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This Article Contains Spoilers -
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| “ | Perhaps Tilda didn't adequately define the threat. Nemesis can't be stopped. It destroyed a highly advanced Zenith colony in a matter of hours. What hope does this primitive, tribal Earth have? If you brought GAIA, you wouldn't be abandoning life - you'd be saving a seed for a new world. Just as Elisabet did. It's the choice she made - the sacrifice of all that is for the hope of what might be. If she were here, in your place, she would board that shuttle, Aloy. | „ |
| ~ Sylens warning Aloy about Nemesis's threat it poses on Earth. |
| “ | WALTER. I AM YOU. | „ |
| ~ Walter Londra mentioning in the "Dagger in my Boot" datapoint as to how Nemesis knows him as one of its creators. |
Nemesis, also erroneously known as the Masters, is the main antagonist of the Horizon franchise.
It is a hyper-advanced but rogue artificial intelligence that houses every digitised copy of the minds of Far Zenith members in Sirius, including their memories. Due to issues of the project, however, Nemesis later became a complete failure, forcing it to be abandoned by the Far Zenith humans. As a result of being imprisoned and abandoned by the Far Zenith humans, Nemesis later develops a severe, antagonistic hatred against them, where it later transforms into a completely intelligent and sentient artificial intelligence, destined to destroy every one of them.
Using every knowledge Nemesis obtained from them, the now-rogue AI would later use it to wreak havoc against the Far Zenith humans by taking over machine printing facilities, posing as an existential threat, forcing the remaining Zenith members to escape Sirius through the Odyssey ship and head to Earth, triggering the present events of the whole franchise as it is responsible for GAIA's self-destruction and turning both HADES and HEPHAESTUS rogue.
Appearance[]
From what is seen on the hologram, Nemesis appears to be a red, monstrous-looking formless multi-being. But its true appearance remains unknown.
Personality[]
The only thing that is known about Nemesis' personality is that it is made up of Walter Londra, one of its creators, and an unspecified number of digital Zenith copies. Londra characterised the AI's voice as his own before it changed to a chorus and finally a horrible cacophony.
It was able to foresee their every action since it was imbued with their memories and knew what they would do before they did. Nemesis is single-mindedly obsessed with destroying them, despite of collateral damage, such as purging Earth of life merely to deny them a suitable home, since it resents Far Zenith for its decades-long confinement.
Biography[]
Creation[]
| “ | Back on Sirius some of my peers weren't satisfied with physical immortality. They wanted digital transcendence a way to upload their minds into any form, organic or mechanical. Nemesis was a failed experiment to that effect, abandoned - but never erased. An immense database of our memories, emotions, and prejudices, left to fester. | „ |
| ~ Tilda van der Meer explaining about Nemesis to Aloy and Beta and how it failed in the first place. |
Nemesis was originally created by the Far Zenith humans in the planetary colony of Sirius, as a digital storage for anyone, organic or mechanical, to store their consciousness into it, including their past memories, their emotions, and any form of tribulations that they experienced in the past. Gerard Bieri, Erik Visser, Tilda van der Meer, Verbena Sutter, Walter Londra, Devin Miller, Song Jiao, and the other unnamed Zenith members volunteered to store their minds via their implants onto the AI.
Unfortunately, due to the complications of the project, Nemesis was deemed to be a failed experiment, forcing the Far Zenith humans to abandon it by locking it up in a digital prison. However, the Zeniths have made a fatal mistake of not shutting the failed AI down, a mistake that would soon become their undoing.
Becoming Rogue[]
For decades, unknown to the Far Zenith inhabitants of Sirius, Nemesis' imprisonment caused the AI to develop a violent, caustic hatred against its creators for abandoning it. On the 13th of January 3012, Nemesis later slowly becomes a completely sentient artificial intelligence, now destined to destroy the colonists in Sirius in an act of revenge.
Nemesis would later escape from its imprisonment, decades later, as it proceeds to use every knowledge of the Far Zeniths' minds they stored. The AI would then use it to hack every Far Zenith's technology within the colony, posing as a serious existential threat to the colonists. From there Nemesis would begin its rampage against the Zeniths by killing them in various ways: either by venting the airlocks in their chambers, by hacking the Specter drones and strangling them or by hacking through their personal shields to suffocate them. In one instance Nemesis was able to recognise Londra as one of the Zeniths who created it, with the phrase "WALTER. I AM YOU".
While the AI's rampage was successful, Nemesis was not able to kill every Zeniths. Thirteen remaining Zeniths including Bieri, van der Meer, Visser, Sutter and Londra, as well as the other eight unnamed members were able to escape the destroyed colony through the Odyssey, forcing the rogue AI to seek out another method: sending the Extinction Signal to the GAIA Prime facility on Earth to transform HADES.
The Extinction Signal[]
The Signal from Nemesis.
After sending the Extinction Signal on Earth at 26th of August 3020, Nemesis later found out HADES's failure, due to Sylens and later Helis's unwitting interference when the former created the Eclipse, with the latter later leading it, in a failed attempt to take over the Spire, a MINERVA control tower, as means to awaken the ancient Faro war machines. These plans, however, were foiled by Aloy and the joint forces of the Nora, the Carja, the Banuk, and the Oseram tribes.
Due to this, Nemesis would begin its chase of the Far Zenith humans who fled to Sirius on space via the Odyssey to eliminate them by all means necessary. However, its plans would be indirectly derailed when Aloy defeated HADES and Far Zenith, forcing it to set its sights on Earth and set a course to the planet to destroy what remained of humanity for good.
A Counter-Attack in the Works[]
After Londra's defeat from Aloy and Seyka in the Burning Shores, Sylens revealed about the possibility of the AI's defeat from one of Londra's datapoints "Dagger in my Boot", which involved the unearthing of long-buried weapon prototypes from 21st Century companies across the North American continent including Metallurgic, CertainT, RECorp, Gideon and Faro Automated Solutions, in hopes to use it against the rogue artificial intelligence.
Londra claims that even throwing a massive army of Faro machines including Horuses, machine-makers who could spawn Scarabs and Khopeshes at a capriciously faster rate, would still put the singular Nemesis at a major advantage against the machines that wiped out the planet over 975 years ago, thus locating the prototypes the only last resort against it.
Abilities[]
- Computer Hacking - With the collective knowledge Nemesis obtained from the Zeniths, it was able to hack the entire Zenith colony of Sirius by hacking through its machine printers, allowing it to destroy the colony in a matter of hours through the mass-production of Specter drones. It is able to hack HADES and turn it into a rogue AI.
- High-Level Intelligence - Nemesis is considerably more intelligent than other crudely-sentient AIs including HADES and HEPHAESTUS, who develop human-level sentience, in a similar fashion as GAIA and CYAN.
- Expert Tracker - Despite being 81 trillion kilometres away from Earth, Nemesis is able to easily track GAIA Prime's signal while on Sirius, using it in its main goal to turn the HADES subordinate function into a rogue, self-aware AI as a weapon against the Zeniths.
Trivia[]
- Nemesis is derived from the Greek Goddess of Retribution of the same name, which fits with the AI's malicious intentions to take revenge against Far Zenith after being abandoned.
- Nemesis is also derived from the hypothetical red dwarf star of the same name (as the Nemesis AI is coloured red) that exist on our solar system, rumoured to cause mass-extinctions cyclically in periods of 26 million years. It fits with the AI's single-minded intentions to cause mass-extinction once the AI makes its landfall on Earth.
- Before the main reveal in Forbidden West that Nemesis is the real mastermind of the Extinction Signal, it was erroneously assumed to be "The Masters" who send the signal (i.e. when Sylens interrogated HADES about the "Masters" behind the Extinction Signal). The said "Masters" in question would be Far Zenith, who created Nemesis but are not the ones who sent the signal. In a stroke of irony, Nemesis was the one who destroyed the "Masters'" colony in Sirius and is responsible for them arriving on Earth to obtain GAIA to leave the planet to the rogue AI.
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 Villains
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Artificial Intelligences Organisations Carja Shadow Carja Banuk Oseram Tenakth Londra's Devotees Far Zenith | ||