JC Denton and Deus Ex

JC Denton and Deus Ex is a plot summary of Deus Ex that appears in Deus Ex: Invisible War: Prima's Official Strategy Guide. The plot summary also includes an insert titled "How it Began."

Transcript
In Deus Ex, you play JC Denton, a rookie agent for the United Nations’ Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO), who has been nano-technologically enhanced. Your older brother, Paul Denton, also a nano-augmented agent, shares his insights with you along the way. At this time, UNATCO is dealing with the Gray Death, a worldwide plague. Although there is a cure, called Ambrosia, the development and distribution of it has been slow. The National Secessionist Force (NSF), [sic] claims the cure is being blocked by secret organizations, so they have taken terrorist countermeasures.

You infiltrate the NSF’s makeshift command center on Liberty Island and determine that the recently hijacked Ambrosia shipment has already left the island. You then recover a unit of Ambrosia and deal with a hostage situation in the subway in Battery Park. After that, you disable the NSF generator in Hell’s Kitchen, so that Paul’s team can gain access to the NSF facility and retrieve the Ambrosia. When you return to UNATCO, you are told that they were nonetheless unsuccessful. At headquarters, you also cross paths with Walton Simons, the director of FEMA, who seems to have more access and influence than you’d expect for someone in his position. Next, you race to stop the Ambrosia from leaving New York. You travel through the underground tunnels of the Mole people until finally reaching the helibase and airfield where the vaccine is being prepared for transport. You track down Juan Lebedev, the millionaire anarchist funding the plot. Surprisingly, you are met there by your brother Paul, who reveals he has been working as a double-agent for the NSF, and urges you to reconsider your own affiliations.

Although you are next dispatched to Hong Kong, your pilot, Jock, redirects you to New York City, because of a message from Paul. After Paul corroborates his accusations that UNATCO is a crooked organization, you agree to help the NSF by activating a distress signal. After doing so, you meet up with strong resistance and are eventually captured.

You wake up confined to a cell in an unknown location. Aided by a mysterious hacker named Daedalus, you initiate your escape. As you make your way out of the facility, you realize that you are being held prisoner by Majestic 12 (MJ-12), a secret U.S. government organization for the research and development of biotechnologies. Originally, it had been clandestinely controlled by the ancient secret society, the Illuminati, but was recently wrested from their power by a member from their highest ranks, the wealthy and powerful Bob Page, after he neutralized the ruling Council of Five. You are surprised to discover that this MJ-12 facility is actually located beneath UNATCO HQ, demonstrating their significant role in the conspiracy and cover-up. You also find out that nano-augmented agents like you and your brother have self-destruct systems that UNATCO can use to remotely terminate you. Before departing the facility, you retrieve the information necessary for disabling this killswitch, so that Tracer Tong, a talented scientist and ally of your brother, can neutralize the system.

Next you travel to Hong Kong to seek him out, but first you must settle a dispute between the triads, the criminal organizations that direct the region’s affairs. Due to the tension, neither The Luminous Path, led by Gordon Quick, nor The Red Arrow, led by Max Chen, are willing to help you find Tracer Tong. Upon investigating the local Versalife facility, Bob Page’s company and the only manufacturer of Ambrosia, you find that Maggie Chow was working with Page to destabilize the area by misleading Max Chen to start the conflict. After restoring the peace, Quick admits you to the Luminous Path compound where you finally meet with Tong, who disables your killswitch. Next, he dispatches you to return to Versalife for more information, where you discover that the Gray Death is in fact a human-made virus. Tong and Daedalus both direct you to Morgan Everett, a member of the Illuminati, because he is the only one who can create a true cure. In Paris, you make contact with Silhouette, another terrorist organization working against MJ-12. Their leader, Chad Dumier, directs you to Nicolette DuClare, whose mother was a member of the Illuminati’s innermost circle, the Council of Five, with Morgan Everett. After searching the DuClare chateau, you find a secret computer room that allows you to contact him. After recovering for him a critical piece of data from a Paris cathedral, you meet one of Morgan’s agents in a Metro station. He knocks you out and takes you to the estate.

At Everett’s, you begin to put together the remaining pieces of the puzzle. Bob Page first eliminated the other ruling members of the Illuminati, then created the Gray Death and now controls its cure, all in order to achieve world domination. He has placed his lieutenant, Walton Simons, into a key role as the director of FEMA, to aid him in his designs. Although Everett, as Page’s former mentor, can help you neutralize the virus, Page seems to have still bigger plans ahead.

You have also learned about various Area 51 AI projects. You discover that “Daedalus” is actually a sentient AI, developed by MJ-12, that has since gone rogue. “Icarus,” his subsequent revision, is still controlled by Bob Page and MJ-12, and “Morpheus,” the prototype for the project, now resides in Everett’s mansion.

Next, you head to Vandenburg Air Force base to get in contact with Gary Savage, the leading researcher in nano-technology. The base is under siege from MJ-12, so you remove these threats. After reactivating various technical systems, Daedalus and Icarus unexpectedly merge into a new entity called Helios, that possesses yet greater power, and a message from Page suggests that this is part of his final plan. After conferring with Savage and receiving various messages from your foes, you find you must rescue his daughter, Tiffany, then head for an undersea lab in order to retrieve information necessary for Savage’s progress against MJ-12.

You are successful in your reconnaissance, but then you discover that Bob Page has aimed a nuclear missile at Vandenburg. You race to redirect the launch to target Area 51 instead, where Bob Page is preparing to merge with Helios, to become an invincible global dictator. You arrive there and survey the damage, and finally penetrate security.

At this point, a number of courses of action are open to you. You can follow Tracer Tong’s advice and initiate a meltdown in the Aquinas router at Area 51, thus paralyzing global telecommunications and returning civilization to a simpler, more decentralized existence. You can also agree to Helios’s plan and join with the entity to create a new consciousness, capable of managing a new world order. In addition, you can neutralize Bob Page and work with the Illuminati to maintain the current balance.

How it Began
The year was 2051 and the world was an even more dangerous and chaotic place than at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Terrorists operated openly, killing thousands; drugs, disease, pollution and, of course, El Nino killed even more. The world’s economies were close to collapse and the gap between the insanely wealthy and the desperately poor had grown to the size of the Grand Canyon. The media openly encouraged the worst in mankind. Still, this was not just Another Grim Dystopic Post-Apocalyptic World™. Deus Ex was set “10 minutes before the apocalypse.” There was still hope.

Technology, advanced almost (but not quite) beyond imagining, was, and still is, the hope of the future. JC Denton (the player character), a powerful, nano-technologically augmented agent for an anti-terrorist organization called UNATCO, was one of the symbols of that hope. Sent to investigate seemingly straightforward terrorist activity in New York City, JC discovered that the organization he worked for, far from working to solve the problem, was actually a part of the problem. Worse, he found disturbing evidence that UNATCO might have been under the control of a cabal of conspirators which wanted nothing less than world domination. And as he hopped the globe from New York to Hong Kong, from Paris to the Desert Southwest of the United States, he discovered an even deeper mystery. Someone — or something — called “Majestic 12” had been playing the puppet-master all along.