Deus Ex Diaries Part Seventy-Nine (Jensen’s Stories)

This is my ongoing exploration of the Deus Ex Universe, in release order. Whether you’re a newcomer or an old-goer, I hope to make this something you can read along with and enjoy. This time I finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided — System Rift.

Having been embroiled in a scheme to hack a bank — again — I had made my way up the atrium and tossed a grenade to get through a grate…

To my utter shock, the place didn’t go into lockdown, no alarms went off, and I’m not convinced that anyone actually heard it. As luck would have it, this was the office of the head of engineering, where ShadowChild wanted the figuring placed, so I did that and called to let her know, then used the password TRUSTNO1 to access the computer on the desk. One email said that the defences in the chamber where Simona Saridakis had been killed were overridden despite her presence.

I called Pritchard and told him about the email, and he complained that wasn’t why I was here. The Saridakis case was something I’d chosen to look into, after all, not what he wanted. Exiting through the office door, I cloaked and went upstairs to level four, almost getting spotted when I decloaked to recharge. There were three guards at the stairs to level five, but I managed to get past without incident, and avoided another guard on the stairs.

The camera watching the entrance of the executive suite wasn’t very good, as it had a wide sweeping arc and didn’t look down at the door keypad, so I unlocked the door and went inside. I hacked into Ashani Talwar’s security computer, but didn’t have the turret upgrade for my hacking, so couldn’t disable that. The computer on the other desk, however, had some interesting emails. The first was about a security guard for Blade 4 that had apparently purposefully walked into a secure area and let the automated defences kill him — and this wasn’t a one-off event. Hidden among general emails was another one talking about how Palisade Bank was going to sell shell companies it owned to other shell organisations it also owned. It also told me where to find Santeau Group’s data, in Chamber 204.

Pritchard whined at me for not taking the funicular up to the servers yet, so I headed out and cloaked as I walked over to it and hit the button to go up. Pritchard told me to just put the Pass-Port into the chamber and he could do his job. Much to my annoyance, the heat sensors were literally through the very first door off of the funicular…

While cloaked and ducking behind everything that I could find, thankfully including some hot radiator panels to disguise my heat signature, I made my way through. The ramps led down to two security terminals that I hacked to disable all of the cameras and open all of the doors. For safety, I upgraded my hacking so that I could take the drones and turrets offline too — which completely removed the stress from the next portion.

Deciding to take a look in every chamber — exactly as Prtichard had feared I would do — I switched off electric floors, closed gas valves, and cloaked past laser grids to have a nose around at everything. Chamber 209 had a pocket secretary hidden behind one of the server towers, which contained an unsent email from Simona Saridakis to her husband Niko. She had found evidence that some data was being moved by “a bug”, and upon reporting it to her boss Masaaki Oshiro he had begun acting strangely. She was going to tell Niko all about it after work, but first she had been assigned a task in Chamber 209 at the last minute…

Heading into Chamber 204, I plugged in the Pass-Port and Pritchard connected remotely. However, the server was empty: the data had been moved off and was likely on a computer nearby. He upgraded the Pass-Port and I used it to get inside Oshiro’s office. Hacking his computer, I found an email with a list of the “top 10 hackers” that they knew about. ShadowChild was at the top of the list, followed by Janus of the Juggernaut Collective, but missing from the list was NuclearSnake, Pritchard’s nom de plume. Another email was an irate Niko Saridakis, and with the evidence that I’d uncovered I agreed with his anger.

There was a door that I couldn’t get through, until I found a pocket secretary beneath an archive box. It had a transcript and voice recording between Oshiro and the CEO Ashina Talwar, which mentioned Stanton Dowd, a member of the Illuminati. Dowd had details about Simona Saridakis’ death, and was using it to blackmail his way into an insider trading scheme that Oshiro ran with Talwar…

The door lock into the next area used voice recognition, and thanks to the recording, I was able to play Oshiro’s own voice to unlock it. The room contained the terminal which Pritchard needed the Pass-Port plugged into, as well as a Neural SubNet (or NSN) machine. I plugged in the Pass-Port and Pritchard logged in, starting to extract what he needed, but the AI core cut off communications moments after trapping his avatar!

I called ShadowChild, as the terminal had fried the Pass-Port. She told me to get into the NSN chair and she could use my Infolink comms to get NuclearSnake out. She was, after all, probably the only hacker in history who could do it. So, I sat down and logged in.

There were a few chambers of very easy puzzles between me and Pritchard’s avatar, but to help us reconnect, ShadowChild created a hole in the lavawall, allowing all of her hacker friends to access the Blade. This distracted the AI enough to help us join up and log out, though I wasn’t shown any of it, only told about it. As I stepped on the pad to log out of the NSN, I reappeared in the room I was just in. The door into Oshiro’s office led me in a merry circle twice before I realised that I was still in the NSN!

Logging onto Oshiro’s computer with the password “masaahiro” (the letters found on the hologram of each server), I found a garbled email. I would later discover that it was in the Atbash cipher, and was between Oshiro and Dowd, and how they were working together against Ashina Talwar…

Since the computer was useless, I realised that I still had my smart vision augment, and turning that on showed a hidden door, which allowed me to finally leave the NSN. ShadowChild called to confirm that the plan had worked, and that she had unlocked the door for me. Unfortunately, there were security bots between me and the door, and they had heat sensitive cameras. So, I loaded up my pistol with EMP rounds and snuck around to the right side, then upgraded myself with the leg augmentation. Using some crates to jump onto a chamber roof, I felt proud of myself for circumventing the worst of it, though the drop to the floor did hurt.

But then, I was spotted through some cover thanks to my body heat! Luckily, I was able to shoot the two bots nearby and made a break for the stairs. ShadowChild told me to use a shaft for a quick escape, though it was a long drop to the river below, and since my only other option was to fight my way out, I opened the hatch and fell.

Later, in my apartment, ShadowChild was waiting for me since I’d broken into her place before. She was leaving the country, partly because of what we’d just done, but mostly because she left the hole she made, and Palisade would likely be coming for her. Once she left, I called Pritchard who was clearly miffed at ShadowChild, but we hadn’t been identified at least. He asked what I thought we should do with the evidence we had uncovered, so I told him to send it to Niko Saridakis’ lawyer, which Pritchard seemed to appreciate. We bid a fond farewell to one another — I’m kidding, Jensen hung up on Pritchard.

Mid-credits, Eliza Cassan came on the news to talk about how the most secure facility in the world had been broken into, and Oshiro and Talwar were implicated in murder.

Final Thoughts

With lots of fun moments and a new area of Prague to explore, System Rift brought quite a bit to the table, and I don’t just mean the Breach mode. I remember playing it when it first released and I’ve no intention of opening that mode again.

The DLC lasts a good couple of hours, depending on how stealthy you want to be. But next time, join me for Criminal Past, a trip down memory lane for Jensen…