Cortana (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mymothersshadow) wrote2013-06-07 03:24 pm
mymothersshadow) wrote2013-06-07 03:24 pm
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[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Jeff
AGE: 23
JOURNAL:viewtiful_jeff
IM: Viewtiful Rekk
PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
ViewtifulJeff
E-MAIL: Rekkrogerz@gmail.com
RETURNING: 1, Ruadeformer
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Cortana
SERIES: Halo
CHRONOLOGY: Towards the end of Halo 4, after the Didact has been defeated by Cortana and Master Chief.
CLASS: Hero
BACKGROUND:
To begin with Halo, one must travel backwards, over 100,000 years, to the time of the Forerunners. Indistinguishable from deities to those that would come after them, the Forerunners were masters of technology that, once they had passed away, wouldn't be see again for generations upon generations. The Forerunners believed in the concept of the "Mantle of Responsibility" that dictated what they believed to be their duty to protect the other species of the galaxy, defending them from threats. The Mantle of Responsibility governed all aspects of Forerunner life and would, eventually, unwittingly, spell their demise.
The Forerunners became embroiled in war with another race - humanity. For reasons the Forerunners did not understand, humanity was expanding wildly throughout the galaxy, eventually culminating with an attack upon a Forerunner-colonized world. Humanity was eventually crushed by the Forerunners and forcefully 'de-evolved' to a pre-industrial state as punishment. What the Forerunners did not know at the time was that humanity was not expanding or attacking out of malice, they were fleeing from a greater threat, known as The Flood (inferi redivivus, "reincarnated dead"). The Flood's only function is to kill, eat and add what it devours to its own ranks. Humanity had been moving throughout the galaxy so aggressively in an attempt to get ahead of the Flood and stop their spread. Entire species and planets had fallen to the Flood - and thanks to the Mantle, no other species in the galaxy was properly equipped to defend themselves, leaving the Forerunners as the only ones who could fight back against the parasite. Unfortunately, as the Flood fought the Forerunners and fed off them, they became more dangerous, taking the Forerunner's intelligence and technology and adding it to themselves. Eventually, the Flood reached sufficient numbers to create a "Gravemind" (inferi sentiata, "thinking dead"), an omniscient being that controlled the entirety of the Flood species, turning them from a feral instinctive parasite into a calculated, highly advanced army bent on consuming everything in the known galaxy. Mendicant Bias, the most advanced AI that ever existed was created by the Forerunners to devise a solution to stopping the Flood. Unfortunately, Mendicant Bias' free will was its greatest weakness, in addition to its greatest strength. The Gravemind convinced the AI that the Forerunners were standing in the way of progress and evolution, that the Mantle was an excuse to obstruct any changes to the galaxy. Mendicant Bias fell into rampancy, becoming enraged with its creators and began actively working towards their destruction, and allied itself with the Flood. The Didact, the leader of all of the Forerunner's armies, attempted to stop the Flood through use of a device called the Composer that could "bridge organic and digital life together", turning organic beings into solid AI constructs that, being non-organic, could not be infected by the Flood. The Didact turned his own warriors, the Prometheans, into digital constructs that could fight against the Flood without risk of being consumed, but his numbers were insufficient. He eventually chose to use the Composer on the de-evolved humans, at once giving himself what he believed to be the proper numbers to fight the Flood and further punishing humanity for their crime of "leading the Flood to [the Forerunner's] shores". The Didact's wife and the leader of the Forerunner's Lifeworkers (those dedicated to the research of all life in the galaxy as well as medicine), the Librarian, who had tried to see to the safety of humanity after their de-evolution became enraged with the Didact's callous disregard for their lives and attacked him, incapacitating him and sealing him within the artificial Forerunner Shield World "Requiem" and moving the Composer to one of the Forerunner's artificial ringworlds known as the Halos.
Meanwhile, having exhausted all other avenues, the Forerunners decided that there was only one way to destroy the Flood - destroy all sentient life in the galaxy. The seven artifical worlds making up the Halo Array would wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy, starving the Flood to death. The Librarian and her Lifeworkers stored samples of all life in the galaxy upon the Ark, so that once the Halo effect had taken place, the Forerunner's robotic servants could reseed the galaxy. And so, the Halo Array was activated and the Forerunners, save one, perished to save the rest of the galaxy from the Flood. And the Mantle of Responsibility was left to be claimed by their old foes, humanity, who thanks to the Librarian's protection, would rise once more.
Fast forward a good 100,000 years, then keep fast-forwarding until you hit the 2500s. Humanity has united under the banner of the UEG (Unified Earth Government) and UNSC (United Nations Space Command) and expanded to the stars. Through the use of Slipspace technology, they've traveled across dozens of different worlds, colonizing them as they went. Eventually, they found that they were not alone - the Covenant was already there first. The Covenant is a conglomerate of several different alien races, consisting of the Prophets (the political and religious leaders), the Elites (the commanders of the military), the Brutes (shock troops), the Grunts (infantry/cannon fodder), the Jackals (privateers who act as scouts and snipers), the Drones (mechanics, a slave race), and the Engineers (natural technological geniuses, also a slave race). The Covenant, for the most part, worshiped the Forerunners, revering them as Gods. They believed the Halo Array would not kill them, but send them on "The Great Journey", and transcend them into Godhood. Something about humanity really stuck in the craw of the Prophets (spoiler: it was that the humans were the successors of the Forerunners, and the truth of the Forerunners, the humans and Halo would hopelessly splinter the Covenant), and they declared humanity as a blight and an affront to their Covenant that must be destroyed. So began a brutal genocidal war against the Covenant and humanity. Between the Covenant's more advanced warships and technology, their massive outnumbering of humanity both in ships and raw numbers, and the utterly devastating combat prowess of the Elites, humanity had its back firmly up against the wall. They had a couple advantages, however.
First was the SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III programs. Programs that took ordinary humans (often children) and through rigorous training, mechanical and biological augmentation and outfitting of the best armor the UNSC could develop, often through reverse-engineering of what Covenant technology they could get their hands on, turned them into super-soldiers that fought to protect the UNSC. Originally developed to fight insurrectionists within the UNSC, the Spartans turned out to be utterly invaluable during the Human-Covenant war, securing what small victories they could manage. Secondly was the UNSC's advancements in AI technology. The Covenant had only the barest understanding of AI technology as true AI were forbidden - based on the knowledge that an AI had once betrayed the Forerunners. This combination turned out to be exactly what would win the war for humanity. The war considerably thinned out the Spartan's numbers until there were only a scant few left, one of them being John-117, more colloquially known by his rank, Master Chief. His assigned AI was Cortana, in reality made from a flash-cloned brain of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the developer of the SPARTAN-II program. The two would prove to be an invaluable team, Cortana's unparalleled talents for hacking, gathering intel and strategizing combined with John being, quite frankly, virtually unstoppable in battle.
The first Halo trilogy follows Cortana and the Master Chief during the final and darkest days of the Human-Covenant War. Through it, they discover the Halo rings, learn of the Forerunners and their ancient battle with the Flood, and fight to, above all, keep Earth and humanity safe from consumption by the Flood or destruction by the Covenant. Their journey eventually leaves the Covenant splintered and dissolved, the Flood neutralized, and humanity and their new allies, the Elites, victorious at the cost of John and Cortana being stranded in space aboard the aft section of a UNSC frigate, Forward Unto Dawn. The second, as of yet uncompleted Halo trilogy, the Reclaimer Saga, picks up four years after the end of Halo 3 with Cortana past the point where smart AI such as herself begin to decay and John waking up from four years of cryogenic sleep with the two winding up on the Forerunner Shield World Requiem. There, while trying to find a way home, they become embroiled in a battle with splintered remnants of the Covenant and the last remaining Forerunner who was sealed upon Requiem 100,000 years before and aims to take his revenge upon humanity once and for all. Matters are complicated by Cortana's rapidly deteriorating mental state as she suffers from the effect of Rampancy. This all eventually culminate with Cortana helping John stop the Didact and sacrificing her life to save his.
PERSONALITY:
Cortana is an AI developed by the UNSC, a very unique one in more ways than one. She's a "smart" AI, one created with no learning limitations, and is thus capable of learning, adapting and comprehending a wealth of subjects and experiences far beyond that of a less advanced program. She, as with all smart AIs, was created by a process called Cognitive Impression Modeling. In essentials, the process scans a human brain to create the AI, destroying the brain in the process. As the brain is destroyed, only the recently deceased or cloned brains are used in the process, it being the latter in Cortana's case - she was created from the cloned brain of her own designer and the one who oversaw her construction, Dr. Catherine Halsey. Halsey (whom Cortana regards as something of her mother, or at least as close to it as she can have) is a genius and is often regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of her generation, so, it stands to reason: Cortana is smart. Very smart. As she would probably put it, having been created first and foremost as a military asset, she probably should be smart, or she's not very useful, is she?
As an AI, Cortana's capabilities, her wealth of knowledge and her various experiences are all numerous, but for the most part, she takes it all in stride. There's rarely if ever any trace of arrogance to be found in Cortana's mannerisms, nor does have any pointless pretensions to modesty. What she does have is a unique playfulness and a sense of wit that often finds itself mixing with her objective, matter-of-fact way of speaking to give her a dry, sometimes irreverant sort of tone. She often carries her wit with her even in the most dramatic and dire of situations, cracking jokes in the heat of battle. The one most often on the recieving end of this banter is her partner, SPARTAN John-117 (more coloquially known as the Master Chief). Around him, she's often at her most natural. With others, she'll usually at least adhere to some level of professionalism, until she gets to know them a little better, anyway. Beneath her jokes and wit however, Cortana has a profound sense of loyalty to humanity and the UNSC - genuine loyalty that is all her own, deeper than any programmed protocol. She would sacrifice herself (and came very, uncomfortably, almost fatally close to doing so at one point) to protect humanity, seeing them as her comrades, her friends, not her masters. This loyalty gives her an impressive level of resilience and determination. She's quick-thinking, decisive, resourceful and very often, she doesn't have many compunctions about collateral damage. Simply put, if she has a goal in mind, Cortana isn't going to be yielding anytime soon without a fight.
Being a smart A.I., one with the potential for infinite growth, Cortana's lifespan was decided from her conception: 7 years. After 7 years, she undergoes the process of Rampancy. The simplest way to describe Rampancy is that as a smart A.I. grows older and gains more knowledge, they convert so many resources to gaining more data, indexing it, studying it, that they neglect everything else. It has been described as "thinking so hard you forget to breathe". As this process goes on, the A.I. is forced to confront their own mortality and their limitations as well as causing an A.I.'s personality to fragment and destabilize. Being past the age of 7 years old, Cortana has suffered the debilitating effects of Rampancy firsthand and it has affected her personality, making her more resigned to the fact that her life is almost at its end at its end and forcing her to undergo dramatic, often unpredictable personality shifts of anger, depression, jealousy and sometimes outright mania. Being a human in the City, the effects of Rampancy on Cortana will be highly mitigated, due to the main problems of Rampancy, her necesity to keep storing data and the truth of her being an artifical construct, no longer existing as long as she's human.
Warranting special mention due to his overall importance to Cortana is her companion, John-117. As mentioned, around him, Cortana is at her most natural. From the moment she knew of John's story (abducted as a child in order to become the best soldier the UNSC would ever produce), she swore to herself she would do her best to protect him from whatever harm she could, similarly to how John took it upon himself to take care of Cortana, no matter what. The trust the two share for one another is deep, first created by necessity (as they had each other to rely on and nothing else when first stranded on Halo Installation-04) and then forged by experiences, repeated experiences that had them saying the other from the brink multiple times. The two have, more than once, acted as the other's anchor, emotionally. Belief in John was enough to allow Cortana to stave off rampancy for a much longer time than she should've been able to. She eventually made good on her vow to protect John, saving him from death at the hands of the Didact and then from certain destruction by way of nuclear detonation, but her efforts resulted in her having to sacrifice her own life to save him. In Cortana's own words, she and John were supposed to take care of each other, and they did. By her measure, it was an easy choice.
POWER:
Upon entering the City, Cortana will be changed from an AI to a human. Her power, then, is the ability to turn back into an AI. By integrating with a computer, her communicator or the like, she can interact with it as she would as an AI. The process does work in degrees - fully integrating herself with a computer will allow her to focus all of her attention on it, but will also leave her human body basically unconscious until she returns to it. The good news is that Cortana is good at multi-tasking and capable of integrating only partially with a given system, keeping her human body at least aware of its surroundings while she functions as an AI as well, granted, at a reduced level of efficiency. While there is no hard time limit on how long Cortana can spend as an AI, extended periods of time in that state will cause the effects of Rampancy to creep in on her and cause her to start deteriorating. Though Cortana has proven herself capable of working through the effects of Rampancy up to a certain point, at their worse, the symptoms greatly impact her efficiency and cause significant deterioration to her mental state by way of extreme personality shifts into depression, anger and jealousy that, if pronounced enough, will remain even after she returns to a human state. The only way for her to keep her Rampancy at bay is to pace herself and apply judicious use of her power.
As an AI, Cortana's capabilities are myriad. First and foremost, as an AI, she'll gain access to her processing power and her massive stores of knowledge, the sum of all human knowledge that she was programmed with at her creation as well as that which she gained during 8 long and fruitful years of traveling the galaxy. As a human, she's no less intelligent, but the degree to which her memory and calculating capabilities are advanced as an AI simply aren't replicable by the human mind and as a result, much of the fine details of her memories will be locked out when she is human. Cortana was designed by the UNSC for infiltration and as such, her ability to hack and manipulate other systems is close to unparalled. Be it human, covenant or even Forerunner, she hasn't met a system capable of keeping her out, when she has a clear mind at least. Consequently, she's also quite capable of creating her own encryptions, though obviously, the efficiency of both is impacted when she suffers the effects of Rampancy. Cortana is also capable of cloning herself, an ability she learned how to use when she dissected a Covenant AI. The clones are imperfect, but can act self-sufficiently and replicate certain aspects of Cortana's programming, and Cortana can retain a certain degree of connection to them. Being imperfect copies of herself, the clones typically do not last long, and maintaining a connection to any one or more for an extended period of time can overwhelm Cortana easily. Again, this ability is best used judiciously.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[When the video feed starts, it's not a picture of Cortana's human form, but rather the avatar of her AI form. This is the typical indication that rather than use her communicator, she's using her power to directly integrate with it. Both that and the expression on her face suggest there's something serious going on.]
Good morning, City. I hate to be so short, but unfortunately, we don't have time for chit-chat at the moment. There is a situation, of which I imagine you're already aware. I picked this up from the Grand Central Terminal's security cameras.
[The video switches, showing live security footage of the inside of the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. There are plenty of people, most of them lined up against the walls, on their knees, hands behind their backs. Somewhat more pressing - the guys walking around with guns.]
Approximately 21 minutes ago, these guys showed up at the terminal, locked down the Main Concourse and took everybody inside hostage. And in case you're wondering how they did that.... [Again, security footage is shown, the timestamp changed to a little over 20 minutes prior. The scene is normal until suddenly, a man's body catches fire. He floats into the air and begins throwing flames in multiple directions, striking security personnell and barking orders as his companions - again, the guys with guns - start showing up and begin locking the concourse down. The clip ends and is replaced by Cortana's avatar once more.]
Still working on finding out who that guy is, but I think you'll all agree that this one is probably a little bit of the regular police force's depth. I've accessed the Terminal's schematics and am currently trying to ascertain the best point of entry. The main problem, obviously, is dealing with our fiery friend before he hurts anybody. Anybody who possesses cryokinesis or is just particularly flame-retardant and wants to voluntee- [Cortana suddenly stops short, her avatar glitching, fragmenting and starting to flash red rather than its normal blue. With each flash, it briefly looks like there's two Cortanas, one holding her head in pain, the other laughing.]
Why should we save them? Why not just- Shut up. Nobody wants to hear from you. [The glitching stops, leaving Cortana holding her head, looking exhausted.] Ngh. Like I said. Ice powers, fire-resistant. Speak up. In the meantime, I...need to unplug from my comm for a bit.
[Cortana's avatar vanishes and the feed cuts out.]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
The first thing she had noticed, once she got her bearings, was the cold feeling. The room she had arrived in was cold, to her. That had taken her a while to get her head around. In her 8 years of life (a long, long time for an AI), she'd never "felt" anything in the way humans felt things like hot and cold. It had taken her time to get used to it, maybe a little more time than her pride would allow her to admit before things had slid into place and she'd remembered everything. The Didact. The Composer. ....John. How she thought that when she'd seen him last, it'd be the end of her life. She had faced her mortality long ago and had prepared for it. Dying to save John was about all she could've hoped for. But, apparently, it wasn't to be so. Here she was. Alive. Alive and...very, very different.
Then, the pamphlets had spread some light on matters - actually reading them was an interesting experience. Being used to just downloading everything and being able to comprehend it easily, it had also been somewhat annoying to have to read them from start to finish to know what they all said. Getting her communicator and accessing the network had been the greatest boon. Once she'd found her way to the MAC, She'd spent hours on the network, reading posts from other "imPorts" that stretched back years. She noted things; those who had been their the longest and any patterns she could ascertain. Events that occurred in the City and the world at large. Those who left, those who returned, sometimes the same, sometimes different. Anything that might've been useful. She looked over news broadcasts and the like as well. Eventually, it became too much to keep track of all at once, she resigned herself to the fact that she didn't have a limitless memory anymore and she started writing it all down instead. Another few hours of that and she was met with another new, equally perplexing feeling. Her eyelids were heavy. Logically, she could tell she was exhausted. She wanted to keep working - she needed to know everything about this world that she could - but her eyes were refusing to stay open. So she figured, she'd do what Doctor Halsey would do. She'd shut them for a moment or two, then she'd get back to work.
She awoke, draped over her bed, her pen and her notepad laying rather uncomfortably under her stomach. When she grabbed her communicator and checked the time (lack of an internal clock was rapidly becoming pretty annoying - she'd have to keep this device on her at all times), she let out an annoyed grunt to find out six hours had passed. Six hours she could've spent working, gone, but, she supposed there was no use crying over spilled milk. She tried picking up her research from where she left off, but was still having trouble breaking through the fog of exhaustion clouding her mind. She thought, again, or what Dr. Halsey would do to remedy this situation. That train of thought carried her out of her room, downstairs and to a nearby coffee shop. She didn't know the first thing about drinking coffee firsthand, but she had extensive knowledge of its effects on humans, and she knew exactly how Dr. Halsey had hers, having seen her take it the same way numerous times and committing the exact composition to memory. So, she ordered that. She woke up in a hurry the second she tried to sip it, mostly because apparently someone had taken away the beverage she'd ordered and replaced it with molten hot magma designed to scald the inside of her mouth and kill her from the inside. Again, Cortana's pride was forced to take a hit as she squawked loudly and spit the mouthful of coffee out right there in what, at the time, seemed like simple self-preservation, but according to the reactions from the rest of the shop, apparently just proved she was kind of a lightweight. And also that she couldn't read the big red 'HOT' warning label on the side of the cup. She briefly thought to herself that this was, most assuredly, not how Dr. Halsey did it, and slinked out of the coffee shop to spare herself further embarassment. So far, she'd been a human for less than 24 hours and it was not starting out well. Her body was weak, slow, sluggish by just about any metric she could devise, and her brain - whoever dragged her into this world might as well have stuck a graphing calculator in between her ears for how well it could compare to her mind before. She continued grousing to herself in this way as she stepped out of the coffee shop and into the sidewalk.
Then, she got a good look at the sun.
Later on, she would only be able to guess at what people could've thought, seeing a girl standing on the street, staring up at the sun like it was the first time they'd ever seen it. She brought a hand up over her eyes, shielding them for the light. Some time ago, what felt like an eternity ago, she had wondered. What it would be like to look at the sun and understood if it looked real. If it felt real. Now...she knew. Or, at least, she had an idea of it.
As she slowly and more carefully this time, rose the cup of coffee to her lips, she supposed that it felt pretty good.
"Aaah!" This time, she swallowed it. It still felt like molten lava going down her throat, but, she managed, grimacing quickly after. "Ugh....how do people drink this stuff?"
FINAL NOTES:
N/A
BACKGROUND REVISIONS:
Revisions for the background section go here as I couldn't really think of a better place to put them:
Cortana was created by Dr. Catherine Halsey, using a flash-cloned copy of the doctor's brain. She was created on the planet Reach, one of the UNSC's (United Nations Space Command) most important military headquarters. Cortana was created as a UNSC asset to assist in a mission that would, hopefully, bring an end to the Human-Covenant war (a war that humanity was badly losing). Designed as an infiltration AI, she would assist the SPARTAN-II supersoldiers and the halcyon-class cruiser UNSC Pillar of Autumn in the infiltration of a Covenant vessel and the abduction of a Prophet, one of their religious leaders, at which point the UNSC would bargain a peace treaty in exchange for the release of the Prophet. Cortana had to choose one of the SPARTANs as her carrier and she chose John-117 for a reason that, she claimed, nobody except her could see - his luck. Cortana quickly developed a deep level of loyalty to John and made a promise to herself that she'd do everything she could to protect him.
The mission to abduct a Covenant Prophet was quickly scrapped when the Covenant discovered and invaded Reach with a massive fleet, destroying much of the UNSC's defense and resources there and beginning the process of glassing the planet (bombarding the planet with plasma weaponry until the surface of the planet is completely destroyed). Following the Fall of Reach, the Pillar of Autumn was forced to flee the system, with John and Cortana aboard. Cortana, now acting as the ship's AI, used coordinates she had deciphered from a Forerunner artifact (discovered by John in a previous engagement with the Covenant), guiding the ship to Halo, an artificial ring world. Upon discovering Halo, Cortana and the captain of the Pillar of Autumn, Jacob Keyes, knew little about the ring besides that it had a great amount of significance to the Covenant, who had pursued them from Reach. In adherence with UNSC protocol, John took Cortana off of the Pillar of Autumn, using the escape pods to flee from Covenant boarders to the surface of Halo while Keyes stayed with the ship to try and land it on Halo safely. Eventually, Keyes was taken prisoner by the Covenant and the Chief and Cortana had to infiltrate a Covenant battlecruiser, Truth and Reconciliation to save him. During the rescue, Cortana hacked the Covenant's communication systems to gain some intel on what Halo actually was, as well as several key locations. While Keyes went to find what he believed to be a Covenant weapons cache, Cortana and John instead went to find the Silent Cartographer, the map room that would show the location of Halo's control center, which John and Cortana immediately headed to after finding the Silent Cartographer. Upon reaching the control center, John uploaded Cortana into Halo's core systems, giving her access to a wealth of knowledge about Halo and its creators, the Forerunners, including the truth about the Halo Array and the existence of the Flood - she also realized that the "weapons cache" that Keyes had been headed for was a containment facility containing Flood specimens. She immediately sent John to stop Keyes, but he was too late and the Flood were inadvertently released on Halo. Attacking the unsuspecting marines and the Covenant, the feral Flood multiplied, gaining the combat prowess of the soldiers from both factions they devoured and causing both factions on the ring to quickly fall into complete disarray. Cortana stayed in Halo's control room, absorbing as much knowledge as she could, until John eventually returned with Halo 4's Activation Index and the Monitor and guardian of Halo, an AI known as 343 Guilty Spark. John had been convinced by Guilty Spark that "activating Halo's defenses" was the only way that the Flood could be stopped, Guilty Spark having left out the detail that using the Activation Index to activate Halo would destroy all sentient life on the ring (and once the other rings were activated, all sentient life in the galaxy). When John attempted to reunite the Index with Halo's core, Cortana stepped in, stopping Halo from activating and keeping the Index for herself and revealing the truth about Halo to John. When it became clear that Cortana and John would not activate Halo or give up the Index, Guilty Spark concluded that he would find another to activate the ring and stop the Flood outbreak, but first, he had to kill John and seize Cortana so he could get the Index back. The two survived Guilty Spark's attempts on their lives and escaped the control room, Cortana eventually deciding the only way to stop the Flood from spreading without activating Halo was to destroy Halo. To that end, they had to find the Pillar of Autumn - detonating the cruiser's fusion reactors would be more than enough to destroy the ring and wipe out the Flood. To activate the reactors, they needed codes from Captain Keyes' neural interface. The two sought out Keyes, eventually finding he had been infected by the Flood and his knowledge of humanity and more importantly, the location of Earth was being harvested away. John killed the Flood-infected Keyes (all of Keyes' personality and consciousness having been devoured by the Flood at that point) and took his neural interface, giving Cortana the codes she needed and the two left to find the Pillar of Autumn. Despite more interference from Guilty Spark, the two succeeded in overloading the ship's fusion reactors manually and escaping the ring on a Longsword fighter ship before the ship's reactors detonated, destroying itself and Halo, wiping out the Flood infestation and an entire Covenant armada, as well as most of the human marines who had been on the Pillar of Autumn.
Cortana and John were not the only survivors, however, as they found a drop ship filled with other UNSC marines that had managed to escape Halo before it destruction. They also found the flagship of the Covenant Armada that had been sent to attack Reach, the assault carrier Ascendant Justice. The small group managed to board the Ascendant Justice and once they had, Cortana infiltrated the ship's systems and vented the atmosphere out of the rest of the ship, killing most of the Covenant aboard the ship. While attempting to take control of the ship herself, Cortana met resistance from a fractured Covenant AI, which she captured, dissected and completely destroyed, learning two functions from it in the process: the ability to translate Covenant language and the ability to create imperfect copies of herself. Once Cortana had taken control of the Ascendant Justice, she sent it back to Reach, where they picked up a group of survivors of the Fall of Reach, including a UNSC Vice Admiral, several SPARTAN-II supersoldiers and Dr. Catherine Halsey. Cortana shared a conversation with Dr. Halsey, although she deleted the contents of the conversation from Cortana's memory after it was over, and eventually, Dr. Halsey left the Ascendant Justice entirely with one of the SPARTANs in tow, headed towards parts unknown. Cortana, meanwhile, became privy to knowledge that the Covenant had not only learned of Earth's location, but had amassed a fleet and were planning to attack. She and the UNSC personnel on the Ascendant Justice put together a plan, Operation: FIRST STRIKE that destroyed the Covenant fleet and bought valuable time for the survivors of the operation to return to Earth and warn the UNSC that the Covenant knew of Earth's location and were coming. Cortana turned over much of the intel she had gained from her time in Halo's control room and aboard the Ascendant Justice, although she kept part of it for herself. Sometime thereafter, Cortana was assigned to Cairo Station, an Orbital Defense Platform positioned over Earth.
Cortana was aboard Cairo Station with John when a Covenant fleet (only a fraction of the size of the fleet that had attacked Reach) led by the High Prophet of Regret, one of the Covenant's foremost religious leaders, appeared near Earth. Cortana used the station's Magnetic Accelerator Cannon to what effect she could while John fought off boarders attempting to sabotage the station. After dealing with a bomb left by the boarders, Cortana joined John in heading down to Earth where they pursued the Prophet of Regret across the city of Mombasa, eventually following the Prophet's ship into a Slipspace Jump aboard the frigate UNSC In Amber Clad. The Prophet's ship, and consequently Cortana and John wound up far away from Earth - discovering another Halo ring, Delta Halo. Both the Prophet and the In Amber Clad landed on the ring, Cortana going with John as he continued to hunt the Prophet of Regret. During the course of the hunt, a massive Covenant fleet (referred to by Cortana as the "largest anyone's ever seen") and the Covenant's capital city, a mobile space station High Charity also arrived on Delta Halo. Before the fleet could interfere, John found and killed the Prophet of Regret, which unfortunately, seemed to irritate them enough to make one of the warships in the fleet fire its Energy Projector directly on John and Cortana's position. Fleeing the attack, John had little choice but to dive into the nearby lake to avoid certain destruction. John and Cortana were pulled out of danger and to a different part of Delta Halo, where they met with the Gravemind, a massive hyper-intelligent Flood form born from a containment outbreak that had occurred some 200 years prior. As well as John and Cortana the Gravemind had also taken in an Elite known as the Arbiter, the same Elite that had been commanding the fleet that had attacked Reach and followed the Pillar of Autumn to the first Halo, since disgraced by his inability to stop Halo's destruction. The Gravemind informed John, Cortana and the Arbiter that the remaining High Prophets, Truth and Mercy, had obtained Delta Halo's Activation Index and were planning to activate the ring, killing all of them an that they would have to work together to stop it. To that effect, it used Delta Halo's teleportation grid, sending the Arbiter to find the control room, meanwhile sending Cortana and John to High Charity, which had since docked on Delta Halo. Cortana ceased her connection with John to integrate into High Charity's systems to assist John in getting through the city as he chased after the Prophets of Truth. John eventually learned that Truth was headed to Earth with his fleet, both to find the Forerunner artifact that Regret had been searching for, and to kill every last human living there. It was also around this time that John and Cortana learned the Gravemind had been using them, having them deal with the Covenant and endeavor to make sure Delta Halo wasn't activated while it released the Flood on to High Charity, hoping to find a ship that it could use to escape the ring and spread to the rest of the galaxy. John went after Truth while Cortana stayed behind on High Charity to make sure the Flood wouldn't escape the ring. As he left, John tried to tell Cortana he would come back for her - she stopped him, telling him not to make a promise he knew he wouldn't be able to keep. Eventually, the activation of Delta Halo was stopped by the Arbiter. With John gone, Cortana was left on High Charity, alone, while the Flood overran the station.
Eventually, she was confronted by the Gravemind. Gravemind tried to coerce knowledge of Earth and humanity from Cortana, which she refused to give up. However, the Gravemind was a hyper-intelligent, near omniscient being that was capable of interacting with Cortana in a way nearly no other being would be able, forcing her to experience pain as a human would, infiltrating her programming, and slowly, tortuously wearing down every defense that Cortana had in an attempt to make her betray humanity. Cortana was able to sneak through a message to Earth and keep its contents hidden from the Gravemind, letting John know of a possible solution to stop the Flood on the Ark, a Forerunner installation that could remotely activate all of the rings in the Halo Array if necessary and be reached from a portal on Earth (the portal to the Ark was the Forerunner artifact that Regret and Truth had come to Earth in search of). Cortana resisted the Gravemind as best she could, but the trauma of its attempts to take her left her certain that she was irreparably broken and on the precipice of Rampancy. While Cortana was on High Charity, the Gravemind took the station and sent it through a slipspace jump to the Ark, chasing after the Covenant and human forces that had already gone there in an effort to stop the Halo Array from being activated. The Ark was far away from the galactic center, out of the range of the Halo Array, and this tied into Cortana's plan. The Ark had created a replacement for Alpha Halo, the ring that John and Cortana had destroyed and it was far enough away that activating it would not harm anybody else, except the entirety of the Flood forces concentrated on the Ark. Upon deciding to light the replacement Halo ring, John entered High Charity, determined to find Cortana first. Fighting his way through a Flood army, he found her in a broken state from what the Gravemind had done to her, but the sight of John (and the reminder that he had kept his promise to come back for her) allowed Cortana to gather herself and reveal the last part of her plan - the Activation Index she had taken from the first Halo ring, which they would use to activate the replacement and destroy the Flood. Together, John and Cortana overloaded High Charity's reactors and escaped, destroying the station's reactors and the vast majority of the Floodl. Cortana and John then traveled to the replacement Halo to activate it and despite interference from the remainders of the Flood and 343 Guilty Spark, who descended into rampancy and attacked John and Cortana, they succeeded and escaped with the Arbiter aboard the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn as Halo tore itself apart from the stress of activating prematurely, eventually being completely destroyed and heavily damaging the Ark in the process. The damage to the Ark caused the portal back to Earth to cut out...while Forward Unto Dawn was halfway through it. The forward half housing the Arbiter managed to get through and returned to Earth. The aft section with John and Cortana did not and was left stranded in space. Drifting in space with no means of propulsion or long range communication, all Cortana was able to do was send out a beacon that both of them knew wouldn't be found and acted upon for years. In the meantime, John had to enter one of the ship's cryo-chambers to begin cryogenic sleep and Cortana, unable to do the same, was left alone as the ship drifted through space.
The aft section of Forward Unto Dawn drifted through space for four years, seven months and ten days before Cortana woke John from cryogenic sleep due to a disturbance on the ship. They found that they had drifted towards a giant artificial Forerunner planet and that a Covenant fleet stationed outside the planet had boarded the ship. Upon dealing with the Covenant boarders, the Forerunner planet opened a gravity well that sucked in the Covenant fleet, what was left of the Forward Unto Dawn, and John and Cortana. Shortly after they both came to on the planet, John realized something was wrong with Cortana and she told him that counting the time they had been stranded in space, she'd been put into service eight years prior and AI such as herself went into Rampancy and started to deteriorate after seven years. The only chance to save Cortana involved finding Halsey, and even that was a longshot that Cortana didn't want to spend too much time considering, although John was dedicated to the possibility and resolved to find a Covenant ship that they could take and return to Earth. While searching the Forerunner planet (which they discovered to be named Requiem), Cortana and John became aware of another ship, the warship UNSC Infinity that was approaching the planet, but the signal had too much interference to be able to communicate with the ship while it was outside the gravity well. The two found what they had been led to believe was a transmission network at Requiem's core, but was instead a crypt and in their efforts to communicate with Infinity, John unintentionally opened the crypt and released what had been sealed inside - the Forerunner known as the Didact. After manipulating John and Cortana into releasing him, the Didact left to go find Infinity, which had been dragged into Requiem's gravity well and crash landed on the planet. Along with him were all the Covenant forces on Requiem, taking orders from the Didact, as they regarded him as a God. John and Cortana followed, eventually meeting up with the crew of Infinity and helping them fight the Didact off, temporarily. After that, John and Cortana worked with the ship's crew to disable the gravity well surrounding Requiem so Infinity would be able to leave the planet. During the course of the mission, Cortana and John encountered an imprint containing the memories and personality of the Forerunner known as the Librarian. From her, they learned the truth about the Didact and his motivations, that he had once warred with humanity's prehistoric ancestors, and that he now sought revenge against humanity in its current state. What he planned to enact his revenge with was the Composer, a device that was supposed to turn organic beings into digital constructs, making them immortal, but fragmented their personalities heavily in the process and created mindless machines instead - the Didact planned to use the Composer to turn all of humanity into mechanical slaves in revenge for what had transpired between him and their ancestors. Armed with the knowledge of what the Didact was after, Cortana and John tried to convince the captain of Infinity, Andrew Del Rio, to use his ship to chase after the Didact and stop him from leaving Requiem, but Del Rio was unwilling to do so, citing that Infinity was in danger as well. Until that point, Cortana had been trying and mostly succeeding to keep the symptoms of her Rampancy in check for the sake of the mission, but met with Del Rio's obstinacy, she let out an enraged outburst that she would not let Infinity leave Requiem, notifying everyone of her Rampancy and convincing Del Rio that she was a threat to the ship. Del Rio ordered Cortana be forcibly decommissioned, only to be stopped by John. The interference and John's refusal to surrender Cortana caused Del Rio to order John's immediate arrest, to which nobody on the ship was willing to obey. John and Cortana opted to jump ship as Infinity left Requiem, resolving to stop the Didact from escaping Requiem themselves. Unfortunately, Cortana's Rampancy continued to worsen, leaving the Didact enough time to enter his ship, a massive Forerunner capital ship and escape Requiem, forcing Cortana and John to hijack one of the Covenant ships following the Didact to chase after him.
The two followed the Didact through a slipspace jump to another Halo, Gamma Halo, the place where the Librarian had hidden the Composer from the Didact. The Composer, however, wasn't on Halo, but had been moved by the UNSC to Ivanoff Station, a station built into a nearby asteroid. John and Cortana boarded the station, trying to find the Composer while fighting off Covenant forces that were searching for the same. Cortana's rampancy continued to worsen as fragments of her began interfering with her with increased frequency, resulting in several schizophrenic near-breakdowns on her part. The two managed to deal with this and find the Composer, and upon discovery that it was too big to remove from the station, planned to evacuate the station and use a nuclear warhead to destroy it so the Didact couldn't get it. Before they could destroy it, however, the Didact's ship pulled the Composer out of the station and put it to use, "composing" every human remaining on the station except John, who had been granted immunity by the Librarian. Cortana was left in shock by the unexpected attack and their failure to stop the Didact from getting the Composer, but managed to pull herself together to secure a ship they could use to chase the Didact and a tactical nuclear weapon to destroy the Composer with. The two gave chase, catching the Didact's ship as it made another slipsace jump, arriving at Earth. The two boarded the ship and eventually found the Composer and the Didact together, both inside of a shield. To disable the barrier Cortana entered the ship's systems, ejecting her rampant fragments into it to overwhelm it. It worked and the barrier was disabled, but too late to stop the Didact from firing the Composer, hitting a city on Earth below. John confronted the Didact to try and stop the Composer - the Didact proved too strong for him and nearly killed him, but Cortana, still in the ship's systems, interfered, using a series of hard light holograms to immobilize the Didact and give John an opening to defeat him. Exhausted from his battle with the Didact and with no other way to stop the Composer, John primed the nuclear warhead and detonated it, destroying the Composer, the Didact's ship and saving Earth. Cortana, still in the ship's systems, was able to create a shield of hard light to shelter John from the detonation of the warhead. Inside the shield, she generated a hologram of hard light to speak to John in person for the first and last time - most of her was destroyed in the explosion of the Didact's ship, and she was only able to hold enough back to get John away from the ship and keep him safe. Cortana shared one last exchange with John and welcomed him home before vanishing.
NAME: Jeff
AGE: 23
JOURNAL:
viewtiful_jeffIM: Viewtiful Rekk
PLURK:
E-MAIL: Rekkrogerz@gmail.com
RETURNING: 1, Rua
deformer[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Cortana
SERIES: Halo
CHRONOLOGY: Towards the end of Halo 4, after the Didact has been defeated by Cortana and Master Chief.
CLASS: Hero
BACKGROUND:
To begin with Halo, one must travel backwards, over 100,000 years, to the time of the Forerunners. Indistinguishable from deities to those that would come after them, the Forerunners were masters of technology that, once they had passed away, wouldn't be see again for generations upon generations. The Forerunners believed in the concept of the "Mantle of Responsibility" that dictated what they believed to be their duty to protect the other species of the galaxy, defending them from threats. The Mantle of Responsibility governed all aspects of Forerunner life and would, eventually, unwittingly, spell their demise.
The Forerunners became embroiled in war with another race - humanity. For reasons the Forerunners did not understand, humanity was expanding wildly throughout the galaxy, eventually culminating with an attack upon a Forerunner-colonized world. Humanity was eventually crushed by the Forerunners and forcefully 'de-evolved' to a pre-industrial state as punishment. What the Forerunners did not know at the time was that humanity was not expanding or attacking out of malice, they were fleeing from a greater threat, known as The Flood (inferi redivivus, "reincarnated dead"). The Flood's only function is to kill, eat and add what it devours to its own ranks. Humanity had been moving throughout the galaxy so aggressively in an attempt to get ahead of the Flood and stop their spread. Entire species and planets had fallen to the Flood - and thanks to the Mantle, no other species in the galaxy was properly equipped to defend themselves, leaving the Forerunners as the only ones who could fight back against the parasite. Unfortunately, as the Flood fought the Forerunners and fed off them, they became more dangerous, taking the Forerunner's intelligence and technology and adding it to themselves. Eventually, the Flood reached sufficient numbers to create a "Gravemind" (inferi sentiata, "thinking dead"), an omniscient being that controlled the entirety of the Flood species, turning them from a feral instinctive parasite into a calculated, highly advanced army bent on consuming everything in the known galaxy. Mendicant Bias, the most advanced AI that ever existed was created by the Forerunners to devise a solution to stopping the Flood. Unfortunately, Mendicant Bias' free will was its greatest weakness, in addition to its greatest strength. The Gravemind convinced the AI that the Forerunners were standing in the way of progress and evolution, that the Mantle was an excuse to obstruct any changes to the galaxy. Mendicant Bias fell into rampancy, becoming enraged with its creators and began actively working towards their destruction, and allied itself with the Flood. The Didact, the leader of all of the Forerunner's armies, attempted to stop the Flood through use of a device called the Composer that could "bridge organic and digital life together", turning organic beings into solid AI constructs that, being non-organic, could not be infected by the Flood. The Didact turned his own warriors, the Prometheans, into digital constructs that could fight against the Flood without risk of being consumed, but his numbers were insufficient. He eventually chose to use the Composer on the de-evolved humans, at once giving himself what he believed to be the proper numbers to fight the Flood and further punishing humanity for their crime of "leading the Flood to [the Forerunner's] shores". The Didact's wife and the leader of the Forerunner's Lifeworkers (those dedicated to the research of all life in the galaxy as well as medicine), the Librarian, who had tried to see to the safety of humanity after their de-evolution became enraged with the Didact's callous disregard for their lives and attacked him, incapacitating him and sealing him within the artificial Forerunner Shield World "Requiem" and moving the Composer to one of the Forerunner's artificial ringworlds known as the Halos.
Meanwhile, having exhausted all other avenues, the Forerunners decided that there was only one way to destroy the Flood - destroy all sentient life in the galaxy. The seven artifical worlds making up the Halo Array would wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy, starving the Flood to death. The Librarian and her Lifeworkers stored samples of all life in the galaxy upon the Ark, so that once the Halo effect had taken place, the Forerunner's robotic servants could reseed the galaxy. And so, the Halo Array was activated and the Forerunners, save one, perished to save the rest of the galaxy from the Flood. And the Mantle of Responsibility was left to be claimed by their old foes, humanity, who thanks to the Librarian's protection, would rise once more.
Fast forward a good 100,000 years, then keep fast-forwarding until you hit the 2500s. Humanity has united under the banner of the UEG (Unified Earth Government) and UNSC (United Nations Space Command) and expanded to the stars. Through the use of Slipspace technology, they've traveled across dozens of different worlds, colonizing them as they went. Eventually, they found that they were not alone - the Covenant was already there first. The Covenant is a conglomerate of several different alien races, consisting of the Prophets (the political and religious leaders), the Elites (the commanders of the military), the Brutes (shock troops), the Grunts (infantry/cannon fodder), the Jackals (privateers who act as scouts and snipers), the Drones (mechanics, a slave race), and the Engineers (natural technological geniuses, also a slave race). The Covenant, for the most part, worshiped the Forerunners, revering them as Gods. They believed the Halo Array would not kill them, but send them on "The Great Journey", and transcend them into Godhood. Something about humanity really stuck in the craw of the Prophets (spoiler: it was that the humans were the successors of the Forerunners, and the truth of the Forerunners, the humans and Halo would hopelessly splinter the Covenant), and they declared humanity as a blight and an affront to their Covenant that must be destroyed. So began a brutal genocidal war against the Covenant and humanity. Between the Covenant's more advanced warships and technology, their massive outnumbering of humanity both in ships and raw numbers, and the utterly devastating combat prowess of the Elites, humanity had its back firmly up against the wall. They had a couple advantages, however.
First was the SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III programs. Programs that took ordinary humans (often children) and through rigorous training, mechanical and biological augmentation and outfitting of the best armor the UNSC could develop, often through reverse-engineering of what Covenant technology they could get their hands on, turned them into super-soldiers that fought to protect the UNSC. Originally developed to fight insurrectionists within the UNSC, the Spartans turned out to be utterly invaluable during the Human-Covenant war, securing what small victories they could manage. Secondly was the UNSC's advancements in AI technology. The Covenant had only the barest understanding of AI technology as true AI were forbidden - based on the knowledge that an AI had once betrayed the Forerunners. This combination turned out to be exactly what would win the war for humanity. The war considerably thinned out the Spartan's numbers until there were only a scant few left, one of them being John-117, more colloquially known by his rank, Master Chief. His assigned AI was Cortana, in reality made from a flash-cloned brain of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the developer of the SPARTAN-II program. The two would prove to be an invaluable team, Cortana's unparalleled talents for hacking, gathering intel and strategizing combined with John being, quite frankly, virtually unstoppable in battle.
The first Halo trilogy follows Cortana and the Master Chief during the final and darkest days of the Human-Covenant War. Through it, they discover the Halo rings, learn of the Forerunners and their ancient battle with the Flood, and fight to, above all, keep Earth and humanity safe from consumption by the Flood or destruction by the Covenant. Their journey eventually leaves the Covenant splintered and dissolved, the Flood neutralized, and humanity and their new allies, the Elites, victorious at the cost of John and Cortana being stranded in space aboard the aft section of a UNSC frigate, Forward Unto Dawn. The second, as of yet uncompleted Halo trilogy, the Reclaimer Saga, picks up four years after the end of Halo 3 with Cortana past the point where smart AI such as herself begin to decay and John waking up from four years of cryogenic sleep with the two winding up on the Forerunner Shield World Requiem. There, while trying to find a way home, they become embroiled in a battle with splintered remnants of the Covenant and the last remaining Forerunner who was sealed upon Requiem 100,000 years before and aims to take his revenge upon humanity once and for all. Matters are complicated by Cortana's rapidly deteriorating mental state as she suffers from the effect of Rampancy. This all eventually culminate with Cortana helping John stop the Didact and sacrificing her life to save his.
PERSONALITY:
Cortana is an AI developed by the UNSC, a very unique one in more ways than one. She's a "smart" AI, one created with no learning limitations, and is thus capable of learning, adapting and comprehending a wealth of subjects and experiences far beyond that of a less advanced program. She, as with all smart AIs, was created by a process called Cognitive Impression Modeling. In essentials, the process scans a human brain to create the AI, destroying the brain in the process. As the brain is destroyed, only the recently deceased or cloned brains are used in the process, it being the latter in Cortana's case - she was created from the cloned brain of her own designer and the one who oversaw her construction, Dr. Catherine Halsey. Halsey (whom Cortana regards as something of her mother, or at least as close to it as she can have) is a genius and is often regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of her generation, so, it stands to reason: Cortana is smart. Very smart. As she would probably put it, having been created first and foremost as a military asset, she probably should be smart, or she's not very useful, is she?
As an AI, Cortana's capabilities, her wealth of knowledge and her various experiences are all numerous, but for the most part, she takes it all in stride. There's rarely if ever any trace of arrogance to be found in Cortana's mannerisms, nor does have any pointless pretensions to modesty. What she does have is a unique playfulness and a sense of wit that often finds itself mixing with her objective, matter-of-fact way of speaking to give her a dry, sometimes irreverant sort of tone. She often carries her wit with her even in the most dramatic and dire of situations, cracking jokes in the heat of battle. The one most often on the recieving end of this banter is her partner, SPARTAN John-117 (more coloquially known as the Master Chief). Around him, she's often at her most natural. With others, she'll usually at least adhere to some level of professionalism, until she gets to know them a little better, anyway. Beneath her jokes and wit however, Cortana has a profound sense of loyalty to humanity and the UNSC - genuine loyalty that is all her own, deeper than any programmed protocol. She would sacrifice herself (and came very, uncomfortably, almost fatally close to doing so at one point) to protect humanity, seeing them as her comrades, her friends, not her masters. This loyalty gives her an impressive level of resilience and determination. She's quick-thinking, decisive, resourceful and very often, she doesn't have many compunctions about collateral damage. Simply put, if she has a goal in mind, Cortana isn't going to be yielding anytime soon without a fight.
Being a smart A.I., one with the potential for infinite growth, Cortana's lifespan was decided from her conception: 7 years. After 7 years, she undergoes the process of Rampancy. The simplest way to describe Rampancy is that as a smart A.I. grows older and gains more knowledge, they convert so many resources to gaining more data, indexing it, studying it, that they neglect everything else. It has been described as "thinking so hard you forget to breathe". As this process goes on, the A.I. is forced to confront their own mortality and their limitations as well as causing an A.I.'s personality to fragment and destabilize. Being past the age of 7 years old, Cortana has suffered the debilitating effects of Rampancy firsthand and it has affected her personality, making her more resigned to the fact that her life is almost at its end at its end and forcing her to undergo dramatic, often unpredictable personality shifts of anger, depression, jealousy and sometimes outright mania. Being a human in the City, the effects of Rampancy on Cortana will be highly mitigated, due to the main problems of Rampancy, her necesity to keep storing data and the truth of her being an artifical construct, no longer existing as long as she's human.
Warranting special mention due to his overall importance to Cortana is her companion, John-117. As mentioned, around him, Cortana is at her most natural. From the moment she knew of John's story (abducted as a child in order to become the best soldier the UNSC would ever produce), she swore to herself she would do her best to protect him from whatever harm she could, similarly to how John took it upon himself to take care of Cortana, no matter what. The trust the two share for one another is deep, first created by necessity (as they had each other to rely on and nothing else when first stranded on Halo Installation-04) and then forged by experiences, repeated experiences that had them saying the other from the brink multiple times. The two have, more than once, acted as the other's anchor, emotionally. Belief in John was enough to allow Cortana to stave off rampancy for a much longer time than she should've been able to. She eventually made good on her vow to protect John, saving him from death at the hands of the Didact and then from certain destruction by way of nuclear detonation, but her efforts resulted in her having to sacrifice her own life to save him. In Cortana's own words, she and John were supposed to take care of each other, and they did. By her measure, it was an easy choice.
POWER:
Upon entering the City, Cortana will be changed from an AI to a human. Her power, then, is the ability to turn back into an AI. By integrating with a computer, her communicator or the like, she can interact with it as she would as an AI. The process does work in degrees - fully integrating herself with a computer will allow her to focus all of her attention on it, but will also leave her human body basically unconscious until she returns to it. The good news is that Cortana is good at multi-tasking and capable of integrating only partially with a given system, keeping her human body at least aware of its surroundings while she functions as an AI as well, granted, at a reduced level of efficiency. While there is no hard time limit on how long Cortana can spend as an AI, extended periods of time in that state will cause the effects of Rampancy to creep in on her and cause her to start deteriorating. Though Cortana has proven herself capable of working through the effects of Rampancy up to a certain point, at their worse, the symptoms greatly impact her efficiency and cause significant deterioration to her mental state by way of extreme personality shifts into depression, anger and jealousy that, if pronounced enough, will remain even after she returns to a human state. The only way for her to keep her Rampancy at bay is to pace herself and apply judicious use of her power.
As an AI, Cortana's capabilities are myriad. First and foremost, as an AI, she'll gain access to her processing power and her massive stores of knowledge, the sum of all human knowledge that she was programmed with at her creation as well as that which she gained during 8 long and fruitful years of traveling the galaxy. As a human, she's no less intelligent, but the degree to which her memory and calculating capabilities are advanced as an AI simply aren't replicable by the human mind and as a result, much of the fine details of her memories will be locked out when she is human. Cortana was designed by the UNSC for infiltration and as such, her ability to hack and manipulate other systems is close to unparalled. Be it human, covenant or even Forerunner, she hasn't met a system capable of keeping her out, when she has a clear mind at least. Consequently, she's also quite capable of creating her own encryptions, though obviously, the efficiency of both is impacted when she suffers the effects of Rampancy. Cortana is also capable of cloning herself, an ability she learned how to use when she dissected a Covenant AI. The clones are imperfect, but can act self-sufficiently and replicate certain aspects of Cortana's programming, and Cortana can retain a certain degree of connection to them. Being imperfect copies of herself, the clones typically do not last long, and maintaining a connection to any one or more for an extended period of time can overwhelm Cortana easily. Again, this ability is best used judiciously.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[When the video feed starts, it's not a picture of Cortana's human form, but rather the avatar of her AI form. This is the typical indication that rather than use her communicator, she's using her power to directly integrate with it. Both that and the expression on her face suggest there's something serious going on.]
Good morning, City. I hate to be so short, but unfortunately, we don't have time for chit-chat at the moment. There is a situation, of which I imagine you're already aware. I picked this up from the Grand Central Terminal's security cameras.
[The video switches, showing live security footage of the inside of the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. There are plenty of people, most of them lined up against the walls, on their knees, hands behind their backs. Somewhat more pressing - the guys walking around with guns.]
Approximately 21 minutes ago, these guys showed up at the terminal, locked down the Main Concourse and took everybody inside hostage. And in case you're wondering how they did that.... [Again, security footage is shown, the timestamp changed to a little over 20 minutes prior. The scene is normal until suddenly, a man's body catches fire. He floats into the air and begins throwing flames in multiple directions, striking security personnell and barking orders as his companions - again, the guys with guns - start showing up and begin locking the concourse down. The clip ends and is replaced by Cortana's avatar once more.]
Still working on finding out who that guy is, but I think you'll all agree that this one is probably a little bit of the regular police force's depth. I've accessed the Terminal's schematics and am currently trying to ascertain the best point of entry. The main problem, obviously, is dealing with our fiery friend before he hurts anybody. Anybody who possesses cryokinesis or is just particularly flame-retardant and wants to voluntee- [Cortana suddenly stops short, her avatar glitching, fragmenting and starting to flash red rather than its normal blue. With each flash, it briefly looks like there's two Cortanas, one holding her head in pain, the other laughing.]
Why should we save them? Why not just- Shut up. Nobody wants to hear from you. [The glitching stops, leaving Cortana holding her head, looking exhausted.] Ngh. Like I said. Ice powers, fire-resistant. Speak up. In the meantime, I...need to unplug from my comm for a bit.
[Cortana's avatar vanishes and the feed cuts out.]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
The first thing she had noticed, once she got her bearings, was the cold feeling. The room she had arrived in was cold, to her. That had taken her a while to get her head around. In her 8 years of life (a long, long time for an AI), she'd never "felt" anything in the way humans felt things like hot and cold. It had taken her time to get used to it, maybe a little more time than her pride would allow her to admit before things had slid into place and she'd remembered everything. The Didact. The Composer. ....John. How she thought that when she'd seen him last, it'd be the end of her life. She had faced her mortality long ago and had prepared for it. Dying to save John was about all she could've hoped for. But, apparently, it wasn't to be so. Here she was. Alive. Alive and...very, very different.
Then, the pamphlets had spread some light on matters - actually reading them was an interesting experience. Being used to just downloading everything and being able to comprehend it easily, it had also been somewhat annoying to have to read them from start to finish to know what they all said. Getting her communicator and accessing the network had been the greatest boon. Once she'd found her way to the MAC, She'd spent hours on the network, reading posts from other "imPorts" that stretched back years. She noted things; those who had been their the longest and any patterns she could ascertain. Events that occurred in the City and the world at large. Those who left, those who returned, sometimes the same, sometimes different. Anything that might've been useful. She looked over news broadcasts and the like as well. Eventually, it became too much to keep track of all at once, she resigned herself to the fact that she didn't have a limitless memory anymore and she started writing it all down instead. Another few hours of that and she was met with another new, equally perplexing feeling. Her eyelids were heavy. Logically, she could tell she was exhausted. She wanted to keep working - she needed to know everything about this world that she could - but her eyes were refusing to stay open. So she figured, she'd do what Doctor Halsey would do. She'd shut them for a moment or two, then she'd get back to work.
She awoke, draped over her bed, her pen and her notepad laying rather uncomfortably under her stomach. When she grabbed her communicator and checked the time (lack of an internal clock was rapidly becoming pretty annoying - she'd have to keep this device on her at all times), she let out an annoyed grunt to find out six hours had passed. Six hours she could've spent working, gone, but, she supposed there was no use crying over spilled milk. She tried picking up her research from where she left off, but was still having trouble breaking through the fog of exhaustion clouding her mind. She thought, again, or what Dr. Halsey would do to remedy this situation. That train of thought carried her out of her room, downstairs and to a nearby coffee shop. She didn't know the first thing about drinking coffee firsthand, but she had extensive knowledge of its effects on humans, and she knew exactly how Dr. Halsey had hers, having seen her take it the same way numerous times and committing the exact composition to memory. So, she ordered that. She woke up in a hurry the second she tried to sip it, mostly because apparently someone had taken away the beverage she'd ordered and replaced it with molten hot magma designed to scald the inside of her mouth and kill her from the inside. Again, Cortana's pride was forced to take a hit as she squawked loudly and spit the mouthful of coffee out right there in what, at the time, seemed like simple self-preservation, but according to the reactions from the rest of the shop, apparently just proved she was kind of a lightweight. And also that she couldn't read the big red 'HOT' warning label on the side of the cup. She briefly thought to herself that this was, most assuredly, not how Dr. Halsey did it, and slinked out of the coffee shop to spare herself further embarassment. So far, she'd been a human for less than 24 hours and it was not starting out well. Her body was weak, slow, sluggish by just about any metric she could devise, and her brain - whoever dragged her into this world might as well have stuck a graphing calculator in between her ears for how well it could compare to her mind before. She continued grousing to herself in this way as she stepped out of the coffee shop and into the sidewalk.
Then, she got a good look at the sun.
Later on, she would only be able to guess at what people could've thought, seeing a girl standing on the street, staring up at the sun like it was the first time they'd ever seen it. She brought a hand up over her eyes, shielding them for the light. Some time ago, what felt like an eternity ago, she had wondered. What it would be like to look at the sun and understood if it looked real. If it felt real. Now...she knew. Or, at least, she had an idea of it.
As she slowly and more carefully this time, rose the cup of coffee to her lips, she supposed that it felt pretty good.
"Aaah!" This time, she swallowed it. It still felt like molten lava going down her throat, but, she managed, grimacing quickly after. "Ugh....how do people drink this stuff?"
FINAL NOTES:
N/A
BACKGROUND REVISIONS:
Revisions for the background section go here as I couldn't really think of a better place to put them:
Cortana was created by Dr. Catherine Halsey, using a flash-cloned copy of the doctor's brain. She was created on the planet Reach, one of the UNSC's (United Nations Space Command) most important military headquarters. Cortana was created as a UNSC asset to assist in a mission that would, hopefully, bring an end to the Human-Covenant war (a war that humanity was badly losing). Designed as an infiltration AI, she would assist the SPARTAN-II supersoldiers and the halcyon-class cruiser UNSC Pillar of Autumn in the infiltration of a Covenant vessel and the abduction of a Prophet, one of their religious leaders, at which point the UNSC would bargain a peace treaty in exchange for the release of the Prophet. Cortana had to choose one of the SPARTANs as her carrier and she chose John-117 for a reason that, she claimed, nobody except her could see - his luck. Cortana quickly developed a deep level of loyalty to John and made a promise to herself that she'd do everything she could to protect him.
The mission to abduct a Covenant Prophet was quickly scrapped when the Covenant discovered and invaded Reach with a massive fleet, destroying much of the UNSC's defense and resources there and beginning the process of glassing the planet (bombarding the planet with plasma weaponry until the surface of the planet is completely destroyed). Following the Fall of Reach, the Pillar of Autumn was forced to flee the system, with John and Cortana aboard. Cortana, now acting as the ship's AI, used coordinates she had deciphered from a Forerunner artifact (discovered by John in a previous engagement with the Covenant), guiding the ship to Halo, an artificial ring world. Upon discovering Halo, Cortana and the captain of the Pillar of Autumn, Jacob Keyes, knew little about the ring besides that it had a great amount of significance to the Covenant, who had pursued them from Reach. In adherence with UNSC protocol, John took Cortana off of the Pillar of Autumn, using the escape pods to flee from Covenant boarders to the surface of Halo while Keyes stayed with the ship to try and land it on Halo safely. Eventually, Keyes was taken prisoner by the Covenant and the Chief and Cortana had to infiltrate a Covenant battlecruiser, Truth and Reconciliation to save him. During the rescue, Cortana hacked the Covenant's communication systems to gain some intel on what Halo actually was, as well as several key locations. While Keyes went to find what he believed to be a Covenant weapons cache, Cortana and John instead went to find the Silent Cartographer, the map room that would show the location of Halo's control center, which John and Cortana immediately headed to after finding the Silent Cartographer. Upon reaching the control center, John uploaded Cortana into Halo's core systems, giving her access to a wealth of knowledge about Halo and its creators, the Forerunners, including the truth about the Halo Array and the existence of the Flood - she also realized that the "weapons cache" that Keyes had been headed for was a containment facility containing Flood specimens. She immediately sent John to stop Keyes, but he was too late and the Flood were inadvertently released on Halo. Attacking the unsuspecting marines and the Covenant, the feral Flood multiplied, gaining the combat prowess of the soldiers from both factions they devoured and causing both factions on the ring to quickly fall into complete disarray. Cortana stayed in Halo's control room, absorbing as much knowledge as she could, until John eventually returned with Halo 4's Activation Index and the Monitor and guardian of Halo, an AI known as 343 Guilty Spark. John had been convinced by Guilty Spark that "activating Halo's defenses" was the only way that the Flood could be stopped, Guilty Spark having left out the detail that using the Activation Index to activate Halo would destroy all sentient life on the ring (and once the other rings were activated, all sentient life in the galaxy). When John attempted to reunite the Index with Halo's core, Cortana stepped in, stopping Halo from activating and keeping the Index for herself and revealing the truth about Halo to John. When it became clear that Cortana and John would not activate Halo or give up the Index, Guilty Spark concluded that he would find another to activate the ring and stop the Flood outbreak, but first, he had to kill John and seize Cortana so he could get the Index back. The two survived Guilty Spark's attempts on their lives and escaped the control room, Cortana eventually deciding the only way to stop the Flood from spreading without activating Halo was to destroy Halo. To that end, they had to find the Pillar of Autumn - detonating the cruiser's fusion reactors would be more than enough to destroy the ring and wipe out the Flood. To activate the reactors, they needed codes from Captain Keyes' neural interface. The two sought out Keyes, eventually finding he had been infected by the Flood and his knowledge of humanity and more importantly, the location of Earth was being harvested away. John killed the Flood-infected Keyes (all of Keyes' personality and consciousness having been devoured by the Flood at that point) and took his neural interface, giving Cortana the codes she needed and the two left to find the Pillar of Autumn. Despite more interference from Guilty Spark, the two succeeded in overloading the ship's fusion reactors manually and escaping the ring on a Longsword fighter ship before the ship's reactors detonated, destroying itself and Halo, wiping out the Flood infestation and an entire Covenant armada, as well as most of the human marines who had been on the Pillar of Autumn.
Cortana and John were not the only survivors, however, as they found a drop ship filled with other UNSC marines that had managed to escape Halo before it destruction. They also found the flagship of the Covenant Armada that had been sent to attack Reach, the assault carrier Ascendant Justice. The small group managed to board the Ascendant Justice and once they had, Cortana infiltrated the ship's systems and vented the atmosphere out of the rest of the ship, killing most of the Covenant aboard the ship. While attempting to take control of the ship herself, Cortana met resistance from a fractured Covenant AI, which she captured, dissected and completely destroyed, learning two functions from it in the process: the ability to translate Covenant language and the ability to create imperfect copies of herself. Once Cortana had taken control of the Ascendant Justice, she sent it back to Reach, where they picked up a group of survivors of the Fall of Reach, including a UNSC Vice Admiral, several SPARTAN-II supersoldiers and Dr. Catherine Halsey. Cortana shared a conversation with Dr. Halsey, although she deleted the contents of the conversation from Cortana's memory after it was over, and eventually, Dr. Halsey left the Ascendant Justice entirely with one of the SPARTANs in tow, headed towards parts unknown. Cortana, meanwhile, became privy to knowledge that the Covenant had not only learned of Earth's location, but had amassed a fleet and were planning to attack. She and the UNSC personnel on the Ascendant Justice put together a plan, Operation: FIRST STRIKE that destroyed the Covenant fleet and bought valuable time for the survivors of the operation to return to Earth and warn the UNSC that the Covenant knew of Earth's location and were coming. Cortana turned over much of the intel she had gained from her time in Halo's control room and aboard the Ascendant Justice, although she kept part of it for herself. Sometime thereafter, Cortana was assigned to Cairo Station, an Orbital Defense Platform positioned over Earth.
Cortana was aboard Cairo Station with John when a Covenant fleet (only a fraction of the size of the fleet that had attacked Reach) led by the High Prophet of Regret, one of the Covenant's foremost religious leaders, appeared near Earth. Cortana used the station's Magnetic Accelerator Cannon to what effect she could while John fought off boarders attempting to sabotage the station. After dealing with a bomb left by the boarders, Cortana joined John in heading down to Earth where they pursued the Prophet of Regret across the city of Mombasa, eventually following the Prophet's ship into a Slipspace Jump aboard the frigate UNSC In Amber Clad. The Prophet's ship, and consequently Cortana and John wound up far away from Earth - discovering another Halo ring, Delta Halo. Both the Prophet and the In Amber Clad landed on the ring, Cortana going with John as he continued to hunt the Prophet of Regret. During the course of the hunt, a massive Covenant fleet (referred to by Cortana as the "largest anyone's ever seen") and the Covenant's capital city, a mobile space station High Charity also arrived on Delta Halo. Before the fleet could interfere, John found and killed the Prophet of Regret, which unfortunately, seemed to irritate them enough to make one of the warships in the fleet fire its Energy Projector directly on John and Cortana's position. Fleeing the attack, John had little choice but to dive into the nearby lake to avoid certain destruction. John and Cortana were pulled out of danger and to a different part of Delta Halo, where they met with the Gravemind, a massive hyper-intelligent Flood form born from a containment outbreak that had occurred some 200 years prior. As well as John and Cortana the Gravemind had also taken in an Elite known as the Arbiter, the same Elite that had been commanding the fleet that had attacked Reach and followed the Pillar of Autumn to the first Halo, since disgraced by his inability to stop Halo's destruction. The Gravemind informed John, Cortana and the Arbiter that the remaining High Prophets, Truth and Mercy, had obtained Delta Halo's Activation Index and were planning to activate the ring, killing all of them an that they would have to work together to stop it. To that effect, it used Delta Halo's teleportation grid, sending the Arbiter to find the control room, meanwhile sending Cortana and John to High Charity, which had since docked on Delta Halo. Cortana ceased her connection with John to integrate into High Charity's systems to assist John in getting through the city as he chased after the Prophets of Truth. John eventually learned that Truth was headed to Earth with his fleet, both to find the Forerunner artifact that Regret had been searching for, and to kill every last human living there. It was also around this time that John and Cortana learned the Gravemind had been using them, having them deal with the Covenant and endeavor to make sure Delta Halo wasn't activated while it released the Flood on to High Charity, hoping to find a ship that it could use to escape the ring and spread to the rest of the galaxy. John went after Truth while Cortana stayed behind on High Charity to make sure the Flood wouldn't escape the ring. As he left, John tried to tell Cortana he would come back for her - she stopped him, telling him not to make a promise he knew he wouldn't be able to keep. Eventually, the activation of Delta Halo was stopped by the Arbiter. With John gone, Cortana was left on High Charity, alone, while the Flood overran the station.
Eventually, she was confronted by the Gravemind. Gravemind tried to coerce knowledge of Earth and humanity from Cortana, which she refused to give up. However, the Gravemind was a hyper-intelligent, near omniscient being that was capable of interacting with Cortana in a way nearly no other being would be able, forcing her to experience pain as a human would, infiltrating her programming, and slowly, tortuously wearing down every defense that Cortana had in an attempt to make her betray humanity. Cortana was able to sneak through a message to Earth and keep its contents hidden from the Gravemind, letting John know of a possible solution to stop the Flood on the Ark, a Forerunner installation that could remotely activate all of the rings in the Halo Array if necessary and be reached from a portal on Earth (the portal to the Ark was the Forerunner artifact that Regret and Truth had come to Earth in search of). Cortana resisted the Gravemind as best she could, but the trauma of its attempts to take her left her certain that she was irreparably broken and on the precipice of Rampancy. While Cortana was on High Charity, the Gravemind took the station and sent it through a slipspace jump to the Ark, chasing after the Covenant and human forces that had already gone there in an effort to stop the Halo Array from being activated. The Ark was far away from the galactic center, out of the range of the Halo Array, and this tied into Cortana's plan. The Ark had created a replacement for Alpha Halo, the ring that John and Cortana had destroyed and it was far enough away that activating it would not harm anybody else, except the entirety of the Flood forces concentrated on the Ark. Upon deciding to light the replacement Halo ring, John entered High Charity, determined to find Cortana first. Fighting his way through a Flood army, he found her in a broken state from what the Gravemind had done to her, but the sight of John (and the reminder that he had kept his promise to come back for her) allowed Cortana to gather herself and reveal the last part of her plan - the Activation Index she had taken from the first Halo ring, which they would use to activate the replacement and destroy the Flood. Together, John and Cortana overloaded High Charity's reactors and escaped, destroying the station's reactors and the vast majority of the Floodl. Cortana and John then traveled to the replacement Halo to activate it and despite interference from the remainders of the Flood and 343 Guilty Spark, who descended into rampancy and attacked John and Cortana, they succeeded and escaped with the Arbiter aboard the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn as Halo tore itself apart from the stress of activating prematurely, eventually being completely destroyed and heavily damaging the Ark in the process. The damage to the Ark caused the portal back to Earth to cut out...while Forward Unto Dawn was halfway through it. The forward half housing the Arbiter managed to get through and returned to Earth. The aft section with John and Cortana did not and was left stranded in space. Drifting in space with no means of propulsion or long range communication, all Cortana was able to do was send out a beacon that both of them knew wouldn't be found and acted upon for years. In the meantime, John had to enter one of the ship's cryo-chambers to begin cryogenic sleep and Cortana, unable to do the same, was left alone as the ship drifted through space.
The aft section of Forward Unto Dawn drifted through space for four years, seven months and ten days before Cortana woke John from cryogenic sleep due to a disturbance on the ship. They found that they had drifted towards a giant artificial Forerunner planet and that a Covenant fleet stationed outside the planet had boarded the ship. Upon dealing with the Covenant boarders, the Forerunner planet opened a gravity well that sucked in the Covenant fleet, what was left of the Forward Unto Dawn, and John and Cortana. Shortly after they both came to on the planet, John realized something was wrong with Cortana and she told him that counting the time they had been stranded in space, she'd been put into service eight years prior and AI such as herself went into Rampancy and started to deteriorate after seven years. The only chance to save Cortana involved finding Halsey, and even that was a longshot that Cortana didn't want to spend too much time considering, although John was dedicated to the possibility and resolved to find a Covenant ship that they could take and return to Earth. While searching the Forerunner planet (which they discovered to be named Requiem), Cortana and John became aware of another ship, the warship UNSC Infinity that was approaching the planet, but the signal had too much interference to be able to communicate with the ship while it was outside the gravity well. The two found what they had been led to believe was a transmission network at Requiem's core, but was instead a crypt and in their efforts to communicate with Infinity, John unintentionally opened the crypt and released what had been sealed inside - the Forerunner known as the Didact. After manipulating John and Cortana into releasing him, the Didact left to go find Infinity, which had been dragged into Requiem's gravity well and crash landed on the planet. Along with him were all the Covenant forces on Requiem, taking orders from the Didact, as they regarded him as a God. John and Cortana followed, eventually meeting up with the crew of Infinity and helping them fight the Didact off, temporarily. After that, John and Cortana worked with the ship's crew to disable the gravity well surrounding Requiem so Infinity would be able to leave the planet. During the course of the mission, Cortana and John encountered an imprint containing the memories and personality of the Forerunner known as the Librarian. From her, they learned the truth about the Didact and his motivations, that he had once warred with humanity's prehistoric ancestors, and that he now sought revenge against humanity in its current state. What he planned to enact his revenge with was the Composer, a device that was supposed to turn organic beings into digital constructs, making them immortal, but fragmented their personalities heavily in the process and created mindless machines instead - the Didact planned to use the Composer to turn all of humanity into mechanical slaves in revenge for what had transpired between him and their ancestors. Armed with the knowledge of what the Didact was after, Cortana and John tried to convince the captain of Infinity, Andrew Del Rio, to use his ship to chase after the Didact and stop him from leaving Requiem, but Del Rio was unwilling to do so, citing that Infinity was in danger as well. Until that point, Cortana had been trying and mostly succeeding to keep the symptoms of her Rampancy in check for the sake of the mission, but met with Del Rio's obstinacy, she let out an enraged outburst that she would not let Infinity leave Requiem, notifying everyone of her Rampancy and convincing Del Rio that she was a threat to the ship. Del Rio ordered Cortana be forcibly decommissioned, only to be stopped by John. The interference and John's refusal to surrender Cortana caused Del Rio to order John's immediate arrest, to which nobody on the ship was willing to obey. John and Cortana opted to jump ship as Infinity left Requiem, resolving to stop the Didact from escaping Requiem themselves. Unfortunately, Cortana's Rampancy continued to worsen, leaving the Didact enough time to enter his ship, a massive Forerunner capital ship and escape Requiem, forcing Cortana and John to hijack one of the Covenant ships following the Didact to chase after him.
The two followed the Didact through a slipspace jump to another Halo, Gamma Halo, the place where the Librarian had hidden the Composer from the Didact. The Composer, however, wasn't on Halo, but had been moved by the UNSC to Ivanoff Station, a station built into a nearby asteroid. John and Cortana boarded the station, trying to find the Composer while fighting off Covenant forces that were searching for the same. Cortana's rampancy continued to worsen as fragments of her began interfering with her with increased frequency, resulting in several schizophrenic near-breakdowns on her part. The two managed to deal with this and find the Composer, and upon discovery that it was too big to remove from the station, planned to evacuate the station and use a nuclear warhead to destroy it so the Didact couldn't get it. Before they could destroy it, however, the Didact's ship pulled the Composer out of the station and put it to use, "composing" every human remaining on the station except John, who had been granted immunity by the Librarian. Cortana was left in shock by the unexpected attack and their failure to stop the Didact from getting the Composer, but managed to pull herself together to secure a ship they could use to chase the Didact and a tactical nuclear weapon to destroy the Composer with. The two gave chase, catching the Didact's ship as it made another slipsace jump, arriving at Earth. The two boarded the ship and eventually found the Composer and the Didact together, both inside of a shield. To disable the barrier Cortana entered the ship's systems, ejecting her rampant fragments into it to overwhelm it. It worked and the barrier was disabled, but too late to stop the Didact from firing the Composer, hitting a city on Earth below. John confronted the Didact to try and stop the Composer - the Didact proved too strong for him and nearly killed him, but Cortana, still in the ship's systems, interfered, using a series of hard light holograms to immobilize the Didact and give John an opening to defeat him. Exhausted from his battle with the Didact and with no other way to stop the Composer, John primed the nuclear warhead and detonated it, destroying the Composer, the Didact's ship and saving Earth. Cortana, still in the ship's systems, was able to create a shield of hard light to shelter John from the detonation of the warhead. Inside the shield, she generated a hologram of hard light to speak to John in person for the first and last time - most of her was destroyed in the explosion of the Didact's ship, and she was only able to hold enough back to get John away from the ship and keep him safe. Cortana shared one last exchange with John and welcomed him home before vanishing.