. Inside however, he found out that Tong had Sevchenko's scavenged arm prostethic installed on himself, and that the scientist was dead - his corpse was given to the Harvesters by Belltower, a few weeks prior. Tong claimed that he didn't know about the other four Sarif employees, but would tell Jensen more, if he agreed to rescue his son, who was captured by Belltower. Jensen agreed, but also learned from Tong junior later, that his kidnapping was orchestrated. He wanted to leave Hengsha, because he did not share the same love for augmentations as his father, and felt that his family shouldn't put so much trust in that technology. Jensen berated him for this, saying that he put the entire population of lower Hengsha at risk by starting a war between Belltower and the Triads. Afterwards, young Tong snuck out of the compound using a scavenged cloaking device.

Upon return to the Harvester hideout, Tong senior told Jensen to look for clues in the Belltower dock, where several ships seemed to load at night and depart to unknown destination. Once there, he was asked to pick up a package, which turned out to be an explosive, plant and detonate it in one of the offices. The resulting chaos served as a distraction for both Jensen to sneak aboard the ship, and for Tong's son to escape safely. Jensen hid in one of the cryo-pods stored on board, and waited for the arrival at the destination. Several days later, he awoke in an unknown locale. Upon examining his surroundings and being contacted by Pritchard, he found out that he was at the Omega Ranch biotech lab facility in Singapore.

Pritchard told Jensen to disable the signal jammer, so that he could locate the G-P-Ls of the remaining scientists. When that was done, Jensen tracked them down one by one, and informed them about the escape plan, which would entail planting a virus Sevchenko created before his death, into the Ranch computers, and setting off three simultaneous explosions in the labs. The virus would prevent the G-P-L signals from being tracked. Jensen then proceeded to the secure wing of the facility to find Dr. Reed, but crossed paths with Zhao and Namir once again. He confronted Zhao, having found out that the new biochip was another tool of the Illuminati - a killswitch, meant to limit the abilities of augmented people, so that they could easily be controlled. If Jensen had installed the biochip himself, Zhao would severely impair him at that point, which allowed Namir to get a drop on him, while she escaped. Namir and Jensen fought, and eventually Jensen won, then found Dr. Reed.

She said that Darrow knew what the Illuminati were planning, and tasked her with making modifications to the biochip before the mass production, which would prevent them from using it as a killswitch. Shortly after however, a broadcast from Panchaea revealed Darrow's true intent - he had altered the signal to project terrible hallucinations into the minds of all the augmented people worldwide, driving them to the point of insanity. Witnessing this, Dr Reed urged Jensen to take a LEO shuttle to Panchaea and stop Darrow's signal. He agreed, but not before making sure that Dr. Reed and the other three surviving researcher escaped aboard Mailk's VTOL. Jensen took the sub-orbital shuttle and arrived at the instalation, finding most people there either dead or driven insane by the signal. He made his way through to the conference room and found Darrow here. He explained that humanity took his gift of augmentation technology and twisted it, He altered the signal as a way of showing that this technology is dangerous, and mankind should evolve without it, even abandon research into human enhancements completely. Jensen was able to reason with him, saying that he was simply justifyng genocide, and the signal must be shut down. Eventually, Hugh agreed and gave him the access codes to the Hyron Project, where Jensen would be able to shut down the broadcast. He also asked for the truth to be known, about the biochip, the Illuminati, through a message that could be sent from the Core.

Making his way through the installation, Jensen crossed paths with Taggart and Sarif. Each one of them attempted to sway him to their side and alter Darrow's message for their own ends - Taggart wanted the Illuminati to control the augmentation technology to prevent its misuse, and asked that Jensen wiped the mention of them from the message, blaming a contaminated Neuropozyne supply for the event. Sarif wanted to conceal the creation of the biochip, and instead shift the blame onto the Humanity Front, saying that their doctors created a virus, which only affects augmented individuals.

Jensen eventually made it to the bottom of the installation, and into the Hyron Core. There, he found out that the system was a quantum computer, utilizing human drones connected to it. While he was distracted, Zhao appeared once again, intent on connecting herself to the Hyron system and altering Darrow's message for the Illuminati's benefit. However, the system rejected her biochip, and in an attempt to gain control, Zhao activated the defenses, turning them on Jensen. He was forced to eliminate the drones and kill Zhao to proceed. In the broadcast control room, Cassan contacted Jensen once more, giving him the option of sending Hugh's unaltered message, or change it to either Taggart's or Sarif's specifications. There was also the fourth option, which involved shutting down Panchaea's pressure control, making the installation crumble under the weight of the ocean pressing against it.

Personality
Adam is very much so a loner, usually working alone on his missions, and has a cold and unemotional personality. He does have remorse for his actions, and could (dependent on the player) morally chooses what is the right thing to do, such as during the Mexicantown Massacre. Adam is also known for showing emotions towards his girlfriend Megan Reed, one of, if not, the only person he has shown feelings of love to. Although Jensen does trust his boss, David Sarif, Adam normally tends to have a dislike for authoritarian figures, largely due to his previous law enforcement experience. In terms of gameplay, story and dialogue choices, Adam's personality is up to the player as there are different type of responses he could give in a conversation such empathic, sympathetic or detached etc. His ability to solve problems could either be through peace and negotiation or violence and ruthlessness.

Behind the scenes

 * Like JC Denton, the protagonist of Deus Ex, Adam has sunglasses, and wears them during night time. His voice also resembles JC's, being very dry and somewhat emotionless.
 * When he was not mechanically augmented, he looked very similar to Paul Denton, the brother of JC.
 * Since his genetic makeup is special, Adam Jensen doesn't need the Neuropozyne treatments that all other mechanically augmented people need to prevent scarring and rejection.
 * His bloodtype is O negative.
 * He is ambidextrous.
 * He lives in a luxury apartment complex in downtown Detroit named the Chiron Building. In Greek mythology, Chiron was considered to be the superlative centaur - intelligent, civilized, and kind. He had a unique lineage and, as a child, was taught by the sun god, Apollo.
 * There is speculation that Adam Jensen's first name references Adam, the first man created by God according to the Bible. This could fit with JC Denton's initials standing for Jesus Christ.
 * 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.
 * After Adam receives his mechanical augmentations, he only retracts his sunglasses one time, when he talks with Megan Reed in Singapore.
 * Adam Jensen's sunglasses are also a promotional miscellaneous item in Team Fortress 2.

Trivia

 * In Deus Ex, Hong Kong authories can be seen searching for one of the leaders of the NSF, who also goes by the name of Adam Jensen. Considering the events of The Missing Link, and the possibility that Adam might have survived the Panchea event, he might have possibly been recruited by Janus and/or Garvin Quinn, who might possibly be tied to the NSF considering their aim of preventing the 2027 Illuminati's plans to control the world.