Chapter Text
2064-DC-04 18:35 – AUDIO RECORDING
Margo Shĕn: Dr. So- uh, Lis?
Elisabet Sobeck: What is it, Margo?
Margo Shĕn: Uh... I was just thinking, you know, about GAIA and HEPHAESTUS and the rest. I know there's not enough time to work on other AIs, I get that, but... won't GAIA get lonely, by herself?
Elisabet Sobeck: [sigh]
Margo Shĕn: It just seems unfair to her. If we had more time to safely implement cognition in the sub-functions...
Elisabet Sobeck: I know. I feel shitty about it, believe me. [sigh] But you know our... successors will be able to interact with GAIA after they complete the APOLLO program. So she'll have people to talk to again, one day.
Margo Shĕn: That's a long time to be alone.
The sun is half-sunk below the western horizon, just visible over distant hills. It casts its last grasp over the land, dying rays stretching like fingers over dusty ground. The soft pink and tan of the air and the land bleed into shades of red as daylight dwindles, and Aloy stands with her back to the west, to the ranch, looking out the way she came.
The Forbidden West is quiet, this far in. No more voices echo in Aloy's ear, crossing a millennium. All she hears is the wind, an endless low whistle that persists in the distance even when the air around her is still. It calls up dust, which floats and dances just as ceaselessly as the wind, etching fleeting ghosts into the air, red-hued by sunset light. The only movement, the only color, no matter which way Aloy looks.
It's almost a disappointment. Almost. From wild Carja tales, she'd been expecting something out here.
Two solitary points of blue emanate from the strider's vertical eyes, the only dissonance to break up the monotony of red. Even the strider's silver-black sides are stained with light, and Aloy gives it a pat before she looks back, though she'd promised herself that she wouldn't. The dying sunlight can't quite take the green out of the trees and ferns and grasses of the ranch. GAIA's work, keeping green life alive out here in such a dry, dusty place, and even without her, life remains, clinging tenaciously to existence. A welcome sight it had been, after the dryness of the western Sundom and the eastern edge of the Forbidden West, and Aloy drinks it in again.
She clutches the globe tightly in her left hand as she does, fighting every urge she has to walk back just a few feet. To place Elisabet's body in her sight again.
Aloy doesn't know how long it would take to tear herself away this time, so she keeps herself rooted to the ground instead and contents herself with watching the way a stray breeze stirs the grasses. She should get moving. She's not tired enough for sleep, and she doesn't know if she can bear sleeping here, anyway. But she watches the ferns sway, and she doesn't move.
Where does she go next?
She'd spent some time in Meridian, helping with the recovery effort there, and then she'd returned to the Sacred Land for the same reason, before making the long trek here. Recovery for both the Carja and the Nora will take much longer than that. A few months, at least, before life settles back into its daily patterns uninterrupted, and much longer before the scars in land and lives fade, if at all. But they don't need her for that. One more person won't make that much of a difference, there.
Out here, however, with GAIA's last words still ringing in her ears... out here is where there is still work for her to do.
"While this admittedly desperate course of action will avert the immediate crisis, the fate of life on Earth will remain in peril."
Aloy listens to it again – not because she needs to, when she has every word memorized, but because the silence is starting to unnerve her. Birds with men's voices and impossibly shaped machines, she'd once read, but there is nothing out here. Nothing but dust and wind and faded triangular carvings left behind in the rocks by people she has seen no sign of otherwise.
The strider moves suddenly, pushing a little closer to Aloy. Startled, she reaches out reflexively and finds herself patting its side, sinking back into thought.
"With no central governing intelligence to regulate the terraforming system, it will continue operations for some time, but in an increasingly chaotic manner, and eventually, it will break down."
Maybe she just hasn't gone far enough to see what the Carja claim is out here. But there is no reason to go further into the Forbidden West, not when such urgency still lies behind her.
"Likewise your gene print will allow you to enter other facilities, and over time, harness their technologies to rebuild the system core and reboot GAIA."
The Cauldrons would serve that purpose, Sylens had said. But therein lies the problem alongside the solution.
///
[summary]
active: Countermeasure/Diagnostic/wurm.nxt
alert: Trace/Intrusion/Detect:Successful
alert: Trace Result: HEPHAESTUS
alert: Infiltrate/Intrusion/Retrieval:Successful
alert: Command Template Acquired
alert: Decode/Initiate:Successful
alert: Result: ENCROACHMENT THREAT: HUMAN
alert: Result: FAUNA THREAT: HIGH
alert: Result: FLORA THREAT: HIGH
alert: Result: BIOSPHERE THREAT: HIGH
alert: Result: DIRECTIVE: CULL
alert: Result: PRODUCTION OVERRIDE INITIATED
alert: Result: ALL OTHER PRIORITIES RESCINDED
alert: Decode/End
///
It's all that Aloy really has to go on, and she doesn't yet understand much of the strange language of AIs, but it's enough. GAIA had been fragmented, her subordinate functions awakened and scattered. HADES had set to fulfilling his duties as soon as he was able to. And HEPHAESTUS, it seems, had set to changing the machines. To bringing about the Derangement. If Aloy tries to use the Cauldrons to restore GAIA, she doesn't know how far she'll get before HEPHAESTUS tries to stop her. If she needs its help, she's even less certain of how to get it.
Overriding the Cauldrons had been a battle and a puzzle, helped along by her intuition and her Focus. But override to shut down, to gain information and a bit of code, is not the same as override to utilize. She doesn't know the first thing about construction. How long will it take her to learn, if she has to figure it out by herself? Where does she even start with something like this?
Aloy watches the sunlight slowly creep away from her, shadows prowling in from the east to greet her instead.
Construction doesn't matter if she doesn't know what she's building.
The wind stirs her hair and the furs on her shoulders, and Aloy nods to herself, rubbing the strider's neck. She'll start at GAIA Prime. It's not the closest location she could hit, but it's the most important. It's not an easily navigated mess, either, and it'll probably take her weeks to examine all of its corners, but it's a solid plan. From there, she can make her way back to Sunfall and the Zero Dawn Project Facility, then to each of the Cauldrons, then to the Spire. While she's at it, she can keep eyes, ears, and Focus attuned for any hint of other subordinate functions causing trouble.
It's a start, she tells herself, even as she hesitates at the idea of not directly pursuing HEPHAESTUS or the other subordinate functions. She doesn't know what they're capable of, but if any of them are like HADES...
She wouldn't even know where to start there, Aloy reminds herself. Revisiting the Zero Dawn sites may give her something. Something that she missed or some new insight. Revisiting the Cauldrons might even draw HEPHAESTUS to her. At the very least, she'll have a working idea of what, exactly, needs to be fixed.
Aloy pulls herself out of her thoughts with some difficulty and looks with fresh eyes on the ranch. With a start, she realizes that evening shadows have engulfed it, that the sun has dipped below the horizon, dragging daylight down with it. The skeleton of Elisabet's old home is now a set of indistinct dark stripes against an indigo canvas, the trees standing as ominous and shadowy sentinels instead of welcome green sentiment.
Somewhere in that is Elisabet, guarded by a triangle of flowers. A fitting resting place, one that Aloy dares not disturb.
Her fingers dig into the globe, but Aloy turns. Her boots drag against the ground and the grass, but she forces herself to look at the strider, at its placid face hovering patiently at her side. Before mounting, she carefully tucks the globe away into a pouch, noting to herself that she'll have to fashion a cord for it, and then she's atop the strider. With a tap of her boots, it turns and faces east, and this time, Aloy doesn't let herself look back. All she'll see is shadows. Instead, she calls to mind the image of the ranch when she'd first arrived, wreathed in the pink and gold of earliest evening, purple flowers and green trees marking a haven in a dry emptiness.
GAIA's voice resonates in Aloy's mind long after the audio has gone silent, long after the ranch is far behind, swallowed up by the night.
"Somehow, you will find a way."
Nothing moves outside of Cauldron ZETA. Aloy crouches in a particularly thick patch of tall grass and listens, but no sound presents itself, save for her own quieted breath and the familiar chitters of nightlife. She flicks her Focus on again and traces its glowing patterns with her eyes, waiting for a stalker’s cloak to briefly flicker and shed, but nothing registers. No stalkers. Not even watchers.
Nothing. Only cool, silvery moonlight filtering through the canopy above, giving the deep greens and blues of the dell at night a sheen, illuminating the sparkling fireflies drawn to the red grasses.
Aloy leaves the Focus on and frowns. Her gut churns with misgiving.
Something is off here. XI and RHO had both been active when she’d revisited them, as if with renewed vigor, all signs of her efforts to override and calm them vanished. They’d been downright vicious, throwing machines at her as if something had wanted her to stay away. Just getting into them had been twice the challenge. But ZETA, worst of them all, stands innocuous. Unprotected.
Something is off.
Aloy leans back on her heels and deliberates as two fireflies dance in front of her eyes, points of gold in the dark. She has her suspicions about the Cauldrons she's revisited so far, about HEPHAESTUS. She wonders if it's become aware of her and her actions, if it seeks to thwart her, even though her purpose for revisiting the Cauldrons has nothing to do with it. Not yet, anyway. But it'll be a problem in the future. She can override the Cauldrons without difficulty once she reaches the core, but she'll never have the time or space to figure out how to use the Cauldrons herself, if HEPHAESTUS keeps resisting her control and throwing machines at her.
She stares at ZETA's entrance. It's closed again. She'll have to take the other way in.
Aloy hesitates for several more seconds, then scowls. Either she can stew here in uncertainty until the world ends again, or she can get going and let ZETA throw its surprise defenses at her. It's not like she has the upper hand in a waiting game against a self-sustaining machine facility, anyway.
She turns the Focus off and creeps forward out of the grass, fingers poised around riser and nock, muscles taut as bowstring, eyes sweeping the moonlit area.
She hears the telltale whoosh and creak of air and metal and twists her body around and up to get a lock on the source. But tremendous force barrels down between the trees, and all sense of direction flees from Aloy as something seizes and throws her. Her bow is lost, wrenched out of her hands, and she scrambles to regain direction, one hand clawing at the ground as she tumbles and the other grasping for her lance. With a snarl, she stops herself against a tree and springs up, ready to strike.
A calculating part of her mind has already assessed the situation: a stormbird lying in wait just out of range of Focus and senses, before she was ever aware of it. As if it knew that, some other part of her mind registers. Swooping down the moment she was occupied with moving.
Screeching and metallic flapping dominate the air now, far too much for just one machine. Aloy revises her assessment as she activates her Focus and zeroes in on their positions: two stormbirds. Of course.
Another screech joins the fray, and Aloy's stomach plummets as her strider comes barreling between the trees, drawn by the commotion. One of the stormbirds hovers close and low, unable to rise without difficulty due to the close proximity of so many trees, and the strider leaps at it.
"No!" Aloy cries out, and the ground threatens to give out beneath her as the stormbird turns its attention to the strider and rips into it like it's made of Carja silks instead of metal.
Aloy's vision narrows and darkens, and her ears scream. She lunges forward towards her fallen bow, unhooks her ropecaster, and afterwards, she can't quite remember the fight.
At some point, she realizes that parts of two dead stormbirds lay scattered between the trees and in the clearing in front of ZETA, their torsos crumpled before her. She stares at one of them as her breathing slows, as the ringing in her ears fades from a roar to a whisper. Three dead machines at her feet, and Aloy's throat is painfully clogged. She takes a few steps forward and drops to her knees next to the unmoving husk of her strider. It's still sparking, little flashes against the night, its sides torn open by stormbird talons. Aloy has only bruises and aches, no gaping gashes.
A hand raises to her mouth, as if to stem a tide, and she feels wetness under her fingers. She draws her hand back to look at it, expecting to see blood, but her fingers aren't red, only damp.
Since Sunfall. That's how long the strider has been with her. It had carried her to the assault on the Sacred Land, to GAIA Prime. Back to Meridian and to the Sacred Land again, not only to battle but to its aftermath. To Elisabet's home, the journey long and lonelier than usual, and then to the Zero Dawn ruins. Somehow the strider had made it that long, not least because she'd been careful with it and taken to fixing it periodically, and yet...
Damn it. Damn it, damn it. She should have paid more attention to where she was leaving the strider, left it farther away, out of range of hearing even a stormbird's shrieks. She should have known that the fight would draw it, that it would leap to her defense.
With a wordless, angry huff, Aloy stands and turns on one of the stormbird corpses. She kicks it, swearing. Then she delivers another kick, for the strider's stupidity, thinking that it could take on a stormbird. And another kick and another, for her own stupidity, bringing the strider so close to danger and getting so attached to a machine in the first place.
Then she stops, a rush of self-conscious foolishness turning her face hot, even though no one is watching.
Aloy loots the stormbirds for any materials that she needs, but she can't bring herself to do the same to the strider. She picks up the rucksacks scattered near it, which had been flung off of its back in the fray, and replaces the supplies that had spilled out. And then she realizes that she can't even carry half what she just gathered from the stormbirds or as much extra at all, for that matter. Not without another mount to share the load.
The thought makes her scowl.
Aloy discards what she can't carry, avoids looking at the strider, and turns her attention to Cauldron ZETA.
She walks to the Sacred Land. It's stupid, and it's time wasted, and she discovers that muscles used for walking can, in fact, grow unused to it when you spend your time riding everywhere, but she persists. She avoids every settlement that borders the Claim and the Sundom and hurries through Dawn's Sentinel as fast as possible, and finally, almost two weeks after ZETA, dives into Cauldron SIGMA.
It's easier to clear out than the others - meant mostly for the construction of smaller machines they say were once harmless, as far as she can figure - but the sawtooth she finds guarding its core is every inch a predator, a little bigger than others she's faced and built to kill. Its red eyes, gleaming and alert, promise an intelligence that will make the fight just as difficult as the other Cauldrons had been.
She overrides it.
It's an impulsive decision. She's too tired for a fight, and it feels like more of a victory against HEPHAESTUS, more of a revenge for her dead strider, than taking it out. I'm in control, not you. She has to use an obscene amount of wire to keep the machine pinned long enough for the override to take effect, but in the end, as the core carries them up, the sawtooth prowls unassumingly around her, no longer deranged.
The core offers a floor choice prompt, but Aloy ignores it. She pats the sawtooth's side absently, retrieves a rucksack stocked with provisions, and begins methodically making her way back through the depths of the facility.
She goes through the place again, cleared out and calmed once more - at least for now. As with the others, she finds nothing that can point her to where HEPHAESTUS hides, but she takes the same diligent records with her Focus, which is quick to organize them for her: scanning and saving images of wires and pipes, interfaces and power cells, and occasionally prying things open physically to see their insides with her own eyes. She works until she can no longer ignore whatever bodily need comes knocking next, stops for a while to tend to that, and resumes.
At some points, she can almost hear a sarcastic voice over her Focus, criticizing her indelicate handling of things. She finds herself wanting to respond to it, missing it, and that is the only thing besides hunger and other immediate needs that halts her momentarily. Missing Sylens. Now there's a perturbing thought.
The pattern repeats, working and pausing and working, all the way back to the core, saved for last - where Aloy finds the sawtooth curled up against the core, still overridden and un-deranged.
Aloy frowns. "You're still here?" she asks, and her frown deepens. The sound of her voice is strange, and it's not just the hoarse lack of sleep. It's... foreign. Like she's no longer used to it. How long has she been in the Cauldron? She's disturbed to realize that she doesn't know. She'd count backwards by meals to figure it out, but she can't remember how many times she'd stopped to eat.
Before she can ask her Focus, the sawtooth jumps to its feet and approaches her, antennas twitching. Maybe it's because Aloy hasn't slept for more than three hours in All-Mother knows how long, but it's like the machine is greeting her. It circles around her, as if it wants her attention.
"What?" she asks. "I'm not your mother." The words are squeezed out between yawns, and Aloy blinks rapidly and tries to think straight. Just the core left, and then she'll need to find a safe place to sleep. Mother's Crown is close by, but she balks at the idea of putting up with stares and bows and whatever else the Nora want to bestow upon the Anointed returning to the Sacred Land at long last. Hunter's Gathering isn't much farther, and Gera and Kendert are always happy to welcome her, but still, she hesitates.
She ruminates on that while she goes through the core, and the sawtooth follows a few paces behind her. Putting her back to it makes her itch with nerves, at first, but Aloy soon gets used to its presence. She would almost swear that it peers over her shoulder as she saws away at plating and analyzes the components of the core with her Focus.
Finally, when the investigation is thorough enough to satisfy her, Aloy goes to accept that floor prompt, which will lift her and the core to the entrance, and then she hesitates. The holographic option swims in front of her tired eyes.
The sawtooth dips its head and bumps it against her arm.
Aloy blinks a few times and shakes her head, observing the way the sawtooth hovers close. She's never seen an overridden machine act this way. They're loyal, and they'll fight other machines to the death, but this... unbidden, she remembers the time she'd tried to keep a lost fox kit when she was very young, before Rost had sternly told her to bring it back to its den. The wilds and their denizens don't belong to us, Aloy, he'd said. We must respect them.
She raises her right hand and rests it against the sawtooth's head, then swallows thickly and shoves the memory away, while her left hand finds the bone pendant that Rost gave her, hanging at her neck. Her head feels tight, like it's buzzing, vibrations to match the ones she feels below the sawtooth's metal coat. Her eyes strain to close despite every effort to hold them open, and she knows that she's not going to make it to any settlement, even if she wants to.
"Alright," she says, patting the sawtooth's head. "I'm trusting you. I hope this isn't a mistake."
She finds a corner of the core and falls asleep within seconds of resting her head on a rucksack.
Aloy skirts the Embrace and shuns the roads as she angles past Devil's Thirst, pushing through the earliest hours of the morning. When the Nora Hunting Grounds come into view, just as dawn is beginning to break, she slows. She can see the Keeper's house atop the promontory, and as she nears, she sees a figure rise from its crouch near a cooking pot, moving to the edge of the promontory to watch her approach.
She brings the sawtooth to a halt with a twisting of her knees. It responds as well as the strider had, ambling to a stop, and Aloy jumps off. "Stay here," she tells it, a little uncertainly, holding up her hands in a placating gesture. Its behavior is mostly inscrutable to her, but as she follows the path that winds up and around the promontory, the sawtooth doesn't try to follow. It remains at the base, watching her and obeying.
When Aloy reaches the top, the Keeper steps around the fire and moves to greet her. It's early enough that the merchant isn't even here yet, but the fire is already stoked, and well-cooked smells drift from the pot - boar meat, Aloy thinks. She isn't the only early riser. "You've learned some new tricks," the Keeper says lightly.
"I've learned a lot more than that," Aloy says with an attempt at a smile. It sits oddly on her face, like she's out of practice. Abruptly, she wonders if it's possible to forget how to go through the motions of interaction entirely.
The Keeper's face breaks into an answering smile. "I'd expect nothing less from the woman who won three Blazing Suns and went on to become a Hawk. I hear you saved the world, too." It's nothing like the reverence and awe that Aloy gets from other Nora, and it's not often that praise doesn't make Aloy irritated, but something about the Keeper puts her at ease.
She shrugs. "I helped. How have you been?"
"Good," the Keeper says with a nod, and momentary surprise settles onto his face, as if taken aback by the genuine feeling behind his own answer. It clears, and he continues. "The attack hit us all hard, even us on the outside, but things are getting back to the way they used to be. More or less." He offers another nod to Aloy. "The opening of the borders has changed a few things."
"Getting more business?" Aloy asks, stepping around any mention of her role in that.
"Some, yes," the Keeper says. "And I don't have to worry about moving freely through Nora territory anymore. But something tells me you didn't just come here to ask about my day."
Aloy shifts her feet and glances down at the waiting sawtooth. Its blue eyes, fixed on her, gleam in the pale pink light of early morning. "I need to ask you a little favor."
The Keeper follows her gaze, and when his eyes flick back to her, he looks amused. "Little?"
"Kind of big," Aloy amends. "Can you handle a sawtooth? In theory?"
"I've fought a few in my day," the Keeper says, thoughtful. "Fought bigger, too. Why?"
"I want to leave that one in the woods between here and Devil's Thirst for a few days, while I... get some things done," Aloy says. She has enough whispers trailing in her wake, and riding up to Mother's Watch on a sawtooth wouldn't help matters. Not to mention how unsettling most Nora would find it. "It'd be a big help if you could keep an eye on it, take it down if something goes wrong while I'm away."
The Keeper gives her a searching look. "They call you machine tamer," he says. "You ever have trouble with one you've tamed before?"
"Not usually," Aloy says. "But this one's... different. It's not a bad different, it's just... I don't understand why yet, so I'd rather be safe. It shouldn't give you any trouble, though." She doesn't expect it to revert back, if it hasn't already, and so she isn't actually worried about leaving it so close to the Hunting Grounds and, more importantly, to the Embrace. But it's better to be safe. "If you could just tell me how it behaves while I'm gone, that's the important thing. But I can take it somewhere else, if you'd rather not."
"Oh, I'll do it," the Keeper says. "Anything for the Anointed." Aloy narrows her eyes, and then she sees the teasing grin tugging at the Keeper's mouth. "Seriously, I'm not going to pass up the chance to see your magic in action," he continues. "But I have a condition." He pauses dramatically. "When you come back, you tell me how you tame machines."
Aloy smiles. "Deal."
The woods between the Nora Hunting Grounds and Devil's Thirst are quiet and empty of machines, with only the nearby tallneck's distant footfalls for company. Morning mist coils through the trees, glowing with the earliest sunlight, the source of which still lies hidden behind the mountains. There's plenty of space for the sawtooth to move around if it wants, though Aloy isn't sure what overridden machines like to do. The machines had originally served GAIA, for the purpose of restoring the biosphere, and in that context, the everyday actions of machines like grazers aren't difficult to interpret. But as far as Aloy can figure, from piecing together recollections of the Derangement and information left by the Alphas, sawtooths had been created by HEPHAESTUS.
The sawtooth doesn't seem to mind the area, at least, and Aloy takes a step back from it, holding up her hands. "Stay here," she tells it. "I'll be back in a few days." She has no idea if it can understand her or not, but it feels better to say it out loud. "Don't give the Keeper any trouble," she adds, for good measure.
The creature looks at her, unreadable. Behind her, the Keeper watches, fascinated. "Does it know what you're saying?"
Aloy shrugs. Sometimes she wonders if her Focus has helped with guiding overridden machines, has somehow managed to transmit her intentions to them. "Can't hurt to try."
They stand there for a moment, watching the sawtooth, which watches them in turn. Aloy takes another step back, and the sawtooth doesn't move, though it seems twitchy. Please stay, she begs it silently. She appreciates that it seems to have an attachment to her, but she really doesn't need it following her to Mother's Watch.
"Will it mind if I get close?" the Keeper asks.
"Go ahead," Aloy says, gesturing to the machine. "It might help."
The man does so without fear, which is impressive even to Aloy. She'd been a little hesitant about touching her first overridden machine, and that had been a strider. The Keeper approaches the sawtooth slowly, holding out his hand as one might with a wild animal, and it regards him calmly. Its head tilts when the Keeper places a hand on its neck, and it looks at him a little more closely, but beyond that, it doesn't react.
"Amazing," the Keeper breathes.
Aloy backs away some more, and the sawtooth stays. All it does is stretch a little as the Keeper runs a hand over it, morning light glinting off of its metal hide. Both of them are at ease, and Aloy relaxes too as she watches them. "Okay," she says, resting her hands on her hips as she observes the sight. "I think this'll work."