- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
I really don't think cortana and gravemind are "merged" in any fashion. First off gravemind seems to be biological. Cortana is a cube of memory. They don't merge. Cortana was seen collaborating with Gravemind at the end of Halo2 of her own free will. The flood do not interface with computers in the way many think, when a flood takes control of a sentient being, it gains the memories of the being it possesses. This means that the flood can repair ships and interface with our systems, in the exact same way that we or the covenenant do, except maybe using tentacles instead of fingers, since they are in practilly dead bio forms. Cortana is not a sentient being, she is a computer program. Graveminds vast knowledge of the past would likely be responsible for any corruption in cortana, especially since she does seem close to death. In the books it is described that most AI have a 7 year life span...but why is this? Because under normal conditions an AI will put itself into a thought loop it can never come out of, it thinks itself into being completely useless. Cortana is not in normal conditions and she interfaced with a huge database of forerunner info. Then she did the same with the covenants info in halo 2. I think from the 2 games alone, she has learned enough information to shorten her life in half. Gravemind being a collective intellegence, doesn't need to infect her for her to do his will. Gravemind was able to convince master cheif and the arbiter to do what he says. The arbiter was raised on the Great journey! Its like a Christian turning against God after 25 years of loyality! When you can convince like this, you don't need to infect, just plenty of time alone to conversate, which is what was implied to me by the end of halo2.
So why is her voice all broken up? How about a better question, wtf is generating her image to begin with? Cortana doesn't just appear in any space she wants to, don't know if any of you noticed that, any time you see her she is at a computer terminal of some type. The machinery in that desert was destroyed. She is using some type of long range communication ability and for it to get to earth so fast(Remember everyone is opening slip space gateways in order to get from place to place because the distance is too far, even at the speed of light you cannot travel to any of these places in the amount of time shown by the game), the communication would probobly travel through slipspace, leaving plenty of room for corruption of the message itself. This is all based on wether or not what was in the trailer was not all false, remember the halo2 demo? Looked like a lot of fun to play, but we never saw it, bungie released something similar but different. The halo2 trailer, again something similar but it never really happened. The only other thing that explains Cortana is her ability to Copy herself, although this one seems more unlikely to me as she learned of the dangerous effects of this when she did it in the book. The only thing that would support it, is that I remember Cortana complaining about some AI on High Charity that was trying to stop her.