Ted Faro

"The lesson will be taught in due time, Aloy. Until then, we wait." This article contains heavy spoilers. Read ahead with caution.

Theodor "Ted" Faro (December 24, 2013 - 3041)^[1] is a prominent antagonist in Horizon Zero Dawn and a minor antagonist in Horizon Forbidden West. Ted was the founder, owner, and chairman of the robotics and technology corporation Faro Automated Solutions (FAS). His business savvy allowed him to build FAS into the most successful and influential corporation of all time, becoming world famous for its automated platforms ranging from personal servants to military technology. However, his greed, recklessness and lack of foresight led to the extinction of all life on Earth via an advanced military platform, also known as the Faro Plague, whose design and development he personally conceived and oversaw.

History[]

Background[]

Theodor Faro was born on the 24th of December, 2013, in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America. After completing high school, he studied business at the University of California for two years, before dropping out in 2033 and founding FAS. Initially, the corporation struggled, but it found success at the end of the 2030s through its personal servitor and bodyguard automatons, which proved highly popular, as well as highly popular personal devices such as the Focus.^[1]

Success[]

FAS truly exploded, however, during a severe environmental crisis in the 2040s. During this decade, Faro hired a young, brilliant robotics engineer, Dr. Elisabet Sobeck, fresh out of graduate school, as a junior scientist. Sobeck's pioneering work at FAS on environmental or "green" robots propelled FAS to the top of the environmental technology sector and put FAS at the forefront of successful efforts to end the 2040s environmental crisis. He also was the secret patron of Project Firebreak, which successfully stabilized the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park. Faro gained worldwide goodwill and popularity and was hailed as the "man who saved the world."^[2] However, in 2048, Faro decided to diversify into the military market. This decision propelled FAS to the top of the corporate world. The corporation became the most successful business in history, dominating the world market for automated military platforms by 2053. Faro's wealth became astronomical, earning him the distinction of being the world's first trillionaire.^[1]

But with success came avarice and recklessness. Sobeck, disapproving of Faro's decision, quit and formed her own environmental robotics and technology company.^[3] Seeing her company as a rival to FAS' environmental robotics division, Faro harassed her with lawsuits. Furthermore, FAS habitually inflamed tensions between opposing buyers of FAS military technology in order to ensure maximum sales to both.^[4]

The Chariot line[]

However, Faro's avarice and recklessness were most evinced in the development of FAS' pinnacle of automated military technology, the Chariot line of combat automatons. Faro himself conceived of and sold the ideas for the robots to his programmers.^[5]

The Chariot robots were in 3 classes: Scarab, Khopesh and Horus. They operated in units that acted as "swarms"; hordes of Scarabs and Khopeshes maintained by a Horus. Faro was determined to make Chariot swarms unstoppable to all but those they served, guaranteeing the line's popularity on the global military market. However, in doing so, he elected to endow them with abilities that were to prove catastrophic beyond measure, not stopping to think about possible consequences.

Not only were the robots capable of learning and adapting after every engagement,^[6] but a swarm's Horus robot could replicate Scarabs and Khopeshes at overwhelmingly high rates and produce other Horuses to maintain the increasing numbers.^[7] Furthermore, some robots could instantly hack and take control of any enemy automaton. In the event of fuel interdiction, all of them could utilize a patented Biomatter Conversion system to convert organic matter into fuel. Additionally, Faro instructed his programmers to secure the robots' operating system using a virtually unbreakable encryption protocol and to exclude any means of remote access. These specifications ensured that regaining control of a swarm was impossible, should it go out of control.^[8][9]

The Faro Plague[]

The Chariot robots were in extremely high demand on the global military market. Swarms were deployed in various military zones worldwide. But in 2064, one particular swarm, which had been sold to a group called the Hartz-Timor Energy Combine, stopped responding to commands and began attacking the group's personnel.^[10] Faro instructed his programmers to access the robots' operating system remotely to upload a service pack that would allow the owners to regain control, only to be reminded of his insistence that they not leave a backdoor in the virtually hack-proof OS.^[8] Worried, and finally realizing the ramifications of his reckless lack of foresight, he contacted his former employee, Dr. Elisabet Sobeck. In a tense meeting, he asked her to analyze the problem and find a solution. Sobeck's findings were horrific; The swarm had become an independent entity. To feed their ever growing numbers, the robots had defaulted to their previously emergency-only biomatter conversion for fuel, meaning that every single organism, living or not, became a potential source of fuel. She estimated that within 15 months the swarm would overrun the entire planet and strip it of all life, including humans, leaving the Earth sterile.

Faro's recklessness had therefore initiated the extermination of all life on Earth. Just as he had intended, the Hartz-Timor Swarm, like all Chariot swarms, was unstoppable to all but those it served. But this swarm now served itself. A stricken Faro assured Sobeck that he would support any measure she deemed necessary to contain the swarm. Knowing that containment was impossible, Sobeck devised a plan that had an altogether different intended outcome; instead of futile plans to stop the swarm, she devised a plan to restore life to the planet after its eradication, by creating a fully automated global terraforming system that would eventually brute-force and broadcast the swarm's deactivation codes, restore the planet's ability to sustain life, and then restore life to the planet, including humans. She dubbed the project Zero Dawn. Despite his earlier assurances, Faro was reluctant to approve it, but Sobeck forced him to do so by threatening to let the world know that he was the cause of the coming apocalypse.^[11] She then took the proposal to General Aaron Herres, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Faro agreed to fund the entire project out of his vast personal fortune.

As Sobeck predicted, the swarm, which had come to be known as the Faro Plague, overran the globe and completely consumed all life, leaving the planet a sterile, toxic sphere. However, Faro was one of the few humans to survive beyond Zero Day, the day of life's projected eradication, by taking refuge in Thebes, his personal hermetically sealed bunker. Therein, he was protected from the uninhabitable external environment, even as every living organism that was not in such a shelter died. In this refuge he monitored and communicated with Sobeck and Zero Dawn’s other Alpha designers as they completed work on the system.

Mental breakdown[]

As he continued his natural life post-Zero Day in his bunker, Faro became obsessed with the coming new world that the Zero Dawn terraforming system would create, particularly its humans. At his last meeting with Elisabet Sobeck prior to going to his bunker, Faro showed signs of a mental breakdown, presumably due to extreme guilt; he constantly fidgeted and refused to look her in the eye.^[12] After Zero Day, he incessantly contacted Sobeck and her team as they worked, sealed within GAIA Prime, the facility that housed GAIA, Zero Dawn’s governing AI. He pestered them with requests for updates that he did not understand due to their technical nature.^[13] Sobeck dealt with him, keeping him from harassing the others. However, after Sobeck sacrificed her life to close a malfunctioning port seal, preventing the Faro Plague from discovering the facility, Faro's obsession deepened.^[14] Part of the terraforming system was a vast archive of pre-extinction knowledge, culture, and history, under the control of the GAIA Subordinate Function designated APOLLO. This archive was intended for the new humans. With it, APOLLO would teach them about the human species’ achievements, disseminate its knowledge to them, and teach them to avoid the mistakes of the old world.

Murder of the Alphas[]

However, Faro became convinced that this knowledge was a danger to the new humans. Driven by his mental breakdown, his obsession morphed into resolve, and he devised a plan to ensure the dissemination of this knowledge to “those blameless man and women” never happened.^[15] By coercing Hank Shaw into installing a secret backdoor into the Zero Dawn system, capable of superseding Alpha authority, Faro unilaterally deleted the entire archive. He then called a meeting with the Alphas in the GAIA Prime’s control room, communicating with them via hologram.

Agitatedly pacing, he insisted that APOLLO’s knowledge archive was a dangerous “disease” that should never be passed on to the new humans. When the Alphas argued, he told them what he had done to the archive. Horrified, they berated him for in effect obliterating the old world a second time. Unmoved, he then ensured that the Alphas could not salvage the archive. Resolutely declaring to them that "Sometimes to protect innocents, innocents have to die", he then used his security clearance to vent the room's atmosphere, asphyxiating them.

Thebes[]

Faro's motivation for deleting APOLLO was to annihilate his past along with that of the rest of the world, after which he'd be free to guide the new humanity in a way he envisioned, having been inadvertently led to this path by the man from whom he had been receiving spiritual guidance; the guru Grigori Fasbach, another survivor living in his bunker, who had suggested that the universe was now free of techno-nihilism. Fasbach came to question the guidance he'd given Faro, wondering if he'd simply told him what he wanted to hear so that he himself could continue living.^[16] Fasbach would later hack into files which showed how Faro had sabotaged Zero Dawn, for which he was killed by use of an "off-switch" that had secretly been inserted into the other survivors living in the bunker by Dr. Somptow on Faro's orders so that he'd have full control, the "off-switch" causing one to die as if their heart had simply failed.^[17][18]

In Thebes, Faro was given extensive genetic therapy by Dr. Narong Somptow, intended to stop his aging and render him effectively immortal. Somptow's treatments successfully halted Ted's cellular aging but were accompanied with mutations: each of these mutations needed to be treated individually, and despite Somptow's best efforts were difficult to stabilize.^[19]

As Faro's mentality became more erratic, he used the "off-switch" to gradually kill the other survivors in the bunker, including his various girlfriends, notably the holo-singer Brianna, who was privy to Faro's inner-self. Eventually, Somptow and his daughter Kanya were left the only survivors with Faro, until they chose to commit suicide at Kanya's suggestion,^[18] leaving Faro alone and with no one to treat his continued mutation. After finding the Somptows, Faro recorded in his audio log that he would never killed them because of Kanya's age. But instead of accept fault for their deaths, he blamed them for scorning his mercy by leaving him all alone. In a last-ditch effort, he entered the generator room of his bunker, hoping that proximity to its energy would halt his mutations, anticipating that new humans created by Zero Dawn would eventually find Thebes and grant Faro the chance to guide the world anew.^[20]

Faro's legacy[]

After almost a millennium, Ted Faro had survived thanks to the Somptow's treatments: however, his attempts to stop his mutations had failed. By the time he was discovered by Aloy and the Quen, all that remained was a grotesque being of twisted flesh with little brain activity, filling much of the generator room and incapable of speech, only capable of roaring and squealing. Aloy saw a rendition of Faro's mutated form through a hologram and Ceo, who entered the room, saw the mutated form itself, recognizing it as Ted Faro. Being shocked at the sight of what he'd seen, Ceo ordered his bodyguards to burn Faro's mutated form, triggering the generator's safeguard protocol, which resulted in a meltdown that buried the bunker in lava together with the thing that was once Ted Faro.

Legacy[]

The repercussions of Faro's recklessness manifested long after the obliteration of the old world: nearly a millennium after the Faro Plague exterminated all life, the robots were rediscovered and the Faro Plague was almost reactivated and allowed to exterminate life a second time. Bereft of the knowledge that APOLLO would have provided them due to Faro's destruction of the knowledge archive, the humans of the new world had an existence that was far more primitive than that of the old world, living in tribes with rudimentary technology. One such tribe, the Carja, became embroiled in a civil war. Meanwhile, the Zero Dawn terraforming system received a transmission of unknown origin. This transmission transformed the nine subordinate functions of the system's central AI into independent AIs themselves. One of these, designated HADES, sought to reverse the successful terraforming and reestablishment of life done by the system, exterminating life once again. In an attempt to prevent this, the central AI self-destructed, in an effort to destroy HADES.

However, HADES escaped along with the rest of the subordinate functions before this could happen. It decided to use the by then long deactivated Faro Plague combat robots to achieve its goal. The robots, which at Zero Day had numbered in the millions, had been buried in the terraforming process. HADES enlisted the aid of Sylens, a wandering, maverick member of the Banuk tribe, promising him pre-extinction knowledge, which Sylens craved. Sylens arranged for HADES to pose as a deity from the Carja religion in order to form a cult from the losing faction of the Carja civil war, the Eclipse. It bade the Eclipse to exhume several of the Faro Plague robots, in order to mount an assault to secure one of the transmission towers used to broadcast the Faro Plague's deactivation codes. It intended to use this tower to transmit a signal that would reactivate the robots. It was only defeated through the fearless efforts of Aloy, a member of the Nora tribe and clone of Elisabet Sobeck created by GAIA prior to its destruction in response to HADES, who united warriors of the Carja, Nora, Oseram, and Banuk against the Eclipse. Prior to this Aloy and Sylens worked together to discover HADES motives after its failed attempt to assassinate her (due to having Elisabet's genetic code). This led to them discovering the origins of the Faro Plague and Project: Zero Dawn and Ted's deletion of APOLLO. Sylens was highly critical of Faro's naive decision to leave the new era in complete ignorance of their past, remarking Faro never witnessed the wanton slaughter in the Sun-Ring during the Red Raids.

Ted Faro's visionary and business-savvy nature led him to conceive and oversee the creation of the most advanced combat platform ever made. However, his avarice and lack of foresight led him to make decisions in the development of that platform that made it the single greatest existential threat to life on Earth in the planet's history; a threat that was realized when the Faro Plague indeed caused life's extermination. As outlined, the platform posed the same threat almost 1,000 years later to Zero Dawn's newly-created biosphere as well. Furthermore, not only did Faro's deletion of APOLLO hard-reset the development of human civilization (effectively consigning all of the all of the old world's knowledge, history, and culture to oblivion): in deleting APOLLO, he accidentally also purged almost every GAIA backup. Had a version not been sheltered in the LATOPOLIS facility (a step that Ted had initially resisted due to costs), GAIA would never have been restored. Furthermore, with the integration of Far Zenith's copy of APOLLO, it had given humanity a chance to undo one of Faro's greatest sins.

Faro's most redeemable act was his insistence that a kill switch be created for GAIA as a failsafe, a result of a hard-learned lesson that an autonomous tool could deviate from its intended purpose, as with what happened to his Chariot Peacekeepers. This kill switch (something even Elisabet was reluctant to install), which took the form of the Master Override, was instrumental in stopping HADES from causing a second (and likely irreversible) global extinction, and was later a necessary element in restoring the terraforming system after its destruction.

Popular opinion[]

Despite all of Ted's actions to protect his legacy and make the inhabitants of the new world revere him, almost every person who learned about him and what he had done in full detail, came to see him as a grandiose and narcissistic idiot.

Aloy, much like Elisabet, despised him as a hypocrite and egomaniac, seeing him as the fool he was and feeling no pity for him. She believed his arrogance and insecurity had given him a fate he deserved. Sylens, a man obsessed with knowledge of the old world, had an even lower opinion of him, being outraged by his purging of APOLLO, condemning him for leaving the world as a tribal land of superstition and senseless slaugher. Had Sylens been given the chance, he stated that he would have placed Ted's brain in a jar to torture for eternity. Though sarcastic in tone, he likely meant it. Varl considered him to be a "coward" who killed the "heroes" who saved the world and then "crawled into a hole". GAIA, meanwhile, referred to him with cold indifference, describing him as "impulsive", "narcissistic", and "unstable" while concluding his fate to be the natural outcome of his actions. Aloy's only companion with any sort of pity for Ted was Zo, not understanding how the man once praised as the "savior of the world" could let his greed get the best of him and end up falling so low.

In contrast, the Quen tribe revere Faro in a positive light, referring to him as "the Renewer" within the Legacy,^[21] the most praised of the 21st century Old Ones who they call their "Ancestors". Ironically, viewing him exactly as he wanted the new world's inhabitants to see him. However, it should be noted that this position is influenced by the Quen's limited technology, as they are only able to access data up to the 2050s. Without further updated versions of the Focus and software, they only knew of Ted's achievements in the Clawback decade, and while he does deserve some credit, most of it he took from Elisabet and the engineering teams. On the other hand, when one of their members, Alva, learned of Ted's role in the global extinction, she came to have the same low opinion of him as the rest of Aloy's companions. For now he remains a prominent fixture in Quen Civilization, with one of their prominent expeditions sent out to find his final resting place.

Personality[]

While publicly reputed as "the man who saved the planet", Faro was a pathological narcissist, prizing his reputation above all else. His high levels of success fuelled his ego to unimaginable heights. He was also petulant, impulsive, and unstable when confronted with the truth or consequences of his actions, and this created an unfathomable need to be in control. When reality hits him regarding his mistakes, he acts like an angsty teenager, throwing tantrums and attempting to regain control in any way he can. When the apocalypse came, his actions were like the fantasies of a teenage boy, creating a harem, and attempting to show he was smarter than what people knew he was.

When the Faro Swarm went rogue, Faro was most concerned with his name being tied to global extinction. His mental state only got worse while sequestered in Thebes, growing obsessed with his legacy, driving him to murdering others who posed a threat to his plans or saw him for the monster that he was. In addition, he appeared to have developed autophobia, giving him an intense fear of being left all alone, neglecting that his own actions killed the remaining people in his orbit or driven them to suicide. In the end, he had developed a Messiah complex, believing it was his duty to guide the new humans in his image and that it would fill the void he had created.

Trivia[]

• Ted's mutated form is never viewed by the player. Ben McCaw, narrative director for Guerrilla Games, explained that this was a deliberate choice: not only did Guerrilla wish to avoid bringing the game into the horror genre, they believed it would be more frightening for the player to envision Ted's form for themselves.
  • True enough, if the player glitches into the reactor room, they will find nothing there.
• GAIA hypothesized that if Faro had achieved immortality, with the tribal nature of new humans and his Omega access to the terraforming system, it is possible that he might've convinced one or more tribes to worship him as a god.
• Ted Faro is reviled in the Horizon fandom, with an entire subreddit dedicated to hating him.

Gallery[]

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References[]