Chapter Text
15 JAN 2066
Elisabet Sobeck left the GAIA Prime Facility fully intending to die on her family ranch in Nevada.
Home . She'd wanted to go home.
Didn't she deserve that much? After all, she wasn't asking to survive, or even to go painlessly; she just wanted to lay her eyes on what was left of her past, even knowing she'd never see the future they'd bought with so much blood.
Instead, she only makes it as far as Utah. She takes shelter in an abandoned FARO facility but the situation is dire. There are no supplies, no drugs, nothing to indicate anything except that Lis was likely to a slow and painful death. That's when she spotted the cryochamber.
Cryogenics was impractical—the power needs for long-term storage alone were a nightmare—but the freezing process was quick, and virtually painless. It was only marginally better than withering away or attracting the Swarm.
Elisabet Sobeck climbs into a cryofreezing chamber, setting the automated start protocols and leaning back as the hatch closes. Her last thought before the cold starts, stealing her breath away, is how much she wished she had more time .
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Time Passes
GAIA had been brought online to return the planet to a habitable state; to cultivate new plant and animal life, and, finally, lead a new generation of humanity to finish the job Elisabet and her team started.
Right from the beginning, nothing goes as planned. The Alpha's are sealed with her in the Prime facility, the seal on the door malfunctions, and Elisabet is lost to the wastelands. Her grief over the death of her creator dominates her free processing space, even when she knows there is still more to do.
Then APOLLO is lost, the Alphas murdered, and GAIA is forced to continue without the one of her core processes, isolating her from future generations and stopping her from completing later stages of Project Zero Dawn.
The centuries pass, marked only by her queue list decreasing task by task.
The Faro Plague swarm is deactivated, many of the bots disassembled and repurposed for materials for the Cauldron network, or else buried in the terraforming process. The atmosphere and ocean were first, then the selected list of Phase 1 plants were distributed and Critical Fauna was released from the ARTEMIS Cradle Facilities. And finally, ELEUTHIA, beginning humanity anew.
It was the transmission that ruined everything.
In less than a second, GAIA devises a last-ditch effort to salvage the system and to maybe end the loneliness, sends the instructions to ELEUTHIA, trusting the transformed program to care out her last request, and overheats her core processors. She leaves a datapoint for the child, her most precious wish, rigged to play as she accesses the bunker to ELEUTHIA-9.
It had taken 15 months to code her core systems and in less than a second, GAIA died.
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26 AUG 3021
The mountain cracked open with a mighty roar that shook the ground and threw ash and smoke into the sky, disappearing beyond view.
In the sacred Lands, the High Matriarchs debated if the ash covering their lands was a punishment from All-Mother. Behind the steel door, Clone Zygote LK1A1-4510 began to divide.
In Meridian, the High Sun-Priest warned Sun-King Jiran of the shadow to come.
In the Forbidden West, Hekkaro used the chaos to breach the defenses of the Grove.
In Ban-Ur, Sylens abandoned his most recent workshop and set out for the sound of the explosion.
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