- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
We know that HALO's could destroy all intellegent life in the galaxy, but do we know that was their original purpose? I believe I remeber the HALO's being called "Fortress worlds" What if they were simply intended as fortresses. The beam towers on the level named HALO could have been designed to destroy attacking ships, the entire thing could have been designed to protect against enemy attack. But, then they found the Flood. Imagine that you're the Commander of the HALO orbiting the Forunner homeworld (Presumably not 04). The Flood have captured a Forunner fleet, and you do your best to defend the homeworld, but a small number of Flood slip through. You know they'll come for you next. Notice that the Control room looked like it had been heavily sealed. A little more fortification could make it almost impervious. The flood were coming and (perhaps literally) banging on the door. So you use the power generators already on HALO to emit a pulse that destroys all sentient life out of desperation. Maybe it interfere with thought processes, causing their brains to overload, making them totally useless or something. Because you're all in the heavily fortified command center, you aren't harmed by the pulse (Given that you made it, I think you'd know how to protect against it.), but all the flood combat forms and all are dead, and it wasn't really a bad thing, because everyone in the galaxy was infected already. You (being a Forunner who can probably live for a rather long time, or maybe the Flood can't live long without a host) stay inside and simply wait for the most of the Flood to die, and then you send out robots to capture them, hoping to study them in order to find a way to destroy them without killing everyone else. Then, you go around the galaxy, genetically engineering new races (including the Humans and the Covenant), and you use the people who put themselves in robots(to escape the Flood) to guard the HALO's, establishing protocols to prevent any chance of a malfunction ending with the (effective) destruction of the galaxy. You keep up contact with the races you created, hence the Covenant use of Forunner technology and the Human similarities to the Forunner.
Note - Is was specifically said that the weapon destroyed all sentient life, it was said that Flood could only infect organisms of sufficient intellegence and biomass, but the weapon seemed to destroy all sentient life. Presuming the Control room of 04' was unhardened (stone wouldn't help much... you'd need something special), If my theory as to how it works, the pulse would have destroyed the Monitor as well... which actually makes him a bit cooler.
PPS - If you respond to this thread, please quote who you are responding to.