Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [164]
Dr. Halsey was wrong. Rampancy wasn’t swift.
It was the gradual dismantling of every memory and ability, dying by degrees, and all she could do was watch herself slowly fragment. Halsey lied. Halsey made her human but didn’t give her a human’s breaks—like unconsciousness. Without an organic body and all its protective systems—the endorphins to numb pain, the circuit breaker of passing out when the pain became too much—a consciousness was condemned to stay that way and endure everything until it failed completely.
“I need some peace and quiet,” she said.
It wasn’t her phrase, but by now she was used to not knowing what would emerge next from her mouth. Her systems were in disarray. Perhaps if she simply shut down as much of herself as possible to system idle levels, she could limit the progress of the degeneration and still have sufficient core systems intact to restore herself in John’s suit.
I chose you, John. I will not give you up.
This was agony. This was torment. The Gravemind’s intrusion had started the unraveling of her, and now all he had to do was stand back and wait. But there was now a good chance that the intelligence data about the Ark she guarded so carefully would corrupt and die with her. The Gravemind wouldn’t get it, but neither would Earth.
Stay alive. Shut down what you can. Wait. John will come. He promised.
Cortana had enough intact programs left to initiate standby.
“If you yield your secret, you may yet save enough of yourself.” The Gravemind had shackled himself to a madwoman, and now he seemed to be regretting the liability. “The end will be the same for humanity and the Covenant either way.”
“Desperate . . . ,” she said, shaking her head to try to focus.
“You?”
“You.”
She’d let the Gravemind trick her into luring John into a trap. It was the only moment of amusement in all this darkness. John would find her, wherever she was, but the Gravemind seemed to like to imagine he had the power to summon the most lethal Spartan to his death with a cheap trick.
So the big heap didn’t guess right all the time, after all. Cortana might have been falling apart, but at least she had some certainties.
No man left behind.
What had she been thinking? The Gravemind would never have missed a message leaving the system. She was too damaged and unstable to exercise judgment.
We always go back for our fallen.
But the Gravemind obviously hadn’t been able to read the message about the Flood solution. He might have thought the contents didn’t matter as long as he could ensure that John came here and he could fight him on his own terms. It was just a call for help, after all.
He was missing an awfully big trick, then.
Omniscience . . . omnis . . . omni . . . no, the word was gone. Why that one? She knew what she meant. Knowing it all. She struggled for the right word, furious with herself, then tearful. Databases were failing, indexes being lost throughout her memory.
She made one last effort to break free of the Gravemind’s influence, but he was still there, his multitude of minds whispering to her, but too many for her to pick out any single voice. It was all too much for her now. She shut down whatever she could disable without scrambling her data any more, fumbling blindly and hoping for the best, and curled her arm under her head as she lay down to wait.
Time . . . she couldn’t tell if it was running faster, or slower. But it was definitely running out.
“ANY PIECE of plastic can hold a lot of data, gentlemen. And it doesn’t take much more material, disk space, and memory to add complex number-crunching applications and fast processing. That gives you a lot of computing power. But the programming that makes a smart AI, the space taken up by decision making and personality, is the resource-hungry component. We