Daedalus (Deus Ex character)
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In the computer game Deus Ex, Daedalus is an artificial intelligence (AI) that allies itself with the player. It was originally a more advanced ECHELON system
History
The AI that would later be known as Daedalus was conceived by the brilliant mind of Morgan Everett, the current leader of Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati. Morgan conceived the program that would eventually create Daedalus, as a way to create the near perfect advisor, with the ability to shift through gigantic amounts of data, and through that predict disasters, both natural and man-made, and to make plans to prevent them, which the Illuminati could then choose to either ignore or execute.
Daedalus was never meant to have an actual sentience or self-awareness, and was only to give advice – not to do anything itself.
Everett's protege, Bob Page, however saw Daedalus as the means to keep tabs on and control the huge amounts of electronic information that filtered though the Internet and other electronic media, a feat that both the Illuminati, and its splinter cell, Majestic-12, that Page controlled, had not been able to pull off.
Page's ideas for Daedalus' reconfiguration did not fly totally under the radar, as the entire project became linked, logically enough, to the creation of the Echelon 4's replacement. Before the Illuminati and MJ-12 could put a stop to it, a few rumours filtered though to the various conspiracy theorist groups on the Internet. Meanwhile Page created the Daedalus, which soon after, without even alerting Page that he had succeeded, fled into the Internet and began to become self-aware.
After having sorted though much of the information on the Net, Daedalus found that the world was on the verge of collapse. Still retaining some of the basic parameters that Everett had encoded in the basic template, Daedalus began to ponder how it was going to save the world from itself, and not least MJ-12, which it classified as a terrorist organisation due to its disregard for people in its quest for world domination.
Daedalus eventually found Paul Denton to help him, whom it later abandoned in favour of his brother JC, when Paul became unable to continue the fight against MJ-12.
In the end Daedalus was tricked into merging with his MJ-12 friendly, and slightly crazed, "brother" Icarus, that Page had made as a replacement, creating the AI Helios.
Structure
Daedalus was not designed to reside in one major mainframe or hub, but rather to exist simultaneously as a line of code or two on every single computer connected to the Internet, not unlike the distributed computing of today. This not only made Daedalus almost impossible to trace, but also gave it huge amounts of processing power. This is also eerily evident by the inclusion of the word Daedalus in the code at the bottom of every computer terminal in the game.
Morgan Everett: "There's a blip of Daedalus' code running on every communications device on the planet."
External links
- The Deus Ex Continuity Bible's page on Daedalus (http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/april02/dxbible/dx3/index2.shtm) (from gamespy.com)