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When she wakes, she can’t feel her hands.
Scratch that. She can’t feel much of anything.
She lifts her head, or tries to, expecting the pull of muscles frozen stiff after too many hours asleep in an awkward position. Draped over a holo-interface again, probably, face pressed to the cold embrace of her work console. Some nights, all the coffee in the world—what little is left of it—isn’t enough to keep her eyes open. So it’s no new sensation, waking up to find the circulation cut off in all her limbs.
But not being able to feel her lashes brush over the bags beneath her eyes, that’s new. Not being hit with the damp, loamy scent of canned subterranean air, that’s different too.
She looks down. Blinks. Registers two very strange things in quick succession.
One: her desk is nowhere to be found. In its place, she sees…light.
Light?
Not the fluorescent stuff spat from the bulbs stretching the length of every ceiling in her mountain prison. It’s real light, shining down from a cornflower-blue sky, so vibrant she’d forgotten that kind of color was possible. It stretches as far as she can see and beyond, a canopy over trees and rocks and rivers.
She’s forgotten what it feels like, just to stand under the sky and let the sun beat down on her. Yet when she tilts her face up to the blue, no warmth reaches her cheeks. She lifts her hand, and the sun shines right through it, illuminating only the glow of an empty space where skin and bone and sinew should be.
That’s when she remembers the second strange thing.
She no longer has a body. Not anymore.
It hits her all at once: the memory of herself sitting on the old bench outside her mother’s ranch, watching the sunset through her helmet. She’d lowered the visor’s opacity as far as it would go, so nothing would dilute the wild sprawl of Nevada twilight: even through the dead, ravaged atmosphere she could see it flare, rose and indigo and fire-gold. Then when the light was gone for good and stars spread across the sky, she’d toggled her environmental suit’s shutdown protocol, letting the oxygen levels run out. Letting her head fall back, her eyes drift slowly closed, the ashes of the world blurring together until they were one with the night.
It’s a strange thing, remembering her own death. More than strange. At any other time, she’d want to catalogue it, to study and dissect it until she grabs hold of the impossible and makes it real, because that’s what she does, but right now—
“Elisabet?”
Right now she has more pressing matters to attend to. Namely how, and why, and when.
She turns toward the voice behind her.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Aloy asks.
It must be at least the thousandth time she’s thought the words, more to fill up anxiety’s empty spaces than anything else. She isn’t normally given to nervousness, but this isn’t a normal situation. Even by her standards.
She doesn’t realize she’s spoken the question aloud this time until GAIA’s gaze lands on her. The AI’s expression is steady and serene as always, tinged with compassion and just a hint of fond exasperation.
“It will work,” GAIA says. “Elisabet created me. She shared with me her memories, her thoughts and feelings, her doubts and hopes, the stories of her childhood. I knew her as well as she could be known, and I have lost none of that knowledge, Aloy. I calculate this subroutine will mimic Elisabet’s personality, thoughts, and mannerisms with 99.85 percent accuracy.”
“99.85 percent?” Aloy echoes. She wrinkles her nose, mouth twisting in something between a smirk and a grimace. “You’re doing better than me, then.”
GAIA lifts an eyebrow. “Elaborate?”
“I’m only a 99.47 percent accurate copy of Elisabet,” Aloy says. “At least according to what the Focus showed me under All-Mother Mountain.”
“Ah,” GAIA says. Her smile softens. “Do not fear,” she adds. “Elisabet trusted me.”
And you should, too. The gentle, unspoken chastisement lingers between them, suspended like dust motes in the early morning sunlight.
Aloy breathes out, settles the end of her spear on the hard-packed earth, steadying herself with its solid consistency. Disquiet rumbles in her stomach with all the force of a Rockbreaker, and she clamps her jaw, pushing it away.
“You’d think after saving the world, everything else would come easy,” she mutters.
GAIA chuckles, the corners of her eyes crinkling even though she doesn’t have skin. For some reason she can’t quite name, Aloy finds it comforting.
“Are you ready?” GAIA asks.
She’s completely not ready, but she’s also been ready for her entire life. Aloy raises her chin, fingers tightening around her spear. “Do it.”
GAIA’s reaction is instantaneous. Her hands unclasp, arms unfurling, and a flash of brilliant light and color splits the pale dawn sky.
Aloy stiffens. Instinct bellows at her to flinch back, to throw an arm up to cover her eyes, but she squashes the impulse. She can’t, won’t miss a single moment of this, no matter how much it might hurt her eyes.
It lasts no more than a split second, anyway, the swath of light resolving to a single holographic form, bent over, head bowed. Yet even hunched, the silhouette is achingly familiar, and Aloy’s breath snags in her chest.
The holographic form straightens, head lifting, shoulders straightening. Just behind her, GAIA waits patiently, a splash of green and purple against the blue sky.
“Elisabet?” she says.
The holograph whips around, so fast that her hair momentarily disappears into her shoulders in a blitz of light. Her eyes widen, locking on GAIA, and a slow smile stretches across her face.
Don’t stare, whispers a little voice at the back of Aloy’s head, but it’s impossible not to. In all the old recordings, all the ancient scans she’s dug up in one ruin or another, the ones she watched over and over until she committed every fragment to memory, she knows one thing without a doubt: none of them ever once showed Elisabet smiling.
But she’s smiling now, a grin full of wonder and disbelief and recognition.
“GAIA,” she says, her voice thick and worn, and Aloy’s throat closes up at the sound. So familiar, yet so different all at once. “GAIA, what year is it?”
GAIA’s smiling, too. “It is the year 3042.”
Elisabet closes her eyes. “Then Zero Dawn worked.”
“Of course. Did you ever doubt?” Warmth floods GAIA’s voice. “It is as I’ve said: in you, all things are possible.”
“Possible,” Elisabet echoes. She lifts her hands again, watching the holographic light winking in the sun. “Speaking of, how did you do this? I remember—I remember dying.”
“Ah. In answer to that question, there is someone who would very much like to meet you.” GAIA turns, and Aloy watches Elisabet’s gaze travel over the AI’s shoulder.
She knows—almost like she knows herself—that Elisabet was (is?) rarely surprised by anything. She’d taken the end of the world in her stride, meeting it with the steel of her resolve when others would have fallen into despair or hysteria. Yet when their gazes lock, Aloy can see Elisabet’s eyes widening.
She knows those eyes, sees them every time she peers into a looking glass or glances down at the calm surface of a lake. She stands fast, shoulders tight, chin raised, as Elisabet’s eyes rake her up and down.
“The Lightkeeper protocol?” Elisabet finally says. Her voice is unreadable.
That might be the most nerve-wracking thing of all.
“I will leave the two of you to get acquainted,” GAIA says. And yes, Elisabet thinks, that is definitely a hint of mirth in her voice. “You must have a lot to speak about.”
Elisabet makes a noise deep in her chest. Her rush of affection for GAIA hasn’t faded—the AI was the closest thing she had to a friend and confidant, back in those final days—but right now, there’s a heady dose of exasperation to go along with it.
She looks back to the young woman in front of her. That face, so like her own—no, it is her own. Just a good twenty years younger.
It’s the Lightkeeper protocol. It has to be. No way one of the humans seeded in the post-post-apocalyptic world GAIA restored just happens to be an exact match to her genetic code. But—
“How?” she wonders aloud. “I canceled that protocol long before it was put into effect.” And what’s up with that outfit? she thinks. Why the hell is this younger version of herself wearing what looks like leather and furs sewn together with machine parts?
“It’s a long story,” the clone says, as though reading her mind—and isn’t that a surreal thought? “How much do you want to hear?”
Elisabet can’t breathe—not technically, not when she’s an AI subroutine and doesn’t have lungs—but her holographic body does a damn decent job of mimicking the feeling of a deep inhalation. She looks into the clone’s eyes, sees…well. A whole lot of things. Some of them are familiar, some not so much.
Interesting, to say the least.
“Better tell me all of it,” she says. “But first, start with your name.”
The clone’s face is caught somewhere between open and guarded, but at that, her expression warms into something that brightens the green of her eyes. It takes Elisabet a moment to identify the emotion there, something so rare on the face she used to stare at blearily in the mirror every day.
Hope.
“Aloy,” the clone says. Her voice is hushed. “I’m Aloy.”
The morning chill bears no responsibility for the goosebumps rising on Aloy’s arms. She holds her breath, waiting, eyes trained on Elisabet’s face.
And then her mother-not-mother smiles.
“Aloy,” she repeats, and Aloy’s blood runs hot, then cold, then hot in the space of a breath. “It’s nice to meet you, Aloy.”
“You, too,” Aloy says. I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life, she doesn’t say, because that feels like too much, too soon, like if she gives voice to the thought it might take something out of her that she can never get back.
But if Elisabet notices the inadequacy of the words, she doesn’t say so. She only turns her head, taking in the world Zero Dawn rebuilt. The world she rebuilt. The sun is still climbing higher in the sky, cresting the mountaintops, bathing the world in pink and gold.
“Can we walk?” Elisabet finally says, gesturing at the expanse of nature stretching out before them. “I want to see it. All of it.”
“Of course.” Aloy drags her spear from the ground, tucking it back into place across her shoulder blades. “Follow me.”
The thought of ‘resurrecting’ Elisabet inside one of the Old Ones’ dank mountainous fortresses had been a depressing one to say the least, so she’d tinkered with machine parts and ancient holo-projectors until she had perfected a way to make it all portable. She activates her Focus, fingers flying and pushing at the air until Elisabet is fully untethered, the projection of her feet resting on the soil.
“I wish I could feel it,” Elisabet says, suddenly. She kneels down, resting her palm on the ground. The holo-light shimmers, and when she lifts her hand again, there’s only undisturbed dirt, no imprint where her fingers would have been, a thousand years ago.
“It’s mostly just cold and damp,” Aloy says, wearing half a grin. “Morning dew. In a few hours it’ll be warmer. A little.”
Elisabet straightens. Her face is harder to read, now.
“After you,” she says.
Back then, there wasn’t a lot of time to sit around and daydream about what the new, rebuilt world might look like, fresh and unspoiled by human corruption. There’d been far too much work to do in far too little time. Yet in the few moments when she’d taken space to breathe, Elisabet had sometimes imagined it in brief images here and there: rolling hills in lush green shades; bright clean rivers that never shriveled up with drought or overflowed with climate change. Trees growing tall and strong; fields dotted with wildflowers in every color.
The reality, the length and breadth of this new world she’d never expected to see, is beyond everything she had imagined.
“GAIA outdid herself,” she murmurs, bending down to peer closer at a fire-red blossom growing along the roadside.
“You did,” Aloy says. Her voice surges, brief but fierce, and when Elisabet turns, she sees spots of pink on the younger woman’s cheeks. “All of this is because of you.”
“It was my plan, but GAIA did the heavy lifting.” Elisabet steps further down the path, noting footprints marring the dust. No pavement, no proper roads. No tire tracks, no bicycle treads. In the distance she sees the derelict remains of a building, jagged twists of metal and brick rising up into nothing. And beyond, on the horizon, filmy wisps of smoke drift into the sky, reminding her of late-night campfires.
“Where exactly are we?” she asks, half-turning to cast her eye over the snow-capped mountains looming over them. “Colorado?” Or, at least, what used to be Colorado?
“I think so,” Aloy says, but the hesitation is plain in her voice. “I was hoping you could tell me, actually. There’s still so much we don’t know about the Old—about what the world was like, back in your time.”
Some things don’t change over millennia: Elisabet is still an expert at bracing herself for news she doesn’t want to hear, just as much now as she was back then. She faces Aloy squarely, lips thinning.
“APOLLO?” she begins. But Aloy is already shaking her head.
“We’ve tried everything,” she says. “But…”
Elisabet closes her eyes. “What happened?”
Somehow, even before Aloy speaks, some part of Elisabet knows. She can see it in Aloy’s eyes, an aching empathy as deep and vast as the Grand Canyon. It’s startling, almost, to see an expression so open, so earnest on her own face. They may share the same DNA, but this version of herself hasn’t let the world beat anger and despair into her.
“After you…died,” Aloy is saying. “Ted Faro…”
Elisabet barely hears the rest over the roaring in her ears.
“There’s a recording of it,” Aloy finishes, her face still creased with compassion and worry. “But I don’t know if you want me to show it to you. It’s…hard to watch.”
Elisabet is already shaking her head. “No, I need to see it. Show me.”
A sad smile flickers across Aloy’s face. “I had a feeling you would say that.”
Aloy still remembers the shock and grief of watching the old recording for the first time, the helplessness that gripped her as she watched the Alphas’ murder playing out before her eyes. Deaths that happened hundreds of years before she was even born—created, not born—and yet the horror of it felt as fresh as though she was watching it unfold in real time.
She can hardly even imagine how much worse it must be for Elisabet. Elisabet, who actually knew all of these people, who spent hours and hours of her life with them, working alongside them, lending them her strength and encouragement.
When it’s over, Elisabet is silent for a long time. Aloy waits, leaning on her spear, fingers clenching and uncurling at her sides, over and over.
“It’s my fault,” Elisabet finally says. She’s still facing forward, away from Aloy, staring into the empty distance where Ted Faro once was.
Indignation jolts through Aloy, sharp as electric shock. “What? No, it isn’t.”
“I knew Ted better than any of them.” Elisabet’s voice is dull, wooden, but laced with a grief she won’t let surface. “I knew what he was capable of. I never thought he would take it this far, but I should have known. I should have seen this coming.”
"You weren’t even there.” Aloy clenches her jaw. Restless energy charges through her, and she paces a few steps, throwing thick knots of hair over her shoulder with an impatient shove. “Even if you had been, it was his crime, not yours. He was…”
She stops, swallowing hard. She can’t find words for Ted Faro.
Elisabet laughs, but it’s a dry and brittle sound. “He was a lot of things,” she says. “But the signs were there. I should have warned them, before I—before I left. It would be easy to say there just wasn't time, but I could have done something.”
It’s probably a futile gesture, to offer physical comfort to someone whose body is a hologram, but Aloy can’t stop herself. She steps forward, reaches out to touch Elisabet’s shoulder.
Her fingers pass right through, but she lets them hover there, a reminder of her presence.
I’m here. It may not be enough, but I’m here.
Seconds tick by, and then Elisabet lifts her hand, her fingers brushing over Aloy’s.
Back on the path, the silence outside is a deep, almost tangible thing, a perfect opposite to the storm in Elisabet’s thoughts. Aloy walks by her side, close but not too close. She says nothing, but she shoots concerned glances in Elisabet’s direction every few moments.
“You’re not very subtle,” Elisabet finally says. She lets a little warmth into her tone. “Not surprising. I never was, either.”
Aloy tilts her head and smiles a little, unashamed. “I know it’s probably a pointless thing to ask, but…are you okay?”
“I just need some time to process.” They’re walking along the edge of a valley, and Elisabet stops, stares down into its expanse, eyes drifting over the little villages made of thatch and mud brick and machine parts. “This world is beautiful beyond what I’d ever imagined. Still, it’s hard not to look at all this and wonder how it might be different if Ted hadn’t destroyed APOLLO.”
Aloy stops beside her. The sun is risen high in the sky now, and Aloy shines so bright she’s almost blinding: green eyes sharp with curiosity, the same freckles Elisabet was teased about standing out on her skin, flame-red hair effortlessly tamed in a way Elisabet’s never was.
“Can you tell me about what it was like?” Aloy says. “I’ve found scraps of the old world here and there, but a lot of it doesn’t make much sense.”
Elisabet closes her eyes. Thousands and thousands of years of human history, of failures and triumphs, of art and technology, of travel and discovery and innovation, all distilled down into one not-quite-alive woman standing with her clone on the slopes of what used to be the Rocky Mountains, in ex-Colorado, ex-United States of America. Just figuring out where to start is an impossible challenge.
But she’s never shied away from the impossible before. She won’t start now.
They’re still talking when the moon overtakes the sky, and the yells of the crickets threaten to drown them out.
“There were times when I asked myself what I was doing,” Aloy hears herself say, slowly. “Times when I’d be bleeding so hard I couldn’t see straight, running out of arrows, diving out of the way of a Snapmaw and thinking, ‘this is it, I’m going to die and all of this will have been for nothing.’”
She shifts in place, leaning forward to feed another twig into the campfire. It’s strange, to finally say these things. It’s never felt quite right to tell them to anyone else. Not even to Talanah with her ready smiles, or to Avad with his patience, or to Erend, who looks at her like she set the sun and the stars in the sky. Not even to GAIA, the driving force behind her existence.
“But the hardest moment,” she continues, “was learning that the reason I didn’t have a mother was because I was never actually born. I was just a tool, a thing. A copy, made for one specific purpose.”
She falls quiet. The fire snaps and pops in place of her voice, its sparks billowing skyward, joining the vast sprawl of stars.
“A tool doesn’t have free will,” Elisabet says. Her voice is soft, but just as full of conviction as it was in every one of the ancient recordings. “You do.”
A sliver of doubt threads through Aloy’s mind. “Someone had to stop HADES. That’s what GAIA made me for.”
“And you did it,” Elisabet says. “But not because you have the same DNA as me. Not because that’s what GAIA created you to do. You did it because that’s what you chose to do. You could have run away or sat back and done nothing, but you didn’t. You saw what needed to be accomplished, obstacles and all, and you didn’t stop until it was finished.”
She wraps her arms around her knees, watching Aloy across the fire.
“Besides,” she says, “a tool is put away after the job is finished. It doesn’t have any say about when or where it goes. But you? Now that the immediate threats are neutralized and GAIA is restored, you have the entire world out in front of you. And all of this, as beautiful as it is, is just one tiny corner.”
She extends her hand, sweeping it in a gesture that encompasses the whole horizon.
“You are what Zero Dawn was for,” she says. “You and everyone else who’s living right now, for all the people still yet to come. I fought for this world, fought so that human life could continue. And you, Aloy, are as human as anyone else. No matter how you came to be.”
She smiles, the firelight dancing on her face.
“And on top of it all,” she says, “you gave me the chance to see it through. You let me see that for all the sacrifices, for all the pain and loss, Zero Dawn worked. Life went on. And I’m grateful for that.”
The world blurs at the corners of Aloy’s vision, and she closes her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
She doesn’t quite trust herself to open her eyes yet, but she can hear the sincerity in Elisabet’s voice when she answers.
“Aloy,” she says. “Thank you.”
“There’s one more thing I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Aloy says. Then she pauses, a rueful smile crossing her face. “Actually, there’s still a lot more than one. But this is one of the most important.”
The fire has burned down into embers, and the sky is beginning to lighten, the stars fading out as black eases to gray. But if Aloy feels tired at all, she hasn’t shown it. Elisabet hides a smile, remembering her own early adulthood, when pure adrenaline and drive and the need to problem-solve took the place of sleep, when time seemed like it would go on forever and possibilities were endless.
“Go ahead,” she says. “Ask me anything.”
She watches as Aloy takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders.
“Do you want to stay activated?” she asks. “Because I remember, in your final transmissions back then, you said you were tired. You wanted to go home. And I…I brought you back without asking. You had just as little say in it as I did when GAIA created me.”
She exhales, her breath stirring the dying coals. “So if you want me to shut you back down, just say the word.”
Elisabet raises her eyebrows. “Is that what you want?”
“No.” Aloy’s eyes flare, bright even in the pre-dawn darkness. “There’s so much more that I still want to know. But if anyone’s ever earned their rest, it’s you. You said that I have a choice, that I have free will beyond what GAIA made me for. I want you to have that same choice.”
Elisabet lifts her eyes, looks to the sky. She remembers her final night on the bench outside her mother’s ranch, the blaze of that last sunset piercing through the world’s poisoned atmosphere. Dawn will come soon, she knows, bringing color back to the horizon. But this time the sun will filter through living trees, wake sleeping animals, shine down on people making their own way through their lives.
More than anything, she wants to watch that happen.
She meets Aloy’s eyes across the fire pit.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
And the smile that spreads across Aloy’s face is the brightest thing of all.