Elisabet Sobeck, Ted Faro, and the Downfall of Civilization [Horizon: Zero Dawn/Forbidden West]

Today we explore new Horizons and soar into the world of Zero Dawn and Forbidden West to answer the question, who were the ones responsible for bringing about the apocalypse that led to the events of the game? We talk about Elisabet Sobeck and Ted Faro, and also take that information to break down what it might have been like to live in the Horizon universe in the 2060's-- our distant future (but hopefully not actually). I'll take the Focus, though.

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Transcript

Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast. My name is Brett, and today I want to dive into something that I’ve had on my short list of episodes since the very beginning, but never really got around to. At the time that I was conceiving the show, I had just finished playing through Horizon: Forbidden West, which shed some more light on the civilization that existed before the events of the game and were responsible for the iconic robots that we see in the series. Long story short, I wanted to take a minute to talk about “modern” civilization in the Horizon universe and explore what the tribes would refer to as, “the Old ones.”

I don’t know about you, but I am a sucker for any game that gives me a bow and arrow as a primary weapon. Something about it is so satisfying and if there’s a bow in a game, you can bet that I’m using it and nothing else. Usually games that give you a bow give it to you as a substitute for a gun to use in stealth scenarios like in the recent Tomb Raider games, or the games are in a high fantasy setting and your weapons of choice are some form of sword, magic or a bow. But usually the bow is limited to taking down unarmoured targets from the shadows, and is largely ineffective against anything else (Elder Scrolls being an exception because of how broken smithing and enchanting is). Horizon is different because, while there are other weapons available like the Ropecaster or the Shredder Gauntlet, the bow is your primary weapon, and its  intended purpose isn’t hunting wildlife or people, but giant robot creatures. Something about the dichotomy between a primitive, tribal civilization and being able to spot a robotic mammoth in the wilds really tickles my fancy.

But I don’t want to focus too much on the game itself, because what I wanted to talk about today was how civilization was before that time in what would be our modern day and the near-future. There are going to be two names that we will repeat today, and those are Elisabet Sobeck and Ted Faro. You can think of them as our protagonist and antagonist respectively. There are also three main periods that we will focus on, and those are the Great Die-Off, the Faro Plague, and Operation: Enduring Victory. The beginning of the end, the middle, and the end. There will be others, but those are the main three events that we will try to focus on today. We’ll also go over the culture and what it was like to be alive during this time, but that will come somewhere towards the end because I think that everything we go over in this episode will contribute to a greater understanding of why it was the way it was. So without further ado, let’s get into it by introducing our angel and devil.

Elisabet Sobeck was born in Carson City, Nevada, on March 11th, 2020 (which is hilarious to think of now, considering she would barely be a toddler in our world). This period was known as the “Snoring 20’s”, a somewhat satirical take on the “Roaring 20’s” of the 20th century, which was a series of rapidly worsening climate crises leading up to the Great Die-Off at the end of the century, which we will go over in a bit.

As early as 6 years old she displayed an interest in electronics, burning down a pine tree in her backyard while playing with a children’s electronics kit. The blaze would consume a chicken coop and after the fire department extinguished the blaze, she was forced to confront the fact that she had just taken lives- even if it were only chicks. Elisabet, being a child, did not seem to understand the consequences of her actions and screamed out that she did not care about the chicks, but her mother would take her face in her hands and tried to impress upon her the importance of using her talents for the good of the world, or they would mean nothing. This event ended up leading to her altruistic philosophy that she carried through her life and would shape her into the person she would become.

Elisabet was a child prodigy, and moved on from burning down chicken coops to being enrolled at Stanford University by the age of 13, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Experimental Physics and Computer Science by the age of 16. She went on to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Design at Carnegie-Mellon University at 20 years old.

Just before her time, on December 24th, 2013, Theodor Faro (better known as Ted Faro) was born, and what a great Christmas present that was to the world. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, his early life was not as prodigious as Elisabet’s, but he was a visionary nonetheless. He enrolled at the University of California for a degree in Business at 18, but dropped out two years later in the year 2033 to found his own company: Faro Automated Solutions. The corporation was not an immediate success, but found its legs in the coming years towards the end of the 2030’s through its line of personal servitor and bodyguard automatons, which proved exceedingly popular. Faro Automated Solutions, or FAS for short, also developed the Focus that we see in the Horizon games- a small augmented reality device which was worn on the temple and served as a multipurpose sensory interface.

The device was a small triangular metallic device with a single light strip going from centre to the tip, and was tuned to the user’s voice and gestures, making it extremely personalized to the user. Sort of like Alexa, but actually useful. It would display a 3d interface only visible to the user, which could aid in plenty of things from communications, construction, operation of machinery– you name it, it could probably do it. Similar to a smartphone, the Focus could be supplemented with a variety of apps purchased from an app store from music to fashion to navigation. And, again, much like the smartphone it became a common household item for the 21st century and remained functional into the 31st century which is impressive in its own right.

FAS experienced explosive growth towards the end of the century and in the 2040’s is when they started to really gain popularity during a severe climate crisis, which we mentioned before. A multitude of disasters occurred due to climate change and a number of civilizations were devastated. A category 6 Hurricane named Omeka devastated O’ahu, an island of Hawaii. The Azores, a region in Portugal, sank into the sea along with New Zealand. The pacific ocean reached critical levels of human waste contaminants. Bioterrorist groups started to form in an effort to quicken the effects of the climate crisis, likely in an attempt to end the world as they knew it. And as a result of all of this, so many people were unhoused and there became an influx of what were known as Climate Refugees. In a British Thamesmead Emergency Relocation Facility that housed these refugees, riots broke out due to the poor handling of said refugees. This mistreatment that led to riots ended in the deaths of thousands after a panicked response from the UK Government. And shortly after, over 200 people jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge in a suicide pact called Project GG/EZ. While the cause of this pact was unknown, I can infer that it was a sort of “end of the world, let’s take matters into our own hands” sort of situation which is why I’m lumping it into the climate crisis. 

In the year 2040, at the age of 20, Elisabet Sobeck joined Faro Automated Industries as her first job after completing her doctorate. Within two years, she was promoted to Chief Scientist, and over the next 8 years she would go on to design and develop “green robots”, automatons that’s sole focus was on environmental recovery. This is what brought FAS to the forefront of efforts to undo the severe environmental damage done during the past couple decades in an era that would be known as “The Claw-Back”. Faro himself funded and provided resources to Project Firebreak which was an effort to stabilise the Yellowstone Caldera– a supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park, which threatened to wipe out much of the planet. The operation was not only successful, but resulted in nearly unlimited clean geothermal energy to the continent. Through their combined efforts, Elisabet Sobeck and Ted Faro were able to use robotics to essentially save the Earth.

But Ted Faro was not satisfied with being hailed as “the man who saved the world”, and decided to take his company in a different direction, focusing more on his original line of bodyguard automatons. In 2048, Faro diversified into the military market, which was quite a lucrative effort on his part and propelled FAS to the most successful business in history, dominating the world market for automated military automatons by 2053. This made Faro the world’s first trillionaire, while it just served to piss off Elisabet. Once Faro started going into the military market in 2048, Elisabet resigned from FAS and founded her own environmental technology company, Miriam Technologies. Miriam would go on to be the world’s leader in green technology and went on to win numerous accolades for its work including the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2056 and the Rachel Carson Award for Environmental Progress.

Unfortunately, in his wealth, Ted Faro became a greedy and paranoid dragon and he saw Miriam Technology as a direct competitor, and accused Elisabet of stealing their work through numerous lawsuits. This overconfidence would ultimately lead to his downfall, and the downfall of civilization as they knew it.

The pinnacle of Faro’s success was in his Chariot line of combat automatons, which were a line of military robots that would essentially replace human armies. The Chariot had three classes: Scarab, Khopesh, and Horus. In Horizon, these were what we would know as the Corruptor, Deathbringer, and Metal Devil respectively. The Scarab was a midweight combat unit which stood on four legs and had a tail of sorts, boasting incredibly nimble movement, melee attacks, and the ability to fire explosives. The Khopesh was a heavyweight unit which stood on six stout legs, thus was much less mobile than the Scarab. It had a flamethrower and grenade launcher, as well as heavy and repeating turrets. Then there were the Horus units, which were large enough to scale mountains and had the ability to burrow. It resembled something like a sea monster or a giant lobster-scorpion hybrid. It stood on ten legs with a segmented tail that trailed behind it, and four massive tentacle-like structures on its front– each were as long as its body and had massive drills on the ends of them that would be used for shredding heavily armoured targets or to dig out landmasses to make fortifications and bunkers. It was also equipped with EMP charges and guided missiles that could act as an anti-air system, as well as a giant laser cannon and anti-personnel missiles. This thing was awful.

But the terror doesn’t end there. The Chariot line was so popular because they essentially required no maintenance once they were built. They were not only capable of learning through AI and adapting their strategies after every engagement, but they were also capable of self-replicating. The Horus was equipped with a hanger and production facility that could replicate Scarabs and Khopeshes faster than the factories could, and each individual unit was capable of repairing itself so once they were deployed, they were unstoppable. They ran on fuel, initially, but were equipped with the ability to consume biomass to make up their fuel reserves. The icing on the cake was that Faro specifically requested that each unit was equipped with a nigh-unbreakable encryption, ensuring that they could not be remotely hacked and controlled. But that also meant that they could not be remotely shut down if they went rogue. This is the definition of hubris, if I ever saw one.

So you have three units of AI driven military units which used swarm tactics to surround and overwhelm their opponents, and would learn how to be more efficient with every encounter. They could endlessly create more units and maintain themselves by consuming biomass, which meant that as long as there was life on Earth, their numbers were essentially infinite. And they could not be stopped, even by their creators. Can you see how this might go wrong?

In 2064, one swarm of Chariots stopped responding to commands and began attacking their owners, the Hartz-Timor Energy Combine. Faro demanded that the automatons be remotely accessed and shut down immediately, only to have finally touched the sun in being reminded that his insistence to make sure that they specifically could not do that meant that this was impossible. In a moment of clarity, he turned to the only source he knew of that could potentially help– Elisabet Sobeck. Realising the ramifications of his lack of foresight, he set a meeting with his former employee in an attempt to set things right.

Elisabet was asked to analyse the situation and come up with a possible solution to the rogue Chariots, and her findings had no silver lining. Because the Chariots were designed to consume biomass in order to replenish their fuel reserves, they were consuming all life on Earth at an alarming rate in order to keep their numbers up. This included everything from plants to animals. Elisabet estimated that within 15 months, the swarm would overrun the entire planet and strip it of all life, including humans, leaving the Earth sterile. And thus, Ted Faro: the Saviour of Earth had just sentenced humanity and Earth to death.

Just as intended, the Chariot swarm was unstoppable and loyal only to its owners… except that they now served themselves. This would come to be known as the Faro Plague.

Knowing that containment was not an option, Elisabet came up with a plan that would have a different outcome than anyone could have anticipated. She knew that they could not win, and so she intended to instead embrace their end, and try to start a new beginning after their inevitable downfall by creating a fully automated global terraforming system that would eventually brute-force and broadcast the swarm’s deactivation codes and restore the planet’s ability to sustain life. This included bringing humans back into the mix after a period of time. This project would be dubbed Project Zero Dawn, and was not accepted openly at first. Faro insisted that there had to be a way to win, but was ultimately convinced that this was the only way after being threatened by Elisabet to be revealed as the man who sold the world.

So, Faro personally funded Project Zero Dawn out of his own pocket, which I’m sure barely made a dent, and Elisabet started her work. It was a complicated process, but I’ll do my best to break it down here.

Zero Dawn was physically a global network of underground bunkers which consisted of automated manufacturing and cloning facilities that were dedicated to terraforming and restoring life to the planet. It had to be underground because it had to be somewhere that the Faro Plague would have a harder time getting to. Not that it would have been impossible for them to find the network and bring it down, but it would make it harder at the very least. At the heart of the system was a supercomputer that housed a powerful AI system called GAIA, who was to be the project’s overseer when there were no more humans left to control it themselves. Once they created GAIA, the human’s job was essentially done. GAIA would take on the job of creating machines that would build the rest of the facilities, since the bulk of the physical work could not be done before the Faro Plague tore down civilization.

GAIA had 9 subroutines that all performed a specific function in Project Zero Dawn. These were:

Aether, which was to detox and stabilise the Earth’s atmosphere through weather control.

Apollo, responsible for the archival of human history and culture, would serve to educate the new generation of humans.

Artemis, who would reintroduce primary faunal species from preserved genetic stocks.

Demeter, which would reintroduce secondary floral species.

Eleuthia was responsible for the reintroduction of humans into the world via cloning and raising humans from cryogenically  preserved stocks of embryos at Cradle facilities, which were underground bunkers that held artificial wombs for gestation and child-rearing facilities. This would also be where Apollo would come in.

Hades, which was an odd one because it was actually built to destroy, not create. Elisabet figured that GAIA would probably not create a perfectly habitable biosphere on its first go, and so she built in Hades as a contingency. In the event that the biosphere was not fit, Hades would be activated to essentially tear down the world again so that GAIA could start from scratch.

Hephaestus was in charge of designing and maintaining the Cauldrons which housed machine production facilities. In other words, it built the robots.

Minerva was the heart of the supercomputer that was going to brute-force its way into the Faro Plague to broadcast the deactivation codes as well as acting as a firewall and cloaking system for GAIA.

And finally, Poseidon, who was aptly responsible for the detoxification of the Earth’s hydrosphere.

It’s important to note that while all of these functions are those of an AI, none of these functions were originally AI themselves. They were all built to be extensions of GAIA so that she could facilitate all of the functions necessary to restore life. Eventually, Hades would gain a mind of its own which we see in Horizon: Zero Dawn, but that was more or less a fluke, not an intention of its design. Also, you might have noticed a trend amongst the naming conventions. Pretty well every function of Zero Dawn was named after a Greek God or Goddess who represented their role in the restoration of Earth. The exceptions being Minerva, which was a roman Goddess, and Aether which was a Greek wind spirit (but close enough, I’d say).

So GAIA would facilitate the terraforming of Earth via machines and reintroduction of life through cloning. If anything were to go wrong with any of the functions or the terraforming itself, Hades would be activated and they would start from square one. The most important part of Zero Dawn was to deactivate the rogue Chariots, which Elisabet estimated would probably take 50 years to crack. In that time, they would build their underground bunker and once they got rid of the Faro Plague then the other subfunctions would start their job.

I’m sure you can imagine that this plan had its own moral challenges. Like I said before, Elisabet gave the Earth 15 months before it was torn down by the Faro Plague, and Minerva wouldn’t be able to break the Faro Plague’s encryption for around 50 years. That meant that in order for there to be enough time to implement Zero Dawn, the entire global populace would have to sacrifice itself in a futile effort to stop the swarm in order to slow its advance, but would ultimately fail and die so that humanity could live again in another age.

Because of the futility, the world could not know that they were doomed to fail. If they did, then there would be no reason to fight and honestly, there would probably be a mass exodus of suicides and infighting. To execute the project, they needed the most brilliant minds on Earth, but they needed to be sworn to uphold the secrecy of the project so that the global population didn’t lose hope and would continue raging against the machine. This also meant that there was no job posting for Zero Dawn. Scientists and other bright minds were abducted from their homes and taken to the site of Zero Dawn and given a breakdown of the project and a proposal to work on it. If accepted, they would not be allowed contact with the outside world. If refused, they were given the choice between being indefinitely detained with no contact to the outside world, or to be medically euthanized. All in the name of keeping Zero Dawn under wraps. This was a hard pill to swallow, and initially Elisabet had per proposals shut down by the U.S. Robot Command, but she persisted and was able to convince them that this was the only way.

And so there was only one thing left to do once Zero Dawn was underway– slow down the robot swarm. At this point in time, the U.S. (and many other countries) did not have a human military. Their militar consisted entirely of automatons which posed a problem in fighting the Faro Plague. They could not send robots to fight robots because the Faro Plague had learned how to forcibly take over hostile robots and drive them to fight on their side. So the U.S. implemented what was known as Operation: Enduring Victory– a civilian-enlistee global war campaign. The naming convention was deliberate in sounding like humanity had a chance when the reality is that everyone involved would die very quickly. Regardless, they fought hard. Billions were armed and sent out against the Faro Plague, and it worked better than expected. Instead of 15 months, Operation: Enduring Victory granted them 2 years to work on Zero Dawn before it was ready in 2066, and in that same year the human military was finished as well.

There were bunkers built specifically for scientists and others working on Zero Dawn called Elysium where, after its completion, they were slated to live out their lives in relative comfort with enough resources to last a lifetime or two. Ted Faro would live his post-apocalypse in a bunker of his own while Elisabet and her group of scientists took up residence in GAIA Prime, the facility that housed GAIA. In his last meeting with Elisabet, he seemed like he was on the verge of a mental breakdown (which is fair considering he was single handedly responsible for the end of the world). He became obsessed with the new generation of humans that would be created, likely out of guilt that felt responsible for them. Ted would constantly pester Elisabet’s team for updates on GAIA, even though he wouldn’t understand what they were talking about because of the technical nature of it all. After all, he was a businessman not a scientist. Elisabet would personally take on his requests so that Ted wasn’t harassing her other staff.

However, one day Elisabet would give her own life for her fellow bunkmates. One of GAIA’s ports malfunctioned, failing to close within the 2mm maximum seam necessary to prevent a detectable energy signature leak which would compromise their location. If found, the Faro Plague would attack and destroy the facility, and so Elisabet went outside to manually fix the seal and was permanently shut out. The others tried to find a way to get her back inside, but Elisabet knew that any way back in meant a potential security breach, and so she refused to allow them to find a way, sacrificing herself so that GAIA could continue. A true demonstration of her selflessness and altruism, showing just how dedicated she was to the cause.

This meant that Ted Faro no longer had access to the information he was requesting, which caused his obsession with the new generation of humans to deepen. I mentioned before how Apollo was to preserve human history and teach it to the new humans. Ted, in his almost feral state, became convinced that this knowledge was a danger to the new humans and decided that humans deserved a fresh start without the knowledge that would make them doomed to repeat his mistakes. Somehow, and there’s now explanation as to how, Ted managed to get security clearance that was higher than Elisabet’s and unilaterally deleted the entire Apollo archive.

After this, he called a meeting with the survivors via hologram. He explained his thought process, how the archive was a disease that should never be passed on to new humans. That they were blameless men and women who didn’t deserve to suffer the same fate as them. He also explained how he deleted the archive, and was met with sheer anger. Understandably. They tried to figure out a way to restore the archive, to which Ted assured them that they would not be able to. He then declared that, “sometimes to protect innocents, innocents have to die” and then used his security clearance to vent the room’s atmosphere, killing the survivors.

I think that the real motivation behind Ted Faro deleting the archives was to delete the evidence that he was behind the whole thing. If you look at the facts, he was undoubtedly the antagonist and I think that his massive ego could not take the fact that people might be looking at him as such. It was also so that he could be given the chance to live and give humanity a fresh slate from his own teachings, essentially immortalising himself as a God to them.

He lived in his bunker with a few others, one of which was a geneticist named Dr. Narong Somptow. Doctor Somptow was given the task of giving Ted extensive genetic therapy to stop his ageing process which was actually successful. They were able to stop his cellular ageing, but at a great cost. Physical mutations began, which all had to be treated individually and were difficult to stabilise. As time went on, Ted’s mental state continued to degrade and he became paranoid of the few who had survived with him. He would end up flipping and “off switch”, a mechanism secretly implanted in all of the survivors that would cause instantaneous heart failure, killing those who remained with him with the exception of  Doctor Somptow and his daughter who would later commit suicide, which left Ted with no one to treat his growing mutations.

Ted, all alone, found himself in the generator room of his bunker in hopes that proximity to the energy would somehow halt his mutations. After about a thousand years, he would get his wish in meeting the new humans. Doctor Somptow’s work let him live for all that time, but the mutations grew unchecked for that time. His body was nothing but a mass of flesh and bone, covering the entirety of the generator room. His mind was hardly intact. He wasn’t capable of speech past primal screeches and roars. Those who found him were a cult dedicated to Faro. Their leader, Ceo, believed himself Faro reincarnated and believed Ted to be some sort of old God. Upon finding his body, they ordered it to be burned with the rest of the facility. And that was the end of Ted Faro.

The legacy of Elisabet Sobeck and Ted Faro would echo through the new world, but hardly anyone knew them by name, or knew what happened to the old world. Ted Faro’s ignorance led to the destruction of the world, and Elisabet’s sacrifice made sure that it was born anew. Both of their creations, the Faro Plague and GAIA, roamed the Earth far after they were gone, and a new generation of humans were given a second chance.

So with that out of the way, I wanted to take some time to go over the general culture of the Old Ones. We can tell by Ted Faro’s example that the world was largely dominated by corporations, but it goes deeper than that. Money was power, and power was absolute. If you were wealthy enough, you could hold seats in governments in some countries, and in those countries a single corporation could dominate and engineer the entire political climate. Because these corporations were so powerful, they could essentially do no wrong. If they did, it was covered up without repercussions. Something similar happened with Ted Faro and FAS where the world never knew that he was the one responsible for the Faro Plague, and that term was only used internally to those who were fighting it.

It was ultimately because of his culture of industry that Ted Faro and Elisabet Sobeck were able to get where they were in the world. The rampant industrialization is what led to the climate crises where they both gained renown for helping curb climate change and initially restore earth to be habitable. But because their efforts to reverse climate change were dependent on automatons, the world had a nasty dependence on robots and automation.

Many jobs ended up being entirely taken over by automation and robots leading to a global unemployment crisis. During the 2050’s, many Americans actually immigrated over to China in search of work in the form of manual labour. There were even riots against this issue. In one instance, a casino worker’s union called UNITY-47 had its members revolt against the automatons that replaced them at their casino and they destroyed many of the robotic dealers in an anti-automaton protest. 

This job crisis also extended to the military, as by 2052 the United Kingdom’s Air Force decommissioned all human pilots in favour of automated combat forces and in 2055, the U.S. military had removed all human combat forces in favour of a fully automated military. This led to veterans being neglected more than we know them to be today. In 2062, 75% of the United Kingdom’s veterans were unable to cover their living expenses under their pension as their funding was gradually syphoned into the pockets of prominent corporations.

These automated military forces meant that wars were morally easier to wage, since no lives were being lost on the front lines. Many wars were waged over the course of a couple decades, and the automatons were used to oppress and enforce a class system. After all, you can’t put a robot on trial for killing a human who was protesting for their rights.

And as evident in the games, holograms were a prominent form of social media. Holograms would take over as tour guides, among other things. And as mentioned before, the Focus became a household item. Imagine instead of having to pick up your phone if you could just tap your temple and think about what you wanted to see how much easier it would be to be terminally online. I can’t say this for sure, but I feel like social media was a much larger issue in this time because of things like the Focus. If you can imagine all of the disgusting TikTok “pranks” and the dehumanisation of people on social media for clicks in our day, I can’t imagine how much worse it was in their world. 

But with that bleak prospect out of the way, I think that brings us to my favourite question– what do you think? Do you think that if someone else were in Ted Faro’s shoes who was of sound mind that automatons could have been used for good instead of bringing about the end of the world? Maybe if Elisabet were put in charge of FAS and they never made the Chariot class, things wouldn’t have been as bad. Although, I have a feeling that no matter what, some evil would have risen. Maybe it would have been the increasing number of bio-terrorist organisations that brought about the end of humanity.

You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media or podcast websites. If you have an idea for an episode, feel free to send me a message or use the fancy Spotify Q&A option on the Spotify app to let me know what you want to hear about!

Until then, remember that while your job may be expendable, you are not. Jeff Bezos may not care about you, but I do. Be kind to other people, and never lose your humanity. I’ll chat your ear off next time. C’ya.