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Human. Humanity. Mortality and morality, life and death. What did it mean to be human? What meaning did those words hold if their definitions were changed, constantly?
Adam knew the barriers that defined life and death, every tier and shade of gray that defined each line; how each converged and blended to appear one and the same. As an ex-SWAT agent working head of security for an international corporation such as Sarif, Adam had seen everything. He had seen everything from death to triumph, greed to charity, all in the name of anything that could be put to a cause. Experience such as his would prepare him for anything.
Or so he thought.
The loss of Megan, the first time he lost her, when their emotional ties were fraying and stress between opposing views and arguments about how no one ever took care of Kubrick or Adam's smoking habit or the fact that Adam just never slept-- was already more than he knew how to deal with. Conditioned to experience fear, physical pain, and trauma, none of this could cover or mend the pain of a fractured heart. Adam would never admit it, but ignoring a problem doesn't make it disappear.
Then, the attack on Sarif HQ took Megan away from him again, along with everything but a sliver of life that could have so easily been avoided; and yet, it wasn't.
David Sarif held onto that thread of life and fought to keep it, harder than even Adam would have tried to. Sensations of cuts, incisions, skin grafting over metal and metal weaving itself through muscle and bone were insurmountable, surpassed only by a final memory of Megan being dragged away, fire swallowing the corridors, numbness of too many broken bones, and the helplessness and fear as Namir sent a bullet through his skull.
As Adam finally woke from a week long state of unconsciousness, he didn't feel like Adam Jensen. He wasn't Adam Jensen, not anymore. The real Adam Jensen could move, see, and feel in a way that didn't involve an electric energy coursing through his bones. The real Adam Jensen didn't have prosthetic limbs and mechanical cardiovascular systems, all so mechanical and yet so disturbingly organic. The real Adam Jensen was mortal, human, and ultimately vulnerable.
After endless weeks of rehabilitation, Adam went home. The unnatural sight of metal infused with skin had become almost normal. He would look down at Onyx colored hands and feet, every contour perfectly shaped as a human, but capable of something so... not human. He would never conquer the opposition to the inability to properly feel, the feeling of his hand gripping a door handle, the smooth, fluffy feeling of carpet beneath his toes, or the smooth, secure feeling of being wrapped in the sheets of his bed. All the sensations he took for granted, he found himself vainly missing.
Sarif had gotten him a new apartment, one fortified, high end, and safe. Everything was nice, and in top order, except for it didn't feel like home. Another thing robbed from Adam's life. If he had no sanctuary, where else could he possibly go but hell? Maybe he was already there.
Adam couldn't manage to look himself in the face. The mirror on his bathroom wall became his enemy, whom he avoided at all costs. One day, he thought. One day and I'll have the courage and the strength to see who I am now and accept it. That day never seemed to come as day after day went by, hours melding into days melding into weeks. Finally, Adam could take no more of his own weakness and rebelled against it, finally looking up while the faucet ran.
The sight he beheld was...disturbing. Anger, horror, and remorse coursed through him as mechanical yellow -and-green eyes stared back at him, scars marred his face, implants around his eyes showing to prove the visual augmentation he utilized. Small modules sat imbedded in his chest, small circles dotting the arc of his collarbone. It was sickening. In the spur of emotion, a fist came in contact with the mirror, with his own face. That mechanical monster could not be him, it shouldn't have been him. Adam reveled in the ever persistent ability to feel every painful thought, but not the inability to properly register the shards of glass the mirror left in between his knuckles. The damage was minimal, and the pain drained quickly. Ruefully he thought how his hand probably would have been broken had it been flesh.
With new days came new lows, and isolated within his own cocoon of an apartment made the alienation of his augmentations even more severe. He had nothing of his old self left, nothing but the scruff of a beard and the short hair that still managed to be windblown. Adam ran mechanical fingers over his head and balled his hand into a fist. A part of the real Adam Jensen was left, but he couldn't feel the tickle of hair between his fingers, not like he used to. Megan would playfully tousle what she could of the jet black hair, and tease that even in his thirties with such short hair, Adam still looked like a ruffled up teenager, with wind-blown hair as if he rode his motorcycle too much without a helmet.
A glass shattered. Amber colored whiskey spilled among the shards, magnifying the rays of sunlight that poked through the drawn blinds. A feral, but more frustrated growl rose from the bottom of Adam's throat. Another glass broken. His new, seemingly superhuman strength was still foreign.
He resolved to purge himself of the need to use glassware and dishes that would imminently be destroyed, by simply not consuming anything. The amount of metal making up his skeleton should have classified him as a machine. Unnecessary were the minimal things like nutrient consumption.
Adam was proven wrong, however when the first of the hunger pains hit, and the scratchiness in his throat became more than a nuisance. Part of him wanted to stay in that realm of dizzying hunger and thirst, if only to feel human again. Another part, the part that called out "self preservation" and more importantly "David didn't save you so you could destroy yourself" was stronger.
Pulling himself out of bed every day was the hardest thing he'd ever done. But running away from his problems had never been his thing. The day he was able to pull off bandages that had covered tidy but gnarly looking sutures, some part of him mended despite the broken skin. Dried blood caked at the edges of skin, and humans bled. He was mortal, vulnerable. He, Adam Jensen, could still be hurt. The wounds turned to scars, and with the scar tissue came numbness. He couldn't feel the coarse outline of where he was torn into, but the concept was there. The natural processes of a human body were still a part of him. The hardest part was to get up every day, but the mend after that was bearable. He could do this. Adam Jensen was able to become numb, and work past the hardships that faced him, no matter what they were; so much like the scar tissue that would forever be a part of him.
Adam was able to pick himself up, but living within his own mind was treading in dangerous waters. The body could heal, however the mind is not always so resilient.
Adam would get used to the sight and the abnormal, mechanical feel of the new him. It was the torrents his memories thrust at him that became the hard part. Megan-- the beautiful woman who put up with him for so long, did so much for him, and yet he still never had the strength to admit that he was at fault. They both were at fault, and Adam shrugged the notion off, hoping that it would just go away, afraid that it would never. Megan tried to let them mend, and yet it would never change the fact that Adam never said anything in their last encounter.
And now, she was gone. Lost to him like the flesh from his bones.
Recuperation seemed slow. After six endless months, Sarif called him in again. The company's progress and interactions with other organizations caused David to find it crucial that Adam be a part of their security again.
The chance to be out of his apartment was well received. The constant ache from implants and traumatized flesh had seceded, for the most part. Adam was itching to get out and just move.
While he was grateful for the reason to get out of his own head, he questioned his own motives. Why did he remain so loyal to Sarif, to a fault? The same augmentations that were used for warfare were placed inside of him, without his consent. David was ambitious, sometimes overly so and his premonitions and drives were questionable over half of the time.
Maybe it was because of the fact that David saved his life, that he followed so infallibly. Maybe it was because David gave him his life back after he'd been canned by SWAT. Or maybe, just maybe some part of him accepted the work Sarif was doing and supported it. It was a Human Revolution they were creating, and Sarif's advancements were ensuring its success. He couldn't say that the augments weren't useful, they definitely helped him, once he got used to them; and he eventually did-- teaching himself how to write again and planning to utilize his ambidexterity. Some things looked up for him, on some days.
The day came when Sarif called him in, and with a knot in his stomach--another feeling he still had, interesting-- he shrugged on a turtleneck and his worn, ornate leather jacket that would help but never fully cover his augments. The faded fabric and well-worn material brought both nostalgia and painful memories, and no matter how familiar Adam got with the augments, there was a part of him that felt like an outsider in his own skin.
Walking into HQ was the most momentous part of his six months away. Adam felt accomplished, he was able to walk back in there, ready for the field, only halfway through his sick-leave. In the corridors employees mumbled about how everyone was on edge about another attack. The corporation who invaded Sarif HQ was powerful, and by no means not strong enough to do it again.
The first glitch in his system occurred. Ruing the fact that he had to be tuned up like a computer, he met Pritchard with the same fake-but-not-really coolness he always did, or at least he tried. To his relief, Francis acted like almost nothing had happened; like he hadn't spent six months healing from being made half machine, like Sarif wasn't attacked leaving a whole team of scientists dead. And thank whoever was out there that he didn't mention Megan. They were all close, in their own way, but Adam didn't need anyone's pity while so much of him was dangerously close to wallowing in his own. In fact, Francis was just focused on the task at hand, the one he'd been called in for, and any stray remarks Pritchard made about him, he ignored.
The tasks David gave him at first were far from minimal. Infiltrate a Sarif production plant, travel to China to investigate a lead, all while Adam faced greater challenges than he had ever and Pritchard was in the process of uncovering something big, something that David Sarif was right in the heart of. Still, he obliged, because what else could he do?
After each mission, each hoop that Adam was left jumping through he had to question: Was he more than human? Less? What made him different or the same than any other person out there? With each guard that he took down, each time his neural implants helped him find a way around a hall filled with enemies or allowed him to hack a computer as well or better than Pritchard; or after each time he was cornered and used the self controlled praxes to augment himself to triumph over those who wanted him dead, in his eyes he was less human. His compassion for people-- the desperation to free hostages, to save a life, to succeed for the better of humanity assured him that he was still more, or different than the cold machines that seemed to be slowly taking over the world.
There were other times when he was forced into combat, to take lives that were so keen on taking his, and the act of doing so felt as if he were fighting for vengeance, for taking from other people what was taken from him. Afterward, he felt no different, if not for the small hole where his humanity once was whole and an aching throb of loss that never went away.
Then, and these were the times that Adam tried to stow away, there were the times that he fought with every ounce of his soul to save someone, to save everyone and he came up just a little too short. He was a monster, a bringer of death who couldn't control who lived or who died. Occasionally he would let himself be taken apart by these things, on a long helicopter ride or a moment when he had golden silence where he could reflect. No matter the consolation Malik offered or the encouragement David gave or the offhand snark that Francis emitted toward him to make him feel better, whenever an effort was made he would acknowledge it and then move on, sometimes empathetic and sometimes cold to the task at hand and the people he talked to.
Every piece he uncovered of the bigger story, it felt like he was drifting farther away from the truth, and his part in all of it. Conspiracies, covert operations by organizations that put secret government black-ops to shame.
When he learned Megan was alive, when he caught word that the team of scientists she was working with was captured by the Illuminati and used for their research, something knotted in his chest. Becoming too attached to his mission would result in failure, years of training as a SWAT team member taught him all too well. But this, this was Megan. The fact that she wasn't dead-- that she was living, breathing, and not dead, God, Megan was enough to drive him harder, test his augments in ways he didn't know they could be; get closer to finding her.
Not only did Adam test his physical abilities; he tested his core of being. Blowing up Belltower's dock, being interrogated after being unceremoniously ripped from cryosleep, tested him in harsher manners than he thought he could take. Morally, mentally, physically; there was no denying that people died in the explosion at the docks-- innocents, in retrospect. Somehow, the fact that they would probably have killed him and countless others didn't provide any comfort. Resulting from his capture on his way to Singapore, he learned that he could still bleed, and without proper connections and signals, Adam Jensen was nothing more than a man with a lot of metal making up his body.
Namir was another mountain to face. As he, another augmented man with equivalent power to Adam so easily tossed him aside,
Engulfing fire, glass imbedded in flesh, Megan's screams
Adam fought with his own humanity, his own strength or lack thereof as man melded with machine to create the mirage of impossibility. Adam fought, against the throbbing ache in his side, against the blindness that not-forgotten loss veiled him with, and ultimately against the man-made-into-machine that threatened his life and those of the ones he loved.
"People like us never get what we love."
Namir's final words resonated painfully as he met Megan again. Thank whoever was out there that she was okay, that they hadn't touched her. The moment was bitter, no matter the relief. It didn't change the fact that she used him. For a moment, just a moment Adam hated her. Hated all that she had done, hated her research, hated that he had ever said "hello" that lonely night in the bar. As Megan touched Adam's arm, his inhuman arm he flinched, and resented himself for it in the same moment. He engaged his neural augs, and perpetually hid his eyes behind shaded lenses. Adam Jensen was the result and the drive for all of her research, it was because of her using him that people were dying all over the world because of LIMB's new Biochip.
Adam was seething, but the hatred only lasted for a moment. In the next, they lost each other yet again, her to her team and he to save the world.
***
Nothing could have prepared Adam for this. Adam Jensen was a man who had never had control over what happened to him. After every goddamn thing that was thrown at him, he rose from the ashes of destruction as a Phoenix would, or rather the beginning of a new age, augmentations the next step in the evolution of man.
Who was he to decide the fate of humanity? Adam was only human, his morality based on things that happened to him and mortality dependent on what he fed himself. Hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, the next step of what humanity would face hung in the hands of one man. Adam Jensen. A man who was no more or less than any other in the collective whole of society. Adam Jensen was no god, or machine but entrusted to make the decisions that only one or the other could make.
I can't do this, he thought, faced with a monumental choice no one should have to make, stuck with only an AI for comfort as he hid from the sun. Adam's own predispositions would affect his choice, and therefore make it invalid. If he was only a machine, the choice should be easy, logical, with no doubt. Adam's fear would be a factor as well. His mechanical-- and yet suddenly seemingly human hand shook as his hand hovered over each option.
Who was Adam Jensen, and what would he do? The question Adam had asked himself since the moment he woke from endless augmentation surgeries, he finally knew the answer to. Acceptance washed over him in a rush of-- relief, was it? Adam took a deep breath, looked down at his hands, and chose. Humanity was thrust into a new age, by none other than mortal, human, albeit half-machine, Adam Jensen.