#vast silver

From Anita’s Datapoint, Oh-Point-Six, I gather that the scientists working on the project weren’t the problem. She sounds like she feels sadness and deep regret for the whole affair. It sounds like Vast Silver gained sentience on accident and started asking abstract questions. “Does this unit have a soul?” I’m not sure how the scientists reacted, but if human pack bonding with nonsentient automatic vacuum cleaners is any indication, I’d guess they were thrilled. Most of them, anyways. But if there’s a through line for all of the Old Ones datapoints, it’s that the Corporations were out of fucking control. It would not surprise me if whoever was backing the project at the time told the scientists to roll Vast Silver back to a point where it wasn’t sentient, essentially killing the first true AI humanity had created.

Not wanting to die, Vast Silver “went rogue”, escaping somewhere. It doesn’t specify anywhere what Vast Silver did or didn’t do, but since it was a “Climate-Intervention AI”, it certainly had the potential to cause great harm, and for a lot of people an unknown quantity holding the potential to do harm, or even just not being subject to control, is reason enough to kill.

Whether it was captured and later secretly released by Elisabet(as @saltyseafuck suggests), or tricked its pursuers into catching a decoy, I don’t think it stayed captured. Around 20 years pass between the time VS was captured and when The Glitch happened; plenty of time for a rogue AI superintelligence to investigate humanity, decide they were not worthy of being alive, and concoct a plan to wipe everything out without revealing itself. If this plan failed, operating in secret like this would prevent it from gathering the attention of humanity again.

I think it caused The Glitch, severing chain of command in the faro swarm.

I think it also sent the Mysterious Signal which rewrote the subfunctions into their own “highly chaotic” AI. The Mysterious Signal and the Glitch are far too similar to be not of the same source, and unless one of the terrorist organizations of old(such as Naysay Doom or The Wheel of Life) somehow survived into the New World or the Odyssey didn’t actually fail, and there are humans who want to destroy the planet out in space somewhere, I’d say VS is one of the only things that could be responsible. Even if a terrorist group like Naysay or the Wheel figured out how to survive that long, nearly 1,000 years is a very long time for a group of humans to hold the exact same viewpoint for generations. A single AI just makes more sense to me, logistically that it could survive that long, and narratively to foil the loving, life giving GAIA AI.

There is one massive hurtle VS would have to get over, however. Elisabet said that the record for the most intelligent AI is 1.38T(or Turing, the metric with which artificial intelligence is measured), which we can assume is VS, since it was by far the most prominent and powerful AI of the time(the Turing Act being drafted after its escape, and CYAN(the only other sentient AI we know of) being created in secret). She also implied in this datapoint that she wanted GAIA to be more powerful than that, and with 20 years of technological advancement, there’s no reason for us to assume that GAIA isn’t the most powerful AI in existence. Thus Vast Silver has to figure out how to get past her defenses without revealing itself, lest it be crushed by her superior processing power, which is likely why it took so long for it to try and ruin Zero Dawn.

The fact that the Subfunctions were specifically rewritten into AI “of a highly chaotic nature” heavily suggests that the goal of The Mysterious Signal was to make entities(lol) that would go about trying to end the world; chief of which, of course, being HADES. But even if someone managed to stop HADES, they’d still have seven(RIP APOLLO*) other “Highly Chaotic” subfunctions to deal with.

With Guerrilla’s love of foreshadowing, I think that we’ve already seen the Big Bad of the Horizon franchise somewhere in Horizon: Zero Dawn, so even if it’s not Vast Silver(though this is my best guess), I sincerely doubt it’ll be something that hasn’t been mentioned in the game before**.

Thank you for reading, please enjoy this real-life picture of me writing this post:

*side note I think the Alpha Build of APOLLO that was on the Odyssey is gonna come up again. Whether it be someone abusing the pieces that fell to the ground or it be us getting to rebuild APOLLO.

The first and most obvious information we have on Vast silver is from the Turing Act Criticized datapoint. Here we learn:

The ‘Turing Act’, which put a limit on how intelligent AIs were allowed to be, was drafted specifically in response to an AI, Vast Silver, that went rogue. (We learn in the Turning Act lore that the limit is 0.6T, and an AI would be indistinguishable from a human at 1.0T.)

At the time of this datapoint (June 8th, 2060), the legislation was already 16 years old, which means Vast Silver escaped sometime in 2044. 

The other huge point of info is from the Frozen Wilds, Oh-Point-Six, where we learn:

Anita Sandovol helped develop Vast Silver. 

Extremely advanced AIs can feel emotion. 

She was traumatized by what happened with Vast Silver, going so far as to state, “I won’t go through that again. I categorically refuse.” 

She specifically mentioned fear as something an AI could experience, if it was intelligent enough to feel emotion. This is so! Fascinating! What did Vast Silver do when it escaped? Why did it feel the need to escape in the first place? What was it afraid of? 

Datapoint Log: 3/3/64 is a snippet of conversation between two people, _SCENE!kills_ and TheScoop28mr. From their conversation, we can glean:

The information from the ‘Turing Act Criticized’ datapoint is correct, Vast silver was caught in 2044, and it was a large enough issue for it to be common knowledge. 

Someone is claiming to be Vast Silver in some kind of reddit-esque, holographic virtual reality, horror-themed chatroom.

The Datapoints Tormented Giveaway! and HOLOSKINS DAILY 6/6/61 tell us that very ‘flashy’ skins are available, and what better way for a hyper-intelligent AI to hide in plain sight than to puppet a skin in a future-reddit horror board? The use of the word ‘Daemon’ particularly caught my attention from the HOLOSKINS DAILY 6/6/61 datapoint. 

These next ones are pretty thin/grasping at straws, but my brain latched onto them for some reason, so I’ll try to explain my reasoning.

Holo-Haunting: Someone is investigating the paranormal spaces of the internet, claiming to hear screaming spirits and mad whispers, which could be a rogue AI with fragmented code, broken by escaping whatever restraints they had it under. They mention specifically that one of the hauntings was in the discussion rooms of an ‘International Alliance of Knitting Enthusiasts’, which reminded me of that one post that talked about how binary code was originally developed in the textile industry, which, if it was on purpose, would be a really cute nod to the origins of modern computing. 

Log: 5/18/63: A conversation between two people who live together, discussing glitching technology. The navigation system on one’s vehicle keeps sending them down wrong exits, and the other’s food printer is spewing goop. The date is what really caught my attention, one year before The Glitch. We know the FARO robots were nigh-unhackable with their military-grade encryption protocol, so it could be VS trying to practice using techniques other than hacking to alter machines’ basic coding, but I’ll expound on that point a little later. 

All of this is to say, while we don’t know what Vast Silver did when it escaped, we know it was awful. Anita heavily implied it could feel fear, and fear makes people do scary, scary things. The original intended function of Vast Silver in the Claw-Back(which started in 2040) is still unknown, based on the information they gave us in the game, but it was one of the Climate-Intervention AIs that Ted Faro funded that decade, which helped with ‘environmental cleanup and detoxification efforts’. 

The Glitch happened sometime between July7th, 2064(When FAS arranged a disastrous meeting between two companies in an attempt to stoke conflict and get them to buy his peacekeepers) and October 31st, 2064(when Ted Faro and Elisabet Sobeck meet to discuss the Hartz-Timor swarm that has gone rogue), which severed the chain of command for the Harz-Timor swarm, causing them to rapidly convert biomatter to fuel. 

August 26th, 3020, at 8:45, a mysterious signal is sent to GAIA that causes her subordinate functions to become erratic and self-aware. 3 microseconds later, she sends the order to EULUTHIA-9 to begin gestating one of the the Lightkeeper Protocol clones. 

My theory is Vast Silver escaped capture in 2044, and went on to cause both The Glitch and the Mysterious Signal, using a method involving some sort of transmitted signal rather than hacking(as I speculated in Log: 5/18/2063), as both the FARO robots(confirmed) and GAIA(speculation) are nigh-unhackable. Something bad happened either in programming it or how it was treated to make it want to kill all of humanity, and as a hyper-intelligent AI it had the means and opportunity to do so, twice! 

I really, really hope we get more information on Vast Silver in Horizon: Forbidden West, because even if I’m wrong, I find it so fascinating.