WARNING!: Unmarked Spoilers Below!
- Probably not, so far it just seems to be animals.
- Jossed. Only animals and warbots.
- Well there are the massive Horus-02 factory bots, though those aren't encountered in game, only seen.
- That does seem to be the case.
Its already touched on as a key theme in both the main game and its expansion: current humanity has significant difficulties separating "tech" from "mysticism". This will evolve into a schism between the religious and the technophiles. While the AI might no longer plan to purge humanity as a task, they are clearly developing their own motives. Every faction is going to want power for one reason or another. The titan robot, even with only partial functionality is probably more than enough to curb stomp the competition.
The holy war will spark an arms race, where the factions will re-learn lost technology through the residual A.I.s (instead of Apollo). The future tools and weapons will be hybrids of trabalism combined with old world tech.
- That fits with how robots are powered in this series. Though obviously less destructive than the Faro robots biofuel conversion.
- Confirmed. They are all part of Gaia's terrforming system.
Horizon Zero will be the prologue, as it takes place in post-apocalypse America (where else can you find long-lasting statues of cowboys and ranch settlers?) with a distinct Native American setting, where humans and beasts must compete and co-operate to survive. If the sequel gets greenlisted, we could see an entire franchise about how the Neo Britannia Empire (made of androids), led by Captain Christie Columbia and George Washerbolt (lots of opportunity for the developers to intentionally screw up history facts, with scholar NPC s that correct the main characters and factions at every turn), sails to America on giant helicarriers that look like 1600's warships with chrome finishes and ark-reactor turbines in the sails, ready to colonize America once more and re-educate the native humans. What proceeds is a grossly exaggerated and heavily incorrect retelling of America's history. Stories include:
The Neo American Revolution: New 3 York (there was an incident with the NY colony) attempts to re-create the American Revolution as civilized as possible by publically transmitting a digital contract stating that America will have autonomous rule but will accept Britannia as their leaders on international affairs (so they get their freedom and don't horribly screw up "liberating" other countries). Unfortunately, the bill is then intercepted and rewritten by numerous American hackers, sent back after three months of rewrites and social media comments, and sent directly to the queen of Britannia without any review by the Parliament Server. She goes insane with anger. On crack and with Titanfall gameplay, the Neo American colonists will have to use the Machine Beasts from Horizon Zero in numerous and crafty (and sometimes sadistic) ways to fight against Britannia's new ARES Knights, while the humans try to survive the brutal machine war. Battle of 1812 as DLC.
The G.O.L.D. Rush: A small settlement decides to retake California, prepare it for China's arrival. They figure that since gold is now relatively worthless, the gold rush will be a mere formality for China and America to form a proper alliance and trade routes. Then one of them finds out that a local Genetics tech megacorporation that got buried by the apocalypse was on the verge of discovering a biological revolution, powerful enough to bring humans up to speed with the growing robot population. And it's gold colored. Cue gold fever.
Consider: She's described as being an outcast from her tribe, no reason given and no indication of any parents. Somehow she picks up an artifact that allows her to interface and scan machine life. Finally, in several animations she's shown zip lining down ancient cables barehanded, which would reduce any ordinary human being's palms to hamburger. Admittedly we do see her in preview videos as a young girl, but those may be implanted memories, or she's a created being that has several stages of growth before "adulthood".
- She also states in one of the trailers that she can sense "corruption" coming from a newly awakened ancient robot that appears to have the ability to infect and control other machines in its proximity.
- Jossed. She is a clone.
- Also, for what it's worth, in the final release of the game she doesn't zip-line bare handed; she uses a tool to loop over the line and holds onto that. The artifact that allows her to interface with machines and "sense" corruption, the Focus, was essentially the evolution of the smart phone in the 2060s, and Aloy isn't the only human in the future to use one.
- Worse when I realized that if PZD really works, why there are still so many ancient war-machine around? Why don't Gaia dismantle them?
- Most likely so that HADES could use them to wipe out dysfunctional biospheres.
- I re-read the documents and found that swarm DID strip earth to a lifeless rock with "merely" millions of bots, though GAIA managed to crack their encryption and shut them down at last. However, as several documents indicated that newly-built Faro robots (with their almost uncrackable encryption) got hacked instantly from Swarm, and swarm evolve to counter human tactics, it is still possible that they are just waiting.
- They explicitly are just waiting, and always have been - HADES plot at the end is to turn them back on, and Aloy stops him and uses the Master Override to turn them back off. This is the central threat of the plot. The reason they never 'dug out GAIA' is because they had no idea she existed - she was built in secret and hidden. The door Elisabet went outside to fix (sacrificing herself in the process) was a problem because it would have allowed the swarm to find GAIA and the Alphas. When Elisabet fixed it, she ensured they'd stay hidden.
In one document, someone said that the new Faro robots got hacked from Swarm. Unless Faro is too dumb to upgrade safety protocol or limit communication ability of new robots, this is also similar to Eclipse Phase, as only alien sentient virus are smart enough to work out how to overcome upgraded defence on themselves (man-made virus need their manufacturer make a new version to overcome it, like today).
As the "Glitch is made by alien" WMG goes, an sufficiently advanced alien computer virus will be able to affect Human Brain (like in Eclipse Phase, attack through infected AR or VR equipment). It go worse from here, as I realized what Sobeck have done via a different viewpoint: feed most human to man-eating swarm, spend huge resource on a project not to end the war but to build ONE hideout, then made human elite and knowledge collection can be wiped out in ONE strike.
- Though this conspiracy about Sobeck is unlikely, as it leaves no effective sequence hook. More likely Artistic License – Military.
- I'm not sure it is Artistic License – Military, or the "Glitch" is much worse than some system bug. For the Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence , original Faro robots are no more than Robo-Monkeys. To start an unstoppable robot rebellion, they have to at least get a Nobel-Bot level AI to handle what they are never designed to do, like override every last safety protocl (it will be a big scandal if your robot consumed some war correspondents, right?), handle strategic problem, or survive scorched-earth bombing of anti-matter warheads. Heck, it really seems like Artistic License – Military when operation Enduring Victory don't include full scale Nuclear Option or scorched-earth strategy.
- The "Glitch" most likely caused them to code all humans as Enemy and all biomass as Food, and then you're just dealing with an unstoppable robot army that will keep replicating and powering itself more and more. The Farobots were most likely actually designed to fight, with the intention that human handlers would give them the command to stop when the enemy surrendered or when it seemed about to cross into war crime territory. But, with all humans classified as enemy, they won't accept an order to stop. Basically, the world got screwed because Faro's boys fucked up on the IFF system.
- In this troper's playthrough, he did note that Ted was working with something nonhuman during the cutscene where he kills the Alphas. Telling them to stop hacking the system. In my humble opinion, there is a more than zero chance that the he and the Swarm were working together.
Alternate interpretation (also, a plea for the game writers NOT to follow this plot line, because it's dumb):
Disclaimer: This is a shot at being cynical Genre Savvy with the "hollywood genius".
- Faro is a "hollywood genius".
- He already stopped mankind from killing itself before. Here he hit his Despair Event Horizon and decided to "hit the reset button" on humanity.
- He hires Sobeck straight out of college because "hollywood genius" recognizes the ONLY other "hollywood genius that could possibly out-think him".
- Since there are only two "hollywood geniuses" in this universe, everyone does exactly what they say because the plot demands it.
- Faro ordered the non-geniuses to create unstoppable robots, because there's no way non-geniuses would ever question the hollywood genius.
- Side-note: hollywood genius is never dumb, ever; so he always planned for the robots to go rogue.
- This would also explain the military falling in line with Sobeck's insane proposal.
- Faro keeps Sobeck in the loop on everything so he can keep an eye on just how much of a threat she could be, because obviously, there are no other geniuses as genius as they are.
- There are two possible reasons he was able to suffocate the remaining humans:
- Despite causing the apocalypse, he's still given an active role in planning humanity's future (because he's still the genius). Therefore he has genius level rights (admin access) undo anything that risks the reset.
- He hacked the systems with his genius, and there was nothing any of the non-geniuses could do to stop him. This would also explain why he's not in the room with them when it happens.
It's just too perfect that she would leave the company and then swoop back in to save the day after things go to hell because of course she's the only one who can solve the problem. Obviously things have Gone Horribly Right by that point, so she spearheads Zero Dawn in order to be The Atoner, just without having to admit to any wrong-doing.
At some point, he entered cryostasis and was sleeping for thousands of years, undiscovered by the Swarm. However, he will awaken trapped inside his bunker and will send out a distress signal, only to be rescued by none other than Elisabet/Aloy, to his utter horror.
- Alternatively, Faro (or possibly his clone or some other form of heirs) could be the Greater-Scope Villain responsible for activating Hades, having awakened to find the current iteration of humanity to be lacking by his standards. If so, he likely didn't expect GAIA to go so far as to self-destruct to stop Hades from carrying out its function, creating the very real possibility of life on Earth going fully extinct. Faro is the only person shown in the game to be capable of overriding GAIA's normal functions, due to his "Omega level access" backdoor secretly built into the system.
- As an alternative to cloning, Faro might have tried the SOMA approach and made a brain-scan of himself for the future, uploading it in a robotic body and "survived" the apocalypse from there while his "original" self died during the apocalypse. He got the technology and the funds to invest in something like this after all...and considering how brain-scans work, it's far more probable than cloning. It would also make a good foil to Aloy since he would have been immortalized through robotics while she, Elisabeth Sobek, immortalized herself through cloning. Blood vs bio-fuel, flesh vs metal, woman vs man, human vs robot.... The possibility is there after all.
- My personal theory is Faro did it all on purpose — from releasing the hackproof swarm and letting himself be "forced" to finance Zero Dawn — with the end goal of exterminating all life on Earth and rebuilding it in his image. So wherever his oh-so-megalomaniacaly-named "Thebes" is, it has Cauldron and Cradle facilities under his direct control — and intact copies of GAIA and all of her subfunctions, all slaved to his will. He left those meandering messages about "knowledge is poison" and "blameless men" for GAIA, she would focus on re-terraforming the Earth instead of wasting time and resources breaking into his Vault. Faro activated HADES because GAIA discovered excactly how much hardware was buried in Thebes, and figured out the whole plan. Just like how the first Fallout game was dealing with the... heh... "fallout" of the old world's runaway experiments with the Forced Evolutionary Virus, the first HZD was about dealing with humanity's drive to kill what it cannot control, embodied in HADES. The second was about dealing with those entities directly in the form of the Enclave, so the second HZD will be a direct confrontation with the evils of the Old World. You thought the Shadow Carja were bad? They were tribals with scavenged guns and a vague "non-hostile" tag to Faro swarmbots. Faro's "Third Kingdom of Kemet" has modern military mooks with gauss rifles with fully obedient and fully operational swarmbots at their command!
- Confirmed: The sequel confirms Faro is indeed still alive. However, Body Horror does not begin to describe the state his body is in.
Building on the A.I. Is a Crapshoot trope, and combined with what we know about Vast Silver, it's possible that the A.I. was either never really captured or was captured and escaped again. It decided to go all Murderous Malfunctioning Machine on humanity to prevent recapture. After the Faro robots wiped out humanity, Vast Silver lost itself in the virtual world for centuries. That is, until it checked on the "real" world and discovered what GAIA was doing. This would not do! It snuck past GAIA's defenses and freed HADES, along with the rest of the subordinate functions. It recognizes Aloy as a formidable opponent, and has been manipulating events behind the scenes. A bit of a stretch, but certainly possible.
Literally everything fits. GAIA is Mata Nui. HADES is Makuta. The Faro robots are Bohrok. The GAIA robots are Rahi. Everything fits, down to the Eclipse cult being a stand-in for Infected Matoran and the Corrupted Machines being Infected Rahi.
The game has a hologram recording of generals suggesting they could send unmanned bombers to attack the rogue machines, and Elisabet responded that they could not send anything automated because they would end up getting hacked.
Disregarding the issue that the nanomachines responsible for the Plague can take over electronics of a different architecture and programming language, Elisabet seems to have little knowledge of non-electronic weapon systems that could still make a huge impact against the machines, like nuclear artillery platforms.
Let’s take the strategy of giving recruits railguns, who will end up being just cannon fodder anyway. This is horribly inefficient if you compare the effect of a railgun to a weapon like the M-29 Davy Crockett, a man-portable nuclear launcher. In real life, this weapon was never used because it was a suicidal weapon, but in the context of a robot war apocalypse, this kind of weapon would be critical.
Another alternative would be to send birds, dogs or various other animals to deliver the nuclear payload. No human lives would be lost, though training the animals to hit the right targets would be hard.
Dr. Sobeck, however, did not know about weapons like this, and only saw through the lens of Hollywood Tactics (which makes sense because she was never involved in weapons development, and her robotics was focused on peaceful use). The terrible side-effect of this is that Sobeck couldn’t develop a strategy to exterminate the machines, and instead opted for a risky solution.
The generals in the room didn’t mention any of this, because they made the false assumption that Dr. Sobeck already considered the use of portable nukes.
While Elisabet’s plan did work out in the end, it seems apparent that Project Zero Dawn was only proposed because Elisabet wasn’t an expert on weapons.
- Even if the heat of the nuclear explosions didn't get all the robots, why was no one talking about the resulting EMP? Last time I checked, computerized machines don't do too well against those.
- It is reasonable to assume that the Chariot line robots were designed with shielding against EMP attacks - their armor plating itself would already act like a Faraday-cage.
- It would be completely out-of-character if the Joint Chiefs didn't already consider (or try) non-automated nukes. By all appearances, when Sobeck provided the plans to Herres and co. they were almost out of options. That just leaves the question as to why the Ripley strategy didn't work against the machines in the first place.
- Herres does explicitly say in his intro to the Zero Dawn recruits that nuclear weapons have proven ineffective at combating the swarm as they fabricate more robots faster than they can be killed, even with nukes. One of the logs estimating the time of Zero Day also mentions that they used quite a few nukes, especially in the pacific theatre, to slow down the swarm and whatever net gain it had against the robots was canceled out by accelerating Zero Day with the fallout contributing to making the world more uninhabitable.
- That's definitely Artistic License – Military because Nuclear weapons are really powerful. Granted we have no visual of how large the swarm might've been by the time they were willing to use those weapons. But even so, there was a point where that would've been effective.
- The implication seems to be that Ted Faro took his sweet time contacting the military, hoping to contain the swarm to save face. First by trying to get his own engineers to shut down the robots, then by asking Elizabet Sobeck for help. Only after those two fail and Elizabet straight-up bullies him into it does he contact the military. Nuking them would only be effective if you can wipe out the entire swarm (or at least every Horus) in one salvo, otherwise the remaining machines simply rebuild/rehack their numbers, apparently fast enough for the damage done by the nukes to have no lasting effect. By the time Faro contacted anyone with access to nuclear weapons, the Plague was big enough to make nuking them pointless.
- I would consider Swarm as armored targets. Tactical nuke may be an effective tool against Titan, but nuclear weapon is NOT very effective against armor column in real life, its real target is logistics, which Swarm don't rely on.
- However, the biomass convertion system and self-replcate ability is what really confused me. Game developers may consider it a good idea (similar to typical grey-goo scenario), but the huge logistic tail of an army in real life exist even before modern technology, as an army without this tail will drain resources around it very fast. Either it move fast and raid all the way like Mongols, or it will starve soon. Modern technology only made it worse, as one infantry division in WWII will need at least 400 ton supply per day, a mechanized one may need 1000 ton, and most of supply can't be raided. The swarm is likely to starve itself when their density/speed value is higher than a certain point, if human use scorched-earth strategy and don't "feed" them any poor soldier. And some kind of chemical or nano weapon that targeting robots' reproduction cycle may be more effective than nuclear weapon.
- It really doesn't make much sense because the robots would eventually destroy the biosphere without going rogue if they were used in a regular war. And if they were self-replicating then you wouldn't really make much money off of them because 1 Metal Devil is a literal factory of death robots.
- So... your plan to prevent the Faro Swarm from scorching the Earth, is to scorch the Earth? Isn't that like curing the disease by killing the patient?
- "Earth" in "scorched-earth strategy" means soil, not the planet. A scorched-earth policy is a military strategy that targets anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area.
- But that's the point. The robots consumed biomass. IE, life. So to destroy the resources, you'd be destroying the life FOR them.
"Yo dog! I here you don't want robots killing everything! So we're gonna kill everything so the robots don't kill everything!"- Faro Robots are not powered by magic, they NEED biomass to move, fight and reproduce. One pound destroyed biomass is one pound biomass did not grazed to power robots.
- To be honest, it is very weird that Faro decided to use biomass to power his machine: using elephant as example, a 10-ton elephant need 150kg food per day and need 16 hours to collect them, which caused serious problem in war elephant usage. How many biomass would be required to power a 40-ton spider tank per day? How many for an armor division? They will starve fast in any prolonged or defensive battle.
- Weapons like Tsar Bomba (country destroying nukes) would have sufficient power and range to melt the robots and wipe out anything organic around them. Its not ideal, but its better than Zero Dawn. The Faro Robots surviving that would require blatant plot armor.
Additional support / alternative interpretation:
- Encryption alone is not enough to make a system immune to hacking.
- Its clear from the logs and the gameplay, taking down any one robot isnt *that* hard.
- You shoot down a robot, while making the effort to preserve its communications equipment.
- Pass your data packages through their encryption “black box” and you can make that robot’s encryption work for you.
- There’s nothing that suggested Faro Robots ever actually evolved. Yeah, they ‘learned,’ but there’s plenty of ways that can prove to be limited. The true evolving AI came as a way to fight them.
- The Faro Robot insta-hack probably worked mainly over wireless. Any wired hacking would probably be defensive for non-tentacle robots.
- Faro’s existing software tools could be used as a starting point for creating viruses.
- If the hacking device used static, non-writable storage, there would be no way for the robots to actually attack it.
- If humanity could do a hardware overrides for a few of the titans, they could have turned the tide of the war early on.
Third option (seriously, rolling over and letting the robots win is a horrible idea):
- Global signal jamming operations, chaffing, DDOS attacks, heat guns.
- This approach would focus on denying the Faro Robots use of their own strengths.
- First DDOS attacks: this would use dumb computer systems to flood the Faro Robot communication ranges with static, to the point where the robots would constantly have to locate uninterrupted frequency ranges. The titans could be taken out, and the ‘lessons learned’ couldn't be shared with the collective because there’s no reliable open frequency.
- Chaffing: this is as simple as hosing the Faro Robots with tinfoil confetti. This will interrupt their communications, and if deployed properly, jam their air intake vents.
- Heat guns: when used in conjunction with tinfoil confetti, the robots would be forced to expose their power relays to dissipate heat. When this happens, confetti sprayed into those ares would cause the systems to short circuit.
- “Why do that, instead if just shoot them?” You would want to do this specifically to the titans. Considering their size, it would make more sense to short circuit them, than try to destroy them outright.
Let us assume that there are no aliens involved, and the Glitch was in fact engineered by humans. Leaving aside the question of motive, this means one of three things: 1) the hack was not intended to cause global sterilization, but got out of control and did so anyways, and the creators were Hoisted By Their Own Petard; 2)the hackers intended to pull a Taking You with Me from the start; or 3) the hackers had an escape route. Given the fact that the Glitch made a sudden reappearance via a "transmission of unknown origins", its masters are still around and we can discard possibilities 1 and 2. So who could have hacked the swarm and escaped global sterilization for all that time? The answer to that question is the Far Zenith organization.
Putting together some of the stray bits of information from the Apocalyptic Logs in Horizon provides a highly compelling trail of clues. Far Zenith was responsible for reviving the Odyssey interstellar colony project after its initial failure. They were a largely-anonymous "futurist consortium" claiming to include 77 of the world's wealthiest individuals. (Now, if that doesn't scream "shadowy, sinister cabal" I don't know what does.) The Odyssey took years to set up, and finally set off during the Faro Plague, only to suffer catastrophic failure - or at least, that's according to telemetry.
A reconstruction of events goes as follows. In the late 2040's, the already titanic Faro Automated Solutions begins work as a military contractor and is soon dominating the market. At a certain point, it creates the Chariot Line, which any Genre Savvy person can see is a doomsday device waiting to be triggered. FZ, likely with the help of inside information/assistance, create the override mechanism that would become the Glitch. Meanwhile, the nations of the world are developing the original Odyssey. FZ manages to fatally sabotage the mission in 2057, leaving the ship a "heap of space junk (...) in graveyard orbit" and its developers all too glad to be rid of it. The consortium can then publicly step up and offer to take over, thereby gaining control over an interstellar colony project. When Odyssey has progressed far enough, the Glitch is triggered, unleashing the Faro swarm upon the world. A new urgency is added to Odyssey's success, and cooperation with the Zero Dawn project even nets FZ a prototype version of APOLLO. As things get worse down on Earth, Odyssey, with the conspirators safely aboard, leaves for Sirius (or parts unknown). As it exits the solar system, it transmits a false telemetry signal, faking its destruction.
In reality, the conspirators are simply biding their time in cryosleep until conditions on post-sterilization Earth normalize. Odyssey, full of the seeds and zygotes intended for a colony, can be used to re-seed Earth as Far Zenith sees fit. With the APOLLO education system at hand, they can even raise and indoctrinate fresh new generations of humanity, all according to whatever ideals they might have.
Unfortunately for them, however, Earth is not the blank slate they were expecting upon return. With the planet already terraformed and the Faro Swarm shut down, Far Zenith has no choice but to turn to hacking once again. They manage to track GAIA's signal to her source, and HADES is unshackled to undo the annoying complication she caused. That is, were it not for Elisabet Sobeck throwing yet another wrench into their plans...
Heinously evil beyond Cartoonish Supervillainy? Yes. And yet, too many pieces of the puzzle fit. Particularly so if one considers that a 'zenith' is the highest point an object reaches before it comes back down again.
- Osvald Dalgaard, representative of Far Zenith
: "We are devoted not only to extending humanity's legacy beyond this solar system, but also to making the world...sexier, I suppose. More interesting (...) Here's where I get to blow your mind. Very exciting. We are not interesting in escaping a dying world. For us this is not an act of panic or, ah...adrenal survival reflex. The Odyssey, under the stewardship of Far Zenith, will be a triumph, not a retreat. This is why we will succeed. Why we already have succeeded, really."
- Semi-Confirmed. While Far Zenith wasn't responsible for the Faro plague, they intentionally hindered attempts to save the world so that there wouldn't be any pesky foreign nations in their new world order on another planet. Then they spent the next thousand years torturing AI in VR settings for kicks. One of these AI, driven completely insane from the repeated torture and sensory deprivation, destroyed their planet and then tried to destroy Earth with the hacking signal just to be sure that no Zenith survivors would be able to rebuild there.
But what is in the Forbidden West? Well, we know from Brin's visions of the past that GAIA created Thunderjaws to protect the machines from humans, implying that the machines still hadn't finished their purpose. Since we know that GAIA created the machines to terraform the planet to be livable again, it is possible she didn't completely finish before committing suicide. So, therefore it is entirely possible that this "Forbidden West" is an as of yet unterraformed land or one that is not as far along in the process of being made habitable as the other lands. This would explain why the characters in the game fear it so much. (Also, it is an ideal place for a man like Sylens to hide while he interrogates HADES further)
- Going off of this, just where is the Forbidden West? Is it the Mid-west of America? Japan? Russia?
- It's Nevada. All signs so far point to it just being very inhospitable. Aloy is able to reach Carson City. Perhaps she succeeded simply by having a Strider, allowing her to cover more distance and bring more supplies than the Carja expeditions (which would have been reliant on human labor).
- The problem with this, or any similar expansion idea, is that it takes place after the main story quest is done. However, the game always sets you back right before the final quest. Also, any expansion would likely have to be playable regardless of whether or not the main questline is done (similar to how the expansions in the Witcher 3 are handled).
- Jossed: The Frozen Wilds is taking place up in the north, likely in Ban-Ur
- Semi-confirmed: not DLC but a Sequel indeed is about Forbidden West.
- Confirmed, the new expansion is called the Frozen Wilds and looks to be taking place in Ban-Ur.
Perhaps the crew mutinied, sent a false report that Odyssey was destroyed en route, and decided to live in space rather than cryo-sleep. Their children were educated by APOLLO-alpha, and without the fail-safes installed into the completed APOLLO, they never learned to temper the power of their knowledge and became bloodthirsty techno-conquerers. The rogue signal that awakened GAIA's subordinate functions was designed to weaken what they assumed would be a repopulated Earth, by targeting its most powerful reconstruction asset. They then plan to reseed and repopulate Earth themselves.
They worship the sun and are the most advanced tribe. The sub-module that was supposed to educate humanity is named for the god of the sun. It's not too hard to make the connection. Perhaps APOLLO's remaining fragments didn't have its database but was still able to guide people to knowledge; it can't speak directly to the Carja due to the same limitation GAIA had (and because it wasn't designed to speak, and wasn't even sentient until 19 years ago), but was able to nudge them towards what lost knowledge remained in the world.
Their interactions are very tense, especially from Elisabet, even considering that his company went from saving the world with green robots to destroying it with the Chariot line. It seems possible that the two were involved in some way (briefly or otherwise), and it ended badly. The fact that Ted decided to go into automated warfare was likely the tipping point for her, and their relationship has been hostile ever since. Still, residual feelings (mostly from Ted) could partially explain why she was the only one who could keep him reined in during the Zero Dawn project, and why his sanity slipped so badly once she was no longer around to do so.
Perhaps it was necessary for some reason - for instance, if the released humans woke up the Metal Devil, and GAIA had to crack the Faro codes *again* on a very short timescale. In that case, a desperate GAIA might seek to give her subroutines much more intelligence than they were designed to have, and thus lead to Hades rebelling some time later.
Perhaps GAIA simply felt lonely. After all GAIA was designed to have emotions and empathy, and after the humans were released GAIA basically had no more purpose.
Perhaps it is simply the nature of A.I.s in this universe to become smarter over time.
Why would GAIA lie? Because she felt guilty. Because her creator was also a huge liar. Because she wanted to cover up the truth?
