- Alexmarin99
- |
- Exalted Member
It seems like there are at least a few more fights to be finished. Halo 3 does not appear to be the end of road for the series. By now, you may have heard the rumors which suggest that the next Halo game may attempt to integrate the fiction from both trilogies into an interesting reinvention. Some fans have even speculated on a separate story detailing the Elites return to Sanghelios.
But, nevertheless, most die hard followers of the Halo story see only one official first party hint about what the next true Halo game will be.
Beyond the credits and the ending which shows the Master Chief and Cortana alive and well we follow the severed hull of Forward Unto Dawn as it floats aimlessly in space. Cortana has activated a beacon for the UNSC to track, but it may be years before anyone even gets word that Spartan 117 is still alive.
As it moves slowly across the vacuum of darkness, the Dawn begins to approach what at first appears to be a planet. As the ship advances, however, the surface reveals a myriad of glowing shapes and geometric patterns when a star's bloom crests over its curved horizon line.
At this point, we only know this structure to be a planetoid . According to Joseph Staten.
GameTap
: Is the Legendary ending of Halo 3 a nod to Marathon, or is it a reference to Ghosts of Onyx?
Joseph Staten
: It's more or less a nod to the beginning of Halo 1. Putting the chief back in his hushed casket, and shutting him down. Oh, wait, you mean the legendary ending of Halo 3 with the crazy planetoid thing? I do not know! There is a crazy planetoid floating out there. Who knows? If you look really, really carefully at the lights on the planet, though, there is something to be seen in those lights.
While there may well be other significant symbols found on the surface of this planetoid structure (including one which resembles the Marathon symbol), the only one which is concretely obvious is found near the northern part of the planetoid.
If you don't recognize it, you may have been living underneath a stone. The symbol has appeared in all three Halo games and in a slew of supplemental content as well:
What does it mean?
No one outside of Bungie really knows. It has been located on each Halo installation we have visited, the Ark, The Terminals and a variety of other places, so one might believe that it may not only deal with the Forerunners themselves, but specifically with the Halo Array.
One thoughtful observer has even suggested that it seems to depict a Halo ringworld and the Index, the key which can activate the Array from the installations control room. This idea was preceded with the notion that it might also be the sword and shield spoken of by Cortana in the Halo 3 Announcement Trailer and subsequently elaborated on in Eric Nylunds Halo: Ghosts of Onyx.
Although both of these ideas sound plausible, one thing is absolutely certain: this place was built by the Forerunners and it was somehow connected to the rings.
When we consider the Halo Arrays corporeal embodiment, we think of the seven ringworlds and the cradle world which are linked together to form a weapon that holds both the destruction and the salvation for all intelligent life in the galaxy. Those who closely followed the story of Halo 3, or have been reading some of the fiction found just outside of the games, know that there is more to the Array than just those eight facilities.
We originally discovered the term shield world in the aforementioned novel, Halo: Ghosts of Onyx. During the development of Halo 3, Nylund worked closely with Bungie to build a supplemental story in the wake of Halo 2 and prefacing Halo 3. This story involved a structure called Onyx. Originally thought to be a planet, the players involved in the story of Ghosts quickly learn that Onyx was much more than a planet, it was a Forerunner installation.
There's so much here, Dr. Halsey whispered. Ive confirmed this world is part of the Forerunners plan together with the Halo rings - their sword and shield . Other parts still elude me.
During the events of Halo 2, Commander Miranda Keyes retrieved the Index just before Installation 05 was fired. This action halted the launching of the Halo Array, but it, in turn, generated a failsafe protocol. The Array was armed but could only be fired from the Ark.
According to Ghosts, this chain-reaction of events opened a rift which had since been dormant at the core of Onyx. It was later revealed that this mysterious planet was, in actuality, a shield world - a facility created by the Forerunners to protect against the phase pulse bombardment of the Array. When the failsafe protocol was enacted with the removal of the Index, a controlled slipspace rupture opened in Onyx's core room, but only for a very limited period of time.
Looking at the shield world from a broad perspective, one might ask what it meant to the Forerunners who built them. With the Conservation Measure in effect and room beyond the range of the Halo Array for other installations, why would a shield world need to be created in the first place?
According to the Terminals, the reason was time - or rather, a lack thereof.
During their darkest hour, Mendicant suggested destroying nearby stars - the solar center of strategically located systems - essentially creating a premature collapse of the celestial body and, in turn, the immolation of the entire system. This would form a firebreak and hedge the parasite in, buying the Forerunners more time. Before this could be done, however, he recommended that the populations of these systems be moved to specific facilities for their own safety - ones which could effectively shield these beings from the Halo effect.
Whether this was fully or partially achieved - or perhaps not even attempted at all - we do not know. We do know that when the protagonists of Ghosts accessed Onyx's slipspace rupture through the core room, they were carried to something completely unique and different. Something no one had expected
The slipspace rift had been stable when they had first passed through, dropping them three meters onto a grassy hill.
They could only watch as it compressed back to a single wavering dot and vanished.
Most of them had thought the slipspace passage would move them to an interior room within the artificial construct known as Onyx.
No one had been prepared for this.
Although technically remaining at the exact center of Onyx, the characters of the novel's story were transported to a structure referred to as a Micro Dyson sphere - an artificial world not too unlike the Halo installations or the Ark. This particular megastructure, however, did not exist in real space and time like the other Forerunner constructs, but within the safety of a controlled rift in slipspace - and, without need for elaboration, its shape was also considerably different.
A very real man by the name of Freeman Dyson envisioned this hypothetical, sphere-like megastructure which could potentially be the residence of advanced extra-terrestrials who abandoned their original habitat. The term Micro Dyson sphere and its concept originates solely from him.
We are inside a Micro Dyson sphere.
The Forerunners grasp of slipspace technology was far more advanced than ours or the Covenant. I believe this sphere resides in the center of the planet, encapsulated and protected by a slipspace bubble of compressed dimensionality.
Although the structure itself had all of the external planetary trappings one might expect of a vast jungle world, the first indication of something peculiar was the ancient Forerunner city uncovered just below the surface. When the protagonists discovered this city, it was abandoned; by the end of the novel, they had not located any surviving Forerunners or other species even within the protection of the sphere itself.
The city had been buried under Onyx stone during the 100,000 years of dormancy after the Forerunners fired the Array, only to begin to be excavated by human (and eventually Forerunner) machines just prior to the weapon network's rearmament on Delta Halo. Interestingly noted, when Onyx's surface began to come under attack, it started to splinter apart revealing that it was composed almost entirely of Forerunner AI constructs known as Sentinels. And much like the Halo installations, the key holders for the shield worlds would have to be the Forerunner's surrogate heirs: the Reclaimers.
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[Edited on 07.16.2009 2:18 PM PDT]