Clay Kaczmarek

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Subject 16 (also referred to as Neumann) was an individual kidnapped by Abstergo Industries and forced into the Animus before Desmond Miles and another descendant of Ezio Auditore da Firenze. He is related to Desmond, indicated by portions of their DNA matching in Assassin's Creed II, and it is also revealed that he had an ancestor at the Battle of Gettysburg, in the Roman forum and connected with a Queen Isabella.

Assassin's Creed

Former Abstergo employee and researcher Lucy reveals in one of her e-mails to her supervisor, Warren Vidic, that Subject 16 has Far Eastern origins, as one of his ancestors was "involved in an important event" in said area. A different e-mail possibly indicates that his name is Neumann. The same e-mail also hints that a former employee of Abstergo Industries, Leila Marino, may have been romantically involved with Subject 16. This suggests a romantic involvement prior to his kidnapping or that Leila worked with Subject 16 in the same way as Lucy works with Desmond.

At Abstergo's orders, Subject 16 was kept connected to the Animus for dangerously long periods, sometimes even days at a time. This led to a severe and powerful "bleeding effect", as Subject 16 became more capable of revisiting these genetic memories without the use of the Animus. Due to his inability to actually control these phenomena, Subject 16 slowly spiraled into insanity, eventually culminating in suicide. In Assassin's Creed II, he describes many of his genetic memories in a glyph he had written.

At the end of Assassin's Creed, due to his own experience with the bleeding effect, Desmond is able to use Eagle Vision to view several cryptic messages that were drawn in blood. Subject 16 states in one message that he drained his own body to paint the figures on the floor and walls of the main room where the Animus is located. But if he had used his own blood to paint the wall mural in the sleeping room, he would have bled out — literally — before he finished his work. The symbols painted on the walls and floors later reappear in Assassin's Creed II as glyphs, parts of encrypted files that Subject 16 added to genetic memories after he hacked the Animus.

Assassin's Creed II

Subject 16 makes his first vocal appearance in Assassin's Creed II, voicing-over 20 encrypted files that he hacked from Abstergo's mainframe. After all twenty files are decrypted, they combine to form a short video which contains what Subject 16 claims to be "The Truth" about the origins of humanity. In the video, a man and a woman who refer to one another as Adam and Eve, race through a modern complex, with Eve carrying "the apple" (a Piece of Eden). The short diatribes from these files, as well as commentary from Lucy, reveal a bit more about the extent of the madness which led to Subject 16's death. In his final commentary in the twentieth file, Subject 16 only states, "Lucy, I can't wait any longer. I am ready to go now... She sees me raise the knife."

In the beginning of the game, Lucy searches for the closest genetic match between Subject 16 and Desmond, and the memory of Ezio's birth appears, suggesting that he is an ancestor of both.

Also, when Lucy makes her first appearance in said game, blood can be seen on her lab coat. She also states that she and Desmond have very little time before they (presumably meaning Abstergo staff) realize what she has done. This suggests that she may have just killed Subject 16 out of pity for him, and that she and Desmond need to escape before they get caught. This would mean that when Subject 16 says "She sees me raise the knife" in the twentieth glyph file, he is narrating a genetic memory, as he does in some of the later glyph files, and is not talking to himself about how Lucy is watching him ready the instrument of his own death. This theory is also supported by the beginning of the same quote from the twentieth glyph file, in which Subject 16 seems o be asking Lucy to put him out of his misery: "Lucy, I can't wait any longer. I am ready to go now...."