DT 2023: The Word Goodbye

==="Prologue: The Word Goodbye"===
:Doctor Catherine E. Halsey
:#### Hours, 7 October 2559 (UNSC military calendar)
:ONI Research Wing, UNSC Supercarrier Infinity
:En route to Planet Reach, Epsilon Eridani System
Doctor Catherine Halsey stared at the terminal phone resting on her work desk, pondering what she would say on record. Her history with keeping personal logs was controversial at minimum.
There were the ONI officers who picked apart her words in past investigations and interrogations. The automated AI systems listening in, saving her words in over ten-thousand places across the Orion Arm. And the future audience, of the classified and declassified sort, who would judge her legacy long after she was gone.
Everyone from the intelligent machines to the agents and children would judge her, and not to misspeak to the potential for a vindictive creator. Halsey dealt with judgement in life, she didn’t know what judgment looked like after her death.
Halsey flicked on her microphone, choosing her first words carefully, and began to speak.
“’Goodbye.’ That word has stayed with me. It has been nearly four months since Cortana’s attack. Since that day we have been constantly moving. Trying to stay one step ahead of her. Any plan we make is risky to say the least.
This one… ‘Goodbye’…”
Halsey trailed off at a low whale-like tune echoed from a gassy Huragok engineer floating between two innocuous research tables nearby. The doctor gave it pause but said nothing, long past any point arguing with its cybernetic kind to document their manipulations and modifications to equipment or technology. Its squid-like, nanomachine tendrils unfurled like twine to minutely disassemble a GEN3 armor-thruster module, separating seamless metal like a 3D block puzzle.
Huragok were too innocent, curious in their nature and always a safety risk when unsupervised. Worse than children, and yet everyone who met them learned to forget the word “no.” The alien hummed and clicked in a therapeutic manner, joining the overhead air-conditioning vents in an industrial harmony.
Halsey took a sip of her lukewarm coffee and continued, “She needs to be destroyed. As I say these words out loud… as I formulate the plan… I have one question.
Can John do this? Can I… Can we all rely on him to do what is needed? To kill his friend?”
A subtle shake rumbled through Halsey’s ONI research office from deep within the supercarrier UNSC Infinity. Probably the sub-light rockets, accelerating or decelerating. With three centuries of gravitic technology, it became difficult to tell the difference as artificial gravity plates pulled everything towards the floor set perpendicular to the thrust direction of human starships.
A single klaxon echoed through the office, marking a shipwide change in affairs as the door slid open and a pair of boots approached. “We are coming up on Reach, Dr. Halsey.”
Halsey looked up from her recorder to her Marine day-escort, a Private Williams. “And Blue Team?”
“Ready. You coming to say goodbye?”
Halsey shook her head. “No. Tell Master Chief to report to me when he has completed his mission.”
The marine nodded and went back out of Halsey’s cluttered office. Halsey watched the infantryman vanish behind the self-sealing door. He and the rest of the Infinity crew would never salute her, it wasn’t proper as a civilian among a military installation. Not even her Spartan-II super-soldiers would offer her such an honor, but that was by design. Instead, they stood at attention in her presence and allowed her to forgo rank when she dotted on them.
Master Chief Petty Officer, Spartan-117 when public appearances mattered. John, and his friends, in respectful privacy. For more than thirty years, they looked to her as a mother-like figure. And yet she was not; it was hardly her right. If the Spartans’ parents knew what she did to their children, a hell would be more remorseful than parental vindication.
Halsey wasn’t even sure if her filling the parental role to the Spartans was evil or disgusting to her own conscience. She asked the question too many times already over decades. She just felt numb.
She felt numb to many things. The law-breaking. The broken ethics. Flashing cloning children. Kidnapping. Stockholm syndrome and indoctrination. Bioengineering. Endless suffering.
The long list of sins with Halsey’s name at the top didn’t end with the SPARTAN-II program. If the public or any audience knew her role in creating Cortana, would they see the AI’s despotic acts as the work of the human-like machine, or the human creator who offered her a mind and personality?
Halsey felt something deeper than numb. Something hollow. What would she do if she were put in John’s shoes and required to bring his old friend kicking-and-screaming back to Halsey to face certain judgment?
It was easy to be the one to make the order, and delegate responsibility to someone else. But no one knew Cortana better than John. She lived in his head for eight years. They shared experiences, memories, and thoughts. Secrets only the two of them would ever know.
Halsey hummed to herself in contemplation, briefly joining the nearby Huragok in meaningless song. John would deliver Cortana. Halsey would pull the trigger and end this AI-made apocalypse. It sounded so simple. But should she worry about John’s feelings towards Cortana, or should she worry for her own?
Halsey muttered to herself. “Goodbye…”
She shutdown the terminal recording and stood up from her desk, shifting aside some shrink-wrapped fiber optic wire sets in her lap. Now would be a good time for a walk free from her silent, judgmental audience of an empty office.
Maybe if she was quick enough, she could send Blue Team off after all. Her half-hearted steps fled the office, knowing even as she left the Huragok Effortless Flight alone that Roland, the Infinity’s AI ship director, would keep a trustworthy eye on him. After all, he refused to take his eyes off Halsey since coming back aboard his warship. Since stepping down this lifepath, she was watched and scrutinized.
Dr. Halsey would be judged until the end of her days. Even as she walked down Infinity's spacious corridors with her Marine escort, she wondered how Cortana might condemn her creator.