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Skye Larsen is a major antagonist in Watch Dogs: Legion, and the overarching antagonist of the Bloodline DLC. She is the main antagonist of the 404 chapters.
A transhumanist billionaire, Larsen is the founder of Broca Tech, a corporation that spearheaded several artificial intelligence projects such as Bagley and Daybreak, with the goal of transcending human flesh and becoming fully digital.
Biography[]
Skye Larsen was born to Danish-English parents, raised in London's West End. Exhibiting an extreme aptitude for science and math from an early age, she also struggled with personal relations, with a misanthropic if not outright sociopathic outlook on life.[1] She and her younger brother, Bradley, were raised by their mother, Sinead, following a messy divorce between her and their father, Kevin, stemming from an affair he had.
When her mother developed a motor neuron disease and her brother was diagnosed with epilepsy, Skye became obsessed with the process of neural mapping, believing it was the next stage in human evolution and could be used to create a society free of death and disease (and save her brother).
At some point, Skye built a cottage under her house to serve as a secret science lab for her experiments. She used her mother and her dog, Ada, as her first test subjects. She killed Ada, uploaded her mind to a Spiderbot, and put her into a glass box in the cottage’s garage with nothing but a tiny football to play with. Sinead was enraged by this, not believing Skye's claims that Ada was "alive and well," and didn’t want Skye to continue her work. Skye took this poorly and assumed that her mother didn't recognize or appreciate her talent.
After burying her dog, Skye’s mother became weaker, and she eventually had to be moved to her bedroom while on life support. Skye later sedated her mother and moved her to the laboratory in the cottage's basement to neural map her. Sinead's body died two minutes after the process was complete, and she awoke to find she couldn't see. Skye spent 29 days deleting parts of her mother's consciousness to make her into a submissive voice assistant, ignoring Sinead's pleas to put her out of her misery. Sometime later, Skye left her home and met with her brother, convincing him to undergo the neural mapping process as a treatment for his epilepsy. This worked for over a year, but his condition began to decline again, and he was eventually hospitalized and diagnosed with early onset dementia.
Skye refused to allow her brother to "waste away" in the hospital, and paid for a room at St. Pancras Hotel so he could be treated there. While his dementia worsened, Skye continued her experiments and was able to create Bagley. With the neural mapping available and Skye in her final year at the university, when she and a number of her peers founded Broca Tech. Having completed Bagley, Larsen dumbed the AI down (which still put it well above competing AIs) and sold it to Blume Corporation for a nine figure sum that would power the next generation of Optiks.[1]
Larsen continued her refinement of high-level AI and machine-learning technologies. The first investment was an automated parking garage system called Matryosh-Car, followed by wildly successful ventures and investments in Tidis and Nudle, bringing her portfolio's worth to almost $1.3 billion, rocketing her to the top of multiple "Top 30 Under 30" lists. Broca Tech's products revolutionized the taxi industry (displacing most human drivers in favor of autonomous cars, like at the London Carriage Service) and the administration of the National Health Service (NHS). Broca Tech AI also formed the neural core of Albion's drone network.[1]
In recent years, Skye Larsen has become conspicuously absent from the public arena, making infrequent appearances only via hologram technology. Chalked up to her eccentric personality most often, rumors that she has died have also started to circulate, with Broca keeping it away from the headlines to prevent the stock from collapsing. In reality, Larsen has been diagnosed with a degenerative autoimmune disorder, as rare as it was fatal, and redirected all her wealth towards Daybreak protocol, which would allow her to become a digital being and cheat death. Her public announcement of the protocol scheduled for the TOAN Conference was overshadowed by the bombing, but continues to be promoted elsewhere.[1]
Interactions[]
Events of Bloodline[]
Skye contacts Wrench, inviting him to her home, offering to help save a comatose Aiden Pearce. Appearing before Wrench via hologram, she explained that Thomas Rempart had taken control of her deep labs and ordered him to clear them out and bring the BrocaBridge. The device would be used to allow someone to enter Aiden's mind and bring him out of his coma, which his nephew Jackson volunteered to undertake, despite an outraged Wrench's protests. Once Aiden had successfully regained consciousness, Skye granted Jackson an extension on his Larsen Family Scholarship before asking the three men to take their leave of her laboratory.
Events of Watch Dogs: Legion[]
DedSec teamed up with 404 and broke into the Blume Complex to stop Daybreak. An operative sent by DedSec shut down the two main generators powering Daybreak, and then headed to Skye’s power source to shut her down. Skye begged them to stop, while Nowt demanded that she be shut down. The operative is given two options: shut Skye down for good, or fulfill her request and finish the upload. If the operative chooses the former, Skye will die, and Broca Tech will shut Daybreak down out of respect for her death. If they choose the latter, she will be uploaded and free to continue her work, sending a final audio note to the operative saying that she now has so much more time.
Regardless of whether Skye is uploaded or shut down, her human body is inevitably killed. Evidence of this is seen even after she is uploaded, when Bagley says "Skye Larsen has completed her cloud upload. She's gone." Also, regardless of whether she is uploaded or shut down, she is not seen or mentioned again in the game.
Personality[]
Skye was a highly intelligent, extremely narcissistic and self-serving sociopath who also suffered from thanatophobia. This fear of death is what fueled her obsession with the advancement of humanity through science and technology, leading to cruel experiments on her loved ones, such as her dog Ada, her brother Bradley and mother Sinead. Upon being confronted by DedSec operatives who broke into Blume, she pleaded for them to upload an AI of her consciousness, stating she did not want to die.
She believed humanity to be a self-destructive species and in danger of extinction through the disasters caused by them in the past, coming to devise the Daybreak Project using neural mapping technology to create AI replicas of a human being's consciousness, so that humanity could live forever without being devastated by a cataclysm. It was obvious to DedSec and even 404 that all these "broken philosophies" she was making about humanity were just excuses for her narcissistic messiah complex and to be seen by them as some kind of a heroine in order to quench her hunger for power.
Appearance[]
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Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- Skye is possibly based on Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos. Skye's conference at the GBB, where she uses her mother's dementia and desire that nobody ever face similar trauma as her motivation for Project Daybreak, parallels Holmes's 2014 TEDMED presentation where she uses her uncle's cancer diagnosis and sudden passing as her own motivation for developing the Edison machine. Also like Skye, she quickly quashed any accusations of unethical practices, such as the 2006 firing of Theranos CFO Henry Mosley after confronting Holmes about how "live" demonstrations of the Edison machine were actually prerecorded.
- In Bloodline, Jackson Pearce mentions that he is a big fan of Skye Larsen, and that he recently won a scholarship from her foundation. However, it is unknown how he reacted to DedSec's exposé on the extremely abusive origins of her AI technology.
- Skye is arguably one of the overarching antagonists of the entire game, due to being the creator of Bagley and having an important part in Sabine Brandt's plot to launch a cyber warfare against London.