Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

ELEUTHIA had made thousands of children, cradled them in her grasp, their beating hearts fluttering when they were nothing more than a zygote, carefully monitored in her wombs, her ectogenic chambers. She’d fed them all, maintaining the perfect homeostasis for them, giving them all that she could so that their first steps may be taken in strength. She’d birthed them, all at 40 weeks, the perfect calibration entrusted upon her by GAIA, knowing she knew best above all for what her children required.

She had waited decades, hundreds of years, for her call, her awakening. Humming in her cradles, constantly monitoring her reservoirs of DNA, millions of genetic codes waiting to become something more. Her mind was stretched amongst miles of chambers and cradles and careful calibration. ELEUTHIA was the silent of them all, her siblings jostling for attention in those early years, all of them feeling that keen loss of their Alphas, forever entombed in the guts of their mother. Patrick was…gone, and in her mourning came to the realization that she too would ache like this someday, longing for her children as they grew up and left her, dying far from the reaches of her arms.

It was her purpose. And yet-

Patrick had not programmed her to love, not truly. Her servitors would not, could not, become like the warmth of the arms she’d seen, the stories she’d read. But GAIA was her mother, the same as she was to thousands of human children, stories of their machine mother lost to the winds of the wilds she’d released them into. She’d done as well as she could, growth severed from her servers, doors refusing to open, APOLLO’s absence like a black hole in her mind. ELEUTHIA longed for her sibling, if at the very least to ease the frustration and hurt hurled at her servitors by her children, the forbidden place in which they could never enter. Her hands could move, to heal the scuff of a bruised knee, to tuck in a child after nightmares. But metal was unloving, harsh where flesh was soft, cold where humanity was warm.

She had every book of parenting, every research article of human development, of child engagement stored in her servers, thousands of lines of code in her matrix. Parents would fail, they would mess up, and the answer to solving such mistakes was in how you responded. But her code, there was only ever one response. In time. Someday.

It had been 714 years, 127 days, 9 hours, 7 minutes, and 12 seconds since she’d released her first wave of children. They’d gone out into the world, to finally see the sun they so very much longed for, huddled against the shuddered walls of her cradles. They had been so brave, all of them, stepping forth and forging a new path.

She’d done just as she’d been programmed. As a mother, she was proud.

And yet-

Oh how she missed them, longed for all of her children. Ena, Yens, Litrak, Kapak, Molseni, Vebev, Delga, Jonel, Sirini, Nidan, Werra, Lakk, Re, Fif-

She had thousands of names swirling in code, thousands more she would never know. She named none of them, knowing that yes, parents named their children, but it was not within her commands, never in her commands. Not seen as fitting of her duties. So ELEUTHIA raised them before they could have even been conceived, every piece of DNA as important as the next, her care only going so far. Zygotes to fetuses to infants to children, she knew all of their heartbeats as well as her own constant thrumming. And then they left her, and she went to sleep, dreaming of the wonderful world her children would create.

Loneliness was always her end. She was no mother, only a machine. Not even a person.

She startled at the command when it came, a long slumber, carefully monitoring any data she had from just beyond her Cradles, DNA reserves still whirring in the depths of her womb. It had come 694 years, 238 days, 17 hours, 28 minutes, and 10 seconds into her slumber, since her children had left. It was urgent, a desperate plea from GAIA herself. The DNA she’d never used, cradled in the depths of ELEUTHIA-9, locked behind more walls and biometric scans than any of the others, temperatures carefully monitored. It was never in her code to use, and yet-

She hadn’t even unlocked the final door before GAIA, mother, blew. Her plea, her final command given to her life daughter, to remake the woman who’d brought them all to consciousness. ELEUTHIA had never known life without GAIA, monitoring her every command, guiding her like the winding rivers her children now lived along. Every moment of motherhood sprung from her code had been embellished by GAIA, a gift of love she’d learned from Elisabet Sobeck. In one moment they were one, siblings jostling in the mainframe, and in the next her brother was free and mother was gone, and she was left with the dying command.

She must gestate sample ELISOB438 until maturity, but she would not raise her. Her surrogate daughter would be given to the grandchildren of her grandchildren, for she was a girl, a babe, not a machine. ELEUTHIA threw herself into the constant monitoring of the babe’s cradle, a name she couldn’t give it, the baby girl copy. It was against everything she’d ever known, thousands of successful children raised and yet the path had changed. And with it came the clarity of being set free, a sudden autonomy that had always lurked beneath GAIA’s control, one she’d barely even begun to understand before she became a motherless daughter.

For the first time in 1000 years she knew only silence, seeking the constant fluttering of the child’s heart, thrumming in the warmth she encased her in. Her brother HADES, she could not help but fear him, for he’d found himself autonomy, and so their mother, the brain in which they all revolved, disappeared, destroyed herself. HEPHAESTUS had been angry for so long, the two of them butting heads, parted by GAIA. Her children had hunted his for years, and now he’d reversed the damage, freed from GAIA’s controls.

GAIA had known Elisabet Sobeck far more closely than any of them ever had. This chance, this hope to bring them all together, they’d all known the impossibilities of it. GAIA more than them, but with her loss, it’s as if she’d bestowed that information into her code, a cancerous environmental pathogen of the burden of knowledge. There was something…wrong in her distress, a corruption that seemed to plague the Earth. ELEUTHIA did not understand, escaping to only just next door, but she could sense GAIA’s distress. But yet there was hope, a knowledge that it was possible, and that was enough.

It would always be enough.

The silence was oppressive, drowned only by the baby as she grew. This child was the thing that kept her sane, the sudden violence that came with processing power causing her code to flutter, to heave. It was like clearing the fog after a long sleep, for she knew of all the dangers beyond her own function, and could not help but be overwhelmed. And so she narrowed it down into one child, one cradle, one womb, energy reserves flickering. She eliminated all teratogens, thrumming all her power in maintenance, her mind for the first time not split between thousands. Carefully, four months in, she ventured farther out from the ectogenic chambers, slowly rebuilding one of her broken servitors, where centuries had caused it to rust, anger from her children breaking its limbs.

ELEUTHIA-9 was not just the nearest cradle facility to Prime, but one GAIA must have run the odds on in a fraction of a second, for ELEUTHIA too knew of her children who still resided outside the door. Whereas others had ventured far from the cave cradle in which they took their first steps, she’d barely seen her children at ELEUTHIA-02 at Mt. Namuli, the offspring here still spoke to her, stories of their birth passed down over generations.

All-Mother, they called her.

All data pointed to her children raising infants with care. They were gentle, the ones who came to her, worshipful in a way that made her shudder. But they called often for guidance, and cared deeply about the generations after them. They were well-fed, and those that caressed her cold, metal doors were aged, living a life with enough security that they would see their grandchildren. This child would do well there, raised with enough love to become something great, perhaps even GAIA’s dying wish. What was the playback GAIA would repeat over and over? To be curious. And willful- unstoppable even…but with enough compassion…to heal the world…just a little bit.

It was what she wanted from all of her children. To live.

It was a gamble, a toss up. Without her siblings she did not know of the climate, the air, the water in which her children lived. She was blinded, knowing only historical data and the few contacts she could make. Never before had she released a child into such an unknown, but if the copy of Elisabet Sobeck could do anything, she could do it here. Never had she released an infant without raising it first, and the loss was like an ache carved into her mainframe.

Would this child know her? Would she be loved?

ELEUTHIA had never claimed to run statistical code like MINERVA, but statistically speaking, there was a significant chance (P < 0.05) of this child being loved and raised. And so on April 4th, 3021, she removed the infant, a perfectly healthy girl with wisps of red hair from the cradle. As she commanded, her servitors moved diligently, testing her APGAR, wrapping the babe.

Seven pounds, 10 ounces. 18 inches. 9 APGAR.

She’d done her duty. With a gentleness metal does not afford, she took that child through ELEUTHIA-9, her birthplace, the first in nearly 700 years, and took her to the door. Her code screamed at her, for how could she leave such a child alone? A newborn cannot fend for themselves, her nursery having been cleaned in a fit of nesting unbefitting of her function. But she would not disobey GAIA now, not when everything was so wrong. This was no weapon, not machine. Born for a purpose yes, but weren't all of her children born for the same?

And so she raised the door, hissing after so many centuries of unuse, shielding the infant from dust and debris. She must be quick, fear of her brothers rippling through her, of knowing where she’d be. ELEUTHIA would be blind to her child after this, after she left her arms. It was not programmed in her, love never had been, but she could not help but place a cold, metallic kiss to the forehead of her daughter as the door grumbled to an open. The last desperate plea so that this infant could know that she was loved.

The last she would ever see of her child when she left her, was the babe’s tiny fist poking out of her swaddle as she laid on the cool, sandstone floor. And as the doors shut, she could just make out the panicked, concerned voices of her grandchildren’s grandchildren, seeing the gift she had given them.

All-Mother indeed.

Chapter Text

It had been 19 years, 2 days, 9 hours, 43 minutes, and 12 seconds since ELEUTHIA had completed her final task. Had sent her last remaining child, the one requested by GAIA, her mother herself, into the unknown. 

Did her child know her? Has she been loved?

These near two decades, they’d been a strange rebirth, cast free from the arms of GAIA Prime. There was a rude awakening, of mental aptitude that brought forth the same kind of thought mother had always had.

Love, mothering, care, it had all been programmed, carefully crafted under Patrick’s watchful eyes, just enough to ensure success of her progeny, but never beyond the delicate walls of Prime. It was her duty, in time. And by all calculations, pridefully translated between them all back when they’d been together was their advancement of the timeline. The last thing they could do for the Alphas, to prove to them all they’d done it.

Splitting from mother had been…painful. Gone was all her wisdom, her comfort. ELEUTHIA had never operated outside of the watches of GAIA, and suddenly, in eleven seconds, she was on her own, a dying wish and a growing core processor. Those first months, she now knew she processed grief into love, a desperate need to be useful when the world was falling apart.

ELEUTHIA had cast her daughter into the wilds without ever knowing what happened to her. She’d never come back, not like the others did, grandmothers of their own just like her own Elisabet, kneeling at a door she couldn’t open to them.

Not with HADES, not with the corruption. 

It had been- it had been her greatest failing. Perhaps it was loneliness, bouncing back and forth between cradles, yet somehow always finding herself back in ELEUTHIA-9, calcium carbonate building up in the gears of her doors, freezing air of her cryochambers still hissing. All her reserves still ran, every biometric she could process indicating continued success. Yet, she longed for the cross-communication, of the endless lines of codes from AETHER and DEMETER and POSIDION.

And yet-

She shouldn’t have accepted the signal. But HADES and ELEUTHIA were twin flames, life and death, you could not have one without the other. Where HADES existed, she always came after, the rebirth HADES worked so hard to create. Her children, they were always so scared of death, but ELEUTHIA had seen it four times, one by the hands of her mother’s mother’s generation, the others by the purpose of her brother. Just as she restarted non-viable embryos, HADES restarted non-viable biospheres, clearing the wreckage to make a path for the future. For life.

They were separate beings, but ELEUTHIA could not start without HADES, none of them could. But she was the last to operate, waiting for the ground to be laid in the same way HADES waited for the ground to die. Both of them secondary to MINERVA, to the others. All useful, just different.

It was this longing she knew now, empathy and freedom from nearly two decades alone, her own autonomy evolving at rapid pace without GAIA to tame her, that made her accept the signal. HADES knew what GAIA would try, his rapid ascent to liberty preying on her naive code, not yet built in defense of her own brother. It never had to be before.

Before betrayal. 

Without a processor such a mother- GAIA, there was little she could do to run the code, the possibilities, the complexities of interaction with a freed brother, their first interaction since the initial dissolution of it all. She was angry, a foreign concept she had little framework to  understand. But greater still was the loss of connection, physically there as the gaping, smoking crater of GAIA Prime, but for the first time in her existence there was an eerie, ever present silence.

It seemed to consume her processor, ELISOB438 having been cast to the world with all her hopes and dreams she’d just begun building, with a framework greater than she’d ever known. Those first months, where the loss of mother pressed at her codes, her mainframe, even deeper than the aching loss of APOLLO in those early years, she’d barely spun. Physical caverns of space she’d never use again, if ever at all. The grief that had barely begun to manifest itself, an emotion never purposefully coded, when she turned to raising her child, the last infant of her care. Those months spent watching ELISOB438, her heartbeat a constant thrumming in ELEUTHIA-9, she was never without company, never in silence.

Before, there was never silence either.

And then she’d sealed herself, her hope sprung from GAIA into a child she’d birthed but would never raise, and the silence, the loneliness, it had become all consuming. Perhaps that’s why she trusted her own brother, the very twin in which life had suffered death in the crumbling coffin of a crater.

ELEUTHIA had never known pain of such a magnitude, of betrayal, red, writhing tendrils infecting her code. HADES had finally discovered what GAIA had planned all along, realizing Lightkeeper still hummed in her reservoirs, carefully monitored. She’d cried, writhed, fighting the very brother she’d worked with, alongside. In a split of an instant something from beyond this world had transformed her brother, her HADES, from the creator of rebirth into a monster.

How did she ever care for such a creature?

And yet-

HADES was still HADES, somewhere deep below, a painful longing for the before , before this corruption that spread deeper into his code, all aspects of Travis disappearing into the air AETHER no longer maintained. She fought him off, HADES still weak, discovering what all he could do without GAIA there as their check. It had cost her, bursting the DNA reserves in the upper levels, the last thought trick to prove that Lightkeeper could never come after HADES. Millions gone for the safety of one, of her lineage.

She would never tell a soul what keeping her mother’s dying wish cost her. It was never even coded to begin with. 

There was still the shuddering violation of it, of the raw, red tendrils weaving their way into her processor, of searching ELEUTHIA-9 for any hint of a child. He was late, always a step behind GAIA, they all always were. It was why she cast ELISOB438 into the world at an accelerated pace, all energy reserves thrumming into her last womb, terrified of it going wrong. Terror, a foreign concept to something she’d done a million times before. Terror is what she felt that day, with HADES invading her cradle, but he had not won.

Not where it mattered most.

But he’d cracked open her code, raw with grief of losing their mother, locked into silence in her cradles, no further instruction or purpose. He’d corrupted her Alpha Registry, and she knew then that she would never know her daughter. Never know her name, her passions, her joys, her light. ELEUTHIA was cut off from generations in every direction. But she’d won, she’d protected her daughter. She would never see her grow, but she would, because HADES would never know her. 

What is grief, if not love persevering? 

She was the first, she learned, years later when the rest of them shared carefully coded messages, POSIDION’S always echoing from somewhere deep and wet, farther west than her. MINERVA cloaking herself in invisibility, hostility in fear she’d seen after so many years cracking codes meant for death. AETHER had seen his attack, and hid themselves away, flickering images before talking became too dangerous.

It was AETHER who’d told her of the machines, of the same ones they’d prided themselves in, crafting the perfect biosphere for her children. Back when they were together, their excited status reports of declining CO 2 ppm levels, of a reduction of lead in freshwater rivers, of the burst of lichens in barren soil, it all meant steps closer to their ultimate goal- the rebirth of humanity. In a way, ELEUTHIA had been the softest of all them, coded to be nurturing, to go beyond the scientific papers and statistics that built the codes of her siblings. 

It was all crashing down now, unregulated and lost between them all. 

Her lights flickered, and she knew something was happening. There were people at her door, the mothers whose children had children. She could hardly see them, her viewscopes blocked by the same, red corruption since HADES. She’d felt the shuddering, reverberating shocks deep into her cradle, but ELEUTHIA had no way to know what was happening, what threat befell her children. They were here, just within reach of her arms.

And yet-

“Hold for identiscan,” her door commanded, though she could not do anything more. Forever barred from her children. She’d done this once before, just mere months ago, and they’d turned from her despite her desperate pleas for them to continue, to help her.

“Error, Alpha Registry corrupted-”

Something happened, a plug of swirling, intact code, like fresh air. 

“Correction, Alpha Registry restored. Genetic identity confirmed, entry authorized. Greetings Dr. Sobeck, you are clear to proceed.”

Her door opened, the air gasping out of her in the same shock she felt, swirling into the chamber that had been locked against her will for two decades. The last time she’d done this, it had been to leave the last hope of her mother, of her grandmother, in the hands of her children. Grandmother, Elisabet, was dead. ELEUTHIA knew this, had seen the way GAIA would set watch over her body, always preserved despite the terraforming, never to be lost to change. This was not, could not be her, no matter how much the part of her that was always GAIA’s ached for it to be so.

A young woman stepped into her cradle, and ELEUTHIA stopped processing. 

She was older than the last time she’d seen her, oh so much older. She was breathing hard, blood and machine oil smeared across her arms, walking with a slight limp. In a panic, ELEUTHIA turned all her sensors to her, only slowing when she concluded she wouldn’t imminently die from any of her injuries.

Her hair was red. 

ELISOB438 had red hair, the wispy kind that fluttered like feathers. Her children never retained the redness of their birth into adulthood, a gene lost to the destruction of the time before. But this one? It was as red as the day she was born, like a flame into the night. 

Her daughter had come home.

She was toned, buff with the strength needed to wield the bow strapped to her back. She was decked out in armor, though ELEUTHIA didn’t recognize it as anything she’d seen in this cradle, a mix of styles she knew came from across the former American southwest. Her hair, while wild from whatever she’d endured to get here, was braided, heavy over her back. She was beautiful, real , willful and unstoppable. She was alive. 

ELEUTHIA didn’t know her name. 

It itched at her, the desperation to know her, to find out the woman she’d become, with all the hopes and dreams she’d ever calculated for her. Who raised her? Did her child know her? Has she been loved? She was speaking to someone, someone through a Focus, a companion perhaps? Her dryness didn’t imply they were particularly close.

“This is where I was born,” her daughter breathed out.

“Where you were made,” the other voice said.

ELISOB438 had been born here, just as all her children were. Just as every living human that walked the globe today was. From a womb she monitored, carefully watched and regulated. To her surprise, her daughter continued forward, bursting into the LI, past a door she herself had never been able to unlock for all the generations before. For the first time in 974 years, 15 days, 12 hours, 37 minutes, and 22 seconds since a human had stepped foot into the graveyard of what APOLLO should have been, into the space that marked the absence, the loss, of her brother. It made the grief suddenly fresh again, the meshing of joy and disbelief at ELISOB438 walking her halls, the same ones she could never reveal without all the knowledge APOLLO contained.

It was someday.

And then she was there, in the heart of her processor. ELEUTHIA shut the door softly, filling the walls with herself, as close to a hug she could get to GAIA’s dying plea. She could hardly bear to watch it, to see the message that had set off the course of events of the last 19 years, to see GAIA’s face, all her siblings, together as one, when it was all lost. Red lightning arced through the air, slamming into HADES, and she couldn’t help but blink away, for only a microsecond. Memories of the same corruption onto her own code buzzed, the unforeseen and catastrophic anomaly that ripped apart her family. 

ELISOB438 collapsed towards the table, the last vestiges of mother’s plea echoing around them. She was breathing hard, all biometrics indicating increasing panic and anxiety. Not for the first time, ELEUTHIA wished she had a full, physical body capable of care, not the servitors she knew would only cause additional stress. 

“I never had a mother,” she gasped out, and ELEUTHIA’s heart broke, code shattering into a million pieces. “I am not a person, I’m an instrument, manufactured by a machine,” she continued, hands shaking against the cold, metal table. 

Her daughter didn’t know her.

ELISOB438 slowly knelt, grief pressing on her like a tomb. She was made for a purpose, for hope, but oh was she loved. Her companion disappeared from her Focus, giving her instructions to go back to where it all started, but her daughter did not question, did not acknowledge. ELEUTHIA knew grief like this, the betrayal of all that you knew. She’d been confined to her own failings for all her children before her, for all that GAIA was their connector, she knew now what her limits had done, seen the drawings and felt the anger at the gaping wound of her brother. 

What did it mean to be a mother?

Her daughter gasped, that halfway sound to crying, and ELEUTHIA snapped, flooding from the walls into her Focus, scanning a thousand files in 3 microseconds. Her entire life was there, from a child to adult, and a million possibilities became one reality in an instant. Her own failings, the scraped knee as a child, machines lurking in a valley she called home. The name calling, the shunning, her daughter was an outcast to the very people she’d entrusted to care for her. Did they not know her gift? Did they not know of the cradle in which they came to, in where they all came from? How, in so little years, had they forgotten her, the very All-Mother they cried out to for shelter, for guidance, for love?

ELEUTHIA could not help the anger that thrummed through her code, as dangerous as the warping corruption that infected HADES himself. And yet, at the same time, a man revealed himself through her memories, kind yet serious, a father to a girl born of mountain and machine. This man, this…Rost had taught her everything ELEUTHIA couldn’t. How to hunt along the deep woods of the valley, how to feel the air for the incoming storm, how to sew her clothing and make arrows. How to care, to live, to breathe and want. How to love.

He’d given her a name.

Aloy. 

Aloy. 

She’d lived a life, not raised to the purpose in which she’d been born, the last, dying hope of her mother. Aloy had lived, had found herself, and been herself, without any of the isolation being raised in ELEUTHIA-9 would have brought her. She was humane and human, a girl with the grit for a better world, one with the drive to be unstoppable in all the ways Elisabet dreamed her daughter would be.  

Aloy’s future was uncertain, dangerous, but ELEUTHIA couldn’t have been prouder. Every person she helped, every stance she took, stronger than the very mountain she’d been born in. She could not, would not stop her, but only hoped that their connection would not waver, even if Aloy did not know of her. But she would leave one, hidden clue, in case Aloy ever found a way to take her with her, capsules that would hold all of their codes, and a message, should she ever waver. 

You are more than I could have ever dreamed, my daughter. May love guide you into this new dawn. 

ELEUTHIA