Plot
Set in the year 2414, when the USG Ishimura (Japanese: "石村", lit. "Stone Village"), a "planetcracker" starship, sends out a distress signal to the Concordance Extraction Corporation (CEC) during a mining operation on the planet Aegis VII. The CEC dispatches the USG Kellion to investigate. After a guidance system malfunction crashes the Kellion into the Ishimura dock, the crew tries to seek other means of transport. As they explore what appears to be an abandoned ship, they are attacked by grotesque monsters, killing off all but Engineer Isaac Clarke, Commander Zach Hammond, and Computer Specialist Kendra Daniels. Hammond notices that many of the ship's systems are failing; he and Kendra direct and assist Isaac in fixing them, so as to keep them all alive for rescue.
As Isaac moves about making the necessary repairs, he discovers various text and audio logs scattered throughout the ship, piecing together the events that transpired prior to their arrival: during the course of its illegal mining of Aegis VII, the Ishimura crew found the Red Marker, the most valuable relic of Unitology, an influential and powerful religion. Captain Mathius, a devout Unitologist, shifted focus, after being asked by the Church of Unitology, from mining to retrieving the Marker. Soon after the Marker's extraction to the Ishimura, humans from the planet's colony and the ship suffered from mass hysteria and violent hallucinations, before subsequently killing each other. Mathius cut off traffic and communications between the two sides, later going insane. Chief Science Officer Terrance Kyne tried to relieve Mathius of duty, only to accidentally kill the captain in a struggle. An alien virus, the genetic coding of which is encrypted on the Marker, then began ravaging the Aegis VII colony, infecting any available corpses and turning them into "Necromorphs" - mutated and reanimated corpses that violently slaughter uninfected humans to spread the infestation. A colony shuttle carrying an infectious Necromorph caused the scourge to spread across the Ishimura. Though Hammond states that he is unaware of what the Marker is, Kendra confides to Isaac that Hammond may be lying. Isaac later encounters his girlfriend Nicole Brennan, a medical officer aboard the Ishimura, though they are unable to meet.
After repairing the critical systems, Isaac's team launches a second beacon, attracting the nearby USM Valor; however, the Valor, having picked up an escape pod with a Necromorph inside (jettisoned earlier by Hammond) is overrun and crashes into the ship. Hammond deduces, from the military equipment he finds on board, that the Valor was actually assigned to destroy the Ishimura (later confirmed through a text log found on the Valor.) Deciding that they must escape while they can, Isaac and Hammond retrieve the Valor's power core in order to repair an available shuttle, though Hammond is killed by an enhanced Necromorph in the process. Dr. Kyne, one of the last survivors of the Ishimura, later contacts Isaac, urging him to return the Marker to Aegis VII, believing that it can restrain the "Hive Mind", a creature that controls the Necromorphs (though originally created for military purposes). After assisting Isaac in loading the Marker onto the shuttle, Kendra murders Kyne, revealing herself as a government operative ordered to retrieve the Marker for her superiors. She reveals that the Marker is a reverse-engineered copy of the Black Marker found on Earth, placed on Aegis VII by the government to monitor its effects. She then leaves on the shuttle without Isaac, but Nicole arrives and is able to help him recall the shuttle via remote pilot, prompting Kendra to flee via escape pod.
Isaac takes the Marker back to the colony, pacifying the Hive Mind and creating a "dead space" that makes all Necromorphs in the surrounding area dormant (it is revealed in the "backstory logs" unlocked by completing the game that "dead space" refers to the area surrounding the Marker wherein the infection and reanimation processes are subdued by the emission of various types of signals from the Marker). However, this also disrupts the gravity tethers keeping Aegis VII from tearing itself apart. As Isaac attempts to escape the planet, Kendra appears and starts to take the Marker back to the shuttle. She shows Isaac, through a recovered distress transmission, that Nicole committed suicide via lethal injection before Isaac's team arrived on the Ishimura; his visions of her were the Marker's attempts to bring itself back to the planet. Isaac intercepts Kendra loading the Marker back into the shuttle; before she can leave, however, the Hive Mind reawakens, violently killing her, leaving Isaac to defeat it in a ferocious battle.
Leaving the Marker behind, Isaac flies off in the shuttle before the colony is destroyed. As he sets course away from Aegis VII, Isaac removes his helmet and watches Nicole's first transmission again; now knowing how it ends, he turns it off before it can finish. Noticing something in his peripherals, Isaac looks to his right and is attacked by a vision of a bloody Nicole, just before the scene cuts to black.
Read more about this topic: Dead Space (video Game)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)