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The year was 2027. Advances in biotechnology were helping people improve their physical and mental abilities to an amazing degree-- provided, of course, they had enough money. A new breed of people was emerging, half-human, half-machine. And in Detroit at least, not everyone was happy to see it.
I'd just landed a job as Head of Security at Sarif Industries, a cutting-edge biotech firm. David Sarif himself handpicked me for the job, said he needed me to keep his people safe. My ex, Megan Reed, was one of them. A brilliant neuroscientist, Megan had found a way to make augmentations safe and affordable for everyone. All she had to do was present her research to Congress-- but the night before her big meeting, my security measures failed.
A team of black op mercenaries stormed into Sarif Headquarters, massacring everyone in sight. Three of the mercs were heavily-augmented walking tanks. Their mission? Take out Megan and her team. I tried to stop them but their leader tossed me through a plate-glass wall. Last thing I heard as his bullet slammed into my brain was Megan's dying scream.
I should have died with her. Only I didn't.
High-end, military-grade "enhancements" saved my life-- the best augmentations Sarif's money could buy. Took me half a year to get a feel for 'em. Should've taken longer, but six months into my recovery, Sarif Industries was attacked again. This time, by a radical group of pro-human "purists."
Violent. Militant. And fanatically opposed to human augmentation, they claimed to be members of The Humanity Front, a non-profit organization that wanted the U-N to limit biotechnology research. The thugs broke into Sarif's factory and found machinists working overtime on a top-secret military augment called the Typhoon. Sarif sent me to retrieve it and when I did, I found one of the so-called purists next to it-- wired with cerebral implants, trying to download its classified specs. Obviously, something more was going on.
The Aug killed himself before I could question him. Sarif ordered me to dig deeper, so with the help of Frank Pritchard, Sarif's Head of Cyber-security, I did. Turns out, a second hacker had been controlling the Aug's actions from somewhere offsite. Pritchard and I tracked his signal to a secret FEMA internment camp in Detroit. The black op mercenaries were there-- the same mercs who'd left me for dead six months before. Figured they'd try again when they saw me. Wasn't so easy for 'em this time.
I took out the tank named Barrett and even got him to give me a new lead-- a penthouse apartment in China. Of course, we both knew it would be a trap in the end...
Hengsha Island, China. Home to a city so crowded, they had to build a second city on top of it. Trying to find clues in Hengsha wouldn't be easy. Lucky for me, I wasn't alone.
Faridah Malik, Sarif Industries' ace pilot, had lived in Hengsha before. A good person to have on your side, she knew enough about the place to get me around. Malik dropped me in the lower city, close to the penthouse Barrett had told me about. Belltower Associates, a private security firm under contract to the Chinese government, had agents tossing the suite when I arrived. Just not for the reason I'd been expecting.
Turns out, the man who lived there was a criminal hacker named van Bruggen-- the same hacker who'd been remotely controlling the Aug in Sarif's factory. Van Bruggen's panicked decision to force the man to commit suicide had been a mistake. Now his mercenary partners were gunning for him, and I needed to find him before they did.
Locating van Bruggen meant playing nice with the Triads, Hengsha's organized crime lords. They had the hacker holed up inside a low-rent capsule hotel. By the time I found him, van Bruggen had no qualms giving up the woman who'd hired him: Zhao Yun Ru, president of the Tai Yong Medical Corporation. According to van Bruggen, Zhao wanted to monopolize the augmentation industry, and had hired black op mercenaries to destabilize her competition. Sarif Industries was at the top of her list.
To prove this, I needed to get inside T-Y-M and grab a surveillance hologram off a server. I suspected van Bruggen was hiding something when he told me this, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
Megan wasn't dead. She and her four best researchers had been kidnapped-- spirited away somewhere while their kidnappers made it look like they were dead!
Desperate to learn more, I confronted Zhao in her penthouse. She claimed to be a pawn in a bigger plan and hinted at a group so powerful, it controlled global interests at a whim. Then she slipped into a panic room and hit the alarm. Forcing me to make a very quick exit...
I figured Zhao was lying, but part of her confession made sense. David Sarif had been worried about his people. So worried, he'd required all of them to have sub-dermal locator devices surgically implanted. The G-P-Ls would have been broadcasting the day of the attack. But Zhao said a single call to Picus, the world's leader in global, 24-hour satellite news-- had turned those signals off.
I needed to fly to Picus headquarters in Montreal if I wanted to learn more...
Eliza Cassan. Picus Communications' "First Lady of News"... Malik thought I was reaching when I told her Eliza was involved in this. The world's most famous news anchor working with a mercenary hit squad?
But when I confronted Cassan in her office, she freely admitted to jamming Detroit's satellites the night Megan's team had been taken. Said she'd just been following her commands. I suspected she wanted to say more, but black op mercenaries showed up, looking to shut us both down. And just like that, the Eliza I'd been talking to disappeared.
The mercs were led by an augmented killer I'd crossed paths with twice before-- Fedorova. A woman who'd made silence her best friend. She waited for me to track Eliza's transmission to a secret server room underneath the Picus complex, then jumped me from behind. A deadly fight ensued. I made sure she never moved silently again.
With Fedorova down and no one left to keep her quiet, Eliza reappeared. Turns out, Picus' "First Lady of News" wasn't a lady at all. She was a sophisticated A-I program, engineered to monitor data-streams and control what people believed. Eliza told me the mercs had brought in a Humanity Front doctor named Isaias Sandoval to remove the scientists' implanted tracking devices while Detroit's satellites were down. She also told me to speak to David Sarif if I wanted to learn more.
By the time Malik and I got back to Detroit, tensions between normal and augmented citizens had reached a flashpoint. Riots were breaking out in several cities, and the U-N was being urged to intervene. Sarif was trying hard to convince Hugh Darrow, the inventor-turned-philanthropist who'd once been a leading proponent of enhancement technologies, to help stop a possible regulatory vote.
Sarif had a lot riding on Darrow. Megan's discovery would have given millions of people the chance to evolve beyond their normal human abilities, and at the same time, catapulted Sarif Industries to the top of the Fortune 500. According to Sarif, Megan's kidnappers knew this, and didn't want people evolving unless they controlled how it was done. He called his enemies "Illuminati" and urged me to keep searching.
Determined to do so, I tracked down Sandoval via America's most outspoken augmentation opponent. Bill Taggart-- Sandoval's boss and founder of The Humanity Front. Sandoval admitted to operating on Megan's team when I confronted him, but said he hadn't removed their G-P-Ls. He'd merely switched them to a different frequency. Pritchard was able to trace one of the signals to China. Malik and I immediately took off in pursuit.
Unfortunately, the Illuminati were one step ahead...
Ambushed. Shot out of the sky by Belltower Associates seconds after entering Hengsha's airspace. Malik's piloting skills saved me. After a tense and bitter struggle, I escaped into Lower Hengsha.
The tracking signal I was following led straight to the Triads. Or more specifically to the augmented arm of Tong Si Hung, leader of a gang of augmentation Harvesters. Tong said they'd taken the arm off a corpse which Belltower had left at their door. Meaning, at least one of Sarif's scientists was dead.
Maybe not the rest of them, though... Tong pointed me to a port used for human trafficking and helped me slip aboard a Belltower ship. It was sailing to Rifleman Bank Station, a military base in the South China Sea. Belltower was holding kidnapped civilians as prisoners there, and using them to perfect The Hyron Project-- a human-computer interface that left most of its test subjects dead.
My search for Megan would've ended then, if not for a mysterious ally named Quinn. In exchange for my help exposing Belltower, he slipped me aboard a second ship headed to Singapore, and an Illuminati-run biotech facility called Omega Ranch. Three of Sarif's scientists were there, forced by their captors to create a technology capable of remotely shutting down augmented abilities. Thanks to an emergency recall notice issued by the World Health Organization, millions of people all over the world already had the biochip installed.
With the help of the scientists, I tracked Megan to a private section of the Ranch. There, I ran into Jaron Namir, the walking tank who'd put a bullet in my brain the first time we'd met. He'd teamed up with Zhao, and was hoping to catch me off-guard. Their little ambush didn't work.
I found Megan in a suite belonging to Hugh Darrow, the billionaire philanthropist whom Sarif had called on for help. Darrow had convinced her to go along with the biochip plan by promising to sabotage the tech. As she was explaining this, Darrow appeared in a global broadcast, telling the world that augmentations would be the death of mankind. Then he activated the biochips to prove his point.
All over the world, augmented people flew into a killing frenzy. Darrow had betrayed everyone-- and it was up to me to set things right.
To do it, I had to reach Panchaea, a massive installation in the Arctic Ocean. As I raced through corridors built by an all-augmented workforce, I saw death and destruction firsthand. By the time I shut down Darrow's broadcast, I knew the damage he'd done.
Yet humanity's future remained unclear. How would the world react to this sabotage? Would people ever regain their faith in augmentations again? What would be the Illuminati's next move?
Only time could give us the answers..."
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