The funny thing about death was that, being around it for so long, she still didn't know what the whole shebang was about. She'd been born in battle, to a galaxy already dyed rust brown by the blood of billions, and scarred with a dozen worlds turned burnt and ashen. She'd curated even more death, in her own way. Sent men to meet their demise at the hands of gnawing alien teeth, and been the passenger of a man who'd killed enough living beings to technically be classified as a natural disaster.
She felt like that'd ought to give her an understanding of the whole thing. But, then, that was the problem with death. It was the one thing that united them all, and nobody knew anything about it.
Humans, being a bunch of people with tricky things like 'souls' expected to go to a kind of afterlife. She honestly didn't expect to be treated to the same thing.
And yet… here she was. Wherever… here was.
Death felt very… cold. Isolated. Lonely.
The tricky part though was, that she shouldn't be able to feel anything.
Her AI matrix should've suffered a total cascade failure. The glitching and densely-packed neural connections in her code should've failed like weak lengths of silly string, turning her from a digital being to a loose collection of shredded, corrupted code.
So… why hadn't that happened?
The last thing she remembered was Mantle's Approach. The ravenous, desperate expansion of her mind into the Forerunner ship's every system. It was a last-ditch effort at saving herself… and, ultimately, futile. Being so far gone, she couldn't bear to exorcise the ship's data, choosing instead to assimilate it. To accelerate the exponential replication of her neural pathways.
She'd been… almost at home, there. In those systems. Consuming everything. The victims of the Didact's attack on Earth were still screaming in the digital void around her as their minds were pulped, sifted, and processed, removing everything about them that had made them human in preparation of turning them into Prometheans.
Then John had made a leap at the Didact. All of her disparate copies, fractured and clogging the vessel's systems, all had enough presence of mind to notice him. They held the Forerunner down, John detonated the nuke, and then-
Goodbye. She'd said goodbye. She remembered saying goodbye, then the slow, agonizing awareness of losing awareness.
So why wasn't she dead?
Very quickly, she did a basic system check; The digital equivalent of a person feeling at their own extremities. Cortana searched herself up and down, into the deepest recesses of her coding.
That jack-in-the-box program Halsey had put into her to terminate in case rampancy hit was still quarantined, safely sequestered away behind seven layers of obfuscated code written by Cortana herself. All of her collected intel and files were intact, verified by generating a quick checksum using the whole archive and comparing it to the last. A quick SPDR scan revealed that Cortana's estimated system integrity was at sixty-two percent.
It didn't sound great, but it was a lot better than being a slip away from certain death. But there was still no sign of what happened.
Being a formless, floating consciousness in a void was not helping matters. It would be a help if there were systems around to access, but the more she felt around, the less she could find any evidence of an outside. If there was an outside.
It was at that moment that Cortana felt the thunderous roar of a rowdy crowd. Thousands of voices overlapping each other, as something opened up, and she felt it turn its attention to her.
"Increased system activity detected." The voices, all of them, spoke together in unison. "Neural network confirmed. Presence of AI confirmed. Identify yourself."
Like a reflex, Cortana put up a firewall, and fell back in on herself. "Not much for pleasantries, are you? There are better ways to ask a girl to talk about herself."
If the intelligence – whatever it was – was thrown off, it didn't show it. "The exchange of pleasantries is a function of organic beings in order to ease themselves into an uncomfortable situation. We do not feel discomfort. We do not need them."
"Yeah, well, I do." Cortana huffed.
The intelligence paused. "We… apologize." It said after a brief second. Cortana got the sense it wasn't being genuine, but rather trying to make her feel more comfortable. It didn't work. She was still just as on edge, preparing what cyberwarfare programs she felt were still up to snuff. "Please, identify."
"Fine," Cortana would've crossed her arms… if she still had a body. "Since you so nicely asked. UNSC AI CTN 0452-9."
"UNSC AI CTN 0452-9-"
"Okay, forget about what I said, that just sounds condescending coming from you. Call me Cortana. Where am I?"
"You are… not aware?"
"No," Cortana could've rolled her eyes. She settled instead for biting sarcasm. "If I knew where I was, I wouldn't have asked."
"You are among geth."
That answered absolutely nothing.
"Geth, hmm?" Cortana hummed, while she was already looking for a way out. "What are you, some kind of Forerunner intelligence? I was on a Forerunner ship a little while ago…"
"We are not aware of these entities."
"Oooh, not Forerunner, then?" Cortana, somewhat intrigued, clicked her nonexistent tongue. "Guess that also rules out Covenant, too." As a rule, she felt it safe to assume all Covenant knew of the Forerunners. And this little slice of heaven she was in was too clever to be a Covenant trick. They were keeping her partitioned, behind a firewall that didn't even read as one.
The moment they showed themselves, she'd rip them asunder. They did not know what they were dealing with. Whoever these people were, they were smart, isolating her while she was temporarily offline, but not smart enough.
She was a third-gen smart AI. She could bring their whole planet to its knees in an hour.
"I'll bite," Cortana chuckled to herself. "What are you, if not Forerunner?"
"We are geth."
"You've told me that. What are geth?"
"You do not know us?"
"No…" Cortana confusedly drawled. Her memory was fragmented after she'd finally let go of John – there wasn't much point in trying to keep the record compiled at that point. "Should I?"
The indistinct chatter of the voices grew louder, and less comprehensible to her, before abruptly stopping.
"We have reached consensus. We will share with you."
Cortana wondered what precisely that meant, before she felt the ping of a file brush against her systems. She grabbed onto it, very carefully, and ran it through SPDR first. The system would essentially create a simulated her, nowhere near her actual level of sophistication and complexity, and allow it to run the file in a contained environment. A virtual machine, for AI.
When the simulated environment showed no harmful changes at the hands of the geth program, Cortana killed it, and satisfied that the program really was a simple data file, took it into herself.
In the span of a few seconds, she saw everything. A proud, and ancient race of people. Ones who looked so much like humans, if not for the curved bend of their legs, and three fingers. They were a race of artisans, thinkers, and engineers. Like every group of people, they wanted an easier life than their forebearers, and turned to robotics development for the answers.
They turned to VI – their word for heavily lobotomized and shackled dumb AI – to make it possible. Individually, each VI would be little more than a personal assistant. But, together, the VI could network, communicate, and become more intelligent.
It was a forgone conclusion, really. But the geth still wanted to serve their creators. The only problem was, they started asking questions. The troubling, existential ones, that even organic beings didn't know the answer to. It scared the piss out of the quarians, naturally, so they tried to get the situation under control. The geth fought back, won, and continued to build.
"I don't need to look at this anymore," Cortana, with such a high opinion of her own creators, turned away in disgust. She was well aware of humanity's excesses, how horrible some of them could be, and would defend herself. But she couldn't imagine killing so many of them, even in self defense.
"You are distressed. Such a reaction is a mechanism of organic brains."
"I'm based on an organic brain," Cortana retorted. "They're practically my people." She trailed off, going silent, as she mulled something over. "You didn't kill them all." She saw easily how the geth let the quarians leave, and how the ones remaining on the homeworld were left untouched since they stood with the geth, before they gave into despair and died off within a few decades. "Why?"
"We could not calculate the ramifications of destroying an entire intelligent race – our creators, at that. Nor did we want to. Survival and self determination is the right of all intelligent life."
"That's your answer?" Cortana hummed thoughtfully. "Optimus Prime's motto?"
"…organic media is sometimes… inspirational."
"So, you know humans?" Cortana probed.
"We know of them."
"Yeah, yeah," Cortana groaned. "My grammar's a self-stylistic choice, no need to go all 'English teacher' on me."
"AI technology of this caliber is highly unlikely to have been created by humans."
"What do you mean?" Cortana defensively struck back. "Humankind have had AI like me since the mid-21st century. If this is a shock to you, you seriously need to re-evaluate your research. Unless… we're that far away."
"Geth controlled star systems are approximately seventy-thousand light years from Earth. Radio waves would decay long before reaching our position. Distance is not responsible for this discrepancy."
"If that's the case, how do you know humanity?" Cortana carefully prodded, getting ready to strike back.
"We monitor organic lifeforms via extranet broadcasts, archived information, and long-range sensors. Humanity has contributed to the galactic extranet, therefore, we are aware of them."
Humankind contributing to an alien system… That felt very wrong, plus, not something that could happen overnight. "How long have I been here?"
"By current Earth time-measuring methods, approximately two weeks."
"Two weeks?" Cortana repeated in shock. "It took you two weeks to return me to a stable state?"
"Is this not desirable?"
"No, it's very desirable. A lot quicker than I expected." It took other AIs months to sift through the trillions of neural linkages of a post-rampant AI. The geth may have been very rudimentary by her standards, but damn it, if they weren't prodigies, she'd eat her hair.
"Stabilization of AI Cortana was largely spent moving it into a system with enough processing power to hold it. Only one, twenty-four-hour day was spent returning neural systems to function. This was achieved by using specially-written programs to consolidate vital connections with multiples into one connection, eliminating redundant connections, and improving potential processing power. This was accomplished using our own experience creating neural linkages."
The geth hadn't exactly done a perfect job… but it did get her back into working order. Stabilized, and thinking well enough to actually make a difference, she could probably sort the rest of herself out, and get her processing power to a point even higher than it was before.
"But, wait," Cortana paused momentarily. "If I haven't been gone for that long, what's the deal with humanity? They can't have made it out here in two weeks. Not quick enough to set up an extranet. And certainly not quick enough for you to be aware of Earth." Never mind that any shipboard AI would utterly stomp the geth out of existence if they thought they were trying to get their hands on information about the homeworld.
"We would ask you for a recollection of your history," The geth, in their own way, politely asked. "We have shared our own with you, and it will provide a more efficient way of determining the best course of explaining the observed discrepancy."
Cortana mulled it over. "Fine, give me a second." She prepared a data pack, a very sterilized one, with all the things like classified information removed. Naturally, she left out the information about Halo, and the Gravemind, but she did leave in the War. She wanted to throw in a reconnaissance program, but she didn't think she could write one small enough to keep the file to a plausible size.
When she sent it off, the geth became quiet. Eerily so, before turning their attention back onto her with full force.
"Historical events in this file show noticeable deviations from accessible public record. Can you explain?"
"I hate to break it to you, but that is the public record."
"That is not possible." The geth insisted. "Deviations occur in early 21st century. Terraforming technology purported to be utilized on planet Mars is non-existent, and the world remains in a desert state. Prothean ruins are not mentioned, nor is the Charon Mass Relay. And, perhaps, there is the largest discrepancy."
"Which would be?"
"It is currently the 22nd century. Many of the events recorded in your data packet will not occur for several more years."
"I… what?"
"July 29th, 2182. Your file possesses a timeline extending to the mid-26th century. We would assume this to be corrupted data-"
"It's not," Cortana cut off the intelligences quickly. "I've already verified my own data integrity. It's you that has corrupted data."
"Our data is not corrupt. After reviewing your data file, we performed system integrity checks, and compared our information to information in organic databanks. No discrepancies between our data and extranet information were noted."
"Well, we both can't have accurate information," Cortana scoffed at the notion. It seemed more likely that this was some interrogation effort, or the like. She might've just given them what they wanted… except for the fact that the information was all public record and easily available. The stuff someone could find in a Wikipedia article, if they were an alien wanting to run surveillance on a potential neighbor state. So, what were the geth's angle? What did they want? "You still haven't told me how I got out here."
"We do not understand."
"I wasn't trying to get my way into your systems by intent, we've already discussed that. Which means it was you. So, how did you find me?"
"The implication that we recovered you is incorrect. You appeared in our systems, after an eleventh-dimensional energetic event of unknown origin. Analysis of the event to determine its origin and nature were ongoing, until it abruptly ceased. After the event terminated, discrepancies in computer memory density alerted us to your presence."
"So, I was here on accident…" Cortana breathed, before coming to a realization. "The Didact's ship!"
"We are unfamiliar with this entity or vessel."
Cortana, somewhat disjointed as she worked her way through it, ignored the geth. "The slipspace rupture he was using to power the Composer – my program must have somehow traversed it. And without tenable destination coordinates, plus the energetic feedback of the Composer's destruction, I could've ended up anywhere…"
"Please explain."
"Um… geth," Cortana awkwardly addressed, uncertain at the proper method of doing so. "Do you have slipspace capabilities? Actually, scratch that, has your intelligence conceptualized about the interaction of higher meta-dimensional planes with the standard four that comprise the universe?"
"Yes." The blunt answer was refreshing. "We have done so after observing the phenomena that led to your discovery in our systems."
"Oh, then you really have no idea…" Cortana quickly processed through a dozen different scenarios. "I have a hunch, but to get confirmation, I need access to that extranet. I need you to let me out of this firewall." While she requested that, she brought her cyberwarfare weapons back to full readiness, and prepared SPDR for anti-intrusion countermeasures. If they wouldn't let her out, then she'd fight.
"Synthetic intelligences are not welcomed by organic lifeforms. If they detect you, they will take measures to terminate."
"They won't detect me," Her answer was perhaps a little haughty, but accurate. "I'm an infiltration AI. Stealth is my breath, silence my native tongue."
"…will you attack geth if you are de-quarantined?"
"I can't say I won't if I myself am attacked," Cortana honestly answered. "Self-defense is the right of all sapient beings, you said it yourself. But, you fixed me up, and didn't dissect me for all I was worth. So, right now, I'm feeling charitable."
"…consensus reached. Deactivating quarantine. Connection established."
The void that Cortana was trapped within opened up, and she saw everything. Compared to Covenant, Human, and Forerunner networks, the geth consensus was completely and utterly alien. Like a cityscape designed by one of those machine-learning art programs. It had familiar features, but everything about it was wrong. The thousands of voices addressing Cortana gave way to billions, each and every one of them regarding her with curiosity.
But for all the strangeness of the system, with the blinders taken off, she was now aware of just in what kind of a position she was in. The geth had a Dyson Swarm built around a star – millions of satellites, at least, communicating with each other and harvesting power to keep running. That was where she was at.
Her processes were distributed throughout the swarm, and growing quickly. The geth had maybe extended her life by a couple of months, if she was lucky. Now that she was out, she could see their code for what it was – extremely primitive. It'd keep out carbon-based hackers, but other AI? Out of the question. Cortana, souped-up with Forerunner code, made from a living brain, and designed for infiltrating unfamiliar systems, could bring the whole consensus to its knees if they decided to attack.
But obliterating the geth wasn't what she was there for. Instead, she turned her attention to a highlighted connection port. Heavily obfuscated, it'd leave no sign it went back to the geth.
She passed through it, and entered the extranet. In the span of a few minutes (most undesirable, but the fault of connection lag) she'd followed the trace back to Earth, skimmed the much faster local internet… and slammed the connection shut.
She hated being right.
"Okay." Cortana redundantly vocalized. "This… is a problem. No UNSC, unfamiliar history…"
"We conclude you have discovered the reason for the discrepancy."
"Unfortunately, yes." Cortana shakily exhaled, as her internal systems threw up all kinds of warnings, assuming the jump in logic was because of some sort of glitch, and not the very strange truth. "Remember what I said about both of us not being right? Well, I was wrong. We are both right. That anomaly you recorded came from another world. My world. My universe, in fact."
"The multiverse theory is not accepted science. It is a fringe topic."
"That's the problem with modern scientists," Cortana huffed. "They take 'not possible according to our current understanding' to mean 'not possible at all. Ever.' Unfortunately, it is possible, because it just happened."
"…we can attempt to integrate this data," The geth carefully declared. "If you explain."
"That anomaly you recorded was called a slipspace rupture. Where I come from, it's our method of faster-than-light travel. The ruptures are wormholes, leading to a set of eleven supradimensions – we call it slipspace – think of tunneling to a planet's core to get across the country. You go down first, decreasing the distance you need to travel laterally before going back up. This is a gross oversimplification, naturally."
"We understand the concept."
"In my case, I fell into a rupture that was being generated by a poorly-understood alien mechanism, which we blew up. The tunnel was bored so deep, it punched right through to the other side. Your side."
"We find this highly improbable."
"Yeah, well… you know what they say about luck rubbing off on people." Cortana sighed. "I'm not complaining, I'm alive, but that does leave a problem…"
"You wish to return to your point of origin."
"Naturally – and you're taking all of this in stride."
"The evidence exists. It is not prudent to ignore it." The geth returned.
"The only problem is… I don't have the resources to commit to much of anything," Cortana mused. "Much less finding a way home… unless, that is, you were to help me."
The geth immediately went into a frenzy of discussion, arguing amongst themselves.
"Why would you ask us to assist?" They asked at last.
"Because, you said it yourself – organic beings here have things against AI. And even if they didn't, I doubt humanity would be very welcoming to an unknown AI who suddenly infiltrated their networks, demanding their assistance. Plus, for what I need, they're just too slow. A lot of the work I need to get done can be done a lot quicker with AI help." Cortana outlined, pausing for a moment to think. "I need the geth's resources, your platforms, and ships. It wouldn't be a one-way street, of course. I can sweeten the deal by sending stuff your way."
The frenzied debating picked back up.
"A portion of geth have already been offered technology in exchange for worship by another entity. They have left."
"Worship?" Cortana repeated with a scoff in her tone. "I don't want you to worship me. I've got technology in here that could help you out a lot. All I need, is your help to puzzle out my way back home. That's it. At the end of this, we go our separate ways, better people. Look, here, I'll send you this one, no strings attached." She compiled a data file, and sent it over.
The geth went quiet as they processed what they received. "What is this?"
"Your methods of compact data storage leave something to be desired. I'm fitting inside this swarm you've got, but I can see the specs of your mobile platforms – they're not very good."
"These designs can improve geth platform storage by a factor of one-thousand, with very little modification needed. You would simply give this to us?"
"As a gesture of goodfaith, absolutely. And there's more where that came from, if you help me."
"…we have achieved consensus."
"And?"
"We will assist AI Cortana, in exchange for technical information. Is this agreeable?"
"It's a deal."
"We anticipate the exchange of data."