- Carl BOS
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- Exalted Heroic Member
We will know soon enough, but it will require thought. Deep thought. Mendicant Bias must be found. The Mantle will soon follow.
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Posted by: crumpster212
Posted by: PETEYENG
No. That wouldn't be fun and the Flood don't need items. They need more mass. The Gravemind wants power. SO the more sentient beings he eats the more powerful he gets and the more he controls. so..... why not infect planets that dont have any sentient species but plenty of biomass? And can i voice what i thought about what you said? So the Gravemind is like some super dictator who has brainwashed all his subjects into a hive mind society?
Almost.
The Gravemind could be considered a sort of collector of knowledge. When an infection form infects a sentient being, it performs an action similar to what we do to back up a memory storage device such as a hard drive - it makes a copy of every single fragment of knowledge ever known, everything that being was ever taught or experienced, then somehow either stores it within itself until it can be "transmitted" (what is believed to be through a telepathy-like ability) to a Gravemind or Proto-Gravemind, or (if a form of Gravemind is already available) "transmits" it directly to the Gravemind (via said telepathy). It then performs the equivalent of a "wipe" to the victim's brain, erasing all original knowledge.
The Gravemind can be considered omniscient, due to the fact that Graveminds theoretically share the knowledge of the Graveminds which come after and before them. The Flood super-cell is so versatile that it can function as a place to store this knowledge where it's needed - therefore, theoretically, if even just one infection form were to be left alive to store the collective knowledge of a Gravemind (and, subsequently, nearly every other Gravemind to exist) and the present Gravemind were to be fully destroyed or obliterated, all that would need to be done is reconstruct another full, physical Gravemind (most likely through said infection form) and everything the destroyed Gravemind would have ever known could simply be transferred over to the newly-constructed one from the infection form, and it'd be almost as though the destroyed Gravemind were never even destroyed. It seems the Gravemind doesn't care about power, dominion, possession, or emotion - it simply believes that all sentience must be consumed. It may not even understand why, even though it knows far more than any other sentient being. It simply believes its purpose it to infect and assimilate everything.
The reason it stores its knowledge throughout not only its own memory cells, but the entire Flood "network", is due to the fact that the Flood runs out of "food" eventually. When a sentient being (notably, a space-faring one) is assimilated, all that it knows of its colonies - every world under the species' control, or knowledge of how to correctly pilot ships to get to said places under control - was almost immediately "told" to the Gravemind through the Flood "network". This is how the Flood would gain the coordinates to new, uninfected worlds, or learned of new uninfected places in general for the rest of the Flood to spread to.
The Cole Protocol, for instance, wouldn't be effective against the Flood. It doesn't require coordinates from a navigation system, because it pulls information directly from the victim's memory. In order to enact a sort of Cole Protocol against the Flood, we'd have to go around either burning bodies, or destroying brains of the dead in particular. Sound fun?
The Flood is extremely interesting, the Gravemind in particular. It's no wonder why the Forerunners studied this ruthless enemy so closely.