In our last installment, I had just avoided  a hopeless fight by surrendering to Gunther. When the loading screen clears, I’m trapped in a cell and bereft of equipment. This lasts for all of a few seconds until some dude named Daedalus contacts me on my infolink. He tells me, in a slightly creepy digitally-altered voice, that Paul is dead, and further informs me that he can help me escape by cutting power to my cell door, but only for a few seconds. True to his word, the power goes out, the door opens, and I slip outside and take stock of the situation.

I’m trapped in an MJ12 facility. At the moment I’m in a small detention area with a few other cells and some crates. There’s a guard post just outside, and the guard periodically walks around on patrol, conveniently putting him out of site of the cell block for a while. I search the area I’m in, and eventually locate a riot prod in a crate. Excellent. While the guard’s making his rounds, I sneak into the guardpost and hide myself behind the desk there. When the guard comes back and returns to his seat, I zap him in the nads as soon as he comes around the desk. He stands there quivering manically for a second, so I zap him again and he goes down. I take his pistol and keys, and start exploring. There are some lockpicks and other goodies in the guard post and the cells.

Also in the cells are two NSF prisoners, one dead and one alive. The dead one has some lockpicks on him, and the live one has a knife and a medkit. He identified himself as Miguel, and suggests that we cooperate to escape. I agree, and he gives me his medkit, since he clearly knows who the mission-critical personnel are here. We head out of the cell block and start trying to escape.

Daedalus has given me an additional mission objective, though. I need to find the medlab and retrieve a datacube from Paul’s body. The cube contains information that Tracer Tong requires in order to defeat my killswitch.

After some exploration, we find a robot maintenance facility, which occupies three floors. The first two floors have wide-open spaces containing guards, technicians, and robots; by rushing up a few flights of stairs we find ourselves on the comparatively safer third level. I say comparatively because while there are more corners and furnite to hide behind, there are a couple of armed guards up there, too. I manage to ambush and taser each of them individually, helping myself to their assault rifles in the process. Sadly, the game does not allow me to prop one of the guards up in a chair carrying a sign reading “Now I have a machine gun, ha ha ha.”

Luckily, the game does allow me to hack a convenient security panel and reprogram the robots on the lower floor. The security bots promptly come to life and start gunning down the guards, putting an end to my non-lethal jailbreak. What can I say? True pacifism is hard, especially in Deus Ex, and I have a low tolerance for frustration these days.

This makes the bot bay a great temporary base. In addition to my new security droids, there’s a repair bot which I can draw energy from to power my augmentations. I leave Miguel there for the time being, just in case any stragglers survived the roboacolypse, and make my way to the nearby armory. There are a couple of very hostile military droids patrolling the hallway in front of it, but they have a predictable patrol route and very limited line-of-site, so I slip past them into the armory, shutting the door behind me.

Inside the armory is a guard and a turret. I machine gun the guard before he can turn on the alarm, and head upstairs out of site of the nearby security camera before it sets off the alarm and activates the turret. Most of the time in Deus Ex, whenever you see a turret or camera, there’s a security camera nearby that you can use to control it, and that’s the case here, too. I hack the system, bypassing the camera and reprogramming the turret to hold a deep-seated hatred from MJ12. I then loot the armory thoroughly, finding all my old equipment in the process. There’s also a fancy-dancy containment field holding a plasma rifle, but while it’s intriguing, I don’t really have the skills or ammo reserves to put it to good use, so I leave it be.

On my way out, I open the door and find a hostile security bot just outside it, so I backpedal furiously and throw explosives into the hallway until the two bots out there are destroyed. Robots are pretty fearsome, and I get shot up pretty badly, forcing me to use some of the medkits I recovered.

After wandering about some more I find myself back outside the cellblock, and this time I notice a large grating in the floor, which I can open. Excellent! I drop down into the ductwork and crawl around a bit. It’s dimly lit and there are some dodgy-looking animal carcasses down there, but I eventually find myself underneath what Daedalus assures me is the nanotech lab. There are plenty of gratings I can use to exit the duct work, most of which seem to go to pretty explosed locations.

I eventually settle on the one which looks like it’ll let me cause the most mayhem; specifically, it open into an office, directly behind a chair where a Man in Black is sitting and using a computer. I pop the grate open and fire a couple crossbow bolts into his head, dropping him. That’s when I discover that, much like Anna, Men in Black explode when they die.

I reload my last save and repeat the process, this time turning on my Speed and hauling ass back into the ductwork as soon as he starts to fall. The explosion attracts the attention of a couple of guards, but they can’t find me and eventually lose interest, whereupon I return to the office and investigate.

The email on the computer confirms that the guy I just killed was the Agent Sherman who Simons sent to oversee the MJ12 operations in New York. Go me! I also find a diagram of a dissected greasel. What’s a greasel? This is a greasel:

They’re these weird transgenic critters that bear an uncanny resemblance to the poison-spitting dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, only they’ve been given additional feathers which don’t seem to serve and purpose other than aesthetics. 

I also find a schematic of The Visible Walton Simons and his augmentations. I’m talking about his nano-augmentations, so stop giving me that look, you sickos. Among other things, he has the ability to remotely detonate incoming explosives, and also has a built-in cloaking device. I guess both of those could be useful for hurricane relief, somehow.

Finally, I discover that I can use Agent Sherman’s computer to open up the greasel containment area. This could be useful because it abuts the large nanotech lab outside the office. The large lab that’s swarming with scientists and armed guards. I decide to go for it.

Utter pandemonium erupt outside. Greasels start spitting poisonous venom at everyone in the lab. The scientists start running around in a panicked frenzy, while the guards start shooting at the greasels. The greasels win. Realizing that the scientists aren’t going to do anything to soften up the critters, I burst into the lab, pistol at the ready, and finish off the greasels, which are surprisingly tough for being so small.

One of the scientists, the aptly-named Dr. Moreau, was a friend of Paul’s and was involved in the creation of our augmentations; he’s not happy with anything that’s happened lately, and gives me the code to get into the med lab right next door. I head over and find that Daedalus was telling the truth; Paul is dead. I find the information I need; Daedalus tells me he’s passed it along to Tong, and gives me the code I need to exit the MJ12 base; this is the designers’ way of making sure you don’t leave the base without the information Tong needs.

I return to the nano-lab and the ducts, since I’m pretty sure that I’m persona non grata here after inciting both a robot uprising and a rebel greasel rumble. I explore until Daedalus tells me I’m under the command center. This is as far as the ducts will take me, and another big room full of guards and dogs is standing between me and freedom. I open the grate and snipe as many as I can from cover, but I’m eventually required to engage in a stand-up gunfight with the survivors. This is another  brutal firefight, but I survive and make my way to the exit.

I’m unpleasantly surprised when I enter the security code and the door opens to reveal another guard just outside the door. Luckily, I’m fast enough on the draw to make sure the surprise is even more unpleasant for him. Before going out, I make my way back to the robotics bay to recharge and to let Miguel know it’s safe for him to make a break for it. Once I’ve done this I return to the command center and exit the MJ12 base.

As soon as I pass through the door, I find myself in UNATCO HQ.