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Subject: Why Destroy Halo 04?
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I have a question that may have already been asked, but here it goes.

As soon as the Flood get out, 343GS approaches MC with the assignment of wiping the Flood out. Stating that "I will need your assistence". 343GS seemed in quite a hurry, did he not? He was in such a hurry it makes me wonder why he didn't use Halo himself as soon as the Flood got out. That is a question he answers himself by saying this...

"Unfortunately, my usefulness to this particular endeavor has come to an end. Protocol does not allow units with my classification to... perform a task as important as the reunification of the index with the core. That final step is reserved for you, Reclaimer." - 343 Guilty Spark (Two Betrayls)

Exactly. This means that MC's purpose is to use Halo to combat the Flood. Got it. So, in that case, 343GS can't use Halo even if he wanted to. Cortana knows this, doesn't she? She was inside of Halo, so she knows all of it's dirty secrets. So then, here comes the real question. Why was Cortana in such a hurry to blow up Halo? I thought it made sense at first. I figured her reason was she didn't want anybody else coming there and using it, but if she had the Index, then nobody could use it except the Forerunner since 343GS can't. But thats not Cortana's reason. She tells us her reason for wanting to blow it up, and during all the excitment it's quite easy to look past it...

"We can't let the monitor activate Halo. We have to stop him. We have to destroy Halo." - Cortana (Two Betrayls)

What the hell is she talking about? The monitor can't activate Halo. It's not in his classification to do so. He even said that he'd have to "find another", so whats the rush? Also, Cortana has the Index, so why the hell didn't she just tell MC to gather some survivors and then take the ship off Halo. Not only would it have been more humain, but also would have made more sense. I then thought that maybe she wanted to blow up Halo to wipe out the Flood, but nope, she clearly states something else that makes that assumtion automatically incorrect. She says...

"The only way to stop the flood is to starve them to death." - Cortana (Two Betrayls)

So then...Wouldn't destroying an installation fling the Flood into space thus it would cause far more harm than any good? If the Flood can only be killed by starvation, then they can survive living in space. Sure, bullets and explosives kill them, but whos to know their virus-like puddles of blood don't reform after a period of time. This means that Cortana basically sent the Flood into space. If a piece of Halo 04 lands on a planet with Human or Covanent life, then the whole galaxy is at risk of infestation. Not very smart, Cortana. The best form of action would have been to just leave with the Index. If the Flood can in fact fly ships, then the best course of action would have been to use the data Cortana has to search out all ships and make them un-usuable, and then flee Halo 04 using the last ship, NOT setting off the PoA fusion reactors to blow the damn Halo 04 instillation into pieces all over the solar system!

Either Cortana is a really sloppy planer, or she's just flat out evil.

[Edited on 8/6/2004 6:51:21 PM]

  • 08.06.2004 6:50 PM PDT
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You're retarded.

  • 08.06.2004 6:54 PM PDT
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she did it so fast because if cheif got killed no one could do it cuz the humans would all die from the flood and she can trust the covies

  • 08.06.2004 6:54 PM PDT
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Cortana also said they needed to destroy Halo before 343GS FOUND a NEW way to activate Halo (without the Index).

  • 08.06.2004 6:56 PM PDT
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A few things could explain it:

1) Her processors have been getting fuller and corrupted, this could be an irrational decision because of that.

2) 343 Seemed pretty hell-bent, with AI like guilty sparks, who's to say we should even take the chance of letting 343 attempt to activate it. I know its a human concept, but the 3 laws of robotics state basically (And yes, I knew this before seeing "I, Robot" so don't flame on that) 1. Robot may not harm or let harm to a human -or its master, forerunner-. 2. Robot must do what it is told unless it conflicts with rule #1. 3. That a robot may defend it's self as long as it does not conflict with rule #1 or #2. Now He already broke rule #1, he attacked his master (He thought MC was a forerunner) to achieve his objective, so cortana realised that he's breaking rules now, nothing is stopping him from breaking the "not-classified" rule. Even if he doesnt have an index, im sure he could find a way around that.

3) The covies, and alot of them, were on the ring, destroying it would take out a chunk of an army which could potentially attack earth.

[Edited on 8/6/2004 7:06:41 PM]

  • 08.06.2004 7:02 PM PDT
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Why not just leave Halo and forget about blowing it up until later? If 343GS could in fact find another way to activate Halo, then why didn't he go do that instead of hunt MC? I don't think 343GS could have used Halo. Spreading the Flood into space seems like the dumbest plan ever <_<

  • 08.06.2004 7:03 PM PDT
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Um, Cortana met the Covenant AI a LONG TIME after halo blew up...

  • 08.06.2004 7:04 PM PDT
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Ah ha, duh *smacks forehead* Your right, got my time line messed up.. damn "The first book is before Halo 1, the second book is after Halo 1 and after the first book but before Halo 2 and the third one is before the first book, not after the third one" stuff

  • 08.06.2004 7:05 PM PDT
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Another person on a forum stated also that Cortana's eyes changed color after she was placed inside of Halo's control room. Is this a sign that Cortana is no longer fully on our side?

  • 08.06.2004 7:06 PM PDT
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her eyes changed before in the books, when she was excited, i thought

  • 08.06.2004 7:07 PM PDT
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She change color on her mood, Im sure her mood from searching data banks of some amazing data would be different from her mood set of being fired upon and close to being blasted into oblivion.

  • 08.06.2004 7:08 PM PDT
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Posted by: NaughtyCalibur
Another person on a forum stated also that Cortana's eyes changed color after she was placed inside of Halo's control room. Is this a sign that Cortana is no longer fully on our side?

She has no other "side" to go to. Maybe she is the AI equivelent of insane???

  • 08.06.2004 7:08 PM PDT
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Okay, that explains that. Different color eyes mean a different sort of mood. Which was obvious from her attitude. Cortana sent the Flood into space, all over space. Now they can not be tracked and she pretty much screwed us all with her hasty plan. Like it would have hurt to battle a few more sentinels in order to devise a better plan...Those sentinels were push overs.

  • 08.06.2004 7:11 PM PDT
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I think we should just join hands and hope for the best.... Coombi-ah mah lord... Coombi-ah... lol, But I think that will take too long in the games short time frame, for the flood to spread across the galaxies and reach Earth fully ready to kick arse. It is confirmed taht we will be traveling to an area where a halo was destroyed, now htat could mean a diffeent one then Halo 04, but most likely you go back to eliminate the remaining threat or somethign to that sort. I think you will go back to exterminate.

  • 08.06.2004 7:16 PM PDT
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nuke em'

  • 08.06.2004 7:19 PM PDT
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Well, if we go back to wipe out the Flood and actually wipe them all out, then the plan made sense. However, it was still sloppy and risky. The Flood could fly through space and land on a ship that goes back to Earth for all we know. Cortana's a cool chick, so I hope she was just being hard headed and not acting with a sinister purpose. It just was kind of odd with the way she was acting and everything.

  • 08.06.2004 7:20 PM PDT
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Remember, Bungie made Marathon and worked with AI syndrome: Rampage

  • 08.06.2004 7:24 PM PDT
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I say...that we should have never let out the flood...were morons...

  • 08.06.2004 7:26 PM PDT
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Posted by: NaughtyCalibur
Well, if we go back to wipe out the Flood and actually wipe them all out, then the plan made sense. However, it was still sloppy and risky. The Flood could fly through space and land on a ship that goes back to Earth for all we know. Cortana's a cool chick, so I hope she was just being hard headed and not acting with a sinister purpose. It just was kind of odd with the way she was acting and everything.



Dude, your forgetting how far that is. Halo is millions of light years from Earth, if not more. So if the Flood were flying at light speed, it would take millions of years. But they wouldn't be flying that fast, so it would take billions of years. And wouldn't they starve to death? Cortana was afraid the flood would learn how to use ships and fly away in one (remember the big brain flood, Capt. Keyes).

[Edited on 8/6/2004 7:31:16 PM]

  • 08.06.2004 7:30 PM PDT
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Yes, I agree with your assesments. In the books she gets even more insane. Actually, she has stored all the information on halo and forerunner she could find in the control room and those files are slowing her processing power down. The Chief noticed her slowness and decreased creativity. She probably didn't have the ability to think logically about what they should do. She isn't evil...it's just that she is totally hindered by all the information she refuses to ditch.

  • 08.06.2004 7:30 PM PDT
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And also, 343 Guilty Spark didn't have the classification to use the index to activate Halo, but whats to say that he doesn't have classification to Activate Halo a Different way?

  • 08.06.2004 7:33 PM PDT
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That's what I'm saying, it could be a problem later, a massive problem at that, much later in our history, definitly out of the range of Halo 2, but we probably would want to stop the process before it becomes a real problem.

  • 08.06.2004 7:34 PM PDT
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It seemed fairly obviouis that Cortana was going rampant after we placed her in the Forerunner computer. however, I was rather dissapointed that there was absolutely no signs of rampancy or insanity in Cortana in the book First Strike. All she did was complain about how full her memory banks where. [hands her a tissue].

One thing we must understand is that Halo smart AI's are technically already in a (stable) rampant state. Such growth limits their lifespan to seven years however. I'm gonna go on a limb and say that i don't think she's going rampant.

I think you're taking the quote about starving the flood to death a little bit too verbatim. A shotgun will kill a blood. A biga$$ explosion will kill a flood. And lack of atomosphere - i'm gonna go on a limp and say it - will kill a flood. I believe she was referring to the flood as a collective when she said you can really only starve them to death (as fun as it sounds, I don't think you could shotgun the entire flood species into exstinction). Therefore, killing the flood's "food" or letting them grow to their logistic potential (food=organic lifeforms of suffient bio and brainmass) will curb the flood problem. But since neither sounds like a good idea, why not just blow up the flood? I have hard time believing that Halo's environmental systems will hold if its shattered into a million pieces. And so I think its safe to say you don't have any flood colonies floating on shards of halo. And if you do, I revert back to Way #2 of curbing flood = logistical growth. They'd max out growth on their little shard and eventually die off from lack of food.

Also, in blowing up Halo we took out any capital ships that the flood could've used to escape. So no more flood problem. From this Halo that is.

Cortana was acting with humanity's best interests in mind. Nothing sinister underneath.

On a tangeant: I find it curious that we will be "revisting" old places as I believe we just heard in a Frankie update (or was it the discovery channel special?). What places will still exist to revisit?!

::ponders some more::

  • 08.06.2004 7:37 PM PDT
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Cortana has halo destroyed so that the monitor doesn't find another way to activate halo. That's also why u take out the power generators in The Two Betrayals.

Also, the only usuable ship big enough to transport all the human survivors is the Truth and Reconciliation (the covenant ship). The original plan was to activate the PoA's self destruct sequence while all the human survivors attack and take over the Truth and Reconciliation. The humans were successful. MC was supposed to have Foehammer pick him up and meet with the humans in space. The Truth and Reconciliation ended up being destroyed by the humans because their was flood still on it and the humans realized it would be a danger to all of humanity if they allowed this ship to leave halo.

Cortana's only choice was to have halo destroyed, otherwise all life in the universive would eventually be wiped out because the monitor could find another way to activate halo.

  • 08.06.2004 7:37 PM PDT
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Reason #1: The flood would starve to death by the time they get to Earth

Reason #2: If they didn't, earth would be a big molten ball of lava (the sun will become a really big sun)

Reason #3: The flood would ovbously miss Earth By Billions of Miles.

Reason #4: Spongebob Squarepants would easily fight them all off.

  • 08.06.2004 7:38 PM PDT

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