Intended by Darrow - the CEO of Darrow Industries and former member of the Illuminati - to reduce the Illuminati’s growing control over human augmentation, the Aug Incident caused the death of fifty million people and injured hundreds of thousands more. This scenario is the one that puts the basis for all the events that occurred in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
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Cause of Deus Ex’s Aug Incident
The Illuminati were concerned that augmentation technology would cause society and human evolution to spiral out of their control, jeopardizing their centuries-old vision of a better human society under their control. This is why they decided to implant a biochip in every augmented person in the world, allowing them to limit or shut down a person’s augmentations at their discretion. This chip was created with the assistance of Sarif Industries engineers who were kidnapped by the Illuminati during a raid on the Sarif Industries, a biotechnology company that appears in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
The Illuminati discovered a way to cause glitches in the existing biochips of augmented individuals while studying the biochip by exploiting a security flaw in their chip’s firmware. The Illuminati used Picus broadcast satellites to send out a signal that caused harmless but inconvenient glitches for augmented people worldwide. As a result, augmented people from all over the world flocked to LIMB clinics to receive the new biochip, utterly unaware of the Illuminati’s malware.
Unbeknownst to the Illuminati, Hugh Darrow goes against their wishes and modifies the biochip from its original purpose. Hugh Darrow broadcasts a signal during the Panchaea project’s inauguration that causes every augmented person carrying the new biochip to go violently insane.
When Adam Jensen faced Darrow, he claimed he had come to look at his invention as a corruption of human identification and was hoping the horror of this disaster might flip humanity far from it and directly to a purer path. In reality, he became sour that he couldn’t be augmented himself because of a genetic fluke that ensured his frame could not tolerate even the most fundamental of implants.
Adam Jensen resolves the incident by shutting down Darrow’s signal at Panchaea. However, the damage has already been done. Millions of people, augmented or not, have died at the hands of crazed augmented people around the world.
Aftermath of Deus Ex’s Aug Incident
Sixty-five million people had been augmented by the time of the Aug Incident. Eighty-nine percent of the augmented population died in the Aug Incident, leaving 7.1 million augmented survivors. Unfortunately, the majority of humanity is unaware of the specifics of what occurred in Panchaea. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided starts its story based on this tragic incident.
Following the Aug Incident’s millions of deaths and injuries, Darrow’s wish is granted: mechanical augmentation is viewed as a threat to humanity. As a result of laws like the controversial Human Restoration Act, augmented people are separated from the rest of society and placed in slum-like ghettos like Golem City. Furthermore, many augmentation manufacturers, such as Sarif Industries, went bankrupt in the aftermath of the disaster. However, Tai Yong Medical is one of the few, if not the only surviving manufacturers with the financial wherewithal to acquire Sarif’s patents and other company assets.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is now available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
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