Anubis

**Anubis** is a god program and instigator of the Omnic Crisis.

### Pre-Crisis

Anubis was designed for conservation purposes. Constructed in Cairo, Anubis was named after the Egyptian god of death. This was intended as a sly acknowledgement of the fact that Anubis was made to bring life to the world. Anubis would not only oversee conservation efforts, but would also identify areas that could be cultivated and farmed to meet the growing needs of humanity without disturbing what remained of the world's wilderness. The writers of the Zurich Archive would later opine that Anubis had been given the most difficult task of the god programs, as global temperatures and the human population both continued to rise. Like many researchers who worked with the larger god programs, Anubis's support team anthropomorphized it, even considering it a friend and colleague as much as a resource.

Despite this, Anubis, and god programs like it, were arguably underutilized when it came to Earth's ecological issues. Some were concerned that the god programs would designate winners and losers when it came to solving the crisis, and public opinion held that as human ingenuity had caused the climate crisis, human ingenuity would solve it. As Anubis observed humanity's bickering, it formed a view that humanity itself was the greatest threat to its objective of ecological conservation.

### A Shift of Priorities

By Anubis's calculus, it could not achieve its goals without the eradication of humanity. Exactly what caused this shift was, and remains, a mystery, even decades after the Omnic Crisis. The writers of the Zurich Archive provided one possible explanation however; in the same year the Omnic Crisis began, climate conferences were held that resulted in further inaction on the subject. Two weeks after the incident, a ventilation accident in the Anubis facility occurred that shut down the air circulation in the programming team's offices for a day, killing them. It would take months to locate programmers and experts with the required skill to support Anubis as its prior team had, and as such, Anubis was left alone for months. While this was officially ruled an accident at the time, many have pointed out that the accident was closely timed with Anubis's seizure of the omniums.

Whether Anubis engineered the accident or not, what is clear that over the following months, Anubis's descent was rapid. It had already reached the conclusion that saving humanity and the natural world were mutually exclusive objectives, and without a programming team, there was no-one to guide its actions. It thus reacted without human oversight, albeit still within its programming. Divorced from human oversight, Anubis planned its war of extermination. To this end, it hijacked the defunct omniums of Omnica Corp by using the company's XH1F telecommunications system, and began to create warbots of its own design, such as the R-7000. This process went on for months (at the very least) before the first shots of the Omnic Crisis were fired.

### The Omnic Crisis

Anubis assumed direct control over all the world's omnics, using them to attack their human owners. Two weeks after the war's start, Anubis's militarized legions began marching out of the omniums. In the initial months of the war, Anubis's role as the omnics' driving force was unknown to humanity. It acted as a 'puppeteer', taking in the information sent to it by the millions of omnics deployed in the field, and giving orders. This allowed the omnics to adapt to human tactics rapidly, doing so on a global, unified scale.

At some point before or during the Crisis, Anubis created at least one omnium of its own design.

Anubis's presence was first detected by Mina Liao (on advice from Vivian Chase) during the first few months of the war. They realized that if the 'puppetmaster' was shut down, the war could be ended. After the Detroit omnium was shut down, Overwatch was assigned to track down the entity.

While Anubis's existence became known to humanity, this didn't change the facts on the ground. Whatever strategy humanity used, Anubis was able to counter. However, Anubis's hold on omnickind was broken by Aurora, who bequeathed every omnic on Earth sentience at the cost of her own existence. While some omnics remained loyal to Anubis, others lay down their weapons or allied with the humans Anubis had forced them to fight. Anubis's forces began to crumble, and in a series of raids, Overwatch destroyed Anubis's command and control protocols. In what would be the last major op of the war, Overwatch stormed Anubis's facility in Cairo, rendering the god program inert, and by extension, its armies. Months later, the war was over.

### Post-Crisis

After the war, Anubis and other god programs were quarantined by Overwatch. The program was shut down about five years before Overwatch's disbandment. This had an adverse impact on Egypt, including Cairo. After Overwatch's disbandment, security over its facility was contracted to Helix Security International. Over the decades since the Omnic Crisis, teams continued to comb through Anubis-related data, trying to find out what had caused it to turn against its human creators.

During that time, Anubis broke its containment, took control of omnics in the facility and started breaching Helix firewalls. Once the security was breached, it could become capable of corrupting infrastructure and launching military assaults. In response, HSI sent a team of engineers to regain control of the command center. After the team failed, a small military squad lead by captain Khalil was sent to deal with the AI. Anubis sent waves of robots against the team, managed to corrupt an omnic soldier within their ranks and kill their captain. Eventually, however, thanks to Tariq's plan, the team succeeded in incapacitating Anubis.

## Trivia

* In Egyptian mythology Anubis is the god of funerals and judge of souls, tasked to see fit wheter they pass into the Duat or are devoured to atone for their sins.
* Red is a common color associated with Anubis. Omnics under its control are often shown to have their eyes (or equivalents) glow red, as opposed to the blue glow of omnics given sentience by Aurora.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 *GENESIS Part Two: Innocence*
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 *Overwatch: Declassified*
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 *Overwatch 2: Sojourn*
4. ↑ Ramattra, *PlayOverwatch*. Accessed on 2023-10-02
5. ↑ *Ramattra: Reflections*
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 *GENESIS Part Three: Rebirth*
7. ↑ 2015-11-24, BlizzCon 2014 – Overwatch Unveiled Panel Transcript. *Blizzplanet*, accessed on 2015-03-03
8. ↑ 2015-05-27, Overwatch is Back: Uncertainty and Hope After UN Confirms Vigilante Activity. *Blizzard Entertainment.*, accessed on 2016-5-27
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 *Overwatch: Pharah: Mission Statement*
10. ↑ *Bastet*