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"The lesson will be taught in due time, Aloy. Until then, we wait." This article contains heavy spoilers. Read ahead with caution.
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An image of the Faro Plague depicted in The Bad News
- "Nothing could stop the Faro Plague. Nothing can."
- ―Aaron Herres
The Faro Plague, also referred to as the Faro Swarm, was the name given to the rogue swarm of Chariot war machines that caused the extinction of all life on Earth in Horizon Zero Dawn in the mid 21st century. It was known as the Time of Ashes by the people of the 31st century.
History[]
The Chariot Line[]
The Chariot line of peacekeeping robots was developed in the late 21st Century by Faro Automated Solutions under the direct oversight of the corporation's founder, owner and chairman, Ted Faro. Geared at the military market, the Chariot line utilized a concept of robots acting as a swarm, similar to an insect swarm. The robots were designed with formidable capabilities, such as the ability to exponentially replicate, consume biomass as fuel, and instantly hack and take control of any enemy automated military equipment such as drones. As per Ted Faro's instructions out of recklessness and shortsightedness, the robots were secured from being hacked themselves using an extremely difficult encryption protocol that would take several decades to brute-force, even using the most advanced supercomputers, and no back door access was built into the robots' OS, making remote access impossible.[1]
The "Glitch"[]
In October 2064, one particular Chariot swarm, owned by a corporation called the Hartz-Timor Energy Combine, began exhibiting what Ted Faro called a severe ‘glitch’: it had stopped responding to commands and began attacking its owner’s personnel. In response, Faro instructed his programmers to use remote access to upload a service pack that would bring the swarm back under control, only to be reminded of his strict instruction not to include any such access in the OS.[1] Thus, regaining control of this rogue swarm was impossible. Worried, he contacted former FAS employee and renowned robotics engineer Dr. Elisabet Sobeck and asked her to come to FAS Headquarters to solve the problem.[2]
Dr. Sobeck studied the ‘glitch’. What she found was horrific. In a tense meeting with Faro, she informed him that the swarm had become a completely independent entity, answering only to itself. This, coupled with the robots' abilities to exponentially replicate and consume biomatter as fuel, meant that the swarm would quickly grow to numbers beyond any hope of containment. Unfettered and uncontainable, the swarm would overrun the planet, consuming all organic matter, until it had consumed the entire biosphere. All life would be exterminated and the planet would be left sterile.[3] The swarm thus came to be known as the Faro Plague, out of contempt for Faro's recklessness in creating the robots. Its complete consumption of the biosphere was projected by Dr. Sobeck to occur within 15 months.[4]
Zero Dawn[]
Realizing that all of human civilization, and indeed, all life on the planet, was doomed, Sobeck devised a plan: Instead of wasting resources on futile attempts to stop the swarm, she would build an automated terraforming system, completely independent of the need for human input, which could be designed to eventually brute-force the codes needed to shut the rogue swarm down. The AI would subsequently reseed the Earth with new life after life as it was known had been exterminated. The project was called Zero Dawn. At its center was an AI designated GAIA, assisted by a number of subfunctions, each responsible for a different aspect of the terraforming process, such as detoxification of soil, air and water. Faro, faced with being exposed to the world as the sole party responsible for the coming global death and destruction, was coerced into approving and funding the project in its entirety.
Extinction[]
As predicted by Dr. Sobeck, the Faro Plague eventually overran the planet and obliterated all life, leaving the Earth dead and sterile. The robots consumed all organic matter, exterminating all living organisms in the process, including humans. This happened directly via their consumption of biomatter, and indirectly via consumption of all plant life, which reduced oxygen levels to zero, rendering the atmosphere unbreathable.[5] All land, water, and air became toxic, rendering the Earth unable to support life. With no more biomatter left to consume, the robots, which by then numbered in untold millions, went into a state of dormancy, ready to awaken and consume any organic matter should it ever appear.
Life was not permanently exterminated, however, as Zero Dawn was successfully completed and implemented before the end. Within 100 years after the extinction of life, GAIA succeeded in brute-forcing the swarm's deactivation codes and transmitted them worldwide, shutting the robots down. Within another 100 years, global flora, some fauna, and finally humans, were restored.
As for the Faro Swarm's robots, many were buried underground or became overgrown and hidden by foliage during the terraforming process, and with the passage of time, were forgotten by the new humans and their descendants. Subsequent events led to their rediscovery, however.
Events of Horizon Zero Dawn[]
HADES' threat[]
By 3020, approximately 894 years after the swarm was shut down, the humans of the new biosphere lived in tribes. Meanwhile, a signal of unknown origin inverted GAIA's subordinate functions, into full-fledged AIs themselves. One of these subroutines was called HADES. Its purpose was to reset the terraforming process should it fail by again destroying the biosphere so that the process could be repeated.
HADES fixedly sought to carry out its protocol of destroying the biosphere even though the process had no errors and had thus succeeded in restoring life to the planet. It was stopped, however, when GAIA willingly chose to self-destruct in order to stop it, denying it the terraforming hardware it would have used. HADES therefore devised a new plan: it would use the long-deactivated Faro Swarm. In possession of the swarm's activation codes, which it knew from its existence as one of GAIA's subfunctions, HADES sought to reactivate the swarm worldwide and allow it to consume the new biosphere as it did before. If allowed to do so, life would again be rendered extinct, but this time with no means of reversal.
To do so, it formed an alliance with a lone wandering maverick Banuk named Sylens.[6] With Sylens' instructions, HADES presented itself to the Shadow Carja (who had seceded from the main Carja tribe over a succession dispute and resulting civil war) as the Buried Shadow of their faith, forming a cult known as the Eclipse to do its bidding. It enlisted Sylens in its service by providing him with then-ancient pre-extinction knowledge, which he craved. After eventually betraying Sylens, HADES induced the Eclipse into organizing and launching a full-scale assault on Meridian, allowing it to access one of the transmission towers GAIA had used to broadcast the deactivation codes to shut the swarm down. It intended to use this tower to broadcast the codes to reawaken the swarm. It almost succeeded in doing so, managing to reactivate some of the robots. It was defeated and its plan foiled by Aloy, a member of the Nora tribe, who had been created by GAIA using genetic material from the by then long-deceased Dr. Sobeck specifically for the purpose of stopping HADES and eventually rebuilding and rebooting GAIA.
Current Status[]
With HADES' defeat, the Faro Plague remains deactivated. Nearly all of its robots remain buried all over the planet. Nonetheless, it has been demonstrated that all that is needed to reactivate the swarm is a broadcast of its activation codes from one of the towers used to broadcast the codes that deactivated it. Furthermore, while HADES was defeated, it was not destroyed, and thus will use the codes to fully reactivate the swarm, with the ensuing consequences to life on Earth, if allowed to do so.
Events of Horizon Forbidden West[]
HADES' Destruction[]
After learning of HADES' survival, fearing it could once again try to reactivate the Faro Swarm, Aloy traveled its last known location in the Forbidden West to destroy it. Upon arriving at the coordinates, she discovered logs about how Sylens had once again uploaded the malevolent AI onto a Horus and had been extensively interrogating it, tearing apart its code and heavily damaging it to extract its knowledge. Aloy once again confronted HADES after following a trail Sylens had laid out for her and, after a short conversation with the crippled AI, destroyed it.
Regalla's Rebels[]
A rogue faction of the Tenakth tribe known as Regalla's Rebels have been salvaging Corruptor carcasses for their override modules, building an army of machines.
Thebes[]
When Aloy and the Quen entered Thebes, Ted Faro's private bunker, they found two Scarabs guarding the facility. These were, most likely, uncorrupted by the swarm and were quickly eliminated.
Trivia[]
- The Faro Plague is referred to as the time of ashes by the Quen.[7]
- Due to graphical similarities between the Corruption and Faro Plague visualizations given by the briefings, it is hinted that the Corruption and Faro Plague are the same.
- The Faro Plague started somewhere in the Timor Sea north of Australia.[8][9]
- The Faro Swarm had the ability to hack into fighting planes and force the vehicles to crash.[10] Some pilots had conspiracies about the swarm, believing that Faro and other corporations were purposely depopulating the planet so the CEOs could claim what was left.[11]