Animus Project

The Animus, a virtual device which the Animus Project was centered around

The Animus Project was an initiative conducted by Abstergo Industries to explore the genetic memories of subjects kidnapped by the Department of Lineage Discovery and Acquisition to discover information about the Assassin Brotherhood and the location of Pieces of Eden.

Operating since at least 1980 and initially led by Dr. Warren Vidic, the Animus Project was one of the most important Abstergo programs in their history. After Vidic's death in 2012, the project fell under the leadership of Sofia Rikkin, daughter of Abstergo's CEO Alan Rikkin.

History

Nathalie Chapman

The project's first test subject was Nathalie Chapman, the daughter of the Assassins Boris Pash and Zenia, who was taken and raised by Warren Vidic following her birth. In 1977, Vidic decided to test his first Animus prototype on a 13-year-old Nathalie, having her relive her father's memories. Through them, Nathalie discovered that she was a hostage of the Templars and escaped, stealing a copy of the Animus blueprints and an Apple of Eden in the process.

Subject 1

Subject 1 was a male individual with an ancestral connection to the Louisiana Assassin Aveline de Grandpré, performing Animus sessions around late 1980 until January 1981. After reliving the lives of other ancestors, Subject 1 was assigned to relive Aveline's memories in 18th-century New Orleans. However, his connection with the Animus readily destabilized and he suffered a seizure, resulting in his death.

Subject 2

Following the failure of Subject 1 in early 1981, Warren Vidic personally volunteered himself as the next Animus subject to keep the project running. He took a four-hour Animus session, first reliving the life of an 18th-century Hungarian ancestor, then Jeanne d'Arc's executioner, Geoffroy Thérage, in 1431.

Subject 3

Adam Sarti was the son of the Assassin Alekseï Gavrani and a participant in the Animus Project during the early 1980s, possibly serving as Subject 3.

Subject 4

Vidic experimenting on Daniel

In 1983, Lineage Discovery and Acquisition delivered Subject 4, a 9-year old orphaned boy, to Warren Vidic. After being codenamed "Daniel Cross", he was placed in the Animus both for his genetic memory to be explored and for his brain to be experimented upon using a replicated Piece of Eden. With this, an impulse was implanted in the boy's brain, that would make him instinctively seek out the Assassins' Mentor and kill him, should the opportunity arise.

After the experiments were finished, Daniel was released onto the streets, though he would suffer from a severe case of the Bleeding Effect for most of his life, involuntarily experiencing the memories of his great-grandfather, the Russian Assassin Nikolai Orelov. In 1998, Daniel was discovered by the Assassin Hannah Mueller, and after a series of events that led to him rising through the Brotherhood's ranks, his subconsciousness forced him to kill the modern day Mentor on 6 November 2000.

Daniel later returned to an Abstergo facility in Philadelphia, where he was again placed in the Animus under the supervision of Vidic and relived the memories of Nikolai and his son Innokenti Orelov. Meanwhile, Daniel's own memories were viewed by Abstergo to obtain the locations of all of the Assassin camps he had visited, allowing the Templars to enact the Great Purge. Eventually, Daniel ended his Animus sessions and officially joined the ranks of the Templar Order.

Subject 12

Subject 12 was forced to relive the memories of an ancestor related to the 1943 Philadelphia Project, in which the USS Eldridge briefly manifested in a future state for approximately 18 minutes, due to the usage of a Piece of Eden. Using recovered data, Abstergo was able to reconstruct the original artifact used in the experiment.

Subject 13

Subject 13 participated in the Animus Project at an unknown point in time. On 7 September 2012, Abstergo CEO Alan Rikkin mentioned in an email to Warren Vidic that Subject 13's Animus sessions had been recorded and reviewed, but outside of this, no other details about the subject's identity or sessions are known.

Subject 14

Prior to 2011, Robert Fraser participated in the Animus Project as Subject 14. After his time in the program he would join Abstergo Entertainment and, in 2014, was tasked with reliving the memories of the French Assassin Arno Dorian. Unfortunately, due to being severely affected by the Bleeding Effect, Fraser's health began to deteriorate, eventually culminating in him believing himself to be Arno. Wishing to help the Assassins, he destroyed Abstergo hard drives with the assistance of his psychiatrist Victoria Bibeau, which led to his termination.

Subject 15

In 2010, the Animus Project focused on Subject 15, a pregnant woman who eventually started suffering from the Bleeding Effect. She experienced "memory-within-memory" patterns due to the memories of the fetus' father conflicting with her ancestors' memories. Eventually, in mid-December 2010, Lucy Stillman noticed that Subject 15's Raphe nuclei were activating at an accelerated rate, and that the Animus was somehow inducing an incomplete state of dream-sleep. When Lucy informed Vidic of Subject 15's dangerous state, Vidic concluded that they had already gathered enough material from her, and subsequently contacted Steve Gibbs to send a disposal unit to "remove" Subject 15.

Subject 16

The cryptic messages in Clay's cell

In 2011, Abstergo kidnapped Clay Kaczmarek, a member of the Assassin Brotherhood who specialized in computer hacking and engineering. Dubbed Subject 16, Clay was placed into the Animus at Abstergo's Rome facility for several months, in order to obtain the location of one of the Apples of Eden, with some of the Animus sessions lasting for days at a time. As Clay was psychologically unable to maintain these sessions for such extended periods of time, the personalities of his ancestors began overlapping with his own.

Eventually, Vidic discovered that Clay was a direct descendant of Adam, one of the first Human-Isu hybrids and an individual amongst the first few to rise up against the pre-existing species. Through reliving Adam's memories, Clay and Vidic obtained the secrets of the Assassins and the Isu, though realizing his mind would soon disappear entirely, Clay hacked the Animus and placed an AI construct of his own personality in the machine that only the next Animus Subject would be able to activate.

Clay also left behind several hidden Glyphs and Rifts throughout the memories of another of his ancestors, the Italian Assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Following this, as he delved into insanity as a result of the Bleeding Effect, Clay wrote various cryptic messages with his blood across the Animus room and his own cell before eventually committing suicide on 8 August 2012.

Subject 17

In September 2012, Abstergo captured their next Subject, number 17, a bartender by the name of Desmond Miles. Prior to his capture, Desmond had run away from his Assassin parents at the age of 16, and was discovered to have a high concentration of Isu DNA in his genes.

Desmond in the Animus

At first, Desmond was directly put in the Animus and forced to relive the memories of the Levantine Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad. Upon reaching Abstergo's target memory, a map displaying the locations of several Precursor Temples around the world erupted from an Apple of Eden, the company to had no further use for Desmond. While Vidic's superiors ordered Desmond's disposal, Lucy managed to convince them of Desmond's use to Abstergo, saving his life.

Not too long afterwards, Lucy, who was previously an Assassin and had secretly defected to the Templars, escaped the Abstergo facility with Desmond and relocated to an Assassin hideout, where Desmond relived the memories of Ezio Auditore da Firenze in a recreated Animus, unknowingly helped in part by Lucy and Vidic's secret plan.

Vidic briefing the Animi Training Program recruits

After Desmond's escape, Vidic turned his attention to the Animi Training Program, which held the objective of training Abstergo agents using numerous Animi and making them relive the memories of Templars, Assassins and unaffiliated individuals of interest through extracted memories, so that the agents would be able to combat the remnants of the Assassin Brotherhood with their newly accumulated skills. The project eventually resulted in the promotion of Juhani Otso Berg to the rank of Master Templar, who was immediately assigned to capture the Assassin leader William Miles.

On 14 December 2012, Vidic was killed by Desmond at Abstergo's Rome facility using an Apple of Eden. Even though Abstergo lost the world's leading expert in genetic memory and the pioneer of the Animus, the next phase of the Animus Project would proceed as planned with David Kilkerman as Director.

Abstergo Entertainment

Following Desmond's sacrifice to prevent the Second Disaster and the subsequent recovery of his body by Abstergo, a new project started in 2013 at Abstergo Entertainment in Montreal called the Sample 17 Project. The company utilized employees to explore the memories of Desmond's ancestors, notably those of the pirate-turned-Assassin Edward Kenway in order to find an Isu temple known as the Observatory.

The work station of a Sample 17 Project research analyst

Meanwhile, Abstergo made a deal with MysoreTech to release the Brahman V.R., spreading new Animus technology to the Asian market. This was done in an attempt to mine the genetic memories of their customers in order to gain more information about the Pieces of Eden. In November 2013, Abstergo managed to locate two individuals of interest, the actress Monima Das and her fiancé Jot Soora, whose genetic memories contained a possible lead to the location of the Koh-i-Noor. However, due to the intervention of the Assassins, Monima died while Jot escaped before he could be captured.

In 2014, Abstergo released a cloud-based software named the Helix upon which they released more games created from the edited genetic memories of their subjects. Using Helix, an Abstergo research analyst analyzed the memories of the Assassin-turned-Templar Shay Cormac and fixed a virus that had been hidden in his memory banks. Also contained within those memory banks were the genetic memories of Arno Dorian, and the twins Evie and Jacob Frye.

In 2017, Abstergo Entertainment released a new Animus device titled the Mobile Animus 4.38. This device saw the release of Rebellion, a game created from the altered genetic memories of the Spanish Assassin Aguilar de Nerha.

Callum Lynch

By 2014, Sofia Rikkin became heavily involved with the Animus Project, which had moved from the Abstergo Campus in Rome to the Abstergo Foundation Rehabilitation Center in Madrid. In February of that year, Sofia's subordinate Layla Hassan suggested the creation of a new inverted six-axis motion rig Animus, which despite initial protest, became the new Animus for the project.

Callum using the Animus

Over the following two years, Abstergo kidnapped several people to use as subjects for the project, including the Assassins Moussa, Lin, Nathan, and Emir, and kept them prisoner inside the Madrid facility. In October 2016, Abstergo kidnapped death row inmate Callum Lynch and staged his execution in order to use him as their next subject. Upon moving Lynch to the Abstergo Foundation, Sofia used his genetic memories to uncover the location of the Apple of Eden once held by Aguilar de Nerha.

However, while Abstergo was successful in locating the Apple, their experiments backfired when Lynch and the other Assassin prisoners, using skills gained through the Bleeding Effect, staged a breakout. Although most of the prisoners were terminated, Lynch, Moussa, and Lin managed to escape and destroy the Madrid facility in the process, and they later retrieved Aguilar's Apple after assassinating Alan Rikkin.

The Aerie

Sean using the Aerie's Animus

In 2016, the Aerie, an Abstergo facility located in North America and overseen by the Templar Isaiah, utilized the Animus 4.35 on the teenagers Sean Molloy, Natalya Aliyev, Grace Collins and David Collins in order to help the Templars learn the locations of the pieces of the Trident of Eden. While Natalya and David were eventually saved from the Aerie by their friend Javier Mondragón and the Assassin Griffin, Grace escaped alongside Sebastian Monroe and Owen Meyers, and Sean was taken captive by Isaiah, who defected from the Templar Order to use the Trident for his own agenda.

André Bolden

That same year, André Bolden, the son of the Black Cross Albert Bolden, was lured to the Abstergo facility in Philadelphia with the promise of receiving treatment for his Vietnam War PTSD. At the facility, Bolden was introduced to the Templars Juhani Otso Berg, Violet da Costa, and Caitlin Gift, who supervised his sessions in the Animus, during which Bolden relived the memories of his 19th-century ancestor Jan van der Graff to track down the Koh-i-Noor.

André exiting the Animus after a session

Despite his initial distrust of the Templars after discovering he had been lied to, Bolden agreed to help Berg find what he was after, and the two developed a friendship over the course of the former's Animus sessions at the Philadelphia facility. Ultimately, van der Graff's memories proved to be a dead end and Bolden was allowed to leave, but he decided to instead help Berg take up the mantle of Black Cross and purge the Templar Order of corruption.

Kō Risa

In 2019, Kō Risa, also known as Lisa Huang, began her therapy at the Abstergo clinic in Yokohama, where Doctor Kaori Kagami had the teenager relive the memories of her ancestor, the Chinese Assassin Shao Jun, through the Animus, hoping to learn the location of the Assassin's Precursor box. Eventually, Risa started distrusting the doctor and was held against her will until she escaped with the help of the Assassin Kiyoshi Takakura and her cousin Mari.

Noa Kim

Noa in the Animus

In 2023, college student Noa Kim was lured on a vacation prize trip to Macau after using the genetic genealogy site WhyYou, developed by the Abstergo Genetic Research Lab. Kidnapped by Abstergo agents and brought to the Exitus research vessel, Noa was forced to relive the memories of his ancestor Edward Kenway in the Animus, under the supervision of Doctor Shimazu Sei, in order to locate a Piece of Eden found by Edward in Southeast Asia.

During their time together, Noa and Sei slowly began to bond and the doctor even made a deal with Noa, promising him his freedom in exchange for his cooperation. Although members of the Zhawang Corporation tried to rescue Noa several times, both in Macau and in Cebu, the young man refused their help as he wished to relive Edward's memories to learn more about himself, and chose to remain with Abstergo for the time being.

Eventually, Edward's memories revealed the whereabouts of a Piece of Eden—a crescent amulet—in the Strait of Malacca, though because of his long sessions in the Animus, Noa began to succumb to the Bleeding Effect. Sei contacted her superiors to update them on the situation, only to be taken aback when they ordered Noa's termination, believing the test subject had outlived his usefulness. Sei disagreed and was contacted by the hacker group DedSec on Nathan Zhang's behalf.

Noa's Bleeding Effect-induced rampage

Sei made a deal with Nathan to ensure Noa's safety before being informed that the latter had gone on a Bleeding Effect-induced rampage aboard the Exitus. After Sei helped him return to his senses, Noa was sent to recover the crescent amulet from the shipwreck of the SS Ourang Medan alongside Sei's bodyguard Yuki.

Upon their successful return with the artifact, Sei informed Noa of her decision to abandon Abstergo and help him escape, just as the ship they were on came under attack by Nathan and his men. The assault allowed Noa, Sei, and Yuki to escape with the amulet, marking the latter two's defection from Abstergo and the end of the company's usage of Noa as a test subject.

Shimazu Sei

Following her capture by Sigma Team in Yangon, Myanmar, Sei became Abstergo's next test subject, being strapped to an Animus and made to relive the memories of her ancestor Shimazu Saito, a close companion of Edward Kenway. This way, the Templars hoped to uncover the location of another Piece of Eden in Southeast Asia, which was part of the same set as the crescent amulet.

Sei strapped to the Animus

After a prolonged time in the Animus, Sei's genetic memories allowed Abstergo to discover the Piece of Eden's location within Saito's grave. Sigma Team was subsequently dispatched to recover the artifact, which Abstergo believed would allow them to take control of the Forgotten Temple in Angkor, Cambodia, and establish their New World Order. However, their plans were opposed by Noa, the Assassins, the Zhawang Corporation, and DedSec, who breached Abstergo's internal network and learned about their experiments on Sei.

To prevent the Templars from extracting any more information from Sei, the group decided to eliminate her, and Noa volunteered to infiltrate the Abstergo Genetic Research Lab in Osaka, Japan, where Sei was being held. Choosing to save the doctor instead, Noa freed her from the Animus and carried her out of the facility due to Sei suffering from a severe Bleeding Effect that essentially left her brain-dead.

After Noa's Assassin allies dispatched the incoming Abstergo security guards, the group escaped the Research Lab with the help of Nathan Zhang and his men, who posed as firefighters. They then drove away while Noa used the Piece of Eden in his possession to cure Sei's Bleeding Effect, although the doctor did not immediately awaken due to the severe damage her mind had sustained.

Known Animus Subjects

• 
  Nathalie Chapman
  (1977)
• 
  Aileen Bock as "Subject Zero"
  (1980)
• 
  Subject 1
  (1980)
• 
  Warren Vidic as Subject 2
  (1981)
• 
  Adam Sarti
  (early 1980s)
• 
  Daniel Cross as Subject 4
  (1983)
• 
  Subject 12
• 
  Subject 13
• 
  Paul Bellamy
  (2002)
• 
  Robert Fraser as Subject 14
• 
  Subject 15
  (2010)
• 
  Clay Kaczmarek as Subject 16
  (2011 – 2012)
• 
  Desmond Miles as Subject 17
  (2012)
• 
  André Bolden
  (2016)
• 
  Sean Molloy
  (2016)
• 
  Grace Collins
  (2016)
• 
  David Collins
  (2016)
• 
  Natalya Aliyev
  (2016)
• 
  Emir
  (2016)
• 
  Lin
  (2016)
• 
  Moussa
  (2016)
• 
  Nathan
  (2016)
• 
  Callum Lynch
  (2016)
• 
  Kō Risa
  (2019)
• 
  Noa Kim
  (2023)
• 
  Shimazu Sei
  (2023)

Behind the scenes

In the non-canonical modern day storyline of the Assassin's Creed French comic, Abstergo was experimenting on the young boy Mike, who was designated as Subject 19.

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed (first appearance)
• Assassin's Creed II (mentioned only)
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
• Assassin's Creed: The Fall
• Assassin's Creed: Revelations
  • The Lost Archive
• Assassin's Creed (Les Deux Royaumes) (non-canon)
• Assassin's Creed III (mentioned only)
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
• Assassin's Creed Unity: Abstergo Entertainment – Employee Handbook
• Assassin's Creed: Unity (mentioned only)
• Assassin's Creed: Templars
• Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants – Locus
• Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants – Tomb of the Khan
• Assassin's Creed film
• Assassin's Creed: Origins (mentioned only)
• Assassin's Creed: Bloodstone (mentioned only)
• Assassin's Creed: Blade of Shao Jun
• Assassin's Creed: Forgotten Temple
• Assassin's Creed Roleplaying Game (mentioned only)