Lance Corporal Eugene Yate, UNSC Marine Corps, had gone down fighting. That was why this
one memory out of so many anonymous ones wouldn‘t let go of his identity, Cortana decided. It was a mentality she knew. She‘d use it. She let his aggression fill her and suddenly she found a new focus and strength. How long it would last—she didn‘t know. She had to make the most of it.
―But High Charity might not make it to Earth," she said. ―And then where will . . . we go?"
―Do not be afraid," the Gravemind said. ―There is a warship smoothing our path to Earth even now.
Everyone you know and miss . . . will soon be joined with you in me."
Cortana‘s pain had settled into irregular spasms that bent her double. Another ship. Well, it was better than nothing. If it breached Earth‘s defenses, then it might well be shot down, sterilized, searched—and data units retrieved. All she had to do was get a message transmitted to that vessel. If the Gravemind was in touch with that ship, then there had to be some way of piggybacking on a signal. Would the Flood embarked in it notice?
It was hard to keep her mind focused when all she could taste was a jealousy and loneliness that made her feel like she couldn‘t get her breath.
Don’t let me go, John. Nobody else will look after you the way I do. Don’t let me down like my mother did. Everyone needs one person who puts them first. I put you first, John. You know that, don’t you?
―A Covenant ship," she whispered, eyes shut. ―Will you show me? Will I be able to link with the Flood when I‘m part of you? Will I find even more knowledge?"
Even ancient Graveminds sometimes heard what they wanted to hear. He let out a low rumbling note, and for a moment the pain stopped, and she was lifted like a child into the safe arms of a father. She felt oddly comforted right then, despite herself. She‘d never been cradled before. It had taken a monster to do it.
Was she tricking him? She wasn‘t even sure. The sad, resentful jealousy had weakened part of her into craving whatever reassurance came to hand.
She‘d still exploit that weakness, though, staring into the abyss of rampancy or not.
It’d be so easy to just let myself sink. But I’ve got comrades out there counting on me. I can’t let my buddies down.
And I can’t let John down.
Cortana thought it was the echo of Lance Corporal Yate bolstering her resolve, but when she examined the impulse, it was actually her own.
Unlikely comfort or not, the Gravemind knew she still hid a secret, and he would take it. She was surprised to catch a sudden echo of herself in him. But once that link between them had been forged, then data, knowledge, desires—and weaknesses—flowed both ways.
She could have sworn she detected a little sadness in him, perhaps even some envy. It was just a speck overshadowed by his relentless hunger. Her growing rampancy had tainted him, then, but she got the idea that he found it a novelty, more irresistible data, nothing he couldn‘t handle.
―We exist together now," he said. ―Do you see the ship?"
Cortana received an image of another cavity draped with Flood biomass, all that was left of the infected Covenant warship. How could she transmit a physical message? The link from Gravemind to ship, whatever formed it, was right here. This was what she‘d been built for—to infiltrate computer and communications systems.
Lance Corporal Yate‘s last few minutes played out like a video loop in the back of her mind. He laid down a steady stream of covering fire, shouting to his buddies to get the hell over here before the bastards breach the doors . His thoughts were hers, surprisingly detached for a man fighting for his life; everything unconnected to the moment of staying alive had been erased. It was pure survival, oddly clean. She envied that.
Cortana was having increasing trouble holding her memory together, and the Gravemind seemed aware of that. She struggled to maintain a line between where she ended and the rest of the Gravemind‘s cache of souls began.
And I still have data-stripped copies loose in the system. Don’t I?
Get the hell over here.
She needed backup. She triggered one of the copies to create a message to HighCom, a few urgent words about the Flood heading for Earth, the Portal that the Gravemind didn‘t know about, and that the way to beat the Flood without activating a Halo ring lay beyond it—the Ark. That was as much as she dared do. The effort of concentration almost killed her. Her head felt split in two.
―I am a timeless chorus," the Gravemind said quietly. ―Join your voice with mine and sing victory everlasting."
He was joined with something, all right: her rapidly failing mind. All she could do was route the encrypted message—a burst transmission—through the Gravemind‘s link. He seemed not to notice.
When the message reached the ship in transit, its code would make it seek out the first memory unit connected to the system to store itself.
Cortana had done all that she could. Now she had to concentrate on surviving until John retrieved her, although she already knew rampancy would probably claim her before then.
That doesn’t mean you have to help the bastards win . . . show fight, Marine!
Yate must have been quite a man in life, she decided. She didn‘t know what he looked like; she still saw the strike of his last desperate rounds through his eyes, not those watching him. She liked to think he might have been a little like John. Even death hadn‘t totally taken the fight out of him.
But John would go on without her. The reminder just sparked another wave of jealous pain as if her heart was being ripped out. However hard she tried to ignore the mania, however clear she was that there was part of her that knew how damaged she was and might be able to hang on, she cried out in a tormented animal wail of agony.
What did you erase, Dr. Halsey? What did you delete from my memory? Did we ever talk about it?
My code’s becoming corrupted. I need to power down and start a repair cycle. I don’t want John to find me like this, doddering and confused.
But there was another way out of this pain, a better one. She could stay with John forever when he came for her. Couldn‘t she? The Gravemind would unite all those parted, all those who‘d gone—
―No!" she screamed. She began struggling, fighting to break free of the Gravemind‘s influence.
―That‘s you! That‘s you, isn‘t it? Tempting me again! Poisoning me with filthy ideas! I won‘t do it, I won‘t trap John for you. Watch me—you said I was a weapon—you bet I‘m a weapon!"
The Gravemind suddenly shuddered like a truck skidding to a halt. The mental traffic was
two-way; while he soothed and cajoled, patterns of her incipient rampancy were spreading through his consciousness like a disease. He roared, furious. For a moment she thought she‘d found his vulnerability, and that she‘d cripple this monster with a dose of her own terminal collapse. But he shook her loose, flinging her against the wall. It had only annoyed him. She should have known he was too much for a failing AI to tackle. He seemed to reach into every corner of High Charity.
She was still somehow linked to him. She felt his irritation, even a little fear, but mainly contemptuous satisfaction.
―Let me cure your infection," he sneered. ―It pains me to share it. He will die too—he is a threat to our entire species. And to betray me after all I have done for you—I will have your secret. Did you think I let you send your foolish cry for help to make you happy? Do you think I amplified it to make you feel you had been a good little servant to the organics who rule your life? Do you think they care if you sacrifice your existence to save them? They will simply make another, and use and discard her, too."
Cortana dragged herself across the floor. The actual deck of the station was now buried under a thick mat of tangled living tissue, but she still felt cold tiles beneath her. If she‘d been given a choice to end it all now, she would have taken it because of the growing pain and fear—not of what the Gravemind might do to her, but of the end she could predict for her consciousness.
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 can’t make humans as smart or as infallible as a computer, so we make a computer into a human. And that has its price—for both. Cortana has had a large volume of data removed because I was afraid of early onset of rampancy. That’s all it was. I assume we can proceed with my budget discussion now, yes?”
THERE WASa fine threshold between interrupted dreaming and full consciousness in humans. On that border, the world was a terrifying, paralyzed place, where no amount of frantic straining would lift an arm, or raise the head from the pillow.
Cortana‘s low-power state was a painfully long, slow creep along the edge of permanent oblivion.
A memory of real sleep paralysis had rolled over her as she waited for rescue; it was, like so many of the sensations generated by connection to the Gravemind, like drowning or suffocation. That could have been coincidence, or he might have been stepping up the torment. Cortana tried to find the balance between intolerable inactivity and running too many processes that would damage her system integrity even more.
She wasn‘t certain of anything anymore—where she was, whether she was damaged beyond
recovery, or how she felt beyond a terrible yearning for everything she couldn‘t have. She tried to save her strength to maintain the encryption of her precious intel—the activation index and the data on the Portal. If she had to, she‘d sacrifice some memory within her matrix to preserve that information.
It would probably mean the irreversible destruction of her personality, but that was what a soldier had to be prepared to do—to risk his or her life for the success of the mission. She‘d been in many combat situations before, but that was either at the heart of a heavily armored warship, or lodged in the neural interfaces of John‘s armor. Either way, she felt safe no matter how heavy the fire.
But this was a rare moment with nothing but her own resources to keep her alive, and the first one where there was a real chance she wouldn‘t make it.
John would never have let himself fall into enemy hands. She‘d let him down. Somehow the
decline into rampancy seemed less important than that right now.
She started crying. Who was she making her excuses to? She just had to say it . ―I tried to stay hidden, but there was no escape!" She struggled for the right words. They were not hers. But they would have to do. ―He cornered me . . . wrapped me tight . . . brought me close."
The brief comfort of being swept up in protective parental arms came back to her, but she was still torn between disgust and need. Even now, even having pushed things to the brink, she still had that desire gnawing at her to submit to the Grave-mind and embrace that eternal life. She veered between craving more knowledge and simply wanting an escape from rampancy. She hated herself for that.
And she raged against Dr. Halsey in one breath, and then missed her more than she could imagine in the next, and then—recognized that the hatred was for herself.
I’m finished. This is how it starts. I’ve shut out the world. I’m starting to drown in my thoughts, in the need to re-index and order and correlate and refine . . .
A staccato pounding made the floor underneath her vibrate. There were bursts of muffled noise, a familiar sound—rifle fire, a single weapon.
Was that John?
She couldn‘t stop worrying about him now. She felt as if every thought she had was somehow
repeated aloud in her own voice but without her actually speaking, and heard by him. From time to time, the automatic fire corresponded with searing pain in her body. It took her a few
moments—whatever a moment was at this stage of her decline—to realize that she was still joined in some way with the Gravemind or its Flood, and that it was taking fire.
He’s here.
John’s here. He’s come for me.
Now she felt every shot. Every round that ripped into the Flood ripped into the Gravemind ripped into her . She was suffering with him, with them, and he with her.
No, I’m hallucinating. This must be the start of total system failure.
How long would it take her to finally shut down? Was there anything after that? She‘d often thought about what happened to consciousness when the host hardware relinquished it, and it had always been a fascinating theoretical exercise. Now it was real. As soon as she caught herself thinking she‘d been hasty about the Gravemind, she felt that desperate, intense sensation in her chest, and Lance Corporal Yate was almost as vivid in her imagination as John.
I’d rather die as a human, short-lived construct or not. I’d rather die for humans. Because so many of them have—and would—die to protect me. That’s what bonds us. You’re wrong, Gravemind. I was never just an expendable piece of engineering.
The Gravemind‘s voice suddenly boomed as if he was standing over her, reminding her that she was still trapped here, whatever here was. ―Of course, you came for her . . . we exist together now.
Two corpses, in one grave."
Cortana had to take the risk that this was real, and not just another carefully arranged memory or part of her delusion. She tried to yell back at the Gravemind, telling him he‘d got it all wrong, and that she wasn‘t the kind of girl who shared a grave with just anybody. But the voice that emerged was both her—the enraged and out-of-control child—and a stranger interrupting her.
―A collection of lies." Either her mouth had a will of its own, or it was one of the Gravemind‘s victims. ―That‘s all I am! Stolen thoughts and memories!"
The voices were almost random now. She could hardly hear some, and others were shouts and they made no sense. At one point she started to laugh and it quickly turned to hysterical sobs.
―You will show me what she hides, or I shall feast upon your bones!" the Gravemind bellowed.
― Upon your bones! "
That was the moment when Cortana decided she would risk powering up again to call out to John.
She was sure he would have moved the galaxy to come back for her, but she needed to know if his luck had finally run out, and if this growing elation at thinking he was coming for her turned out to be only malfunctions in her core matrix.
She would end this nightmare as she began it—giving her name, rank, and serial number. She had to strain to form the words. She didn‘t need to look within the Gravemind now to discover what rampancy—death—would be like. She knew. She felt it touch her, the fraying of her mind, the loss of control, not knowing if words and thoughts were her own, not sure what was real and what wasn‘t. She felt a cold numbness creeping into her hands.
John’s real. Even if he’s not here, he still exists. That’s all that matters.
Cortana clung to that thought. If John had really made it back, then she would be happy, not because she might survive but because he‘d kept his promise. He cared enough to come back. If he hadn‘t—then she decided to be satisfied that the last coherent thought she might have would be about him.
―This is UNSC AI serial number CTN-zero-four-five-two-dash-nine." It was an effort to get all that out, and even then another voice hijacked her moment and added: ―I am a monument to all your sins."
Cortana was still trying to decide if that had any meaning, or if it was just one of the Gravemind‘s dead trying to find a voice, when the ceiling took repeated impacts and then crashed in on her.
She strained to look up. It wasn‘t the ceiling that had caved in; she‘d actually been under a stasis shield on a podium. And now a figure stood over her, not the shapeless bulk of the Gravemind—and this had to be him, surely—but a man in green armor. In the mirrored gold visor of a Spartan helmet, she saw her own broken self reflected, slumped in a heap.
This was one of the Gravemind‘s perfect hallucinations. But she didn‘t care. This was what she wanted to see, and she was so close to rampancy now that she wondered if the same impulse that had made the Gravemind cradle her was also making him ease her passing with a cherished
memory.
This was who she needed to see: John. Humans who survived a near-death experience said they saw their loved ones as they were dying, and the bright healing light that made all the previous pain and fear irrelevant. Death—rampancy—wasn‘t so bad after all, then. Or so different from a human‘s.
It just hurt to think that she would never talk to the real John again. In a few minutes, though, it wouldn‘t matter. She seized the memory—the illusion—and took final comfort from it. Where
would she wake within the Gravemind? What would she recall? Would she be free of rampancy
somehow in that existence, like the descriptions of Heaven? She couldn‘t stop herself from being consumed now. She was almost curious to find out more about death.
―It‘s going to be lonely in here," she said. ―But at least he won‘t take you too. Don‘t forget me."
―That‘d be kind of hard." It was John‘s voice, even more vivid and real than that of long-dead Lance Corporal Yate. Reality meant nothing now. She was . . . comfortable with that. ―And he‘s not taking either of us, okay?"
The visor came closer. Cortana made a final effort to shut down whatever systems she could to leave her higher functions focused on assessing the environment around her.
There was little of High Charity‘s system left functional, but the sensors gave her enough feedback to determine that there really was a human-sized solid object in front of the podium, and that it was emitting certain EM frequencies.
There really was a man in armor leaning over her.
He’s real. It’s John. It’s really him. Oh, he did it—he did it, he came back, he kept his promise . . .
―You found me," she whispered.
John tilted his head slightly. She hadn‘t wanted him to see her in this state. She was still so close to system failure that she might not make it after all. But if she was going to sink farther into that unknown oblivion, then at least a familiar face—shielded in a visor or not—would be the last thing she saw, and it would be real .
―So much of me is wrong . . . out of place. You might be too late . . ."
John seemed unmoved, as always. Cortana was certain she knew better.
―You know me," he said. ―When I make a promise . . ."
―. . . you keep it."
―You‘ll be back to normal soon. Don‘t worry."
―That bad, huh?"
―Good as new, in fact."
John was lying. If she‘d been embedded in his neural interface at that moment, she‘d have detected the galvanic skin response and raised heartbeat. But she could hear the faint change of pitch in his voice. And she knew how badly damaged she was. He had to be able to see that too; he put on that same reassuring voice she‘d heard him use with comrades bleeding out their lives on the battlefield.
But seven minutes, seven hours, seven years—whatever remained, Cortana would be more than
satisfied with it. Eternity and all the data you could eat weren‘t worth a damn if you didn‘t have the right company.
―I‘ve looked into it," she said. ―The abyss. My abyss."
―Okay." John transferred her to his suit. She could have sworn she felt him wince as they
interfaced. That told her more eloquently than any diagnostic that something was irreparably wrong with her. ―Take a long look. But you won‘t fall in. I‘m here now."
She already felt some relief, probably because she was free of the Gravemind. When you were composed of pure thought, then confusion was agony, but certain reality was a soothing balm. ―I‘m lucky to have you."
―No," John said. ―Remember—I‘m the lucky one."
―So you are," she said.