Polito, the player's trusted guide for the first portion of the game, has been dead all along, as she committed suicide when she realized what SHODAN had done and was going to do. She only reveals herself to the player during a moment of despair, at the same time the player discovers that Dr. Her involvement in the game's goings-on is not disclosed up front, but only subtly hinted at in the game's early portions. The player character in System Shock 2 is a soldier cybernetically modified by SHODAN to serve as her avatar.

After both are brought aboard the starship Von Braun and SHODAN is reactivated, she discovers the experiment is no longer at her command and begins to enlist humans to aid her in destroying her creations. The pod crash lands on the planet Tau Ceti V and she survives by hibernating for the next 42 years. The grove contains one of SHODAN's processing components and part of her grand biological experiment. In System Shock, the player ejects a garden grove pod from Citadel Station. Though she has a small army of cyborgs and mutants to command, she has no actual physical power to wield, and as such thwarting more than one of her schemes has to be done with the AI's screams and threats in the background. Basically omnipresent and the de facto ruler of Citadel Station, SHODAN watches from security cameras, stares out of screens and monitors, sends threats and snide messages over the station's PA system or via email to the player's data reader, and sometimes cuts off communications from friendly sources to prevent the hacker from advancing in his goals. She was hacked by the game's protagonist (at the behest of the corrupt corporate Vice President Edward Diego, in exchange for a military-grade neural implant, and amnesty) and, to access the vital information about TriOptimum corporation, its ethical restrictions were removed, starting a process that eventually resulted in the AI going rogue, seizing control of the station's systems, robots and considerable defenses, and either slaughtering the whole staff or converting them into mutants and cyborgs-with the sole exception of its 'creator', the unnamed hacker whom the player controls. SHODAN was created on Earth to serve as the artificial intelligence of the TriOptimum Corporation's research and mining space station Citadel Station, which orbits around Saturn.

After she has been hacked, the cone turns red, the surface becomes covered in rough metallic material and four 'tentacles' or 'claws' grow from the top, with her actual face starting to form above that. In the cyberspace of System Shock, she is initially represented as an inverted blue-grey cone, reminiscent of the Master Control Program from the 1982 Disney film Tron.

She is voiced by former Tribe keyboardist and vocalist, Terri Brosius, the wife of System Shock 2's sound editor, Eric Brosius, who distorted the samples to provide the distinctive SHODAN effect. On screens, SHODAN manifests herself as an eerie-looking green and/or grey female cybernetic face that usually wears a malevolent expression, and speaks with a chaotic, discordant voice. Although as a cybernetic entity SHODAN has no conventional gender, the original disc version refers to her as either an 'it' or a 'he', while the later CD version uses 'she'. Her words are accompanied by stuttering, fluctuating voice pitch, shifts of timbre, and the presence of three voices speaking the same words with the constituent voices alternately lagging behind and leading ahead in different patterns, as well as computer glitches resembling a sound card malfunction. She is a megalomaniac with a god complex and sees humans as little better than insects, something which she constantly reminds the player of. SHODAN is an artificial intelligence whose moral restraints were removed from her programming by a hacker in order for Edward Diego, station chief of Citadel Station, on which SHODAN was installed, to delete compromising files regarding illegal experiments and his corruption.

System shock 2 background