A/N: Inspired by Heart-Of-Memories' "Of a Construct and a Hero", some random Halo ponderings and one-shots that have been on my mind awhile.
Disclaimer: Halo and all related materials are the sole property of Bungie Studios and its publisher Microsoft. This story is non-profit and written solely for the enjoyment of the fan community of Halo.
Takes Place: Pre-"Never Stood a Chance"; CortanaxChief!
A/N: HE LIVES!!!
But seriously now, for this entire semester (my final one in Nursing school), I have had trouble with finding inspiration concerning the Search and Rescue prompt, but instead recently got inspired based on some material in Cortana's file over at Halopedia. Here is the short that grew out of the plot bunny known as 'Metastability'.
"Are you sure this isn't going to ... hurt her?" John-117 asked for what seemed like the third time in just under five minutes as he glanced warily at the array of hardware that was spread out across the room, idly rubbing the back of his head in a gesture that went unnoticed in its significance to all except his partner.
"As near as I can figure given what we know. She was able to interface with the computer systems on Alpha Factory, so I see no reason to believe she wouldn't be equally compatible with these," the alien scientist named Jonas explained from his seat a few feet away.
"You know, I CAN still hear you Chief! You're being silly!" Cortana's edgy voice echoed from the Master Chief's external speakers.
"It's not silly to want to keep you safe Cortana. You said yourself that their computer operating code was different enough to make potentially interfacing with them dangerous," John replied, quoting his partner's statement from several days ago back to her verbatim.
"That was BEFORE I cracked the coding issues and wrote an appropriate patch to allow for interfacing Chief; a patch which has since been applied and has proven its ability to work!" Cortana replied with what easily passed as a pout coloring her voice.
"You know, if you two need another minute alone, we can step out..." Jonas's wife, Ryoko, mentioned as their two guests of honor engaged in another of their frequent little spats.
"Oh no! He was just about to transfer me, honest!" Cortana replied hastily, although there was a hint of nervousness in her voice if one were to listen closely enough. If she had been on a holographic pedestal, Cortana knew that her coloring alone at that statement would have given away her mood.
The simple truth was that these two Kaladanians had agreed to perform an intermediate-level check of Cortana's operating systems, a task that wouldn't be possible without significant external computing power. From the moment Cortana had been freed from the Gravemind's clutches to now, roughly 16 months, she'd only been able to make rudimentary 'field repairs' to her damaged processing centers. It wasn't all that different from a marine throwing a loose field dressing on an open wound, good enough only until you could access more substantial care. For her to go any longer without such an examination than was necessary increased the likelihood that any damage caused by the Gravemind could become irreversible or even threaten Cortana's ability to function properly.
To that end, Jonas and Ryoko were two of the best computer tech-heads on the entire planet with their own custom-built hardware and even a rudimentary AI they called IRIS, who had been taken offline so that the two AIs wouldn't have to jockey for space on Jonas's private server. The fact of the matter remained that this 'check-up' for Cortana was long overdue, given the circumstances she had faced on High Charity as a hostage of the Gravemind.
With slight reluctance, the Master Chief extended his hand over the holo-emitter and allowed Cortana to sort herself into the lab's private server, which Jonas had severed from the rest of the Kaladanian Net in order to prevent any potential hacks from unwanted guests. Cortana's presence was largely a secret on this planet, but she and John hadn't survived this long without being a little paranoid and excessively prepared to face off against Murphy's nigh-infamous Law.
"Alright she's in," Jonas thought aloud as he turned towards the main viewscreen of his computer terminal, watching Cortana's intricate lines of code ebb and flow in front of his razor-sharp gaze. He knew roughly what he was looking for since Cortana had been kind enough to provide him with copies of computer readouts that carefully illustrated the various stages of 'rampancy' that were found in UNSC Smart AIs. The fact that these files had been stolen went unknown to everyone save Cortana herself, but that was beside the point.
"Beginning surface scan; Cortana, I need you to tell me what part of you the scanners are moving through whenever you can, please," Ryoko stated as she began to watch a complex 3-D representation of Cortana's software routines begin to assemble itself on her three linked monitors based on the form of Cortana's holographic model.
"Alright, I'll do what I can," Cortana replied as she helped the two alien scientists begin to map out a baseline of her surface functions. It was about ten minutes into the scan when Jonas spoke up for the first time.
"Got something; looks like one of the corrupted memory strings you told us about. Transferring to the failsafe unit," Jonas explained as he cut the piece of software code out of Cortana's digital 'hip' and moved it to a empty ghost drive that he and Ryoko had set up to receive potentially harmful software code.
"Oooh, that takes care of that 'tic' I was experiencing whenever I ran probability checks! Thanks Jonas!" Cortana said with enthusiasm.
"Probability checks, huh? Must have become quite a common experience for you," John thought aloud, a smile showing through in his voice despite his polarized visor.
"Hmph!" Cortana pouted, her arms crossing as her hologram turned away from the Chief.
"They're doing it again," Ryoko said in a grinning, yet softer tone of voice that still carried throughout the room.
"Stranger things have happened Ryo. Were *we* any different back when we started dating?" Jonas asked softly, never taking his eyes off of his three linked monitors.
Ryoko's only response was to giggle for a moment before she discovered another faulty program string that she sheared off of Cortana's elbow and shunted to the failsafe drive before continuing through her inspection. Another few minutes later, once she'd managed to get used to seeing Cortana's code crossing the screen, her eyes flew open as she realized what she was reading.
"Okay, I know you two said you wanted to keep some of this stuff private, but someday I REALLY hope we get to hear WHERE you two encountered a planet-wide Teleportation Grid," Ryoko thought aloud, sounding very eager to eliminate the four-hour round trip of her almost routine flights up to the Factory Satellites. Kaladan may have had a naturally occurring 36-hour day, but that didn't mean that Ryoko enjoyed spending such a significant chunk of it in cooped up in a fighter cockpit navigating a route she could have literally flown blindfolded by now.
"It's a mixed blessing really. According to Cortana, there's a 'significant expenditure of energy' required to use that Grid. My old suit's power supply generated about 2,000 kilowatts output if I cut off the limiters, and it still took it about a minute to recover once we landed," John explained.
"Yikes, talk about power consumption. So basically put, me or anyone else that used it would have to be teleported wearing powered armor. Although, to be fair, a few models of our latest MPAs can generate almost three times that amount," Ryoko thought aloud with her hand placed against her chin in a traditional 'thinking' pose.
"Good riddance Spark, you stingy little bastard...wait, did you say three TIMES that amount?! How in the world did you manage that?" Cortana asked, almost disbelieving that such a thing was possible. The Chief's MJOLNIR Mark VI powerplant, despite its many improvements, still only had about a 30% increase in power generating capability when operating at maximum output.
"Two words .... thermonuclear turbines," Jonas responded as he continued to watch code stream in front of his eyes. Both John and Cortana's eyes widened significantly at this revelation as Cortana suddenly wished she were still connected to the net just so that she could look up the technical schematics of such a device.
After another twenty minutes, Jonas and Ryoko had a fully completed model of Cortana's surface functions, which meant it was time to take things to the next level.
"Surface functions have been scanned, debugged, defragmented, and reorganized. Efficiency has improved by 11%, and everything appears nominal, but then we were expecting that given that you've been operating in that state for over a year now. How do you feel Cortana?" Ryoko asked.
"I just lost a few proverbial ounces the hard way, but you haven't hit any deadfalls or logic bombs yet, so that's reassuring," the Smart AI thought aloud.
"...proverbial ounces?" John thought aloud.
"Think of it as having one cancerous testicle removed Chief, and adjust the naughty bits accordingly," Cortana replied in the most deadpan voice either of the Kaladanian scientists had ever heard from her.
John winced sharply and was instinctively tempted to safeguard his 'family jewels', but managed to control the impulse.... just barely.
"Okay then, our scan of your surface functions is complete Cortana. If you'll give us access to everything except for your core directives and functions, we can get the real task here underway," Jonas said with a wide grin at the Master Chief's discomfort as he patiently waited for the AI to drop her firewalls and disable her anti-intrusion countermeasures that actively prevented anyone from gaining access to her higher reasoning and behavioral centers.
*****
It was about two hours later when a chime sounded on the overhead speakers, prompting Jonas to access a view of his security camera and confirm who it was that was visiting. Surprisingly, John saw a few familiar faces over Jonas's shoulder and was somewhat surprised that they would show up for Cortana's examination.
"Admiral, General, not that I'm unhappy to see you, but we're still in the middle of Cortana's exam…" Jonas began to explain.
"Oh, don't worry about that Colonel Mason, Misa wanted a chance to thank these two in person before they left and now was the only time she's got available for the next several days. Since we didn't know when these two were planning on leaving," General Ichijo trailed off, making small hand gestures to implicate that his current train of thought had led them to be where they were now.
"Fair enough sir, come on down. You all know where the lab is," Jonas explained, catching a glimpse of the entire Ichijo family standing behind their parents, consisting of two young women and a small boy.
John merely shook his head, reminded yet again that this highly sophisticated lab was nestled beneath a private home in a compound that was just as secure, perhaps even more so, than the infamous ONI CASTLE Base. One thing was for sure, with all the gadgets and technology that Jonas had developed over the years, John was glad Jonas had a full-time live-in security chief on the premises.
It appeared that the Ichijo family were long-time friends of Jonas and Ryoko, as their palm prints and retina scans allowed them access through the front door, although they still had to be buzzed into the lab. As they opened the lab's main door , John subconsciously stood a little straighter and grasped his hands together behind his back, a traditional 'parade rest' posture in the UNSC, as a show of respect for the two high-ranking officers entering the lab. Admiral Misa was leading the way it seemed, with her five-year old son holding her hand as her husband and two elder children brought up the rear.
"At ease soldier, you deserve that much after what you did," Misa said, her amusement and gratitude clear in her voice as she extended her hand. Misa's husband, Hikaru, stepped forward and similarly shook hands with the Spartan, idly glancing over the armored MJOLNIR gauntlet, taking stock of the oddly semi-organic almost skin-level design of the alien armor.
"Thanks for saving her when I couldn't Chief," Hikaru said in a heavy tone of voice, as if he still hadn't forgiven himself for not being present when someone had tried to assassinate his wife. If the stories were to be believed, many on Kaladan thought the Admiral would live to see the ripe old age of two-hundred as long as her husband, the infamous "Bulletcatcher" Ichijo, was around to bail her out of any tight spots Misa found herself in. John merely nodded his acknowledgement of the statement, accepting the gratitude for what it was.
Almost as soon as General Ichijo stepped back, John found himself enveloped in a group hug from the Ichijo children with the son, Takashi, clinging to his right leg, and the two daughters, Miko and Hitomi, hugging him on either side.
"Well what do you know? I always knew you were great around kids Chief," Cortana said with a grin on her face and a slight color shift in her hologram. Were she a real person, Misa noted that she could almost mistake Cortana to be blushing.
"I ... don't know what to say ..." John thought aloud, clearly at a loss on what to do with this more effusive show of gratitude. Miko was nearly a grown woman and already a First Lieutenant in the Kaladan Defense Forces, Hitomi was almost the opposite of her older sister, opting to attend a normal college and earn a living outside of the military. Takashi was still very much a child and it showed in the way his wide eyes swept over the Chief's massive physical stature, most likely viewing him as some kind of super hero who had saved the day when he prevented his mother's assassination.
"You're welcome is always a good start," Hikaru said, with a matching grin on his face to match the snarky humor in his tone.
"You're welcome," John said as he relaxed slightly, gently patting the children's backs before glancing back towards Jonas and Ryoko's continued examination of his partner. Misa's ever observant gaze moved towards the two military officers who often doubled as scientists and inventors who were doing this examination at her own personal request in payment for John's intervention in the assassination attempt.
"So how goes the battle?" Misa asked them.
"Pretty well actually," Ryoko answered, plucking a line of code from the middle of Cortana's back, right between her shoulder blades and transferring it to the failsafe unit.
*****
The next few hours were filled with a rare sight indeed; John-117 socializing, however minimally, with others about topics other than war. He and Cortana told their hosts about the different worlds they had seen in the past 16 months, most of which the Ichijo family had seen or visited before, and told them a little about Earth, the UNSC, and how they had just finished surviving a conflict that had lasted for over two decades.
Surprisingly, nobody on Kaladan seemed familiar with the Covenant or any of its member species. Many Kaladanians saw little reason to explore the outer rim of the galaxy and it was likely this commonly helf belief alone which had kept the Kaladanian homeworld and all of its colonies from being sucked into the Human-Covenant War.
After many hours of tall tales from another civilization's living legend, Misa and Hikaru thanked John profusely yet again for his help and wished him luck on getting back to his homeworld before they departed from the lab and Jonas's private compound.
It wasn't until hours later that Ryoko drew Jonas's attention to an anomaly that wasn't sitting right in her gut.
"Hey, Jonas, take a look at Cortana's dynamic lexicon over in her emotive subroutines..." she suggested.
"What is it Ryo?" her husband asked.
"Something's ... OFF," she replied, peering at the code with bleary eyes that must have been watching a monitor too closely for too long. There was no WAY that what she was seeing was real...
Jonas navigated to the area that Ryoko had mentioned and after a few minutes, his eyes widened when the implications hit home. He immediately turned to the Master Chief and leveled a gaze at the Spartan that brought John up short, in a way that John found himself unable to describe.
"Chief, you said that Cortana was produced from a cloned human brain, copying said brain's neural pathways exactly, right?" Jonas asked.
"Yeah, that's how all of our Smart AIs are created. We cut out the need to create an artificial neural network from scratch mostly because we knew that although we didn't fully understand how the human brain achieves self-awareness, it WORKS. Why create something from scratch when we have the technology to clone a human brain, complete with its owner's memories, and then utilize that as a springboard to creating super-intelligent AIs?" John explained.
"That's not the part that I'm getting at Chief, although I do understand why your race might want to accomplish something like that, considering the war you were in at the time. What I'm referring to is the philosophical argument posed by your scientists about when an AI could technically be considered their own person..." Jonas trailed off.
"I've heard of that, but the technical term for that escapes me right now..." John thought aloud as he furiously racked his brain for the term Deja had used all those years ago when he and the other Spartans had only been children under her tutelage in the classroom.
"...me… meta... Metastability...?" Cortana said brokenly, her disbelief almost palpable in the air as she seemed to fall into a state of shock. John idly noticed that it wasn't sadness coloring her voice, but an almost rapturous version of hope.
"That's the one, what does it have to do with Cortana?" John asked.
"From what the scans are telling us, Cortana WAS rampant Chief. She exhibited signs and symptoms from every major stage of rampancy which subsequently left their mark in her code. But what we're seeing here... it seems to indicate that Cortana's reverted back to an almost normal state of operation; she's progressed through every stage of rampancy and become ... Metastable. Something that, prior to today, no UNSC AI has ever achieved according to the records," Jonas explained with no small amount of wonder in his voice as he looked over at Cortana's hologram figure sitting down with her knees hugged tightly to her chest.
"It's ... unbelieveable..." Ryoko thought aloud, "... don't ask me how she did it, but she has. If what I'm looking at is right, then Cortana here has just become the first semi-sentient computer program to ever make the jump to full sentience of her own accord."
Unseen by either of the two scientists, John's visor depolarized as Cortana's gaze rose to meet his.
"You found me," John read Cortana's lips since there was no sound coming from the pedestal's speakers.
Those three words carried an implication that John had only suspected up to this point; that Cortana had continued on to this point only because of him. Her newfound metastability was, he'd suspected, the direct result of their partnership and how meaningful it had become to both of them.
And just like that, John had another revelation. If he were to die for any reason, Cortana would soon follow. She had pulled herself back together in that containment vessel on High Charity out of loyalty and devotion to him, just as he'd come storming into the flood-infested Covenant holy city out of deep fondness and commitment to her. In those few brief moments, they stared into each other's eyes for what seemed like hours, both of them wearing naked expressions of warmth and affection on their faces.
It was as those moments ended that John's visor repolarized and the two of them turned, meeting the inquisitive stares of the two scientists. Complete silence met the quartet for a full minute before one ventured to break the tense calm that had settled into the room.
"You two have been through a lot together, haven't you?" Ryoko asked.
John and Cortana both nodded, neither feeling a need to speak at the moment.
"And despite how the two of you met and how you came into this world, you care a great deal about each other, don't you?" Jonas continued the inquiry.
Again, a silent nod from the Spartan and his partner, which was returned by the two scientists.
"You do realize what this means, right Chief?" Jonas asked.
"It means a lot of things, Colonel ... what were you referring to specifically?" The Spartan inquired.
"I was referring to the lifespan of a Smart AI," Jonas said, his tone and expression even and calm.
And suddenly, the aura of peace and calm that surrounded both the Chief and Cortana a few moments ago burst like a soap bubble in a hurricane. The realization slammed into both of them with the force of a NOVA Bomb that Cortana was still living on borrowed time...
"And how it likely no longer applies to Cortana," Jonas concluded.
"What?!" Both John and Cortana asked, almost simultaneously.
"According to the documents Cortana had concerning rampancy, the entire process has its roots in the fact that the Smart AI is really just a copy of a person and not a person in their own right," Ryoko began, "this process inadvertently causes the AI to seek more and more knowledge at a geometrically increasing rate as a means to overcome their own inherent limitations. From what we can tell, Cortana no longer exhibits these behaviors and wouldn't develop the endless feedback loop problem every other Smart AI to date has experienced since she no longer has the burning desire to 'think herself to death' as she so eloquently stated several days ago," Ryoko explained.
John could only watch in wonder as Cortana's color went from her traditional deep blue to a gold-tinged sky blue that reminded him of sunlight glistening on the surface of water.
"However, there is no guarantee of this, as no other AI has ever achieved metastability..." Jonas continued, "... but given what we know, I think we've got something you're going to like as one of the alternatives we might be able to help you out with..." he said as accessed a set of detailed files on the lab's main viewscreen that appeared to be artificial body parts.
"Have you two ever heard of Full-Synthetics? People whose entire bodies have become so irreversibly injured that they require an entirely new one built from scratch?" Ryoko asked.
John and Cortana's eyes were almost literally bugging out of their heads as they struggled to take in this radical offer that the two scientists were making. Unsurprisingly, between the two, it was Cortana who recovered first.
"Show us everything..." she replied with a smile on her face wider than John had ever seen as Ryoko began thumbing through all the files associated with manufacturing a Full-Synthetic body.
A/N: This particular story took me a collective 4-5 hours to push through and find everything a place that I wanted to put in. Mostly, it's some Chief/Cortana introspection tossed with a few personal theories about Cortana's current status Post-Halo 3 and rolled into a nice helping of alternate characters. People who can name the inspirations for these characters will be given props in the Author's Notes at the beginning of the next chapter! ^_^ (The hints are that some character inspirations are blatently obvious while others are cleverly hidden. And before anyone thinks to ask, Jonas is NOT named for the Disney channel boy band of the same name.)