- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Ok guys, here comes my contribution to the growing speculation about the Halo 3 story.
As we all remember, at the end of Halo 2 Cortana is seen talking with Gravemind, but why? Does she have some secret plan to trick/ take advantage of him? Perhaps she does.
Fans of the marathon series, or really anyone who has visited the HBO halo story page is familiar with an anomoly that occurs in AIs known as rampancy. Rampancy is essentially a rapid growth of an AI's degree of conciousness and intellegence. It can be caused by abuse, expossure to a very large network that would allow them to grow, or at times, happens completely randomly. During the events of the first Halo, Cortana spent about 12 hours in Halo's core computer systems while the Cheif went running around in search of Keyes and latter the index. This planet sized network would be sufficent to sustain a rampant AI, and could easily encourage the growth required to corrupt Cortana. There is other evidence as well to support the theory that Cortana is in fact the stages of rampancy, but I will not go any further into this here.
Lets asume now that the time Cortana spent in Halo's core systems was enough to spark her rampancy, and she ahs been growing ever more unstable since then. Unfortunatly for her, Cortana can not survive in small computer systems like the cheif's suit for very long without reverting back to a more stable state, so she will need to find a network that can handle the taxation of a rampant AI.
Cortana needs to find a larger network, and realizes, from data that she has gathered about the flood, that this network need not be artificial. We know that some types of flood (think the Keyes blob) can interface with computer systems. Could this mean that Cortana has found a biological network that she can inhabit? Perhaps.
Knowing that she needs a massive network to maintain her rampancy, Cortana may try to download herself into the ultimate system, the flood. The flood could in theory grow to any size, meaning that Cortana would have NO restrictions in terms of the size of her network. She could grow as large as she needed to, and would eventually become a meta-stable rampant AI.
To allude to ILUVBEES.com, she would really be "wide awake and physical"
any thoughts?
[Edited on 5/11/2006]