APOLLO (2024)

"The lesson will be taught in due time, Aloy. Until then, we wait." This article contains heavy spoilers. Read ahead with caution.

APOLLO was the subordinate function of GAIA responsible for providing the knowledge of the ancient world to the new generation of humans as part of Project Zero Dawn.

Purpose[]

APOLLO was a crucial part of the terraforming process. It was meant to teach the history of Earth and humanity's past achievements to the future humans. This was to help them continue being an advanced society, and ideally not make the same mistakes.

History[]

Background[]

Creation[]

APOLLO was designed by Project Zero Dawn Alpha Samina Ebadji. It seems she implemented a hologram of herself to educate the new humans born from Project Zero Dawn. She intended Apollo as a gradual gamified learning system in four languages, designed to gradually disclose knowledge as society marches on, with multiple failsafes on advanced technologies and a steady learning curve, with redundancy as its main way of preserving at least one copy of every entry. In addition to knowledge of science, it would also include every object of culture, history and entertainment known at the time.

Odyssey[]

Far Zenith was given an alpha-build of APOLLO for the Odyssey spaceship in exchange for ectogenic chambers needed for ELEUTHIA. While the deal was jeopardized by Far Zenith's attempted theft of the GAIA build, Elisabet Sobeck was ultimately convinced by Tilda van der Meer to follow through.

Purge[]

Following Elisabet's death, the guilt from creating the Faro Swarm caused Ted Faro to undergo a complete mental breakdown. Becoming obsessed with what would become of the new humans that would be born from Project Zero Dawn, he came to view the knowledge that they were supposed to gain from APOLLO as a "disease" that would cause them to eventually repeat his mistakes.

Faro thus used his secretly acquired^[2] Omega-level clearance over the facilities and computers of Project Zero Dawn to purge the subordinate function, deleting all its contents (accidentally deleting all backups of GAIA in the process). Afterwards, he called together all the Alphas for a meeting where he announced, via hologram, what he had done before venting the room of air, suffocating them all to prevent them from rebuilding the subordinate function.

Results[]

While APOLLO survived the purge, it was left as an empty husk, unable to serve its purpose. Because of this, the new humans only received a kindergarten-level education. Eventually, the cradle facilities were forced to release the humans when food supplies ran out, even through they were woefully unprepared to venture into the outside world. This eventually caused the new humans to regress into primitive tribes, hunting animals and HEPHAESTUS' machines to survive. Additionally, without APOLLO in place, the Cradle's servitors defaulted to English as their primary language of instruction, effectively wiping out every other language.

APOLLO's purge also caused two of GAIA's other subordinate functions, ELEUTHIA and ARTEMIS, to be robbed of their full potential. ELEUTHIA, which was supposed to birth and raise the new humans, wasn't able to properly do the latter, continuing to treat them as children even as they started to become adults. Similarly, ARTEMIS, which was supposed to repopulate the Earth with animals, could only introduce pioneer organisms, as the original plan was for the new humans to recreate the remaining species after having been taught how to do so by APOLLO.

The sole copy of APOLLO to survive the purge was the one given to Far Zenith, since it was already on it's way to Sirius by the time of Faro's purge.

The Signal[]

One day, a transmission from the rogue AI Nemesis struck GAIA and turned her subfunctions, including APOLLO, into independent AIs. This led the subfunction HADES to initiate his purpose of destroying the biosphere. To prevent this, GAIA self-destructed in an attempt to destroy HADES along with herself. However, in response to this, HADES released a virus that unshackled itself along with all the other sub-functions from her. APOLLO then disappeared for parts unknown.

Horizon Zero Dawn[]

Rediscovery[]

When Aloy entered the Zero Dawn Project Facility, she found datapoints on APOLLO but was confused on what happened to the sub-function. When she later accessed ELEUTHIA-9, she found the APOLLO stations offline and later learned the truth about the deleted database in the conference room of the GAIA Prime.

Horizon Forbidden West[]

Zenith's Copy[]

While all copies of APOLLO on Earth were destroyed, Far Zenith's copy remained untouched by Faro's sabotage, due to being already in space by the time of the purge. There was a possibility for the new era of humans to learn from the old world's history and knowledge, and bring society back to where it once was. While the Odyssey was en route back to Earth, the alpha build of APOLLO was used to educate Beta but its database was heavily restricted from any topics outside her learning parameters, specifically on how Far Zenith came into possession of Elisabet's DNA or how the colony on Sirius was destroyed.

Rebuilding GAIA[]

The Zeniths later attempted to integrate their APOLLO with the GAIA alpha build they acquired from the HADES proving lab. However, this was thwarted by Beta stealing the alpha build during her defection to Aloy's group. Following the Zeniths' defeat, their copy of APOLLO was successfully integrated into Aloy's copy of GAIA, paving the way for the Old Ones' collective knowledge to be returned to their intended holders. Unfortunately, the Zeniths had left the sub-function infested with corrupted code, making usage of it impossible until Aloy's GAIA copy had purged it all. Sylens speculated that APOLLO might be able to help find a way to replicate HEPHAESTUS' functionality.

The APOLLO database currently remains on the Odyssey. Sylens speculates that it remains largely restricted as it was during Beta's training but believes that MINERVA can help crack its encryption. Furthermore, he fears the possibility that the database might not be fully intact, either due to the Zenith's neglect over a thousand years or if it was damaged in their escape from Sirius.^[3]

Burning Shores[]

GAIA would ultimately succeed in purging the database of the Zeniths' corrupted code, granting her and Aloy's companions access to it. During her adventure in the Burning Shores, Aloy learned of something codenamed "MSP" and GAIA searched the database to find out its meaning, though her search ended up delivering nothing as it was a top-secret project not recorded within APOLLO.

Trivia[]

• APOLLO was named after the eponymous Greek and Roman deity, their patron god of knowledge as well as music, art, poetry, oracles, archery, plague, medicine, the sun, and light.
• APOLLO has a Focus as its icon.

References[]