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
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.
Odyssey
An Alpha-build of APOLLO was aboard the spaceship Odyssey as it left Earth in the midst of the Faro Plague. Unfortunately, according to a message from the Odyssey's parent company, Far Zenith, to Elisabet Sobeck, the spaceship, along with it's copy of APOLLO, was destroyed in an explosion when it's antimatter engine malfunctioned; Elisabet, in turn, relayed the tragic news to the other Alphas.
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[1] Omega-level clearance over the facilities and computers of Project Zero Dawn to purge the subordinate function, deleting almost all it's contents. 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 death.
Results
Because APOLLO was purged, the new humans only received a kindergarden-level education. Eventually, the cradle facilities were forced to release the humans when food supplies ran out, even through they were woefully underprepared to venture into the outside world. This eventually caused the new humans to regress into primitive tribes, hunting animals and HEPHAESTUS' machines to survive.
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.
Unknown Signal
Despite it's contents being purged, APOLLO remained an active subordinate function of GAIA, remaining "Offline" for centuries.
One day, an unknown transmission struck GAIA and turned her subfunctions, including APOLLO, into independent AIs set only to their predetermined purpose. This caused the subfunction HADES to initiate his purpose of destroying the biosphere. To prevent this, GAIA activated her kill-switch in an attempt to destroy her subfunctions along with herself. However, in response to this, HADES released a virus that unshackled itself along with all the other subfunctions from her. APOLLO then dissapeared for parts unknown.
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.
- There is a possibility that APOLLO can be recovered, or that it wasn't actually purged at all.
- Samina and her team took special measures to prevent APOLLO's contents from being lost.
- Aloy purged HADES, but never destroyed it as she thought.
- While exploring ELEUTHIA-9, the computer stated that APOLLO was merely "offline."
- At least one data-file (Welcome to the Lyceum) survived despite APOLLO's purge.
- APOLLO was seen in GAIA's message where the subordinate functions went rogue.
- Margo Shĕn claimed that Ted had no idea how GAIA's systems worked, adding that they were intentionally designed that way.
References
| AI Characters | |
|---|---|
| Artificial Intelligences | AETHER - APOLLO - ARTEMIS - CYAN - DEMETER - ELEUTHIA - GAIA - HADES - HEPHAESTUS - MINERVA - Nemesis - Nova - POSEIDON - The Julius - VAST SILVER |