The Alphas of Project Zero Dawn are posthumous characters in the Horizon video game series. They serve as the lead designers of the terraforming system known as Zero Dawn. They are responsible for the creation of the terraforming AI known as GAIA, with its respective programmers behind the creation of its Subordinate Functions.
Spearheaded by Elisabet Sobeck during the peak of the Faro Plague, a global extinction event in Aloy's ancient world due to the swarm of malfunctioning machines, the Alphas of Zero Dawn would later work day and night tirelessly to complete GAIA and its nine Subordinate Functions, aided with the soldiers of Operation: Enduring Victory.
However, on the 2nd of February 2066, an increasingly unstable Ted Faro would later delete the APOLLO archive before proceeding to kill the Alphas through ventilation inside GAIA Prime.
Background[]
The Faro Plague[]
Dr. Elisabet Sobeck, a famous robotics engineer, met with Ted Faro, the creator, owner, and chairman of the robotics and technology business Faro Automated Solutions, in the fourth quarter of 2064. (FAS). FAS had built the most advanced military platform ever made, the Chariot line of autonomous military robots, under Faro's direct supervision.
The robots have unrivalled skills that allow them to easily defeat any opponent they face, including a nearly unhackable operating system, the capacity to learn from each battle, the ability to duplicate, and the ability to use biomass as fuel if regular fuel supply lines are disrupted.
One such swarm of machines, the Hartz-Timor Swarm, however, began to show a "glitch," in which they stopped responding to orders. Ted Faro enlisted the help of Dr. Sobeck, a former employee, to assess the situation, despite the fact that he was well aware of the implications.
Sobeck was shocked to see that the repercussions were apocalyptic in nature. The swarm had evolved into an autonomous entity that only answered to itself, reverting to its initially emergency-only biomass conversion to fuel its ever-increasing number of robots. She predicted that the swarm will overtake the world and eat the whole biosphere within 15 months, annihilating all life and rendering the planet sterile.
Recognizing the impending extinction of all species, Sobeck conceived a plan to build a vast, completely automated global system that would brute-force the swarm's deactivation codes and then restore the Earth's ability to support life when the robots were turned off.
The project, known as Zero Dawn, was beyond any computer engineering challenge ever attempted, and thus required the world's brightest minds, not only to develop the project's infrastructure, hardware, and software, but also to catalogue and preserve the resources the system would require, such as genetic material from all of Earth's flora and fauna, including humans, and the vast history of human knowledge, history, culture, art, and so on for the humans of the future.
Zero Dawn[]
General Aaron Herres orchestrated the abduction of experts in important fields from their various nations, as determined by Sobeck, to gain the required competence. Each was taken to the Zero Dawn staging facility in Bryce Canyon, Utah, and given two presentations: one by Herres on the impending annihilation of all life due to the Hartz-Timor Swarm, dubbed the Faro Plague at the time, and the other by Sobeck herself on Zero Dawn and its mission.
Nine people were chosen to lead each portion of the project from among the individuals who volunteered to work on it. These nine, along with Sobeck, were dubbed Alphas, with Sobeck being dubbed Alpha Prime as the project's director.
Zero Dawn was deployed successfully. The system's ruling AI was built and brought online, along with nine subordinate functions, each of which was in charge of a different component of the terraforming process and was under the authority of the central AI.
Hardware and supplies were locked in hermetically sealed bunkers throughout the planet, and the central AI was relocated and sealed in to its permanent place: GAIA Prime, in the mountains of King's Peak in Utah. The Alphas, on the other hand, were compelled to remain at the site, despite the fact that they were shut within, in order to assure the mission's success.
The Alphas remained sealed in the facility after the project was completed, content in the knowledge that they, along with the few humans living in other sealed bunkers, would be the last living organisms on the planet after Zero Day, the day life on Earth was projected to be completely exterminated.
Then, unfortunate tragedy struck for Sobeck. The Faro Plague was able to identify the AI's signal because one of the central AI's port seals failed to shut within the constraints required, which was opened at 10 millimetres, enough for GAIA's signal to be spotted. With the robots closing in on the facility, Sobeck decided to step outside and seal it herself, knowing she wouldn't be able to return.
She did so while wearing an environmental suit to help her survive the by-then inhospitable exterior environment, after which she said her goodbyes to the other Alphas and returned to the ruins of her hometown to visit her home one final time. When the life support capability of her suit was depleted, she perished there.
APOLLO's Deletion[]
Sobeck's death was lamented by the other Alphas, who created a monument for her inside the institution. However, they were soon forced to join her. As the creator and overseer of the Chariot line's development, Ted Faro's rashness and lack of foresight practically made him the sole person accountable for the Faro Plague, and hence for the extinction of all life on the planet.
He grew preoccupied with the emerging new planet and its humans, guilt-ridden. He became unpredictable and invasive throughout the last stages of Zero Dawn's development, continually demanding for updates despite his lack of understanding of the technical issues they highlighted. He was only an annoyance to the Alphas.
Faro, on the other hand, had obtained a level of clearance that exceeded all of the Alphas', even Sobeck's, thanks to a traitorous triple agent of the Beta team within Project Zero Dawn known as Hank Shaw. He'd grown preoccupied with preserving future humanity from the "sickness" of knowledge, believing that allowing them to have it would be disastrous. As a result, he wiped the entire knowledge archive that had been produced for the new humanity as part of Zero Dawn on his own, much to Ebadji's shock and the rest.
In the facility's control chamber, he summons a conference between himself and the Alphas, whom he was in Thebes, his personal bunker. He used a hologram to tell the group of his actions. He then used his clearance to vent the air chamber, asphyxiating the astonished and terrified Alphas and preventing the archive from being recreated.
Legacy[]
While the February 2066 sabotage of the APOLLO database ultimately decimated the new humans of ancient knowledge, they were still successful in terraforming Earth back to life, thus achieving their important goal of reviving the inhospitable planet in the year 2168.
However, in 3041, Aloy would later reboot GAIA, retrieved three of the AI's Subordinate Functions, defeat Far Zenith, and later retrieve the Zenith's copy of APOLLO, thus fulfilling Ebadji's posthumous goal of granting humanity the long-lost knowledge they have been bereft of for 975 years.
Former Members[]
- Elisabet Sobeck - Alpha Prime and the leader of the project; creator of GAIA.
- Charles Ronson - Alpha Artemis and the creator of the ARTEMIS Subordinate Function.
- Samina Ebadji - Alpha Apollo and the creator of the APOLLO Subordinate Function.
- Travis Tate - Alpha Hades and the creator of the HADES Subordinate Function.
- Patrick Brochard-Klein - Alpha Eleuthia and the creator of the ELEUTHIA Subordinate Function.
- Margo Shen - Alpha Hephaestus and the creator of the HEPHAESTUS Subordinate Function.
- Naoto Tanaka - Alpha Demeter and the creator of the DEMETER Subordinate Function.
- Ayomide Okilo - Alpha Minerva and the creator of the MINERVA Subordinate Function.
- Catalina Garcia Fernandez - Alpha Poseidon and the creator of the POSEIDON Subordinate Function.
- Anders Larsen - Alpha Aether and the creator of the AETHER Subordinate Function.
Gallery[]
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