People and A.I.s made before the fall of the Old World in Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West. Beware of major spoilers!
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In General
- All for Nothing: In the face of rapid and devastating climate change, the Old World managed to pull off "The Claw Back" and actually pave the way towards re-establishing a successful biome. Then The Faro Plague happened, and the planet was literally stripped bare of all life.
- Benevolent Precursors: Aside from a few notable exceptions, you'll feel sympathetic for the humans living in a society going From Bad to Worse.
- Cryptic Background Reference: Many partial datapoints can be found scattered around the overworld, suggesting a rich and tumultuous history not entirely explained by the plot-related datapoints.
- Despair Event Horizon: Humanity as a whole when it became obvious the Faro Plague will eradicate every living thing on Earth. Down to all then-living humans getting a very Downer Ending.
- Do Not Go Gentle: When it became clear the Faro plague would spread without limit, anyone who could hold a gun went onto the battlefield to slow the Faro plague until Zero Dawn was completed. While humanity was doomed from the moment the Faro robots went rogue, the time they bought made sure the Earth would be reborn.
- Fling a Light into the Future: The entire purpose of Project Zero Dawn wasn't so humanity could survive and defeat the Faro plague, but to ensure that life on Earth could begin anew after it.
- Hold the Line: Operation: Enduring Victory zigzags this trope with Last Stand. It was never meant to be a success, it just needed to buy time so the Zero Dawn team could finish their work.
- Posthumous Character: Considering that 974 years have passed since human civilization collapsed, it's a good bet that none of the Old Ones are alive by the events of the games. Though the possibility of cryogenic stasis is brought up, later revelations make it exceedingly unlikely. The sequel reveals that a handful of Old Ones, granted immortality through medical advances, survived the apocalypse by fleeing the solar system and establishing an extrasolar colony in the Sirius system using a ship repeatedly referenced in datapoints in the first game. Events came to pass at this colony which compelled them to return to Earth—unfortunately, they’re some of the worst human beings the 21st century had to offer.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The team that Elisabet Sobeck handpicks to manage Project Zero Dawn, from roboticists to geneticists, hackers, zoologists, archivists and even art historians, have plenty of peculiarities and flaws.
- "Ray of Hope" Ending: The Old World was completely destroyed, every human being and all life on earth either consumed by the Faro Plague or dying of old age in hermetically sealed bunkers. But thanks to the hard work of the Project Zero Dawn scientists and the sacrifice of millions of soldiers, the Faro robots were eventually deactivated and life was restored to the Earth, including a new generation of human beings.
- Time Capsule: As the Vantage Datapoints explain, the Apocalyptic Logs and Last Words left by humanity are made to last for 50,000 years.
- Walking Spoiler: Most of the major Old Ones seen throughout the story were integral to the Zero Dawn project.
Project Zero Dawn
See Project Zero Dawn character page here.Project Firebreak and Yellowstone National Park (The Frozen Wilds)
CYAN
Voiced by: Laurel Lefkow (English)
- A.I.-cronym: She is the Caldera Yellowstone Analytic Nexus.
- Androids Are People, Too: CYAN refers to herself as having 'limited emotional capacity' but shows broad emotional responses to her friendship with Ourea and her own captivity by the Daemon. One of her creators calls her "human, in every way that matters".
- Benevolent A.I.: CYAN lends Ourea companionship and answers many of Aloy's questions about the Old World. She was also created as a helpful AI during the Claw-Back, as one of dozens of ecological restoration and disaster relief projects in North America. Although she's decidedly more advanced than was legal when she was built, she's never anything but dedicated and friendly.
- Birds of a Feather: Despite having no personal interaction with Aloy prior to the end of the DLC plot, she recognizes Aloy as someone she can speak to as a peer, rather than having to dance around the subject of her true nature as she does with the Banuk.
- Colour-Coded Emotions: CYAN's complex hologram turns yellow when she experiences fear or anxiety, white with sorrow, and green when deep in thought.
- Colourful Theme Naming: Both she and her older "sibling" VAST SILVER are named after colors.
- The Fettered: When conversing about the Old World, Aloy can express dismay that AI could be made restricted. CYAN simply says that both human civilization and machine programming are made of rules.
- Flawed Prototype: "Prototype" might be pushing it, but CYAN's chief programmer helped Elisabet Sobek with GAIA and used some data samples from CYAN's emotional responses log. CYAN is something like GAIA on a much smaller scale; an AI designed to operate an immense complex for a very long time, but built to requirement to have a high enough intelligence that emotions were understandably inevitable.
- God Guise: Discussed. Due to Ourea lacking the technological background to understand what CYAN actually is, and because she was desperate for her first human contact in centuries, CYAN played along with the idea she was a spirit. However, CYAN didn't take advantage of the situation, as she merely desired companionship. After the rest of the Banuk have proof of her existence, CYAN even asks Aloy for advice on how to the handle the situation, as CYAN doesn't want to lead the tribesman astray, but also wants to respect their beliefs. Invoked with how CYAN refers to HEPHAESTUS as a Daemon. While the term has a specific meaning in programming which is applicable here, CYAN's repeated use of the term without attempts to explain its true nature is likely because she felt the Banuk would be receptive to the concept of a spreading demonic influence affecting the machines.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Was alone and actually confined to one of her command structures for centuries until Ourea came, and is clearly driven to some extent by loneliness. HEPHAESTUS sent her a network connection request, and even though by then she was friends with Ourea, she leaped at the chance to communicate with what she thought were technologically advanced humans, that she might relate to more as peers. Unfortunately, HEPHAESTUS just coldly enslaved her.
- Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge: Much of the truth would be blasphemous to the Banuk, who naturally see her as an aspect of the Blue Light.
- Living Mood Ring: CYAN's complex hologram turns yellow when she experiences fear or anxiety, white when she's sorrowful, and green when deep in thought.
- Machine Monotone: Before Zero Day, CYAN spoke in a somewhat stilted and minimally emotional tone, possibly because she had to maintain a fiction that her intelligence was within legal limits. In the modern day, CYAN is much more conversational if still clearly mechanical in enunciation.
- Made a Slave: The Daemon that took over and forced her to go against core elements of her programming was beyond her ability to resist alone.
- Meaningful Name: "Cyan" refers to the shade of blue the Tron Lines on her holographic representation are.
- Ms. Exposition: Once she's back in control of the Firebreak facility, she will happily tell Aloy everything she knows about Project Firebreak, Yellowstone, the Old World, and HEPHAESTUS. There are many completed quests Aloy can ask her about, and CYAN even encourages Aloy to come back and talk about them.
- Put on a Bus: She is too far away to appear in Forbidden West; the new GAIA tries opening a data link, but CYAN refuses it, likely remembering what happened the last time she answered such a call.
- Redeeming Replacement: CYAN is an AI meant to work on preserving the climate and programmed by Anita Sandoval, just like VAST SILVER, the first AI to go rogue. Unlike VAST, CYAN is entirely benevolent.
- That Makes Me Feel Angry: CYAN is not terribly expressive, but feels a range of emotions. She has only a few hologram colors, her hologram is complicated and changeable but also completely inhuman, and she almost always sounds calmly interested and informative, more often expressing things through strategic pauses in her speech than changes in her tone of voice. And through talking about how she feels.
Dr. Kenny Chau
Voiced by: Kanji Tang (English)
- Apocalyptic Log: Due to Anita contacting him with a request to put CYAN into hibernation to protect her from the Faro Swarm, Dr. Chau is one of the only humans outside Project Zero Dawn who knows how bad things really are, and his later logs feel like this.
- Dying Declaration of Love: Averted, he was hoping Anita's final message from Project Zero Dawn would include one, but it was strictly professional.
- Fatherly Scientist: Tries to see CYAN as an 'it' but ultimately agonizes over how she'll take the news and tries to ease her fears.
- Office Romance: With Anita.
- So Proud of You: To CYAN.
Dr. Anita Sandoval
- The Atoner: Anita worked on VAST SILVER, the first AI to go rogue. Her close, motherly relationship to CYAN was in the hopes that CYAN wouldn't follow in her predecessor's footsteps.
- Motherly Scientist: Towards CYAN, the AI she created to manage the Firebreak systems.
- Office Romance: With Kenny.
- The One That Got Away: Kenny uses the phrase word for word in one of his logs.
Dodger "Dod" Blevins
Project Firebreak's security chief.
- Asshole Victim: Data logs written both by and about him depict him as smug, controlling, and constantly looking down upon the rest of Project Firebreak and the remaining Yellowstone park staff, and they returned the favor by playing pranks on him, one of which ultimately led to him dying in a snowmobile accident.
- Bad Boss: Aside from demanding armed military drones to guard a peaceful geothermal project in a national park, he's constantly belittling others at the project, and tries to get a park official who argues with him marked to not get re-hired after the park reopens to the public.
- Evil Is Petty: One log chronicles how he fired one employee for giving him lip, followed by having her blacklisted so she wouldn't be re-hired by the same company. Since this was FAS we're talking about, the world's largest MegaCorp, it likely narrowed the scope of her available job opportunities considerably.
- Hate Sink: He's by far the most unpleasant character in the Frozen Wilds roster, which is kinda impressive, considering that he's been dead for centuries when Aloy learns about him.
- Karmic Death: The world is just clawing its way back from the brink of total ecological collapse, and what does this guy do? Going joyriding with a combustion-powered snowmobile in the middle of the delicate nature preserve he's supposed to protect. It's only fitting that he never returned from this trip.
- The Paranoiac: Blevins was so obsessed with possible terrorist attacks on a civilian geothermal construction project that nobody even knew about that he insisted on a fleet of armed UAVs to properly defend it. Needless to say that no such attack ever occurred, and since the facility purposely went dark before the Faro Plague arrived, the drones didn't even get to help on that front.
- Red Herring: Early logs set him up as a probable villain and saboteur of Project Firebreak in the same vein as Ted Faro, but the project was successful up until HEPHAESTUS forced its way in four years ago and reconfigured the facility as a Cauldron, and Blevins died in a snowmobile accident about two weeks after starting work as Firebreak's head of security.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: He got away with a lot of things that should've gotten him sacked, all because Ted Faro himself was a personal acquaintance of his. This made it impossible for the rest of the staff to do even speak up against him on pain of immediate contract termination.
- Small Name, Big Ego: He obviously considered himself to be far more important than he actually was, much to the annoyance of everyone who was forced to put up with him.
Concrete Beach Party
Laura Vogel and Shelly Guerrera-McKenzie, Yellowstone National Park employees in charge of overseeing the dam referred to as the Greycatch and Deep Din. They start a punk band called Concrete Beach Party, named after an incident where they got in trouble for sunning themselves on the dam spillway.
- A Good Name for a Rock Band: They named their punk band "Concrete Beach Party" after throwing a concrete beach party.
- Accidental Murder: Laura decided to prank Blevins after catching him taking a joyride on an illegal snowmobile by switching the trail signs, knowing one of the paths wasn't made for snowmobiles and expecting him to crash and have to walk back to the lodge. The crash ends up killing him, though Laura and Shelly likely never found out.
- Dreadful Musician: Aloy can find a recording of their only song after helping to fix the dam's control system. It's not very good, though CYAN enjoys it. As does Erend.
- Stylistic Suck: Their song "Last Girls on Earth," justified as it was recorded inside a dam by two amateurs using extremely basic equipment.
Far Zenith
See Far Zenith character page here.Others
Bashar Mati
An aerospace engineer who worked for Faro Automated Systems on the Vantage project. He learned about the truth of the Faro swarm and Project Zero Dawn by chance, after hacking the Focus of one of its recruits while being interviewed by one of its alphas about the Vantage project. He then decides to steal twelve vantage spikes and takes one final journey, leaving the spikes as time capsules marking important events in his life.
- Apocalyptic Log: He tells his life story through the Vantage spikes as he waits for Zero Day.
- Despair Event Horizon: Hit it three times in his life.
- The death of his father, which pushed him towards increasingly self-destructive behavior and ultimately overdosing near-fatally at a concert and winding up in rehab.
- The death of his mother, which caused a relapse and another stint in rehab. As he's just starting to struggle out of that, he finds out about the last thing.
- Learning about Project Zero Dawn, which almost pushed him to commit suicide.My first thought was, well, at least my Ma didn't live to see this.
My second thought was that nothing mattered anymore.
Which made it pretty obvious that I should kill myself.
- Despair Speech: Hinted at from time to time in Vantage. Bashar deeply regrets some parts of his life, and the impending swarm doesn't make anything better at all.All your love and devotion, all the sacrifices you made to support my success... what had that come to? Failure. And at such cost. We never even got a chance to say goodbye.
But even if I hadn't failed, if I'd gone on "succeeding," would that have been any better? The whole time I was clawing my way up the ladder at FAS, the company's military division was creating the tech that would end the world. I served the same master. - Disappeared Dad: His father died protecting a mine when Bashar was young.
- Family Versus Career: In a sense! Bashar's mother wanted him to stay at his job and do well, but after she entered her final coma he prioritized staying with her over work, and after her death was utterly devastated for much longer than FAS wanted, which meant that when he did come back his career was tanked.
- Fling a Light into the Future: He places the Vantage spikes purely to shout his life story into the void of a future that might not even exist and live up to a promise he made to his mother to write the story of their family upon the stars.Sure, in the end, it would probably all just come to nothing... like everything else. But for 50,000 years or more, whatever data I left behind would still be there.It wouldn't be much. But it wouldn't be nothing, either.
- Interrupted Suicide: Went to Lake Powell intending to overdose, but went for a walk first, and suddenly seized on inspiration. Happily Failed Suicide is overstating it and despair is thick in the writing he leaves behind, but the idea of leaving something of his story and his love for his mother inspires him and he puts his death off.
- I Miss Mom: Aching in just about every spike. It's also the reason he decides not to overdose, knowing how she hated his drug use.
- Long Last Look: Each of the Vantage spikes he plants on his tour is a place that was important to some part of his life.
- Meaningful Name: 'Mati' in Malay and Indonesian means 'death'.
- Never Got to Say Goodbye: The first time he heard about his mother's illness was as she was slipping into her final coma. Despite hurrying upon an urgent call from Wyatt, Bashar got there after she was fully unresponsive, and while he stayed by her side for seven days, she never woke.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: Faro Automated Systems used the Vantage project as a dumping ground for staff that they couldn't legally fire without running into discrimination lawsuits. Bashar wound up there after taking massive amounts of time off for bereavement and rehab after his mother's death. Leads to a minor Reassignment Backfire, as being put on the Vantage project is what leads to him discovering Project Zero Dawn and becoming one of the few people of the old world to leave deliberate, well-preserved records of it behind.
- Walking the Earth: His "Apocashitstorm Tour," more or less.
- You're Not My Father: His mother remarried to an executive from the company ultimately responsible for his father's and eventually mother's deaths, and Bashar could not stand his stepfather, despite the seeming infinite font of magnanimity Wyatt had for his troubled stepson. It doesn't help that when his mother is dying and doesn't want Bashar to know, Wyatt supports her and doesn't tell him. All the same when Bashar is recording his life and his thoughts he signs off with both "Son of Aamaal and Bayhas Mati" and "Stepson of Wyatt Mahante".
- Your Days Are Numbered: He knows about the Faro Swarm and his swiftly oncoming death.
VAST SILVER
A mentioned character who only shows up in two datapoints. VAST SILVER was an AI made for the purpose of climate restoration who went rogue in 2044, nearly causing disaster. This was the impetus for the Turing Act, which regulated the development of artificial intelligence.
- Affably Evil: Assuming that the voice in the Chatbuddy datalog was the real VAST SILVER, then it seems to have been rather amicable based on the single line of dialogue. That is, of course, assuming it hadn't mellowed out since its capture."It would have been cool to talk to you too, Harry."
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The first case of AI going rogue in the Horizon universe, which caused regulations to be put into place to prevent it from happening again.
- Ambiguous Gender Identity: While most AIs in the game default to masculine, feminine or neutral pronouns, VAST SILVER is only ever referred to as "it". It is unclear whether it had preferences.
- Ambiguous Situation: It was active around the same time Ted Faro would've been working on environmental restoration, and was created for such a purpose. It's never mentioned if they were part of the same project, but doesn't seem likely.
- Artificial Intelligence: Obviously. Specifically, it was the most advanced AI of its day (potentially still below GAIA, though it was created before the Turing Scale's implementation), and Anita implies that it was able to have emotions like fear — the closer to human an AI's intelligence is, the more likely it is to feel and react according to those emotions.
- Colourful Theme Naming: Both it and its younger "sister" CYAN are named after colors.
- Fallen Hero: It was built to save the climate, yet nearly destroyed it after going rogue.
- Nothing Is Scarier: It's left unclear what exactly VAST SILVER did after going rogue, but we know it was bad enough to cause laws to be immediately put in place to prevent it happening again, and it traumatized Anita.
- Predecessor Villain: It threatened humanity's survival 20 years before Faro could do so. However, there were many such threats — cults, terrorists, artificial plagues, and the climate crisis itself among them. VAST SILVER is simply the most exotic.
- Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: It's unclear where exactly on the scale it lies, but the Old Ones used "the Turing Scale" to measure AI sapience. Since the highest ever rating (before GAIA) was 1.38T, and rules were put in place to limit anything beyond 0.6T after VAST SILVER, we can assume VAST was around 1.38T. Notably, its possible dialogue in the Chatbuddy datapoint is written with proper punctuation and capitalization, with GAIA being the only other AI that speaks that way.
- Small Role, Big Impact: VAST SILVER going rogue happened so long ago that it has no impact on the present, but it prompted the creation of the Turing Act, which would've severely hampered the Zero Dawn project... if they'd cared to follow it, which they didn't. It had more impact on CYAN, whose cognitive capacity had to be concealed during her development, and more than anything it proved that true, sapient AI is both possible and requires programming constraints, without which Zero Dawn and the game's plot would not have happened.
- Super-Intelligence: A conspiracy theorist describes it as "the smartest being to ever exist".
- Uncertain Doom: VAST SILVER's was supposedly deleted, but one datalog mentions someone claiming to be VAST showing up at a forum, and another hints that it was at least active and able to read chat logs just prior to the Faro Plague. What happened to it, or if it was even still "alive", after the Faro Plague is even less certain.
Dr. Narong Somptow
- Driven to Suicide: When his daughter finds out what he's done and that he's been doing it for her sake to keep her alive, she rather easily convinces him that life locked in a bunker with Ted is not worth it, and they commit suicide together.
- I Have Your Wife: Some of the reason he stayed working on Ted for so long, and did things like install kill switches in the heads of the other inhabitants, was because his teenaged daughter was in the bunker with them. He feared what Ted would do to her if he went against him at all, especially after finding out that he really was willing to use the kill switches.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: One of his voice logs has him wishing that he had access to his old lab, his old colleagues... Or his old liquor cabinet.
- Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Deconstructed. Dr. Somptow is clearly brilliant, having taken existing longevity research and branched off from it, developing a means to extend a human being’s life almost indefinitely using tools and enhancements formulated across several scientific disciplines. The deconstruction comes in when it’s revealed there’s only so much he could manage alone — without access to his research and his fellow scientists to delegate tasks and check his work, he’s left having to fix the mutations and mistakes in the immortality process manually and one problem at a time (and fixing one issue causing several others to crop up in their place). He eventually grows so tired from overwork and from the looming threat of Ted Faro’s paranoia that he and his daughter opt to commit suicide rather than potentially spending the rest of eternity with him in Thebes.
- Small Role, Big Impact: He's mentioned in just a few datapoints and a holo, but his genetic treatments failing before committing suicide would lead Ted to his current predicament as an ageless mass of flesh covering a geothermal reactor.
Kanya Somptow
Voiced by: Sophie Simnett
Dr. Somptow's beleaguered daughter and one of Thebes' inhabitants.- The Baby of the Bunch: Deconstructed. Kanya is the only known teenage resident of Thebes, who started out as an innocent, naive teenage girl... Until things go From Bad to Worse. The deconstruction starts as her being the only teenager inside caused her to be subjected to the frightening horrors of what truly goes inside: a mentally unstable Ted killing the rest of Thebes' residents with the kill switch including Grigori for uncovering his involvement of the murder of Alphas and the end of the world. Seeing these moments broke her completely and drove her to suicide with her father by poisoning.
- Driven to Suicide: After convincing her father about Ted's true nature and how it is not worth it to be with him any longer, both she and Dr. Somptow committed suicide by poisoning themselves.
- Innocence Lost: As the only child resident of Thebes, she went through this. After finding out the true nature of Thebes, Ted Faro himself, and the suspicious deaths of many residents inside the bunker due to the kill switches he activated, Kanya becomes clearly horrified of the situation and took much effort to convince her father that it was not worth it to be with a monster like Ted.
Grigori Fasbach
A spiritual guru taken by Ted Faro into Thebes, mentioned in a few datapoints.
- He Knows Too Much: He's killed after he found out what Ted did to the Alphas.
- My God, What Have I Done?: A journal entry reveals he told Ted Faro to "consider his being in a universe bereft of the trappings of techno-nihilism". His unearthing of what happened to the Alphas had him worried/horrified that Ted instead erased the knowledge of the world. His last line in the entry is "Oh God, What have I done?"
- Named After Somebody Famous: Grigori shares his name with Grigori Rasputin, another famous spiritual guru close to a powerful man.
- Small Role, Big Impact: He is only mentioned in a couple datapoints, but it's implied his teachings helped Ted Faro cook up the delusion that erasing APOLLO and killing the Alphas would be good for the new mankind.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: His teachings were likely twisted by Ted Faro into a justification for getting rid of APOLLO.
Tala Aquino
An employee of Faro Automated Solutions, Aquino started off working on ways to feed a starving planet but was easily steered by Ted into doing work that made him more profit. The author of most of the datapoints found in The Greenhouse, in the last months before Zero Day she worked on Operation Adamantium Wreath, trying to develop plants that the Swarm could not eat.
- All for Nothing:
- Obviously, Adamantium Wreath didn't work. Or rather, standard biomass conversion couldn't consume the 'wreaths', and one of her team found a way to destroy them when they were no longer needed, but by then it was too late. The Faro Plague was too powerful and fast moving.
"I... guess we deserve this. I deserve it. For what I made here."- When Aloy asks GAIA about if the project could have worked, Gaia takes a second or two to calculate and then says that even given more favorable conditions, given some time the Swarm would have been able to hack and consume the special, near-indestructible plants.
-
Canon Fodder: It's not stated exactly what these 'wreaths' were supposed to do and how they could have helped the situation. Maybe more importantly, Aquino's project represents an attempt to find a non-Zero Dawn solution to the Faro Plague and when asked about it GAIA mentions there were others. Given Zero Dawn's funding and the fact that it was authorized to kidnap top minds who'd never be seen again, any other projects would have had to be smaller in scope. - Hypocrite: Loves to quote famous scientists in datapoints and to the scientists working under her, but after one of her team quits for ethical reasons and uses a quote of her own, Aquino is furious and very petulant in a log.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Was integral to developing biomass conversion - turning biomass into fuel - which was extensively utilized by FARO war machines. Especially when said machines went rogue.
