- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Shifty, I like your theories as to what and why the Flood are, but somethings don't sit with me well. In the Control Room with Cortana and Master Chief, Spark says something along the lines of, "when all the other Halo Installations fire, this galaxy will be quite devoid of life." To me, this says that when one Halo fires, all other Haloes in a certain range will fire as well. If such a thing happened, an entire galaxy could be rendered lifeless. So, when previous Halo firings are mentioned, it is my belief that these previous firings occurred in another galaxy, not this one.
So, if the Flood got out and the Forerunners needed to destroy them, it didn't happen here. Thus, the containment protocols for the Flood on Halo were never breached until the activities of the Master Chief. The Frigid population of Flood, therefore, are completely unrelated to the Halo population(s). Now, think for a moment as if you were the Forerunner in charge of building Halo. If it is meant to be a weapon and prison to contain the Flood, why give it the ecosystems it has on the surface? For study right? Why would the ecosystems be so varied? Because the Forerunners want to see how the Flood stand up to certain climates and varying levels of "biomass." If there is an engineered (augmented by the presence of cadavers) population of Flood on Frigid, they were put there because the Forerunners knew that the Flood could live there without risk of spreading. No other life forms exist on Frigid, so the Flood would not grow; the planet isn't exactly a tourist attraction so no one else would go there for fun and accidentally get the Flood off the planet; lastly, the environment does not kill the Flood and may in a way preserve them (like cryonics).
The Flood, by their nature, seem to be the squid-like facehugger guys. So, the addition of cadavers by the Forerunners to the population seems to be sign that they wanted "Warrior" forms of Flood preserved on Frigid. What kind of facility is locked down tight, in the middle of nowhere and contains (a) weapon(s) of mass destruction? Frigid is a weapon depot.