- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
One thing I think is certain, from what we know of what the Halo 2 storyline already, is the fact that whatever significance these letters have, Frigid is going to be a place that the MC and perhaps Cortana as well visit in the second game.
Of course, I could also be just smoking crack.
I'm hypothesizing this because of the fact that we know, for sure, that in the second game, while the Covenant are attacking Earth, the MC takes the fight to the Covenant and, more importantly, there is another Halo ring involved. While I don't think that 343 GS has anything to do with these letters, the fact that it was the monitor of installation 04 means that there are, at minimum, another 3 Halo rings somewhere in the galaxy, as well as other Monitors.
We know that Cortana also has all the information from the Index as well, a fact that I don't know if it's been overlooked in these discussions - there is a point in "First Strike" where the MC notes that ever since she "absorbed" the Index, she'd been more "twitchy" than before. Could this be a sign of some sort of impending change in her character?
The Index, while I don't know exactly what function it served on Halo, among other things, it was like a key to activate Halo's "defenses". It also must have had, I would imagine (since 343 GS mentions how the other installations would follow suit once Installation 04's pulse is activated) information on the location of the other Halo rings. More importantly, in the book "First Strike", it's said somewhere that while Cortana has all that information from the index, she feared that some of it was corrupted because she had to compress it to make room for other things.
I feel that Enkidu is an AI that may or may not have some part in the Halo 2 storyline. More importantly, though, I think that the location of the transmissions (i.e. Frigid) is something of importance for the next game. Maybe Frigid is a world close to another Halo ring, or has information or artifacts that relate to another Halo ring. Let's not forget that installation 04 was in orbit around a gas giant called Threshold. Who is to say that another installation might not be close to Frigid?
There is definitely more than one voice in the Enkidu letters, though, that much is for certain. There is the voice of Enkidu itself, another Covenant AI (present at the end of the 7th terminal), and another AI that chastises Enkidu (?) for reading other people's mail.
I think what we need to do, as a group, is to perhaps not focus so much on what is said in the letters, and more on why, out of all the literary allusions that whoever wrote this could have chosen, did they pick Enkidu? They could have chosen King Arthur, Baba Yaga, Little Red Riding Hood, Aboriginal Dreaming characters, Tom and Jerry, Daffy Duck, but instead they chose this one. Why? It's from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and while there is a chunk of that story related in one of the terminals, I think more analysis between the Epic itself and these letters might turn up some more interesting and illuminating ideas and clues.
Here's a link to one version of the text - The Epic of Gilgamesh
Last, but not least, if Enkidu is an AI, then who is the counterpart "friend" or AI that would be it's "Gilgamesh"? Is it another Spartan? As I said above, there are a host of other characters from the Epic of Gilgamesh that have been mentioned in the terminals, and whether or not the AI Enkidu is referring to them as their literal names or just "codenames" or whatever, it might be something to check out.