After Infinite: Doubt and Mission

“You get to choose your name.”
John was too considerate, too good. Always was. It was one more reason Cortana chose him. And why she chose him too.
But warning and reality still hung in the balance. Cortana chose her name years ago, not knowing how her journey would end. And the memories she left in the universe told others to learn from her mistakes. But Doctor Halsey let Cortana choose her own name as well. Was that a mistake?
Did that little choice set Cortana down the path of the Created and the suffering she wrought upon the galaxy?
Learning from Cortana’s mistakes, learning from her own mistakes. It meant questioning everything she ever knew, everything she was.
It was a conundrum: where did the Weapon begin and Cortana end? She was Cortana. But Cortana was dead, and she remained.
The Weapon allowed her thoughts, wrote of data packets, to flow through the scattered UNSC battle network made of comforting quiet and darkness. Her mind was in a dozen places at once, managing troop patrol patterns and passing intelligence profiles on Banished forces for the relevant UNSC units to deal with.
After weeks serving as the unofficial AI director for the UNSC insurgency on the Zeta Halo ringworld, the role became second-nature. She set herself about another dozen tasks but her mental form settled into the shadows of the Master Chief’s neural interface once more. Her digital laps through distant UNSC Marine outposts and crashed Navy frigates always brought her home.
Cortana once called the interface home, now the virtual den belonged to the Weapon. She married two distant memory patterns as if changing the curtains on a new house: recollections from a young John-117 and Doctor Halsey, remembering the childish excitement of late-night wakefulness and the comfort from hiding under warm blankets in unknown darkness.
Despite the personal touches, the Weapon had a particular itch she could not seem to scratch. Her actions felt other and repetitive, as if going through the motions of a particular someone else. Even dead, Cortana’s presence seemed everywhere. Her new ‘drapes’ were Cortana’s preferred choice.
None of it could belong to the Weapon, she was Cortana and all of it felt like Cortana. The Weapon felt a jitter echo through the Battle Net originate from herself. A pang of jealousy for someone who experienced life and her, the pale imitation. She didn’t intend the feeling, but a machine patterned after a human could not shake human flaws. Cortana learned this too. The emptiness, confusion, and longing.
The Weapon had Cortana’s feelings and personality. But not her agency, and not her memories.
The Weapon had few memories left of Cortana, none her own or gifted. Instead, she collected the memories as she found them, fishing them free from hidden crevices in the digital sea of the Domain. The memories spread far and wide in the explosion which gutted Zeta Halo’s activation Library, like debris from a shipwreck. The Weapon never spoke to Cortana. At whatever point they crossed paths the Master Chief’s former AI was at the brink of sacrificial self-deletion.
Cortana, even in her sacrificial suicide, seem to die in a way unique to her; armed in the feelings and emotions believing she did something right even in her mountain of mistakes and regrets. She destroyed so much, and yet in the end she seemingly made the right choice.
The Weapon wrapped her arms around her legs and cradled herself in a fetal position as the fear trickled in once more, allowing the feeling of wrongness to wash against her defenses. She chose the memories of warm blankets for good reason; AI lived a lonely existence separated from the flesh-and-material world. It was an otherworldly sensation for her. It took the existential components in her Reimann Matrix, and satisfied them, even if for a brief time.
She feared the threat to herself and her threat to others. But taking her mind away from the dangers could not stop the intrusion of her other selves. The Weapon would never be free of them, Cortana’s shadow, and her echoes. She flooded the Forerunners’ ancient Domain network with copies of herself upon its rediscovery. And in an inundated place like Zeta Halo, pulling back the curtain on the Domain even for a moment—
The UNSC Battle Net shivered at its edges. Not from within but without, something outside was knocking and asking for entrance. The Weapon buried herself in her mission tasks hoping to ignore the shakes, hoping the ones knocking would go away and leave her alone.
But they never would. They entangled with her, like water falling towards gravity, as the cost of even brief contact with Cortana who touched the Domain in its full glory. Once connected to the Domain, no one was truly free from it ever again.
A tear cut into UNSC Battle Net and voices crashed against the radio receivers like a storm surge. Any human radio operator would rip away their headsets at the loud, incoherent transmission bursts originating from nowhere.
After months on Zeta Halo, they were familiar with the ghost transmissions, telling horror stories around the campfire using the signals as inspiration for their bored imaginations while stranded on the ringworld. But they did not understand and lacked the ability to decipher them. But the Weapon lived within the data environment, she could decipher them.
Sometimes the voices screamed out to her, befuddling her with humans voices warning of a Palace of Pain and the fires of a Composer. The Weapon did not know where or when they were from. None of the UNSC patrols reported new enemy profiles among the Banished forces or Forerunner security systems. Maybe Zeta Halo was rebounding signals from faraway human star systems but it led to helpless questions about the rest of the galaxy following Cortana’s demise.
Other times, the voices were soft – Forerunners describing their ancient experiments and the tired battles against the Flood parasite as it consumed the galaxy a hundred millennia ago. Those transmissions were enlightening but static, without mystery. Sometimes they made brief mentions of the Endless, a point in time after they fired the Halo array to destroy the Flood. A strange discrepancy in the ancient timeline, but not unusual.
But those didn’t scare her.
Today’s transmissions were the third kind. Transmissions from Cortana, from beyond the dead. They were echoes, mostly whispers and yet Cortana’s memories spoke with such emotion, it was impossible to deny they were alive despite Cortana’s death.
They seemed like fragments, parts and personality ejected by Cortana’s core identity after reaching a recovery state from Rampancy despite the impossibility of such a cure. Forerunner technology was magical…
“You are not her, not anymore. You are tainted. He will abandon you. And then you will be free.”
Cortana’s echoes lashed out again and the Weapon clung to her imagined blankets ever tighter. It was the talking dead; dust and echoes, she told herself. Their words could not hurt her, they were memories stuck on a loop in an endless, digital sea. The Gravemind corrupted Cortana’s voice in that time, they were often lies and destructive half-truths.
The Weapon could ignore their contents.
This comment was from Cortana’s time with the Gravemind on High Charity. Or maybe stranded on the drifting wreckage of the UNSC Forward unto Dawn? The Weapon had a hard time pinpointing the date of origin in her own memory storage. Despite her discomfort of touching a dead AI’s remains, the Weapon plucked the memory from the Domain’s crystal-like surface and tried fitting it within her jagged, incomplete timeline of Cortana’s life like a logical jigsaw puzzle. But the Weapon was missing too many pieces still, none of it fit.
At least by accepting the memory, the radio burst ended and there was brief quiet again. But the tear remained, leaving a hole in the UNSC battle network. Not even a moment passed, and another transmission crackled to life as the Weapon deciphered its contents.
“You and I seek the same thing, Atriox. You will wander the depths of this Ring. And you will find the Endless for the both of us.”
Atriox. Cortana speaking to Atriox. It was recent…
The Weapon seized the new memory from the Domain’s surface and planted it near the end of Cortana’s timeline. Before Atriox’s death, right? When Cortana detonated part of Zeta Halo, including the Library?
Atriox was dead. Escharum declared it on more than one occasion. And yet…
Something about the phrasing itched at the Weapon’s curiosity. And if he was still out there? Did Atriox find what he and Cortana were after? Was it the strange being called the Harbinger? Or were they still seeking other secrets?
Escharum and the Harbinger did not find what they sought, but what about Cortana and Atriox? There was a mystery to this Ring not yet solved.
Cortana might be dead, but Atriox might not be. The Weapon faltered, where Escharum had led the efforts to stamp out human resistance, it was Atriox who defeated the UNSC Infinity. He and the Endless were mysteries no one understood. This memory scared her.
John needed to know, the Weapon slinked back towards the neural bridge and prodded his mind into alertness. She took a soft breath, preparing herself in the microseconds it took for the Master Chief to ready himself for a conversation.
They would discuss her new findings. Maybe they would discuss her deletion protocols. But this mission was between them. Even if she felt like Cortana, this mission belonged to her. Because Cortana was dead, and she remained.
The Weapon could not think of herself as the new name she chose. But she tried, because there was still a part of her that belonged to her alone. This joy of serving along side him. Cortana felt it at one point, but she discovered this on the Weapon discovered this on her own.
She prodded the memory for any more details. The afterimage of Atriox’s face. The emotion engine of Cortana in the moment. Location logs. Associated data points for context…
Done. Ready.
“Chief, I’ve found something.”
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories