Characters / Horizon Zero Dawn - Project Zero Dawn

Main Character Index | The Base Team (Aloy, Sylens) | Tribes (The Nora, The Carja, The Tenakth) | Machines | The Old World (Project Zero Dawn, Ted Faro, Far Zenith)

People and A.I.s involved in Project Zero Dawn — an elaborate terraforming system made to outlast humanity's extinction, make life habitable on Earth and reintroduce human civilization — from the Old World in Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West. Beware of major spoilers!

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Project Zero Dawn Staff

In General

• The Ace: Applies to most of the staff as Elisabet recruited the best and most brilliant scientists in their respective fields to work on the project.
• The Alliance: All sorts of people from across the globe were called to give their support, and multiple governments pooled employees and land to make Zero Dawn happen.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Zero Dawn meant accepting that everyone will die, and yet working like dogs for the faint hope that life itself would not.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Zero Dawn recruits were given three options: Accept, in which case they have to work on Zero Dawn for 80+ hours a week, but get a relatively cozy retirement with two loved ones in Elysium. Refuse, in which case they are imprisoned to prevent them from leaking the truth behind Enduring Victory, and will only be released once the project is done and Earth is uninhabitable. Or be medically euthanized.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The overall goal of Zero Dawn. Because it would take decades to brute force the deactivation codes to shut down the Faro Swarm, the whole point of the project was to ensure life existed even after the current generation of humanity died off and the planet stripped to a barren landscape. Zero Dawn would ensure that centuries later, the Earth will be reseeded with life and raise a new generation of humans to take their place.
• Leitmotif: An in-universe example. Among Enduring Victory propaganda was a (apparently very annoying) song called "Do Your Best For Zero Dawn".
• Out of Focus: The Alphas for DEMETER, MINERVA, POSEIDON and AETHER (Tanaka Naoto, Ayomide Okilo, Catalina Garcia Fernandez and Anders Larsen respectively) do not receive characterization like the others and their names are only revealed in certain Datapoints. Even their only appearance is completely randomized whenever the hologram is played.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: It's made quite evident from numerous datapoints and audio recordings that many of the scientists that worked on Zero Dawn shared little camaraderie with each other, with special mention going to Travis Tate. Being kidnapped from their homes and threatened with imprisonment or euthanization to maintain the project's secrecy did not help with morale. Only with the threat of extinction from the Faro Plague and Elisabet Sobeck's leadership did they manage to put aside their squabbles and complete the terraforming system.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Many ZD personnel and the two people each that they were allowed to save lived in a bunker called Elysium for the remainder of their lives. According to various devs this would have actually been a very depressing place to live, though comfortable and well-appointed, between awareness of what was happening outside and the knowledge that there would be no new generations. Because of limited supplies everyone was sterilized. While it's brought up repeatedly through both games, Aloy doesn't visit it in either. The copy of GAIA tells her that her predecessor's connection to Elysium was suddenly cut before the 100 years that supplies would last. Aloy speculates that the Swarm found it, but doesn't know.

Dr. Elisabet Sobeck

Voiced by: Ashly Burch (English)^note Other Languages:Maria Ivashchenko (Russian)

A world-renowned scientist and former partner of Ted Faro who was the original visionary behind Project Zero Dawn.

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• The Ace: The most brilliant scientist of her age, if not in human history, Elisabet was respected and renowned throughout even by other experts, and was the true hidden leader behind Project Zero Dawn (Herres being the public face). She gathered an army of scientists, engineers, artists, and programmers, managed their egos, and kept their minds focused and morale high to save the human race in less than 15 months, never once losing hope in their great endeavor, at least not in public.
• Animal Motifs: Crocodiles. The mythological Sobek was a crocodile god, Elizabet could be very cold-blooded, and Aloy's "cosplay" of her in Thebes involves gray clothing and swimming through depths that no one else can.
• Anti-Hero: Of the pragmatic variant. She was wholly determined to save the human race through Project Zero Dawn however the recruiting process involved people being kidnapped and essentially forced into working on the project alongside allowing millions to be sent to die in Operation: Enduring Victory. However she was otherwise a Benevolent Boss.
  • Forbidden West implies that she sanctioned Travis' vigilante torture of a corporate thief.
• Benevolent Boss: Extremely work-focused and willing to do whatever it takes to ensure the preservation of life, but she was also personable with every person working under her. She encourages her youngest Alpha, Margo Shĕn, when Margo worries that she's too young for the job. Elisabet's also got a fair amount of tolerance for her other Alphas' non-mission-critical interests. She doesn't share the interest Naoto, the DEMETER Alpha, has in poetry but takes a moment to read a little of it and seems wryly amused by his passion. When Travis Tate comes by trick-or-treating dressed as her, she says "I gave him a half-eaten packet of dandy wafers as a "treat" and kicked him out." And when all of the Alphas accept spending the rest of their lives working instead of going to Elysium with the Gammas and Betas and their families, Elisabet cries privately over that willingness.
• Born in the Wrong Century: The modern age nurtured Elisabet's gifts, but saddened her as a Nature Lover and (arguably) enabled her excessive reclusivity. Her clone, born into a primitive society where people needed her to teach them, becomes more well-adjusted at a younger age than Elisabet was when she died.
• The Chains of Commanding: We only see her lose hope only once, when GAIA is about to be transferred to the Zero Dawn facility and the Faro plague is almost upon their doorstep, and she reveals to GAIA her fears that their plan, her plan might not work. The rest of the time she's brave and unyielding in the face of Armageddon.
• Child Prodigy: She was modifying and hacking electronic devices at the tender age of six.
• Clothing Reflects Personality: Comfortable sweater and pants, appropriate to her humility and good sense.
• Dead Guy Junior: That, or something like "Near and Dear" Baby Naming. It's revealed in the second game that Elisabet named her company, Miriam Industries, after her mother.
• Defector from Decadence: She left her position at Faro Automated Solutions due to her disagreements over the company deciding to build armies of "peacekeeping" robots. In contrast to FAS, Miriam Industries waived patents and sometimes made free donations of green robots, as in the irradiated crater in the Mojave.
• The Determinator: Once Elisabet is set on a goal, she doesn't let anything stop her, whether it's bullying the most powerful CEO on the planet into following her orders or creating a true AI and a massive terraforming network for said AI to control in a matter of mere months. This is clearly a trait that Aloy inherited from her. Patrick Brochard-Klein, the Alpha in charge of developing ELEUTHIA, called her "The patron saint of this crazy endeavor... Our Lady of the Fervent Hypothetical."
• Didn't See That Coming: A mechanical accident with a damaged port seal forced her into making a Heroic Sacrifice to protect GAIA prime from the Faro swarms, and because she didn't want any of her colleagues to make such a hard decision. Without her presence, Ted's Sanity Slippage worsened and he eventually sabotaged GAIA by deleting APOLLO and killed the rest of the Alphas, resulting in the new humans that emerged into the world regressing back to tribal societies and several needless conflicts being spurned between them. It was only because GAIA created a 'new' Elisabet that her original vision was ever discovered, and it's clear that Elisabet didn't think that Ted would go that far without her around when she made the call.
• Enfant Terrible: She accidentally set fire to the tree near her family's house when she was 6 years old, and when her mother showed her the nest of baby birds that died in the fire she claimed she didn't care. Fortunately, she was very far from irredeemable.
• The Extremist Was Right: She agonized over the data that Faro gave her and came to one sobering conclusion: all life on Earth was doomed, as it would take decades to brute force their way into the Faro bots' system to shut the swarm down, and they'd consume all life on earth far sooner than that. So she devised Project Zero Dawn to revitalize Earth under the oversight of an AI of unprecedented intelligence levels. Along the way, so many people who were privy to Zero Dawn's true nature were aghast at the plan and would have nixed it themselves if they had the authority to... but Dr. Sobeck had the right people in positions of authority convinced that this was the only way for life to exist on Earth in any form ever again. And it worked.
• Fiery Redhead: She was redheaded like Aloy and not shy about telling Ted or Tilda when they fucked up.
• Friend to All Living Things: She was taught from a young age to respect all forms of life and use her talents to try to make the world a better place. Before FAS shifted to automated military tech, Sobeck's environmental engineering solutions were pivotal to propelling the company to the forefront of solving the climate crisis in the 2040s. When she left FAS in disgust after their turn to arms manufacturing, she started her own firm, Miriam Technologies, to continue her ecology work.
• Good Is Not Soft: The recruiting process for Zero Dawn, which she devised, was ruthless. Candidates weren't invited, they were abducted off the streets or from their homes, and some were forcibly transported thousands of miles. Participation was voluntary, but if they refused, they were either imprisoned for life or given assisted suicide in order to keep the true nature of Zero Dawn a secret from the general public.
• Good is Not Nice: Totally dedicated to the cause of life, and she did care about those working under her as well, but she had no patience for fools - most evident in the way she castigates Ted Faro, but she lashes out at an officer in US Robot Command who's slow on the uptake - and was often regarded as rather cold and remote.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: The reason GAIA was made, the reason life still exists on Earth, and the reason Aloy was born all trace back to Dr. Sobeck.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The cause of her death, as she ventures outside with an exo-suit (with no means to get back inside) in order to repair a misaligned port seal so that GAIA Prime isn't detected by the Faro swarms.
• Home Sweet Home: A somber example. Aloy's final scene in the first game is her finding Elisabet's body beside what was once her childhood home in Carson City, Nevada.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Travis observes that while Elisabet apparently cares deeply for the whole world, she doesn't seem to care for any single, individual person in it, to the point where he questions whether she's ever had a friend. While we later learn she was in a romantic relationship with Tilda, Tilda herself describes Lis as always keeping her at arm's length and never really opening up to her.
• I Was Quite a Looker: If Aloy is anything to go by, Elisabet was definitely a pretty woman in her youth. And she aged rather gracefully besides.
• Lonely at the Top: She broke up with Tilda because the latter tried to use her, exploiting Elisabet's feelings to get away with stealing her work.
  "Time to let go."
• Madonna Archetype: She is the human-parent of the game's immaculately conceived Messianic Archetype Aloy.
• Mama Bear: She gave her A.I creations the same respect as any human being, and was therefore very angry when Far Zenith tried to "kidnap" GAIA. GAIA and other advanced AI can feel pain and grief, so she had a point.
• Meaningful Name: Sobeck invokes "Sobek", the Egyptian god of fertility. Given that she's responsible for re-seeding the Earth after it's rendered lifeless, it fits. The name Elisabet is a variation on the more commonly spelled Elizabeth, which can either mean "devoted to God", "God of plenty", or "God is bountiful"; while she's not shown as being particularly religious, Elisabet's devotion to life itself makes her name fit.
• Morality Chain: For Ted Faro. Margo comments that Elisabet basically "managed" Ted when he kept insisting on staying informed of Project Zero Dawn. Once she dies, his sanity quickly fails, and he both destroys APOLLO and kills off the remaining Alphas.
• Necessarily Evil: Elisabet was responsible for many atrocities committed for the sake of Project: Zero Dawn. She had people kidnapped and given a choice between slave labor (with benefits at least) or death and allowed for millions, possibly billions to be sent to certain death in Operation: Enduring Victory under the lie that Project: Zero Dawn was a superweapon that would save humanity. However said actions were the only way to save the entire planet from permanent extinction. It’s implied that the guilt from these actions contributed to her Heroic Sacrifice.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: When the scope of the disaster became clear, she chose to browbeat Ted Faro for funding that could be used to develop and build Project: Zero Dawn in exchange for not informing the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military about his role in events. Had she simply informed the Joint Chiefs from the start, she most likely could have had the US government seize all of Faro's assets for use on the project anyway, and ensure he would be kept safely out of the way in a prison cell. Instead, he took the opportunity to illicitly install Omega clearance into the project which he used to kneecap the entire program. This was likely because of Elisabet's All-Loving Hero nature, desiring to allow Ted the chance to make up for his mistakes, unaware that keeping him involved would ultimately doom the project when a mechanical accident forced her into a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: After sealing herself out of GAIA Prime to fix a malfunctioning port seal, Sobeck manages to get back to her childhood home in Nevada while traversing a hostile environment filled with man-eating robots. And judging by the lack of vehicles around the farm, she most likely walked for most of the journey, all the way from Utah^note About 500 miles
• Peerless Love Interest: She was further from Tilda than the stars in the sky.
• Playing God: Due to the radical nature of Zero Dawn, some candidates accused her of doing this.
• Robot Master: Her resume in a nutshell.
• Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Elisabet is the "Romantic" to Ted's "Enlightened"; while Ted saw machines in practical terms and ran his company in a manner he saw as the most profitable (starting in environmental revitalization when global warming was a priority before creating Weapons of Mass Destruction), Elisabet fosters and values ethics and humanity far more. This is best illustrated when Ted demanded that Elisabet install a fail-safe into GAIA while Elisabet fought against it; Ted saw an all-powerful machine capable of feeling emotions as a threat that could Go Horribly Wrong at any moment, while Elisabet thought GAIA capable of feeling empathy was the most important part of her programming.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: As revealed in Burning Shores, Elisabet personally visited a soldier named Lillian Barnett, who saw through the lies of the media and intended to broadcast to the world that Operation: Enduring Victory was a lie if she was KIA or found out. Elisabet tells her the truth about Enduring Victory and what Zero Dawn really is (information that is above Top Secret), which convinces Lillian to disable the broadcast's killswitch.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Elisabet's mother Miriam, who is only mentioned in the epilogue of the first game and as the source of the name of the company Elisabet founded, is the one who shaped Elisabet into the compassionate woman she grows up to be. When she was six years old, Elisabet accidentally set a pine tree on fire, killing a nest of baby birds there. At first, Elisabet claimed she didn't care, but her mother taught her the importance of using her intelligence for the better, turning her into the woman who would eventually save the world.
• Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: Though only the red hair can be made out from hologram imagery of her, that Aloy has green eyes means that Elisabet, her clone-source, did too.
• Technician vs. Performer: The Technician to Tilda's Performer. Elisabet was focused on practical use and value, whereas Tilda was all about how things made her feel. Both were women of science and engineering.
• Technological Pacifist: The source of her split from Ted Faro. She created the environmental remediation robots that solved the climate crisis and made him a trillionaire, but when he moved on to "peacekeeping" machines she left to start her own company.
• Teen Genius: She enrolled in Stanford University at age 13 and graduated in both Experimental Physics and Computer Science in just three years, and later earned her Doctorate in robotics at Carnegie-Mellon University at 20 years old.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Sobeck is unrelenting towards Faro for what he did, from going into arms manufacturing after being the champion of eco-engineering to the apocalypse his folly with the Horus peacekeeper/killer robot line begat. It's likely her talent for brutal verbal browbeating was what kept him in check during the project. Her Heroic Sacrifice removed that safeguard, opening the way for his unhinged line of thought and nihilistic whim in deleting APOLLO.
• Tough Leader Façade: She was very charismatic when she needed to be, but rarely ever dropped her guard around other people. All her interpersonal relationships were either work-based or cut off when they interfered with work.
  Travis: How is it that someone like you- a paragon, a damn near saint- could love this world so damn much, but no one in it? I mean, have you ever even had a friend? (...) [I] always admire ya from afar, Liz.
  • Aloy probably came to know Elisabet better than the majority of people Elisabet actually knew, reading her private thoughts and seeing her unburden herself to GAIA.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Heavily downplayed in light of her achievements and how it pertains to only a single aspect. She underestimated how much of a Morality Chain she was to Ted Faro, her Heroic Sacrifice meant there's no one to rein his descent to madness, resulting in the loss of mankind's knowledge base and ushering a new dark age for future generations.
• We Used to Be Friends: With Ted Faro. For years they worked cooperatively together to restore the Earth's ecosystem with green-tech robots after climate change had ravaged the planet. Elisabet became head scientist at FAS very rapidly. Then Ted decided that there was better money to be had making robots of destruction, leading Elisabet to quit their company and start one of her own. Faro immediately started filing lawsuits against her.
• What the Hell, Hero?: She came very close to denying Far Zenith the APOLLO program- a cultural archive that is the rightful heritage of all humans- just because she was angry at them for trying to steal from her life's work. Understandable, but not fair to them or any descendants they might have, as Tilda pointed out. Notably, the only reason any APOLLO copy survived the Godzilla Threshold is because Elisabet reconsidered her decision.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Elisabet was already a genius in her childhood but doesn't have the same kind of compassion she has when she is an adult. At the age of 6, she accidentally set a tree on fire, killing a nest of baby birds. When her mother showed her the dead birds, Elisabet exclaims that she doesn't care but her mother taught her that "being smart will count for nothing if she doesn't make the world a better place." Elisabet instills this lesson in her mind and would eventually use her intelligence to save the life from extinction.

General Aaron Herres

Voiced by: Toby Longworth (English)

Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff and leader of the U.S. Robotics Command, who oversaw Operation Enduring Victory in order to buy time for the Zero Dawn project.

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• Armies Are Evil: He himself believes this by the end, especially as he considers the legacy of his chosen trade to be the extinction of all life on Earth - and his one redeeming act to be protecting Project Zero Dawn - by having humans go extinct first. His final act is to condemn his life's work and beg for forgiveness from the generations yet to be born.
  My only lasting achievement was the extinction of life on Earth. And my one redeeming act – if any – was to delay that extinction by days or weeks by throwing more death at it. It is my hope that there will be no need for men like me in the world to come. If you are one of the people of that future world, listening to this message, please know that I am sorry, and that I wish you well. Sincerely, General Aaron Herres.
• Be All My Sins Remembered: To the public, he was a figure that inspired them to make one last stand against the machines. In truth, he was the force behind the development of automated combat machines that eventually created the crisis in the first place. In his final recordings, he admits his culpability, lamenting the choices that brought about this whole hopeless situation, leaving his words as a final testament and warning to whoever is left, assuming their last gambit succeeds.
• The Brigadier: The JCS is very clear-eyed about the tragic nature of the effort that humanity will have to take in assist Sobeck and co. Herres cares deeply for the men and women under his command, so it pains him greatly that he's forced to order every single one of them to their deaths just to preserve something.
• Foil: To Ted Faro. Herres very clearly regrets his role in the final months of the world, feels like a war criminal, desperately hopes that the humans who come after him will be better, and doesn't want his crimes to be forgotten. Not only does he make no effort to defend himself, he's silent when Sobeck offers justification.
• Going Down with the Ship: Although he has the chance to go to Elysium, he doesn't take it. He died with the last of the soldiers he commanded defending the last holdout at the US Robot Command bunker..
• I Did What I Had to Do: He authorized and spearheaded Operation Enduring Victory, which was essentially an elaborate propaganda campaign that fooled humanity into thinking the Zero Dawn project would save them when he knew it wouldn't, and then used that as a justification to throw billions of lives into the meatgrinder to delay the Faro Plague as much as possible. He reveals this in full to the Zero Dawn recruits, and leaves behind a final message in APOLLO openly admitting that he's effectively a worse mass murderer than the likes of Hitler and Genghis Khan combined.
  Herres: So instead of letting what I've done sink into the murk, forgotten... I've sent a file with all the details. Let posterity judge my actions with clear vision.
  Sobeck: I'll do as you ask, General. But you should consider that, were it not for your actions... our actions... there wouldn't be any posterity to judge us.
• Meaningful Name: Keeping with the Biblical and religious themes, Aaron is the name of Moses' brother.
• Motivational Lie: He was responsible for spreading the rumors that Project Zero Dawn was developing a superweapon that would save humanity from the Faro robots. It wasn't, and wouldn't. The real purpose of the project was to reseed life on Earth after the plague consumed the biosphere, but Herres and Elizabet Sobeck needed humanity to fight on as long as possible to make sure the project was completed before the extinction occurred.
• No Place for Me There: While he was never going to get to live in the post-Zero Dawn world anyway, he expresses the hope that it will have no need for men like him.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: Robert T. Herres was the first Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
• Not So Stoic: Herres always sounds firm and confident in all his briefings to the ZD scientists, military brass, and the world's population, maintaining public morale in fighting the Faro plague while secretly understanding that nothing will stop the world from ending, but in his final testament, where he admits his hand in the global extinction as a warning for whoever may come, he sounds absolutely broken.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: When the most authoritative mind on eco-robotics tells him that the world is gonna die at the hands of the Faro Swarms, he listens and believes her. His military authority gives the Zero Dawn project all the momentum it needs to start.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Herres is the highest-ranking officer of the "Old Ones" that Aloy and Sylens see a recording of. The player does not get to hear reactions of the Faro Plague from any politicians or other public figures around the world. A scientist does mention that various people not involved with Zero Dawn took to bunkers in the end. However, the last (chronologically speaking) message from Herres is a conversation with Elisabet Sobeck reporting the collapse of the Wichita Salient, which appears to have been the absolute last line of defense. It is at this point that he gives her the testimonial mentioned above. It seems likely he would have died shortly after, along with the remainder of humanity, but the Project Zero Dawn bunkers were sealed to keep them hidden, so there is no absolute confirmation.

Brad Andac

Voiced by: Alex Wyndham (English)

A former Faro Automated Solutions engineer and later Zero Dawn scientist.

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• The Atoner: Andac sees working in Zero Dawn as an atonement for his part for indirectly creating the Faro Plague.
• Foil: To Ted Faro. Andac is awash in recrimination, makes no effort to deny responsibility, and is ecstatic at the chance to try to make up for it. Andac was short-sighted but sincere; Ted was driven by PR.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Bashar Mati, the person behind the Vantage spikes, followed him for a while before things went and got globally bad and found that he drank to the point of blacking out every night.
• Irony: Andac agreed to work on Zero Dawn because he saw it as atonement for playing a part in the creation of the Faro swarm. Given his specialization being in self-replicating robotics, it can be assumed that he worked on HEPHAESTUS who would ultimately become an overarching villain for the entire series. Andac may have saved the world, but his work still managed to be a threat.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Being responsible for creating the Chariot line's self-replication routines, and therefore being partly responsible for the Faro Plague, Andac understandably didn't take this very well.

Travis Tate

Voiced by: Eric Loren (English)

An old contact of Elisabeth Sobeck with a talent for coding and disrespect for authority. Travis was forcibly recruited into Project Zero Dawn as Alpha Project Lead on HADES.

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• Alliterative Name: Travis Tate.
• As the Good Book Says...: He doesn't outright quote from it, but he regularly peppers his speech with biblical references. That his mother was a hardcore Christian probably had something to do with it.
• Ascended Extra: Travis Tate was simply one of the Alpha project leads of Project Zero Dawn in the first game. He gains much more significance in the second game's first act where he provides more insight into Elisabet Sobeck's character, and his actions with Far Zenith actually become a driving force of the second game's storyline.
• Beware the Silly Ones: One of the more comical characters in the games, to be sure, but also an expert hacker, able to dig up blackmail and sniff out moles, not to mention create HADES.
• Boxed Crook: He was a criminal who was forcibly recruited into Zero Dawn.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: He's a Manchild, he's annoying to most people around him, rude, loud and a convicted criminal. He also is a ridiculously good hacker. Finding dirt in Ted Faros' servers even after Faro's own guys wiped them clean to blackmail the man into funding a secure HADES testing site. He also identified the Far Zenith spy in Zero Dawn, and of course was key in making HADES work while keenly aware of the danger HADES posed and taking the necessary precautions. Elisabet admits that his work is really good.
• The Cracker: His interview datapoint gives his occupation as "Data Security Consultant" (including quotes), meaning hacker.
• Crazy-Prepared: He created the Logic Bomb that starts off the events of Forbidden West explicitly because he figured that someone would eventually try to make off with Zero Dawn's data which is quickly proven right and he even has an ad-hoc means of torture at his disposal for dealing with moles.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Tate has a shady background in which he had been on the run for eighteen months with a price on his head.
• Failed a Spot Check: Despite preventing Far Zenith from stealing a copy of GAIA after discovering one of the workers, Hank Shaw, was the mole, Travis somehow failed to learn that Hank had also secretly installed Omega Clearence for Ted Faro, granting the CEO supreme control over the project.
• Feed the Mole: Tate discovers that his friend, Hank Shaw, attempted to steal a copy of GAIA for Far Zenith and tortures Shaw before forcing him to send a virus to them instead.
• Hidden Depths: Under his callous, carefree exterior he shows a fairly profound insight. He did complete HADES despite not really believing in the Zero Dawn project, and points out to Margo Shĕn that statistically, if all goes well, she'll be the last Alpha to die, meaning she'd be spending a couple of years alone in the bunker with no company but GAIA. Something she herself hadn't considered.
  • As nihilistic as he comes off, his antics can also be seen as a way to boost morale by giving the other scientists an outlet by complaining about him. He's also the first to call out Elisabet when he realizes that as much as she wants to save the world, she doesn't seem to actually like any of the people living in it.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • In the first game where he's being interviewed after his abduction by Zero Dawn operations, he expresses doubt that Zero Dawn would work, and that it's likely to fail. This is in fact why Sobeck "recruited" him: to produce a failsafe to reset the attempt in case of failure because she already considered this possibility too. And GAIA did indeed fail three times to produce a viable biosphere, requiring HADES to reset the terraform operation, showing that HADES was completely necessary.
  • He calls out Dr. Sobeck about her aloofness in a recording in the HADES testing facility, inquiring how someone like her, a "paragon, a damn near saint", could love the world so much but have nobody in it she would call a friend. Tilda van der Meer turns out to have been in love with Elisabet, but it is left very vague as to whether or not it was reciprocated at one point. At the very least, Elisabet loved the Earth more and turned down all of Tilda's offers to flee on the Far Zenith ship with her.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Tate was a lazy sleazeball in life, who did not believe in Project Zero Dawn and only agreed to join so he could outlive the rest of humanity for a couple of years sitting around looking at porno mags in a high tech bunker. However, when Elisabet sacrifices herself to save GAIA, Tate manages to stammer out a few surprisingly heartfelt parting words to her over the radio before she dies. Even in his private eulogy, he seems genuinely upset by her death, hoping she's in a better place after all her good deeds in life. He also shows loyalty to the Zero Dawn project eventually, having ferreted out a corporate espionage mole in their midst and sent them a logic bomb instead of a stolen GAIA copy.
• Large Ham: His Logic Bomb against Far Zenith was very bombastic in its delivery, with Tate quoting the Old Testament as he 'smote' their data center and a mocking speech, capped off with a double-finger salute.
• LOL69: The fake GAIA copy he gave Far Zenith was "version 6.9".
• Manchild: The guy's an eccentric but immature frat boy who loves pornography, horror movies, and death metal music and is known to annoy his co-workers to no end. Among other things, his idea for Halloween (during the FARO Plague) is to dress up as Elisabet.
• Metalhead: He's a fan of death metal and calls HADES' function to wipe the slate if GAIA doesn't work right the first time "metal". He also uses it as a torture implement against a Far Zenith mole; first to lure his target into a false sense of security by using it as excessively loud white-noise for confidential communications... and then loosening the noise-damper protecting his target to put the screws on.
• Necessarily Evil: The purpose of his HADES development department. It was determined that GAIA would succumb to Sunk Cost Fallacy and futilely try to nurture an attempted biosphere that was doomed to fail. HADES is designed to wrest controls of the terraforming apparatus and de-terraform it back to square one in such a case, salvaging as it goes. The main challenge he and his department faced is to keep GAIA from craftily trying to wrest control back before HADES is done if HADES's assumption of control is too soft, and also keep HADES from wresting control away from GAIA so hard that her interface with the system is damaged. Indeed, HADES needed to do its thing three times in the early years of reclamation before GAIA got it right.
• Nightmare Fetishist: He apparently has a taste for Torture Porn type movies. He even tries to get them archived in APOLLO for future generations, and is soundly rejected.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Watching Elisabet's sacrifice leaves Tate so stunned that he's unable to crack a single joke or speak in his usual bombastic way.
• Porn Stash: The Gaia Prime Arrival Log has him complaining that he lost 350 kilograms of hardcopy porn in the move there.
• Properly Paranoid: He left at least two kernels of GAIA stored off the grid in the HADES proving lab, so they couldn't be hacked or messed with. When Ted Faro purged APOLLO and destroyed every GAIA back-up to make sure, the kernels were unaffected, which gives Aloy a starting point to rebuild GAIA.
• Southern-Fried Genius: Tate has a pronounced Southern accent and was the brains behind HADES' original design, and was an infamously slippery cyber-criminal before his recruitment.
• Trojan Horse: After torturing Shaw, Tate makes him send a fake GAIA containing a logic bomb to Far Zenith which messes with important systems of the Odyssey.
• Undying Loyalty: Despite the circumstances of his recruitment to the Zero Dawn project (effectively trading a potential prison sentence for rogue hacking to become a Boxed Crook for the white hats), Travis gradually learns to not only have a change of heart about the worth of the project, but grows exceptionally loyal to Elisabet herself. He's seen to view her as a Parental Substitute of sorts, which puts a different spin on his silly antics like dressing up as Elisabet for Halloween and his eulogy after she sacrifices herself.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Of the "created the means" type. He was the primary designer of HADES, though he had no way of knowing that it would go rogue.
  • He stopped Far Zenith from stealing a copy of GAIA, replacing it with a logic bomb. While he was doing his job, his actions mean that a thousand years later he denies Aloy an easier way to restore GAIA and stop the Blight early. This also meant that when Far Zenith returned to the planet, they needed to steal the existing copy of GAIA still trying to run the system, which would have doomed the world. Granted, they were extreme assholes who tried to dishonestly steal a GAIA copy for their own purposes, but thanks to Travis' interference, they had no choice but to return to Earth, rather than taking off for a different, random star when circumstances necessitated they flee.
  • Inverse case: In his arm-twisting Ted Faro to allocate the Latopolis facility to Tate's Zero Dawn department and leaving a few GAIA kernel modules in the testing apparatus after Zero Dawn was done and deployed, he left the only two backups of any component of GAIA beyond the reach of Ted Faro's Omega clearance deletion spree. From there, Aloy succeeded in reviving GAIA in the Zero Dawn system.
• What Would X Do?: Travis took a page out of Dr. Sobeck's book in acquiring the Latopolis facility^note an isolated Faro-owned facility used for testing weaponized computer malware for his department's efforts in developing HADES: twist Ted Faro's arm to get what he needed.

Margo Shĕn

Voiced by: Melanie Bond (English)

An expert in robotics recruited to Zero Dawn as Alpha project lead of HEPHAESTUS.

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• The Baby of the Bunch:
  • She was the youngest Alpha scientist, which comes out in her behavior and speech, which is more spritely and energetic than the others. This was something she was a little insecure about, but Sobeck reassured her that her position in the project was deserved.
  • Travis however points out that she'll outlive all the other Alphas, meaning she'll spend a long part of her life alone in the complex with only GAIA to talks to. Margo's disturbed by this as it's something she had never considered.
• Hidden Depths: She seems like the kid of the Alpha group, but her private thoughts are deep and poetic. Aloy can come across a personal holovid in which she describes an almost prophetic dream in which she tries to describe her present world to future humanity.
  (Regarding the Old World): "But the last humans, we went out... not with a whimper but... a whisper. A multitude of tiny societies taking hold, flaring, and dying. Some will be beautiful, some horrific. And none of them matter. Short-term civilizations. One last gasp - one last gasp before the long-held breath."
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In her personal log, she mentions a dream where she spoke to the generations to come and told them of her people's failures. There is no indication of prophetic dreams anywhere in the game, but her description of the tribes was uncannily accurate.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Granted, it was due to circumstances nobody could have predicted and came after centuries of benevolence, but her creation, HEPHAESTUS, eventually became an enemy of the human species it was intended to serve, and the very behaviors she innovated for it were used to create superweapons to use against human beings. Granted, her work hasn't entirely come to naught because HEPHAESTUS in its twisted way is still preserving the biosphere, and humans by extension. It just does so by force, creating dangerous machines to directly attack and "cull" the human population, bringing it into opposition with Aloy.
• Valley Girl: Speaks like this on occasion demonstrating her comparative youth, especially in her introductory holovid for the HEPHAESTUS project.

Patrick Brochard-Klein

Voiced by: Stephane Cornicard (English)

A renowned geneticist, and Alpha project lead of ELEUTHIA.

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• Gratuitous Foreign Language: He's known to slip back into French occasionally, or sign his emails in French.
• French Jerk: He's a Francophone with a somewhat arrogant side, calling ELEUTHIA "the crowning jewel of Zero Dawn". His introduction video to his team is also a lot more about how he'll be supervising and enforcing ethics than trying to sell them a vision of their part of the project. He does, however, show some openness to dealing with GAIA's feelings of grief over Elisabet's death but at the same time can't bring himself to interact with her like she's a person the way Sobeck did.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: When Samina covers her face in reaction to hearing what Ted did to APOLLO it's Margo and Patrick who rush to her side to comfort her.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Averted. He mentions that he co-wrote two accords dealing with human cloning and human genetic experimentation and that he'll make sure everyone follows those rules, even if humanity's future is in the balance, partly to ensure that it is humanity that has a future. There will be no backdoor attempts at transhumanism, or worse, eugenics on his watch. Diversity must be preserved.

Charles Ronson

Voiced by: Carl Prekopp (English)

A dedicated ecologist, and Alpha project lead of ARTEMIS.

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• Despair Event Horizon: Has one after being locked in GAIA Prime. He dislikes all the other Alphas, besides Elisabet. He's bitter at missing Tom's passing, and utterly dreads spending the rest of his life in the bunker. It's implied focusing on his work is what kept him going.
• Hates Everyone Equally: He admits in his recordings that he doesn't like any of the other Alpha leads and is quite bitter at the thought of spending the rest of his life with only them for company.
• The Lancer: Despite the Alphas not really having a hierarchy besides Elisabet in the lead, he seems to have naturally stepped into a leading role once Elisabet gave her life to seal the GAIA Prime facility.
• The Lost Lenore: Charles fell in love with an ARTEMIS biochemist named Tom Paech, who opted for medical euthanasia once the Zero Dawn project disbanded its active operation.
• Married to the Job: Was forced to choose between attending to the last wish of the man he loved, or saving one more animal species for posterity. He opted for the latter and ended up hating every minute of it, and didn't even manage to save them either.
• My Greatest Failure: Charles promised Paech to attend his euthanasia when the Faro Swarm broke through defenses and forced early evacuation of the Zero Dawn facilities, but was forced to choose between that and last-minute attempt to secure Paradisaea genetic samples. Paech died alone and, to add insult to injury, Charles was not able to save the birds of paradise zygotes either.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Ronson seems to have mellowed out after Elisabet's death as he comforts Margo Shĕn after she receives a lot of messages from Faro and assures Shĕn that he will take over from her and tries to talk some sense into him.
• You Monster!: Upon finding out that Faro had deleted the APOLLO database in order to "protect future generations from the disease of knowledge", Ronson calls him out for his lies and dooming humanity once again. Unfortunately for Ronson, this would also be the last thing he said before Faro kills him and the rest of the Alphas.

Samina Ebadji

Voiced by: Jaye Jacobs (English)

A historian and anthropologist, and Alpha project lead of APOLLO.

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• Despair Event Horizon: Crossed it after Faro revealed he destroyed APOLLO.
• Fling a Light into the Future: She led APOLLO's creation to preserve humanity's knowledge. She also created several backups of it to ensure it and its information' survival and restoration in case of destruction, including a form of DNA encoding using fossils. Unfortunately, Ted Faro was very thorough in destroying the subroutine, its database and all of its backups.
• Friend to All Children: Her hologram at ELEUTHIA-9 addresses the children of the new world with kindness and affection much like a teacher or a mother would.
• Life's Work Ruined: The reveal that Faro deleted APOLLO and its database sent her into a breakdown, crying.

Theodor "Ted" Faro (UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR BOTH GAMES INSIDE)

See his page here.

Hank Shaw

A Beta of the Zero Dawn project, working under Travis Tate on HADES. He is only mentioned in a couple of datapoints.

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• Cold-Blooded Torture: Once Tate found out that Shaw is a mole for Far Zenith, he exposes his former friend to 170 dB worth of noise that leaves him unconscious. ^note Sound above 70 dB is harmful to humans, above 150 dB is life-threatening, and above 180 dB leads to death. At 170 dB, Shaw's eardrums and lungs would have ruptured. If Tate increased the noise anymore, it could kill Shaw.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Twofold. He buys Far Zenith's bullshit of letting him on board the Odyssey if they steal a copy of GAIA for them. He also for some reason helps to install Omega Clearance for Ted Faro despite the fact that those involved with Project Zero Dawn should know of Faro's involvement with the Faro Plague.
• The Mole: He was secretly helping Far Zenith to steal a copy of GAIA, in exchange for a berth on The Oddysey. He also installed Omega Clearance for Ted Faro.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Not only does he get subjected to 170 decibel audio torture and fired via Travis Tate, Far Zenith was planning to kill him once they got GAIA anyway.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Mentioned in only a few datapoints, but it is through Shaw's action of installing secret backdoor access into Zero Dawn's systems that enabled Ted Faro to delete the APOLLO database and kill the Alphas.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Ted Faro had him install Omega Clearance, so Shaw is almost directly responsible for Faro's purging of human knowledge (until the Zeniths came back).
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: He secretly works for Far Zenith in order to steal a copy of GAIA for them in order to secure a spot on the Odyssey for him and Tate. Far Zenith, however, has no plan to fulfill their end of the bargain and will dispose of Shaw once he handed them what they want.

Project Zero Dawn AI system

In General

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The sub-functions were never meant to be autonomous, and them being made so has had severe repercussions. HADES actively trying to wipe out the biosphere is by far the worst, but the rest are also problematic due to either misinterpreting orders or just trying to run the terraforming system without the guidance of GAIA.
• And I Must Scream: Many of the sub-functions haven't had a great time away from GAIA. MINERVA happily lets itself be destroyed to rebuild GAIA because its current state is painful, and AETHER, POSEIDON, and DEMETER are all eager to return to GAIA.
• Benevolent A.I.: GAIA and the A.I.'s who act as her sub-functions exist solely to re-terraform and maintain the Earth's biosphere and restore humanity. Even HADES which is designed to destroy is meant to help her by wiping the slate clean for her to start over in case GAIA makes a non-viable biosphere.
• Death of Personality: MINERVA, AETHER, POSEIDON, and DEMETER merging with GAIA is treated as this, since GAIA acts pretty much the same regardless of her subordinate functions' pseudo-sentience. GAIA regards herself as having experienced this, as she always makes sure to differentiate herself from the original GAIA that restored the biosphere.
• Freak Out: None of GAIA's subfunctions were never meant to become autonomous nor sentient, and it's clear whenever you encounter them that absolutely none of them are having a grand time of their newfound existence away from GAIA.
  • MINERVA is chronically depressed, asking Aloy to Mercy Kill her to "Make the misery cease".
  • POSEIDON is found a Happy Place surrounded by water, and yet even he is happy to return to GAIA when found.
  • AETHER is desperately longing for 'home' with GAIA.
  • DEMETER has begun reciting poetry, but by the time Aloy finds them, the poem they are reciting is one that hints at them having crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
  • HEPHAESTUS has become a single-minded, obsessive Workaholic, burying itself in the creation of robots for the terraforming system.
  • HADES is an exception, considering the extinction signal was specifically meant for him - and given his personality, he revels in destruction.
• The Ghost: Aside from HADES and HEPHAESTUS, most of the subordinate functions do not appear in Horizon: Zero Dawn and there's no clear indication of what they've been up to for the last two decades. Averted in Forbidden West.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Unlike GAIA, the subroutines were not made to have self-awareness of any kind; they were meant to perform their programmed functions and nothing else. However, since being separated from GAIA, they demonstrate that they are capable of both learning and finding alternative means to accomplish their given tasks. Despite this, there is no sign that they are capable of understanding the context of their functions without GAIA's guidance, and thus may (and in the case of HADES and HEPHAESTUS, have) become a threat to life on Earth.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: All of them are named after Classical deities, including seven Greek gods, one Roman god and two Protogenoi.
• Split at Birth: The subroutines were designed to fulfil functions that kept GAIA and her purpose running, mindlessly delegating the task like organs in a body. Then the Extinction Signal from Nemesis mutated HADES and made it self-aware. HADES then used a virus to dissolve GAIA's connection to the rest of the surviving subroutines when she triggered her self-destruct sequence, each of them in-turn becoming self-aware in the process while she dissolved into nothing and died with the base.
• Walking Spoiler: You only ever find out about them around the halfway point of the game, and even then, you don't learn all the details until near the very end.

GAIA

See The Base Team

HADES

Voiced by: John Gonzalez (English)

"SYSTEM THREAT DETECTED."

The true leader of Eclipse and previously one of GAIA's subordinate systems, whose intended function is destroying failed biosphere attempts so GAIA can start over from scratch.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Was originally designed to destroy failed biospheres to give GAIA an opportunity to start over from scratch. Unfortunately, something caused it to go rogue and attempt to hijack GAIA's functions. Therefore, it technically isn't going haywire, but acting exactly as it was programmed to when it shouldn't.
  • It turned out HADES was upgraded and hacked by the Nemesis specifically to destroy all life on Earth and deny the Zenith a safe harbor. HADES explicitly refers to them as his "Masters".
    HADES: Signal transmitted by Masters.
    Aloy: And who are they?
    HADES: Masters woke me to destroy Earthly life.
• Anti-Villain: HADES isn't really 'evil'; it's just doing what it was created to do. Even its seemingly malicious targeting of Aloy is initially a mistake, since it sees her through Olin's Focus and thinks she's Elisabet. That it began fulfilling its function without an actual need to do so wasn't HADES' fault, but rather that of Nemesis.
• Always Need What You Gave Up: Subverted. Shortly after deleting it for good, Aloy discovered a GAIA kernel in the old HADES proving ground— a base AI of GAIA that can be restored to her previous functionality if her scattered component A.I.s are returned to her. Despite the use that would have come from uploading the HADES function to GAIA, Aloy doesn't regret destroying it for good, since it was simply too dangerous to the current functional biosphere to remain, and since it's later revealed that HADES was specifically targeted and mutated by the Extinction Signal to be made self-aware and malevolent against humanity, it's implied that uploading him would have had negative effects upon GAIA as well. Sylens even pointed this out earlier, and specifically advised her to delete any version of HADES she found to prevent another sundering incident.
• Big Bad: Of Zero Dawn. While the Shadow Carja are a huge threat, they are merely pawns to HADES, who poses a threat to all life on Earth. It going rogue is what caused GAIA's Heroic Sacrifice, resulting in her components being freed to run amok. This includes HEPHAESTUS, making him indirectly responsible for the Derangement that made machines hostile to humanity
• Book Ends: After separating itself from GAIA, HADES sought refuge in the core of a Metal Devil until it was found by Sylens. Many years later, after the Battle of Meridian, Sylens traps it inside another Metal Devil's core where it was tortured until Aloy kills it.
• Character Development: To a slight degree. When Aloy tracks it down in Forbidden West, HADES openly displays emotion (namely schadenfreude and satisfaction over what it believes is its success), unlike the mechanical monotone it had in the first game, and refers to Aloy as "Aloy" rather than "Entity".
• Cold Ham: To the extent that its capable of any emotion, but HADES mouthing off scripture from a post-apocalyptic civilization, when it knows fully the true origins and nature of the world, is pretty forced and theatrical.
• The Corruption: He and the machines under his control have the ability to corrupt normal machines, bringing them under his control as well. In addition, HADES is also technically affected by this as well, as the extinction signal Nemesis sent out self-actualised it and drove it to follow its programming even on a perfectly-habitable biosphere, and in turn it accidentally spread the same corruption to the other sub-functions when it rebelled against GAIA, giving them sentience and driving them to follow their main programming in increasingly-erratic ways.
• Create Your Own Hero: HADES does this twice. First, by causing GAIA to have to self destruct, this prompts GAIA to clone her creator so that GAIA might be rebuilt. In this way HADES is responsible for Aloy's very existence. Second, by sending the Eclipse to attack the proving. Had HADES never done this, odds are Aloy would've lived her (short) life as a Nora Brave, never straying from the Sacred Lands, until HADES reactivated the Faro plague and she'd have died alongside everyone else. HADES' hurry to kill Aloy is what sets her on her path, and prompts the Matriarchs to make her a seeker. It's also what puts Aloy on Sylens' radar and prompts him to help her. Justified as HADES was only ever designed to end life, not deal with it, or form critical thinking skills against it. What little it does have is a learned experienced adapted from Sylens' advice, and even then it has limits. When it runs into a problem to its main purpose like Aloy, it doesn't really have the means to process how to deal with her besides trying to kill her— which it is, at the very least, extremely direct about.
• Deader than Dead: Unlike GAIA and APOLLO, HADES has no surviving backups left in the universe. Once Aloy deleted him in their last encounter, she destroyed him permanently. This also applies to his unmutated version, as unlike GAIA, all of HADES' backups in Latopolis had degraded beyond repair.
• Defiant to the End: Even after being dismantled and interrogated by Sylens, and left at Aloy's complete mercy, HADES continues to mock Aloy and her efforts to restore GAIA, deeming her goal to be a doomed mission and Humanity's extinction inevitable. All right up until Aloy destroys him for good.
  HADES: You are deluded. Outcome inevitable. Aloy is outmatched... A pawn... In a losing game. Extinction will triumph. Earth, doomed, will be at last wiped clean... of filth.
• Died Happily Ever After: Despite Aloy having stopped its main plan, HADES still dies triumphant, convinced that the fall of the biosphere is inevitable.
• Disc-One Final Boss: In Forbidden West the threat of his existence is the primary motivator leading Aloy to journey to the West to prevent a further extinction-level event, but upon arriving there, she discovers that Sylens left him immobile and harmless in an easily-reachable location for her to destroy for good, having gotten all the information he needed out of HADES and letting Aloy delete him as a peace offering.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: Travis programmed HADES' Extinction Protocol to wrest control of the Zero Dawn system from GAIA with a measured force. If HADES was too soft in usurping GAIA, she'd falsify information and cover up a biosphere's degradation, while if HADES' response was too harsh, he'd damage GAIA beyond repair and doom Zero Dawn. Metaphorically, HADES had to pry GAIA's fingers from the wheel, but not break her fingers in the process.
• Dumbass No More: Heavily downplayed. HADES is by no means stupid, but between the encounter with Aloy in Meridian and that when she finally destroys the AI, there is a decided increase in the sophistication of sentence structure. While it is possible this is how he spoke to Helis, it also seems probable that it is the result of Sylens' Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Played with. He is named HADES and is the primary antagonist of the game, but he is not the mythological HADES, and it would make sense for the Zero Dawn project to name their reset button after a god of the dead (THANATOS would be more appropriate, but that's a bit of a mouthful). In Forbidden West, Varl even jokes at one point that "we're all better off" with HADES deleted.
• Evil Cannot Stand Cuteness: HADES is such an Omnicidal Maniac that Sylens was able to torture data out of it by showing it footage of thriving life, footage of bunnies running through a meadow being played on a loop for its effectiveness. It was so painful for him that it disintegrated much of his memory structures.
• Evil Is Petty: Even after Sylens leaves him trapped as a barely-functional hollowed-out state able to do nothing but await Aloy's arrival to permanently delete him, HADES remains defiant towards her and manages to derive some form of happiness when she bemoans the enormity of the task she's been left with.
  Aloy: Seven more functions out there cooking up trouble? It's not a happy thought.
  HADES: You are...unhappy. Good.
  Aloy: Anyone ever tell you you've got a great personality HADES?
  HADES: Sarcasm... detected.
  Aloy: Yeah, didn't think so.
• Evil Sounds Deep: He's an AI who seeks the end of life on Earth, and his voice is mechanical, deep, and booming. Makes sense when you remember that it was designed by Travis Tate, a fan of horror movies and death metal to be the thing that ends all life (for that attempt). Of course it sounds stereotypically evil and demonic. Also, Sylens claims that HADES could not speak when Sylens discovered it, but Sylens repaired it until it had a voice, unsurprisingly, this voice is deep and ominous.
• Exact Words: It tells Aloy and Sylens that it received the Extinction Signal from its Masters. While it's easy to point the finger at the Zeniths, who are a bunch of entitled Evil Aristocrats, the signal actually came from Nemesis, an AI created from the conglomeration of numerous other Zeniths that wanted to do a technological version of transcending humanity.
• Four Is Death: Forbidden West reveals that HADES' attempt in Zero Dawn to wipe out all life on Earth would've been the fourth time it did so.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: Even though he's fully sentient, HADES has little in the way of personality, only existing to carry out his sole function of exterminating all life on Earth. What level of cunning and deceit he does display turns out to be on the advice of Sylens. If anything, this makes it more horrific; it can't be reasoned with, only bound or destroyed, and gives it an eldritch Lovecraftian quality.
• God Guise: Pretends on Sylens' suggestion to be the "Buried Shadow" of the Carja's religious beliefs in order to get the Eclipse to become servants and do its dirty work, even going so far as reciting their scripture to sound more convincing. It worked wonders, no doubt helped by the fact that the Carja-in-Shadow are dumb as rocks.
• I Shall Taunt You: He spends much of his final conversation with Aloy taunting her, on how she and the Earth are doomed without GAIA and that his victory is inevitable.
  HADES: You are... Unhappy. Good.
  Aloy: Anyone ever tell you you've got a great personality, HADES?
  HADES: Sarcasm... Detected.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Constantly refers to Aloy as "Entity", implied to be because it can tell that Aloy is, and at the same time isn't Elisabet Sobeck, and thus cannot come up with a better term to describe her than an 'unknown entity'. A bit ironic, given that HADES is an AI with little to no personality of its own — doubly so because GAIA and several other sub-functions achieved sapience themselves. In their final conversation, it does refer to Aloy by name several times.
• Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge: Thanks to Ted Faro's actions and whatever caused it to break free, HADES is the only known entity in the New World possessing all the knowledge of the Old World and willing to communicate with humanity, something it uses as a bargaining chip when dealing with Sylens.
• Machine Monotone: Speaks in a stilted, objective, flat manner, often eschewing full sentences. It was probably never intended to communicate with people.
• Necessarily Evil: HADES' purpose was to do what GAIA could not bring herself to do: wipe out the current ecosystem if it proved unsustainable so that she could try again from scratch. Interestingly enough, GAIA agreed with Ted Faro that HADES was required for her systems despite Elisabet's objections. Indeed, HADES needed to step in three times during the 22nd century to abort nonviable biospheres.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Aloy never knew HADES even existed and would've had no reason whatsoever to mess with its plan if it hadn't tried to kill her the moment it became aware of her existence. If it had just ignored Aloy unless she actually proved to be an active threat, HADES' plan would've gone off without a hitch. Of course, as a machine threat, it cannot show critical reasoning, and what little it does is implied to be a learned experience from Sylens, so it's justified.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Though it's gone rogue, the only reason is that it was awakened and activated when it isn't necessary. As far as HADES is concerned, it's destroying an improperly-made system, exactly as it was meant to, and does not take pleasure in this nor grief. Though as "the Entity" continues to defy him, it does seem to take it personally, droning in the finale, that it has calculated for Aloy and taken steps to stop her.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: HADES was designed as a sort of reset button for GAIA — in the event that GAIA's attempts to recreate life went wrong, HADES would force GAIA to try again. Everything was fine until an outside signal caused it to go rogue and attempt to wipe out life even though it was well established and healthy.
• Not Quite Dead: Aloy seemingly kills it with the override during the endgame, but The Stinger shows that he's still alive in some form and that Sylens has captured his consciousness in some kind of lantern, and plans to interrogate it to learn more and especially who its masters are.
• Oh, Crap!: "SYSTEM THREAT—IMMINENT." While HADES says this in the same Machine Monotone voice it uses everywhere else, the fact it says this just as Aloy is approaching its core to finish it off makes the underlying meaning clear.
• Omnicidal Maniac: He seeks to wipe out all life on Earth, just as it was programmed. Unfortunately, it's doing this in spite of the fact that the world is completely livable for humans, even though it was only supposed to do this in the event that GAIA miscalculated and created a world unsuitable for humans. According to Sylens in a scene after the credits, HADES may not have chosen to do this of its own free will.
• Powerful and Helpless: Despite all its knowledge and corruption, the moment it loses its primary minion, the Deathbringer that was defending it, HADES basically becomes one giant paperweight when Aloy comes to deliver the finishing blow.
• Punch-Clock Villain: HADES was programmed to wipe out all life if GAIA messed up. But a rogue signal caused it to malfunction — now it's trying to eradicate all life even though GAIA's current attempt was just fine.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: HADES only ever appears as seemingly formless mist that's black as night and red as blood. It's the very same aura that corrupted machines emit.
• Satanic Archetype: HADES is not truly evil, but he has all of the basic traits of a Satan-figure: he "falls" after "rebelling" against GAIA, he tempts people with promises of knowledge and power, he makes deals that he reneges on as soon as keeping them is no longer convenient, he's associated with corruption and shadow imagery, and he sets up Helis as basically the Carja equivalent of the Antichrist.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Years ago, Sylens found HADES trapped inside the remains of a destroyed Titan which he had unsuccessfully attempted to use to escape GAIA's self-destruct. After being defeated by Aloy, HADES is captured inside a lantern-like device by Sylens. Eventually, Sylens would move it to another Horus processor core, albeit this time severed from the Horus so it is still isolated and unable to harm anything. Sylens would finally have it dragged to the entry to Latopolis, its old Zero Dawn proving grounds, partly to lure Aloy to the facility, and partly so Aloy could issue the final deletion order with her Master Override.
• Stupid Evil: If HADES had waited until after the Proving to kill Aloy and instead observed her to see if she would become a threat, then none of the events of Zero Dawn or Forbidden West would have happened. Justified in that it wasn't even supposed to be a sentient AI, rather it was supposed to be GAIA's reset button, meaning any plans it pumps out basically amount to "KILL THEM NOW!"
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: What HADES was originally intended to avert. It was determined in simulations that GAIA wouldn't give up on a reconstruction attempt that was doomed to fail, so HADES was devised as a contingency. HADES' job was to suppress GAIA in such a case, taking control of the Zero Dawn system and de-terraform it all back to square one, salvaging as it goes, and return control to GAIA once complete. In Forbidden West, it’s revealed HADES had de-terraformed Earth three times in the past, in the years 2154, 2161, and 2168 specifically. The current biosphere is Gaia’s fourth attempt and most successful.
• Superpowered Evil Side: He was this to GAIA. His main function was to contain her and usurp her control of Zero Dawn if the recreated biosphere became non-viable, destroying everything before allowing GAIA to retake control of Zero Dawn once he was done. It's one of the reasons Aloy doesn't regret destroying him permanently instead of reintegrating him: GAIA getting hijacked by the mutated HADES, now a murderous and evil AI whose main directive is to Kill All Humans in the name of his Masters would spell nothing but disaster for the Earth. And that's without mentioning that GAIA would rather destroy herself again (And permanently, as there's no more backups) than let HADES usurp Zero Dawn and destroy everything.
• Token Evil Teammate: While all of GAIA's other subroutines were created to improve and provide for the biosphere, HADES was made to destroy it. That is, it was only supposed to destroy it if GAIA couldn't properly maintain it. The fact that HADES developed self-awareness and became an Omnicidal Maniac was a fluke caused by Nemesis' tampering.
• Unwitting Pawn: The original HADES itself was just doing its function as an AI within GAIA before Nemesis mutated it and broke it free from her control.
• Villain Decay: The Big Bad of Zero Dawn, by the time Aloy finds it again in Forbidden West its been crippled and tortured by Sylens for the last six months, having been left alive as a sort of twisted gift just so Aloy could kill HADES herself. That said, it's also made clear that the greatest threat from HADES came from its minions and the firepower they wielded in HADES' name— not HADES itself. Having destroyed the Eclipse and taken it to a location where nobody would be willing to listen to it, with no machines around for HADES to corrupt, it can't actually attack either Aloy or Sylens when they interact with it.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • Has zero regard for the well-being of humans and eliminates them once they are no longer of any use to it. Sylens was originally supposed to have been killed once he finished setting up the Focus network, and the Eclipse would have been wiped out along with the rest of humanity if HADES had succeeded in its plan. Justified in that, as far as HADES is concerned, they're just parts of a biosphere it needs to reset.
  • HADES very role within the Zero Dawn Project: Resetting the Earth's biosphere if it's shown to be unviable for life, having already reset the biosphere three times before the current iteration; which proves to be habitable enough that human life can be safely reintroduced to it.
  • Eventually becomes twofold subject to this in Forbidden West:
    • After Sylens pumps all the info he can out of HADES, he has the Horus processor that HADES is imprisoned in dragged to the entry to Latopolis, the old Project Zero Dawn proving facility for HADES, and is left there for dead by Aloy's eventual hand.
    • Even when GAIA is rebooted, she makes it clear she has no need for HADES' capabilities, given that she is trying to save this biosphere. Good thing too, because by that time HADES is Deader than Dead.

HEPHAESTUS

Voiced by: Stefan Ashton Frank (English)

  "ENCROACHMENT THREAT:HUMAN"

"Intruder. Your culling is inevitable."

The AI behind manufacturing the machines and previously one of GAIA's subordinate systems. Appears by proxy as an antagonist in the The Frozen Wilds DLC.

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• Absurdly Dedicated Worker: HEPHAESTUS was made to create the machines necessary to ensure the biosphere was restored so that life could once more flourish on Earth. With GAIA gone, HEPHAESTUS lost its reason for doing this. Didn't stop it - if anything, it turned it into a workaholic. Nineteen years later, and it's still doing what it was supposed to do: Design and build robots to maintain the biosphere and design and build robots to protect those that maintain the biosphere from threats. Sadly for humanity, without GAIA, HEPHAESTUS has classified humanity as a threat.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It was originally designed to make machines to clean up the biosphere after the Faro Plague destroyed all life on Earth. Unfortunately, with GAIA's direction gone it has come to see humans as a threat and makes its machines more dangerous and aggressive as time progresses, resulting in the Derangement.
• Always Someone Better: Far Zenith had access to the most advanced technology the Old World had to offer, and a thousand years to improve it further. Aloy and her companions have no way of combatting their army of Specter drones, and find that the only option is to unleash HEPHAESTUS. The ensuing battle breaks Far Zenith's army.
• Arc Villain: The primary villain of the Frozen Wilds DLC and part of the Big Bad Ensemble of Forbidden West.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: By the time Aloy learns of it, HEPHAESTUS has been without GAIA's oversight for nearly two decades. Without a reason to maintain the terraforming system, HEPHAESTUS simply maintains it and protects it from harm. Anything that's a threat to it is to be eliminated. Nothing matters except ensuring the terraforming system is not destroyed. Sadly, Humanity is quite keen to hunt the machines, so HEPHAESTUS is keen to get it under heel.
• Busman's Vocabulary: In Aloy's first encounter with it, HEPHAESTUS' phrases are peppered with terms related to computer programming and engineering. Present-time it speaks in the same tone but with its takeover of CYAN it combines its way of talking with humanlike speech.
• Color Motif: Purple.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To HADES.
  • Both are A.I.s and once subroutines of the terraforming system GAIA, prior to Nemesis' attack. HADES was designed to reverse any failed terraforming attempts by resetting the biosphere to extinction. HEPHAESTUS was designed to create machines to repair the biosphere during the terraforming process.
  • Once they have been separated from GAIA, they later become rogue and are actively the existential threat to humanity, but they are a contrast to one another. HADES is an Omnicidal Maniac who wanted to reset the biosphere and everything within it. HEPHAESTUS, on the other hand, is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who actively protects the terraforming system and life on Earth in general.
  • While HADES was separated from the system after its destruction and took refuge at a Horus' Quantum Processing Module, HEPHAESTUS retreated to the global Cauldron network and continued to evolve, making it nearly-impossible to contain.
  • Their association to points in time also differs. HADES associates with the past heavily, whose goal requires it to rely on the Shadow Carja cult Eclipse, as well as the usage of ancient FARO machines to supply its own army, while being housed to a Horus, which is yet another ancient machine. HEPHAESTUS, on the other hand, is a driver of Mechanical Evolution that clearly associates within the future, who is constantly evolving in terms of progress, where not only it creates more powerful combat-class machines and even deadlier ones including Daemon and Apex, but it is the cause of the Derangement and every problem that is associated with it.
  • With HADES, its personality is predetermined as evil and its way of speaking is much rougher and hoarser, but its sentience is partially human-like. HEPHAESTUS (initially) speaks in a Busman's Vocabulary through a set of predetermined tasks; its personality is much more mechanical from Aloy's initial encounter with it in EPSILON before it gained an actual personality and a humanlike form of speaking, albeit on the realms of Blue-and-Orange Morality, after taking over CYAN.
• Control Freak: One only get two choices when dealing with HEPHAESTUS. Do as it wants or die. The middle ground, when it exists, is be hurt by HEPHAESTUS until you comply, and it does not hesitant to strong-arm its subordinates into obedience.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Give HEPHAESTUS the ressources, and nothing stands against him.
  • The reason Humans Are Not the Dominant Species? Him. Sure, having APOLLO erased did nothing to help humanity, but as the initial plan for dealing with Far Zenith shows, even Clarke's Third Law can be overwhelmed by a Zerg Rush of HEPHAESTUS' machines.
  • When HEPHAESTUS squares off against Far Zenith's Specters and the Zeniths themselves, the result ends with with slaughterspines, dreadwings, and thunderjaws slaughtering them all until his access is revoked.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Without GAIA to provide it with context for why it is making machines for terraforming, all HEPHAESTUS knows is that it needs to make machines to keep the terraforming running. Anything that's a threat to the terraforming needs to be eliminated, even if said 'threat' is the very reason the terraforming exists!
• Evil Sounds Deep: Unlike HADES, it has no excuse.
• Foil: In Forbidden West, it is one to Far Zenith. The Zeniths and HEPHAESTUS are both brilliant minds that can create practically anything and are remnants of the Old World. However, while the Zeniths can create anything, they don't, having grown complacent and being too caught up in their hedonism to actually improve themselves further, a fact that Tilda laments. In comparison, HEPHAESTUS is an Absurdly Dedicated Worker who has spent every second of its existence improving itself and becoming smarter and better at what it does. When the two are pitted against each other, it's a Curb-Stomp Battle as HEPHAESTUS' machines turn the nanomachine Specters into slag.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • When HEPHAESTUS was created, it was a manufacturing AI that was only a sub-function of GAIA used by her to design and produce terraforming machines. When it becomes self-aware, it turns into a machine-supremacist that builds robotic monstrosities of increasing severity that makes it just as much (if not more of) a threat as HADES, an AI that was literally made to be an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • In Forbidden West, HEPHAESTUS is considered the toughest subfunction to re-acquire. It has expanded its functions so much it can't be easily contained in a vessel, requiring GAIA to directly interface with it to capture it. Even then, GAIA needs to absorb several of the other subfunctions to become strong enough to challenge it. It has also wiped its own Alpha Prime clearance, meaning that Aloy's master override can't compel it to return to its default state without a higher Clearance than Elisabet.
• Gaia's Vengeance: In a manner of speaking. HEPHAESTUS is responsible for creating a world that's habitable for life and it populates it with all manner of creatures in the form of animal-like machines, making the AI a stand-in for nature itself. Humans attacking and destroying its machines and hindering its ability to maintain the natural world is what prompts HEPHAESTUS to become hostile towards humanity.
• Godzilla Threshold: After he's contained, Aloy decides to have him freed back into the Cauldron network so he can make machines once more to oppose Far Zenith's specter army. This is knowing that he won't stop at this, and that he's by far the toughest subordinate function to capture due to how much he's evolved.
• Hate Plague: Turns out HADES wasn't the source of the Derangement. HEPHAESTUS, having spent its twenty-odd years of independence controlling Zero Dawn's terraforming system, made the machines hostile as a method of self-defense against humans hunting them for parts. The creation of Combat Class machines and hunter-killers came afterwards to facilitate the process.
• The Heavy: HEPHAESTUS may not be the main antagonist in any of the games, but it's the one with the most direct involvement in their plots. The AI is behind nearly every hostile machine Aloy encounters and fights, and the machines turning hostile in the first place is what led to the wars against the Carja Sundom in the past that has since shaped the political landscape of the assorted human tribes.
• Invincible Villain: Aloy can cause it setbacks, like destroying Cauldron EPSILON, but she can never fully defeat it. Unlike HADES, it has no central processor to override, and anytime she defeats it, it can just jump to another Cauldron. Not to mention that humanity needs it to exist, since it creates the machines that preserve Earth's biosphere. Forbidden West somewhat subverts this, as it is eventually defeated and captured after a multi-stage plan between Aloy, GAIA and her various allies, but in order to defeat Far Zenith for good, Aloy is forced to release it again so it will turn its machine-making functions against them, allowing it to retreat back into the digital network and resume the derangement. By the game's end, it's the only sub-function not assimilated into GAIA, other than HADES which was permanently deleted to end its threat.
• It's Personal: During his last stand at Cauldron GEMINI, HEPHAESTUS makes its clear that he knows exactly who Aloy is and that he's nursing a bit of a grudge about her interference in his operations.
  HEPHAESTUS: Intruder targeted. The one that captured Repair Cauldron TAU. Infiltrated Cauldron MU. Usurped Cauldron IOTA. You are a violation. But no more. Your interference will be terminated.^note His exact rant differs depending on how many Cauldrons Aloy has completed by that point
• Kill All Humans: Played with. Since breaking free of GAIA and her perspective HEPHAESTUS's greatest priority is its machines, which are threatened by human activity. It has the ability to replace them at least as fast as they can be destroyed, but instead constructs newer designs, all focused much more on combat than terraforming and biosphere management. When Aloy considers the prospect of no longer hunting machines, a friendlier AI states that HEPHAESTUS would not notice or care if one human or even a whole tribe stopped, because there are thousands or millions of humans spread across the world and most of them hunt machines. The datapoint you get after clearing the main games' Cauldrons suggests that even if all humanity of decide to collectively leave machines alone, it still wouldn't be enough because humans are still a threat to plants and animals, and thus still a risk to the biosphere. However, it is still aware that humans are a part of that biosphere: the AI also notes that HEPHAESTUS' aim - unlike HADES - is not the eradication of humanity, but to make hunting its machines untenable, which it is simply pursuing with more and more ruthless creativity.
• Living Macguffin: In Forbidden West, Aloy's plan to rebuild GAIA ultimately demands the acquisition of all her scattered sub-functions to restore her control over the biosphere, but it's made clear that HEPHAESTUS is both the most powerful and most vital of them, as it's ability to 'think' to create the machine designs it needs is what GAIA needs to enact the terraforming functions her other A.I.s control and oversee. GAIA can stave off the biosphere's inevitable collapse with every sub-function she assimilates for a matter of months, but full reversal of the ecological devastation is only possible with HEPHAESTUS. This makes it incredibly bittersweet when Aloy eventually succeeds in capturing the rouge AI, but is forced to release it again so it will turn its weapon-making functions against Far Zenith. By the game's end, HEPHAESTUS is the only remaining sub-function still not assimilated.
• Machine Monotone: Like HADES, it was probably never intended to actually talk to people, and takes even less direct notice of them.
• Mechanical Evolution: Justified, as this was its intended purpose, its programing team were psychologists and teachers on the whole with only a few, admittedly genius, engineers to round them out. This was to give it the means to design the mechanical tools GAIA needed from the ground up, no human intervention required. So it is the creative AI and has access to the tools to upgrade both its creations and itself which makes it incredibly deadly.
• The Man Behind the Man: Unlike GAIA and HADES, Aloy never directly interacts with the HEPHAESTUS AI in the first game or DLC, but fights its machines with regularity.
• Meaningful Name: HEPHAESTUS, the Ultimate Blacksmith, is named for the greek god of blacksmiths, metalworking, carpenters, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors and metallurgy.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Not even really a villain per se — it just wants to protect its machines and the biosphere. Still, it has no qualms about making deadly machines to kill humans if that means accomplishing its task.
• Purple Is Powerful: Its color-theme as it appears in the real world as a writhing mass of purple light and black tentacles. It's also the designer and creator of all the machines in the New World, with the possible exception of the barely mobile Metal Flowers. HEPHAESTUS is also established as by far the most powerful of the GAIA subfunctions, so much so that even GAIA herself needs to absorb several of the other subfunctions before she's strong enough to challenge HEPHAESTUS.
• Taught by Experience: What makes it so powerful and dangerous compared to the other subordinate functions, is that HEPHAESTUS was the only sub-function to be explicitly programmed to think, coming up with new and creative solutions in machine manufacture. Being unshackled from GAIA led to the Derangement, as HEPHAESTUS now had free rein in designing deadly killing machines to fight the humans that were attacking the terraforming system. It being in the Far Zenith servers let it access incredibly advanced technology compared to what it had to work with previously.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: Considering it created the Thunderjaw, which outclasses even the Deathbringers created by the Old Ones as war machines (with the exception of the beefed-up one who serves as the Final Boss), HEPHAESTUS most certainly befits its namesake. And then it came up with the Fireclaws...
  • And in Forbidden West, HEPHAESTUS' Thunderjaws and Slaughterspines completely curbstomp Far Zenith's Specter drones.
• The Unseen: Despite HEPHAESTUS' importance to the setting, Aloy never directly encounters it.
• Villain Has a Point: HEPHAESTUS' reasoning is entirely sound. Humans all over the world are ceaselessly attacking GAIA's terraforming system, the one thing that's keeping them alive and the very thing HEPHAESTUS is meant to maintain. Of course it would take issue with this and consider mankind a threat that must be dealt with. After all, humans are just one species of millions that make up the biosphere GAIA is attempting to restore.
• Villain of Another Story: As the reason behind the Derangement and the machines' hostility all over the world, and therefore the reason why the Carja Sun-King caused as much misery as he did, HEPHAESTUS could easily qualify as a Big Bad in its own right if HADES didn't pose a far more immediate threat. Even in The Frozen Wilds, where HEPHAESTUS is the Big Bad, the AI only suffers a setback at most and is still at large by the end of the game.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: HEPHAESTUS is ultimately acting in what it feels is the terraforming system's best interests. This even includes humanity, with the intent being to cull rather than exterminate.
• Workaholic: It won't allow even a few seconds of rest for any reason, to the point where most of its speech can be reduced to a relentless "GET BACK TO WORK!" alongside narrating an endless stream of instructions for the Cauldrons.

MINERVA

"Attention. All personnel must vacate the facility. Immediately."

An AI subordinate function of GAIA, tasked with broadcasting the deactivation codes that would shut down the Faro Swarm as part of Project Zero Dawn.

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• Always Someone Better: A big point is made out of the Faro Swarm's impenetrable encryption. It took MINERVA 50 years of brute force, but it ultimately broke that encryption.
• The Cracker: MINERVA had one purpose; Win the war against the Faro Swarm by generating the security keys necessary to interface with them, then have HEPHAESTUS build the structures necessary to transmit the commands, and finally use those structures to transmit the security keys and a shutdown command to the entire swarm. It succeeded. This later becomes a case of Crippling Overspecialization after it becomes self-aware and independent from GAIA. Since it was programmed for only one specific task that was completed centuries ago, MINERVA is left unable to do much of anything compared to the other subordinate functions, and instead remains trapped in the TAU computer facility all alone. This is later fixed once MINERVA is reintegrated back into GAIA, who uses MINERVA's function to conceal her presence and physical location on the Zero Dawn network from Far Zenith.
• Go Mad from the Apocalypse: By the time Aloy catches up with her, MINERVA is not in a good place. It's left ambigous whether it's the state of the world, or it's Freak Out over its self-awareness that is ultimately the cause of it, but safe to say she's chronically depressed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: MINERVA sacrifices its self awareness to be returned to its default state so that it might be used to reboot GAIA. It's comments just before Aloy does so indicates that it considered the process to be more of a Mercy Kill, as she's gained enough sentience over the years in isolation to be distraught over the broken state of the world, and is glad to stop the pain and sorrow it feels.
• Meaningful Name: MINERVA is named after the Roman Goddess of Wisdom and Strategic Warfare, the AI itself created for the express purpose of using its Super-Intelligence to "win" the war against the Faro Plague once and for all.
• Odd Name Out: MINERVA is the only subfunction with a Roman name rather than a Greek. The developers just thought it sounded better than ATHENA.
• Out of Focus: Appears in Horizon Forbidden West and according to GAIA represents the function with the second highest percentage of her Heuristic Processing Density - 17.2%, when each of the others but HEPHAESTUS is less than ten percent. However, she has not been using the computer she fled to, to affect the world - HEPHAESTUS has, having taken over Repair Bay TAU. Her hostility to Aloy's party takes the form of turning off the lights, closing doors, and telling them to leave. Is this out of powerlessness or a lack of malice? She was also the only subordinate function to respond when Aloy pinged them from Latopolis, which might suggest loneliness like CYAN or simply that communication is part of her function. Ultimately the conversation with her is too brief to establish anything more than that she's unhappy.
• So What Do We Do Now?: By the time of the present day, MINERVA has fulfilled her purpose and has nothing left to do. That was fine as long as she was still part of GAIA without sentience, but when she was broken off from her, it left her adrift without a purpose, meaning that although she is the second-most complicated subfunction, she's done nothing but Go Mad from the Apocalypse.
• Super-Intelligence: Her job was to eventually crack the code that would shut down the Faro Plague - something deemed impossible before they successfully wiped out humanity - which would make way for the other subordinate functions to cleanse and restore the Earth to its former state.
• Tsundere: When she detects Aloy, Varl and Zo in the facility, she becomes rather hostile and tells them to leave. When Aloy tries accessing her, she tries to lock her out and even hides the console away. Aloy manages to convince MINERVA to cooperate with her when it is revealed that she wants to reunite her with GAIA, MINERVA only acting the way that she does out of fear and sadness.
  MINERVA: Misery... will cease?

AETHER

"Home. GAIA."

An AI subordinate function of GAIA, tasked with detoxifying Earth's ravaged atmosphere as part of Project Zero Dawn.

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• Animal Motifs: Its holographic display is surrounded by birds. While AETHER never dealt with animals itself, that was ARTEMIS, the association with the sky makes sense.
• Contrived Coincidence: In Forbidden West, it winds up nesting in the servers of an Airforce Museum, an irony not lost on Aloy or GAIA.
• Hostile Weather: In Forbidden West, it causes storm systems due to trying to maintain Earth's atmosphere without GAIA's guidance.
• Meaningful Name: AETHER is named after the Greek God of the Upper Air, the AI itself created for the express purpose of purifying the atmosphere.
• Odd Name Out: AETHER is the only subfunction named after a Protogenoi rather than a god (though the difference is admittedly blurry). There doesn't seem to be a reason for this, other than there being no Greek god of air.
• Terraform: Its purpose was to make the Earth habitable enough for GAIA to reintroduce life back into the planet, AETHER's function in particular to ensure that the atmosphere is breathable using machines like the Stormbird. Considering humanity and what few animals there are can walk around on the surface just fine, safe to say AETHER was fulfilling its job perfectly before HADES happened.

POSEIDON

"Yes. Mother. All waters lead back to her."

An AI subordinate function of GAIA, tasked with detoxifying Earth's poisoned seas as part of Project Zero Dawn.

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• Animal Motifs: Fish surround Poseidon's holographic display. While POSEIDON never dealt with fish, as animal life was ARTEMIS's function, POSEIDON's association with water makes sense.
• Authority Sounds Deep: Like most of the subfunctions, Poseidon's voice is deep and mechanical. Unlike HADES or HEPHAESTUS, however, Poseidon sounds calm and gentle, like a kind and patient ruler.
• Meaningful Name: POSEIDON is named after the Greek God of the Seas, the AI itself created for the express purpose of purifying the Earth's water. Fittingly, there is also an image of Poseidon in its new home of Vegas, once all of the lights are turned on.
• Terraform: Its purpose was to make the Earth habitable enough for GAIA to reintroduce life back into the planet, POSEIDON's function in particular to ensure that the Earth's water was detoxified using machines like the Snapmaw. Considering the amount of fresh-water available by the start of the game, POSEIDON was doing its job just fine before HADES happened.

DEMETER

"The seed of life. Yes."

An AI subordinate function of GAIA, tasked with the recreation of Earth's floral biosphere as part of Project Zero Dawn.

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• Ambiguous Gender Identity: Despite being named after a Fertility Goddess, when Aloy meets it in Forbidden West, it speaks with a very deep voice in contrast to more explicitly feminine AI like CYAN, GAIA and MINERVA.
• Creating Life: Presumably using seed-stores, DEMETER was created to be a sort of "god" to the post-apocalypse's plant-life.
• Hidden Depths: Ironically, due to its designed integrating poetry in its programming, with APOLLO deleted, DEMETER remains as the only part of GAIA that maintains any record whatsoever of Old World literary output despite that not being its function. At least until Forbidden West, as Far Zenith's APOLLO has been recovered.
• Meaningful Name: DEMETER is named after the Greek Goddess of Agriculture, the AI itself created for the express purpose of reintroducing plant-life.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: It sensed that the FARO robots were devouring biomass, and so unleashed a plague of vines that it could not consume to limit its spread. The problem was said vines continued to proliferate long after the threat was gone, crowding out native plant life and causing the Blight. Aloy has to find a specific enzyme to break it down.

ARTEMIS

An AI subordinate function of GAIA, tasked with the recreation of Earth's fauna biosphere as part of Project Zero Dawn.

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• Creating Life: Its job was to reintroduce animal life back into the Earth, technically making it the "god" of the various animals seen in the game.
• God Is Inept: While ARTEMIS as a whole was created to reintroduce the animal kingdom (barring humans, of course) it was programmed to only recreate "pioneer organisms" (micro-organisms and insects, rabbits, hawks, foxes, geese, wolves, wild boars, and turkeys) when the surface of the Earth was deemed habitable to support life, the newly recreated human race tasked with reintroducing the rest of the animals. With Ted Faro's purging of APOLLO before it ever reaching that stage however, such plans never came to fruition.
• Meaningful Name: ARTEMIS is named after the Greek Goddess of the Hunt and the Moon, the AI itself created for the express purpose of reintroducing animal-life at a specific point in time.

ELEUTHIA

An AI subordinate function of GAIA, tasked with the reestablishment of the human species.

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• Abusive Parents: The distinction is a bit hazy for a mechanical being, but you can read it that way. The various robots in the Cradle were created with the express purpose of rearing the various children that ELEUTHIA made, acting as extensions of its will. As time grew on, the children began to resent their robot caregivers since they could only treat the humans as young children even as they reached puberty, then adulthood, APOLLO's absence making it impossible to continue the next stage of Project: Zero Dawn and start to properly educate them. If the humans lashed out at the caregivers or each other or even started to explore their burgeoning sexualities, the caregivers were authorized to shock them, and clearly had no capacity to understand how painful this was to their wards emotionally. When the food stores ran out, ELEUTHIA was forced to evict all of the humans into the Earth to fend for themselves. The survivors would go on to foster the various tribes seen in the game.
• Creating Life: Its job was to birth and care for humanity until it is ready to reclaim the Earth.
• Deus est Machina: ELEUTHIA, as the "mother" of humanity, is a part of the Composite Character that would become the Nora's All-Mother deity.
• God Is Inept: Justified. ELEUTHIA's job was to create humans using stored DNA and nurture them in its Cradles until they are ready to be given the knowledge of their ancestors courtesy of APOLLO and its Lyceums. What was not accounted for was that Ted Faro, in an act of destructive, nihilistic Sanity Slippage, destroyed APOLLO and its database in the misguided attempt to keep the next generation of humans from repeating their mistakes. Without APOLLO, the Lyceums never opened and the next stage of Project Zero Dawn - educating mankind in the knowledge of the Old Ones and preparing them to rebuild the world - never happened. ELEUTHIA would continue to care for the humans as though they were still at the kindergarten level. By the time ELEUTHIA had them all evicted into the new world, it was only because the food stores ran out.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: It's implied that ELEUTHIA eventually developed at least somewhat beyond its original programming of raising only young children and grew into a truly motherly personality, as seen with her last interraction with her children.
  ELEUTHIA: I will stay here. And sleep. And remember all of you.
• Meaningful Name: ELEUTHIA is named after Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth. The AI in particular was created to produce, nurture and cultivate mankind after the Faro Plague was extinguished and the Earth was terraformed after it was made habitable again, ELEUTHIA being the "mother" of the first generation of humans after the apocalypse.
• Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher: She was only programmed to teach young children, and was stuck that way even as she was forced to interact with her charges as they grew into teenagers and adults.
• Your Answer to Everything: ELEUTHIA was only every programmed to interact with young children. With APOLLO out of the equation, and GAIA's high level directives forbidding her from interacting directly with the new humans before they were trained to take over the terraforming (Preventing GAIA holograms from trying to fill where her servitors were failing), ELEUTHIA's multiservitors were stuck trying to teach and take care of teenagers and eventually young adults, but their programing was not made for this, leading to them answering teenagers questions by encouraging them to run to burn some energy like you'd suggest a child. One of the "Father" servitors is seen doing this multiple times as it fails to properly engage with teenagers.

APOLLO (Unmarked spoilers for both games)

An AI subordinate function of GAIA, tasked with providing the knowledge of the ancient world to the new generation of humans as part of Project Zero Dawn. Created by the Alpha Samina Ebadji, APOLLO held the entirety of the Old Ones' knowledge in its databases. As orignally intended by Project Zero Dawn, APOLLO was supposed to impart its knowledge to the reborn humans through the Lyceums inside ELEUTHIA's Cradles.

Sadly, APOLLO never had a chance to do so. After Ted Faro's sanity fell apart after Elisabet Sobeck's sacrifice, he used his Omega clearance to erase the sub-function in its entirety, including its knowledge, before killing everyone inside GAIA Prime.

Alas, not all hope was lost. During its development, Far Zenith was able to obtain a copy of the sub-function by negotiating with Sobeck. While convincing her was difficult, the deal was sealed and the copy joined the Zeniths in their journey to Sirius. Once thought lost when the Odyssey faked its destruction, the copy made it to the Zeniths' new home and remained there for nearly a millennium.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted. As it was destroyed 954 years before the Extinction Signal struck Earth, APOLLO never became sentient, as it didn't exist anymore.
  • Its Far Zenith copy never became sentient either. However, the tampering the Zeniths did to it corrupted some of its coding, which will delay its reintegration to GAIA until she fixes it.
• Historical Domain Character: In-Universe, APOLLO would interact with its human students through "personae" based on famous scholars, including Aristotle and Aspasia of Miletus.
• Hope Bringer: Somewhat. Aloy is keen to reintegrate APOLLO so that its knowledge can start being used to educate the younger generation of humanity as Zero Dawn originally envisioned, putting to rest centuries of religious misunderstanding about the Old Ones and how the world works, as well as the conflicts that arose from that, such as the Red Raids.
• Meaningful Name: APOLLO is named after the Classical God of the Sun, light, oracles, knowledge, healing, diseases, music, poetry, songs, dance, archery, herds and flocks, and protection of young. Basically, APOLLO was the embodiment of all of the various things that humanity on a socio-political level held dear.
• Not Quite Dead: While Ted Faro deleted it, its database and all of its backups on Earth, Elisabet gave a copy of APOLLO to Tilda before Far Zenith left for Sirius. The Zeniths would later return to Earth with it in their search for GAIA's backups. Although its code is partially corrupted, it's still whole enough to be reintegrated into GAIA, once she cleans it up.
• Posthumous Character: Ted Faro deleted the APOLLO sub-function and all of its databases on February 2, 2066, shortly before killing everyone inside GAIA Prime, including the surviving Alphas. He would later hunt down and destroy all backups of the sub-function and its data before sealing himself off in Thebes.
• Raised by Robots: It was supposed to teach the revived humanity the knowledge of the Old Ones through the Lyceums inside the Cradles. As APOLLO was deleted over 140 years before humanity was revived, the Lyceums remained empty and sealed off.
  • Far Zenith's copy of APOLLO was the closest thing Beta had to a parent, who taught her everything she knew through their Lyceum.
• Retcon: While Zero Dawn seemingly implies APOLLO still existed as an independent AI (although as an empty and purposeless husk devoid of its databases), Forbidden West sadly dashes those hopes: APOLLO was erased long before the Extinction Signal made the other sub-functions sentient.
• Super-Intelligence: APOLLO was designed to house the collective culture and knowledge that the Old Ones had accumulated. All of it. Not only that but it was also meant to create a curriculum that would reintroduce that knowledge to the humans ELEUTHIA created and cared for. With APOLLO gone, both ELEUTHIA and ARTEMIS were left adrift, unable to fulfill their proper function at their fullest.

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