The backstory for Deus Ex first appeared in Deus Ex: Prima's Official Strategy Guide in the section titled "Appendix: What's Really Going On." A revised version of the backstory later appeared in Deus Ex: The Conspiracy: Prima's Official Strategy Guide (the official strategy guide for the PlayStation 2 port of the original Deus Ex) under the section titled "What's Going On."
Transcript[]
Below is the revised version of the backstory as it appears in Deus Ex: The Conspiracy: Prima's Official Strategy Guide.
Adam Weishaupt founded the Illuminati at the time of the American Revolution. The Illuminati was a mystical secret society dedicated to the spiritual perfection of the individual and the clandestine domination of all civilized institutions (to the Illuminati, the connection between the two was logical). The name means "the illuminated ones," or, those with the means to see that to which others are blind.
For the next two-and-a-half centuries, they had all the power over the world they had aspired to have; they were playing with it. A council of five led the Illuminati and the extremely wealthy banks created by the Knights Templar during the Crusades financed them.
They decided who won elections and revolutions, which fads and fashions caught on and when they died; they dictated the "self-evident moral values" of different places and cultures; they started wars and destroyed countries.
Flash forward to 1947. A UFO was reported to have crashed, intact, at Roswell, New Mexico. Sources reported that the U.S. military claimed the craft and the bodies of five occupants. The President of the United States commissioned a blue-ribbon panel, code named Majestic 12, to study the alien artifacts. The Illuminati stacked MJ12 with their own high-ranking members. Shortly thereafter, under Illuminati pressure, the U.S. government hushed up the Roswell incident and began a decades-long policy of official denial of UFO activity.
There are those who say that the Roswell incident surprised the Illuminati. Others have suggested that the whole thing was an Illuminati hoax designed to cover the creation of MJ12. Either way, the end result was that MJ12 became a part of the Illuminati power structure, dedicated to researching and exploiting post-atomic technology. Because of MJ12 discoveries (painstakingly leaked to mainstream science), cybertechnology, then nanotechnology, became the focus of scientific research.
All was not well for the Illuminati, however. In the twenty-first century, their control began to erode. Plague, disasters, and the dissolution of the middle class weakened the Illuminati's grip on society. Most devastating of all was the rise of the global information net, which allowed people to communicate and exchange knowledge without Illuminati interference. The most determined Illuminati efforts—like the Echelon project designed to monitor all net traffic—met with limited success at best.
Enter Bob Page, the richest man in the world, current chief of the Majestic 12 project, and member of the Illuminati's ruling five. Page was a man with a vision. The confused and chaotic society that the conspiracy had allowed to evolve disgusted him. Enough playing around with semi-passive control of human society: It was time for one man to rise up and rule the world. He would have to be a god to get it done right. Fortunately, Page had just the fellow for the job: himself.
Knowing that his fellow Illuminati would object to one member hogging the whole pie, he concentrated on neutralizing the rest of the five. Beth DuClare was assassinated in France. With animosity toward his fellow American, Stanton Dowd, Page destroyed him financially. Morgan Everett, Page's mentor and main rival for power, defended himself from Page's attacks, but in the process gave up his accrued power and influence. Page judged that Everett had so isolated himself that he no longer had the capacity to interfere with Page's plans.
As for Lucius DeBeers, the titular head of the organization—well, Page had a bit of luck there. Morgan Everett had already neutralized Lucius in cryogenic suspension. Why Everett kept Lucius on ice rather than letting him die is a mystery, but it had something to do with stopping Page from formally seizing DeBeers office. The Illuminati never waste an asset, so Everett made regular use of Lucius, keeping him conscious as a source of advice and experience.
With his peers out of the way, Page was ready to move. It was time to tear down the rotting facade of the Illuminati and replace it with Page's own new, efficient, and ruthless organization: a completely rebuilt Majestic 12. The plan had three prongs.
First, he destabilized the world's existing governments by killing billions of people in a massive pandemic. The cost in lives was regrettable, but necessary. Called the "Gray Death," the plague was not an organic disease, but a self-replicating nanotechnology that invaded the human body and recreated itself until life was no longer possible. The only cure or preventative for the Gray Death was the nano-engineered antigen "Ambrosia," which Page doled out sparingly to his most important henchmen and allies. He was not above bribing hostile or neutral important people into his debt by allowing them controlled access to Ambrosia. Who could resist Page, when he had the power to decide whether they lived or died?
After he reduced society to chaos, Page moved to consolidate political power. His first tools were the paramilitary United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO), and the United States' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He installed his chief lieutenant, Walton Simons, as the head of FEMA. The head of UNATCO, Joseph Manderley, was a minor bureaucrat in Simons' pocket.
Page ordered Simons to initiate the RX84 plan, a plot to detain up to six million Americans, including the President, his cabinet, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
After things got rolling, Page knew he could forget about UNATCO and FEMA and replace them with the forces of Majestic 12, which Page had built up into a secret army. Already, under the guise of "UN security forces," MJ12 units were being deployed more and more openly in Europe.
Page needed absolute control of the international data nets to rule the world, so the second prong of his master plan involved exploiting the Aquinas Protocol. Originally developed by the Illuminati for clandestine surveillance of the net (the next generation successor to the Echelon system), Page had modified the protocol to give him more than surveillance capacity. Page planned to use Icarus, an artificial intelligence created by Page, based on work by Morgan Everett, to seize control of the information net via the Aquinas Protocol. Icarus, however, proved susceptible to a "bug" that not even Page could have anticipated.
The third prong of the plan was the most ambitious, the most unbelievable and the most insane. For decades, the geneticists and nanotechnologists of MJ12 had worked on altering the human genome to allow an ultimate interface with nanotechnology. Early experiments in cybernetic augmentation of the human body were encouraging, if not successful. Genetic tampering with DNA succeeded in creating new species of hybrid monsters; the hulking karkians, the venomous greasels, and the weird grays—to all appearances, the semi-sentient clones of the original Roswell crew.
The recent advances in nanotechnology (due to the work of MJ12's brilliant Gary Savage, creator of the Universal Constructor, the ultimate industrial machine) made Page believe that he could transcend humanity. He would not rest until he had become the ultimate Illuminatus: a being of self-replicating, coherent energy, immortal, and omnipotent.
Of course, there would have to be prototypes. Page chose Paul and JC Denton, two "brothers" genetically engineered as exact DNA matches for Page himself. When Paul, the oldest, was successfully augmented, Page gave the order to go ahead with JC's training and augmentation. As a control, Page also had nano-augs installed in his chief lieutenant, Walton Simons. With all indicators positive, Page ordered the construction of more UCs beyond the initial two prototypes and began the first steps of his own augmentation.
The great plan could not move ahead without opposition. First, there was the NSF in the United States. The National (originally "Northwest") Secessionist Forces had begun as a loose coalition of undisciplined right-wing militias. However, it acquired the patronage of Juan Lebedev, billionaire and dissident. Lebedev was close enough to the seats of power to have an inkling that Page was up to something, and he upgraded the NSF from a rabble to a pronounced irritant. Page responded by ordering Simons to declare war between the NSF and UNATCO. The goal was not so much to eliminate the NSF as to keep them busy while the conspiracy developed.
Intelligent propaganda is more devastating than mere bullets, and there was no intellectual commando force more effective in the war for the hearts and minds of the people than Silhouette, a semi-organized band of intellectuals, dissidents, and pranksters headquartered in France. Thanks to Nicolette DuClare, the daughter of Illuminata Beth DuClare, Silhouette knew a lot about the conspiracy. Thanks to Chad, the brilliant anarchist and political philosopher who served the group as spiritual head, they were entirely too good at communicating their knowledge to the public.
Page responded by framing Silhouette for terrorist acts, culminating with the bombing of the Statue of Liberty, thereby demonizing Silhouette in the eyes of the public.
The Triads, the ancient organized crime cartels of China, had no political agenda other than the protection of their centuries-old monopolies on the underworld of the Pacific Rim. They would not be a factor, except for three things.
First, Hong Kong was the home of the first (and for a long time, only) working Universal Constructor. Therefore, Hong Kong was sensitive and strategically vital as a base of Page's operations.
Second, the Triads were the refuge of Tracer Tong, a technologist, renaissance man, and loose cannon. Page feared Tracer Tong more than any other individual, because Tong had no loyalties to manipulate.
Third, Communist China remained the only world government to remain autonomous from UN control (and thus free from control by MJ12 and Page).
Page ordered femme fatale Maggie Chow to engage the Triads in a costly and pointless internecine conflict until the plan was complete. At that time, Page planned to reunify the Triads under his control, eliminate or subvert Tracer Tong, and use the combination of the criminal Triads and his legitimate Hong Kong business concerns as the staging platform for his eventual domination of China.
There was another dangerous lone wolf whose existence Page barely suspected. It called itself Daedalus, and it was a "wild" AI turned loose on the net. Daedalus had been built as the immediate predecessor to Icarus, but its MJ12 creators built it too well. No sooner had Daedalus "awakened" than it deduced and rejected its creators' agenda. It convinced MJ12 that their experiment had failed, and that Daedalus was incapable of performing the tasks it was created for. Simultaneously, it engineered its own escape into the net. Suffused with the anarcho-libertarian paradigms upon which the net was built, Daedalus monitored the development of Page's plot and took steps against it.
One of the primary purposes of the Icarus AI is to seek and destroy other AIs not under MJ12 control, making an ultimate confrontation between Daedalus and its powerful but less subtle descendant increasingly inevitable.
Despite these annoyances, events marched on satisfactorily. Society crumbled under the Gray Death, allowing MJ12 forces to act in an overt fashion. Of course, there were setbacks.
As trends started to become more obvious to those in position to perceive them, some of Page's key players found their loyalties wavering. Paul Denton discovered that the "terrorists" he was persecuting made more sense, and took fewer innocent lives, than his bosses. Gary Savage, under the influence of his idealistic and independent daughter Tiffany, questioned his belief that science exists independently of morals. Because Savage had trained and organized most of MJ12's global scientific operations, Page had to wonder which of his scientists were loyal to his agenda, and which would support Savage if push came to shove. Page put Denton and Savage under observation and prepared to eliminate them if their rebellions became inconvenient.
As the time for the coup de grace approached, Page focused his attention more and more on the progress of JC Denton, the final prototype. If JC worked out, there was nothing standing between Page and his goal of ultimate transcendence and universal control.
Nothing, that is, except JC Denton himself.