Michelle Walthers

Michelle Walthers is an elderly woman in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. She is involved in the Acquaintances Forgotten sidequest.

Biography
Not much is known about Michelle Walthers' past, other than the fact that she was a nurse at White Helix Labs in 1993. When two White Helix researchers set the building on fire to protect the only survivor of their research on children, Walthers rescued the boy from his crib. Eventually, Walthers left the child in the care of former co-worker Arthur Jensen, whose wife Margie was sterile and had been deemed unfit to legally adopt. For most of his life, the boy named Adam Jensen believed he was raised by his biological parents, and had no memory of Walthers or White Helix.

2027
As part of a background check requested by David Sarif before hiring Jensen as his chief of security, private investigator Brent Radford found evidence tying Jensen to White Helix and its parent company VersaLife. Recognizing the danger posed by the corporation and its powerful benefactors, Sarif stopped digging and encouraged Radford to do the same. In his haste to close the case, Sarif left a vulnerability in the company firewall, which is later exploited by Yune during an attack on the company's Milwaukee Junction plant. Jensen's subsequent investigation leads him to Sarif's backdoor, Radford, and ultimately Walthers, who lives in a low-end apartment nearby.

Walthers appears to be suffering from dementia; she mistakes Jensen for a "Rolling Meals" delivery man and believes he is too old to be the boy she rescued. Gentle questioning gradually reveals bits of Jensen's past: she was aware "some kind of gene therapy research" was being conducted at White Helix, and Jensen's "real parents" were scientists who may not have been biologically related to him. The full scope of the tests was unknown to Walthers, but VersaLife wanted to use Jensen to inoculate more infants, prompting the researchers to destroy the lab.

After telling her story, Walthers will ask Jensen to bring her dinner, and give him 200 to "buy Adam a present" for the birthdays and Christmases she missed. As he leaves, Jensen orders Pritchard to assign Walthers a temporary security detail. Her fate after this is unclear; she may have been killed in the Detroit riots or the Aug Incident, but given her advanced age and deteriorating health, it's likely she died of natural causes at some point not long after her reunion with Jensen.