APOLLO

Believed lost to human sabotage in the early days of Project Zero Dawn, APOLLO was the subordinate function for GAIA dedicated to the reeducation of the regrown human population. Ted Faro, in an act of nihilism, murdered the remaining Zero Dawn Alphas and purged all known databases and backups of APOLLO. The physical remnants of APOLLO are visible as kiosks in the ELEUTHIA-9 Cradle Lyceum area.

APOLLO in Other Cradles

It’s conjecture, but Skyline takes the stance that each ELEUTHIA Cradle intentionally “went dark” as it was sealed, removing almost all abilities to communicate with the outside world. This was standard procedure for all facilities evading detection of the FARO Swarm, as shown in the holograms concerning the last communications of Elisabet Sobeck. It’s also alluded to in the Cradle Sealed datapoint when it refers to “pingback”, implying that communication with the facility has been reduced to no more than the ability to see it’s still functioning.

This implies, then, that it would likely have been improbable for Ted Faro to destroy all copies of APOLLO in all Cradles across the globe, only the ones at ELEUTHIA-9. It’s possible the APOLLO developers configured its database in such a way that Cradle facilities did not have their own copies at that time, and would fetch one when they woke up after the MINERVA signal, but this would have been exceedingly risky design. It might be justified if the Alphas truly intended to work on APOLLO until their final days, decades later, but this does not seem to be the case from the existing datapoints.

In Skyline, it is possible some version of APOLLO exists and is functional in other Cradles. Given human politics and the proclivity to put some kind of local spin on any project, it’s also likely the versions of the APOLLO database in other regions around the globe would not be some idealized “one Earth” vision. That is, in addition to Language concerns, it may be safe to presume a version of APOLLO in France would be noticeably different from the version in Brazil.

APOLLO in Skyline

The APOLLO AI plays a part in the Connection story module.