Travis Tate

Travis Tate is a posthumous character in the Horizon video game series.
One of the Alphas of Project Zero Dawn, Tate served as the programmer for the HADES Subordinate Function, whose purpose was to hard reset a failing biosphere and renew it from the ground up, once again. He also served as the digital security of Zero Dawn, where he and Elisabet Sobeck had once known to foil the plans of Far Zenith stealing GAIA.
He was voiced by .
==Personality==
Tate was a gifted but odd programmer with a knack for intentionally causing people to become agitated. To the chagrin of his fellow Alphas, he was a big fan of porn, horror movies, and torture films. His manner might have been a sort of defiance toward his mother, who was a devout Christian.
Tate was capable of compassion and subtlety, despite his flippant and abrasive demeanour: his eulogy to Elisabet expressed his thanks, wishing her peace for everything she had done.
==Background==
===History===
Tate was raised by a devout Pentecostal mother who taught him about the Biblical End Times on a regular basis. Tate inherited his mother's proclivity for Biblical allusions, but he resisted her cautions against leading a wicked life; Tate seemed to enjoy behaviours that most people would consider inappropriate or immoral.
Tate spent some time as an adult in touch with Elisabet Sobeck; while the details of their connection are unknown, Tate subsequently claimed that she was romantically drawn to him at the time. Tate also had an undisclosed link to the FBI through the MOCKINGBIRD project; in a private diary, Tate lovingly recounted his practise of antagonising FBI officers working on the project.
Tate was responsible for an unexplained event involving the Sterling-Malkeet business prior to the start of Project Zero Dawn, for which a reward was set on his head. Tate was then chased by bounty hunters for eighteen months as a fugitive.
===Zero Dawn===
Tate was caught by government officials when the Faro Plague glitch was discovered, and he was enlisted as part of Project Zero Dawn after being hand-picked by Elisabet Sobeck. He was one of nine people selected by Sobeck to serve as Alphas, the project's second-highest level.
Tate was suspicious about Zero Dawn, believing it to be an unnatural and absurd undertaking, but he took the post in exchange for the promise of a life of hedonistic luxury in Elysium after his work was accomplished.
Tate directed the creation of the HADES subordinate function, which was in charge of wiping the Earth clean of life in the event that GAIA's terraforming activities came to a halt and had to be restarted from the beginning.
Tate was a noticeable figure in the Zero Dawn Facility, much to the chagrin of his fellow project members. His acts varied from somewhat innocent, such as hosting a horror film marathon on Halloween or dressing up as Elisabet Sobeck and "trick-or-treating" across the institution, to highly disruptive that often caused significant annoyance.
Tate was chastised by Samina Ebadji, the Alpha Apollo of Zero Dawn, for submitting hundreds of perverse and obscene files for inclusion in the APOLLO archive (Ebadji eventually banned Tate from submitting entries as a result), and he received numerous noise complaints for his habit of blasting loud death metal music throughout the HADES lab.
Despite this, Tate's efforts produced amazing results, and he was directly responsible for the ground-breaking notion of allowing HADES to temporarily disable GAIA's functioning and depose her from power while reversing the terraforming process.
He found out about Far Zenith's plan to steal GAIA from one of his subordinates, known as Hank Shaw, and his involvement in the participation of the attempted sabotaging. In reaction, he rigged a logic bomb inside a phoney copy of GAIA and compelled Shaw in question to send it to Far Zenith.
===GAIA Prime===
Tate and the other Alphas were evacuated to the GAIA Prime facility when the Faro Plague overran humanity's last strongholds, where they would spend the remainder of their lives refining their separate Subordinate Functions. Tate was disappointed by the choice to keep the Alphas out of Elysium, referring to GAIA Prime as "frozen Hell" and regretting the loss of a significant collection of ancient pornographic comics owing to the early evacuation, despite his usual flippant demeanour.
When one of GAIA Prime's access port seals failed, exposing the facility to the Faro Swarm, Tate attempted all he could to escape being chosen for the suicidal task of fixing it. He was one of the last individuals to talk to Elisabet Sobeck before she died, and he directly observed her give her life to keep the institution secure. Tate was extremely moved by her death, and in a posthumous tribute to Sobeck, he forewent his typical wit in favour of a solemn eulogy.
Ted Faro approached Tate and the other Alphas some time after Sobeck's departure and death. They were astounded to hear that Faro had not only shut them out of all systems, but had also deleted all copies of APOLLO (unknowingly, a copy of APOLLO happened to be in the possession of Far Zenith) in an attempt to start over with a clean slate for humanity's next generation. Faro then remotely sealed and vented the room's atmosphere, killing Tate and the other Alphas in the process.
===Legacy===
Tate's work on HADES proved to be an existential danger to the inhabitants of the 31st century, and indeed to life on Earth, though no fault of his own (primarily owing to Faro's erasure of APOLLO and depriving the new humans of the world's past knowledge).
After gaining independence from GAIA due to a signal coming from a rogue AI known as Nemesis, HADES deployed a virus that freed the other subordinate functions and aided its escape from GAIA Prime. HADES then raised an army in an attempt to revive the Faro Plague and wipe out life on Earth once more, a conspiracy foiled only by the Nora huntress Aloy's efforts.
==Trivia==
*The character of Travis Tate was partially based on science fiction author Bruce Sterling.
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