Donovan Hock: the arms dealer who stole Keiji Okuda's memories

Donovan Hock was a weapons dealer, a smuggler and a patron of the arts, which in his case were the same business dressed three ways. He lived on Bekenstein in a mansion set between fields and a lake with a city on the horizon, and he kept a vault under it. He is best remembered for what he did to a thief who broke into that house, and for what Kasumi Goto did about it afterwards.

What did Donovan Hock do to Keiji Okuda?#

Hock caught Okuda during a burglary of his Bekenstein estate, killed him himself, and forcibly extracted the graybox implant from his head so he could read the memories stored on it.

He enjoyed it. As he walked away he observed that he had never taken a person's memories before, and told the dying man to treat it as an honour.

The graybox was worth the trouble to him because of what it held: a secret that would implicate the Systems Alliance if it ever surfaced. Okuda had encrypted it, which turned a prize into a fixation. Hock followed the decryption work closely and kept the device locked in his vault whenever it was not being worked on.

That vault also held Michelangelo's David and the head of the Statue of Liberty, among other priceless things. How he came by any of it is not recorded.

The party#

Hock threw an extravagant party at the Bekenstein house, invited the galaxy's better-dressed criminals, and expected tributes from them. Kasumi heard about it and got Commander Shepard an invitation using fabricated credentials built to appeal to his tastes.

It works. Hock welcomes Shepard under the name Solomon or Allison Gunn and accepts the tribute, a golden statue of Saren Arterius. He then turns Kasumi away at the door on grounds he makes up as he goes.

Getting into the vault needs his voiceprint, which means keeping him talking, and Hock is happy to talk. The party, he explains, is for himself and his friends, the people doing the terrible things that keep the galaxy turning. He envies ordinary people, who only have to think about simple luxuries, while he and his guests are the cleaners, the support structure underneath the galaxy's cheerful pretence of peace. The room gives him a standing ovation and he stands in it enjoying himself.

The gunship#

Kasumi and Shepard get into the vault and take the graybox, and Hock is already ahead of them. He had suspected her involvement, and he appears as a holographic projection to say so.

His mechs fail. His Eclipse mercenaries fail. So he climbs into an A-61 Mantis Gunship fitted with its own shield and comes after them himself. Kasumi closes the distance and knocks the shield down, and the two of them shoot the gunship out of the air. Hock dies in the explosion.

If Shepard never goes#

Skip the job and Hock keeps working the problem, and he apparently cracks Keiji's encryption.

The consequence shows up in Mass Effect 3. The salarian Spectre Jondum Bau pays Hock for intelligence relevant to a case he is running: the Alliance covered up a raid on a batarian outpost, and the hanar were complicit in leading the Alliance to it. Bau's assessment of the man he bought it from is that Hock is unpleasant.

Trivia and cut material#

The developer script for Kasumi: Stealing Memory summarises Hock as a bad person who kicks puppies for fun. John Ullyatt, who voices him, also plays Kenneth Donnelly and Faryn in Dragon Age: Origins.

Unused dialogue fills in more of him. Kasumi puts his age at fifty or so, says he murdered his way to the top of the arms market, and lists his stock: mines, heavy mechs, gunships, body-nukes, biocide. Hock's own account at the party has him fighting his way out of the slums of Omega as a child soldier who served in a dozen small wars and then tortured his recruiter over unpaid wages. He also mentions selling horse tranquiliser whenever the red sand supply dried up. At one stage in development Kasumi referred to him as "Shuriken Hock".