SPOILERS!: Just after the start of Requiem on Halo 4, while you’re still among all of the wreckage from falling into the planet, there’s an audio log from Dr. Halsey. In it she mentions the time Cortana removed a hidden code inside herself, put in place by Halsey in order to destroy Cortana if need be. Cortana wasn’t supposed to be able to do this and it baffled Halsey as to where Cortana would have gained to ability to do so. She goes on to speculate that it might be due to the unique nature of Cortana’s creation using living tissue from clones. I think Halsey cloned her own geas into Cortana when she used clones. The geas are genetic, after all; maybe Halsey had her own… Maybe it’s the Libarians geas and that’s why Cortana/Halsey has such an intense bond with John, who likely has the geas of the Librarian’s husband, Iso Didact.
After reading more about Mendicant Bias, I was reminded that at the end of his life he was beginning to reverse his own rampancy caused by speaking with the Primordial for too long. If Mendicant Bias was powerful enough to reverse the process of Rampancy, and that huge Forerunner object rising from the sand is likely Mendicant Bias, then maybe the Chief is looking for a way to retrieve Cortana and learn from Mendicant Bias a way to either reverse her rampancy… or even crazier… reverse clone her into biological tissue using all of the “Halsey” information inside of her. The process that Halsey used to create Cortana is just a few short steps away from what the Didact was trying to do to Humans with the composer, turn things from flesh into machine; Halsey basically composed herself, resulting in Cortana. Maybe that still has something to do with how they’ll handle the flood.
Who else is in total denial about her death with me?!
I admit that I haven’t really read The Forerunner Saga as I did not enjoy the storyline and writing much but I think that Geas’s are more for organic creations then per say digital ones, I don’t think a Geas can be copied into a digital being as it were, I think that the audio log by Halsey indicates that Cortana is something more then just a standard smart A.I and it was 343 “hinting” that Rampancy wouldn’t kill her (But a HAVOK Nuke is a different story)
An interesting thing with Mendicant Bias is that he did survive Rampancy, and apparently the new threat in Halo 5 is causing vast amount’s of data corruption, now if anything can fight that an A.I that has survuived Rampancy can.
Me personally I think that Cortana should stay dead for Chief’s character development but him trying to cure rampancy in A.I’s and fix the terrible legacy of A.I’s going rampant since Forerunners could be interesting.
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> I admit that I haven’t really read The Forerunner Saga as I did not enjoy the storyline and writing much but I think that Geas’s are more for organic creations then per say digital ones, I don’t think a Geas can be copied into a digital being as it were, I think that the audio log by Halsey indicates that Cortana is something more then just a standard smart A.I and it was 343 “hinting” that Rampancy wouldn’t kill her (But a HAVOK Nuke is a different story)
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> An interesting thing with Mendicant Bias is that he did survive Rampancy, and apparently the new threat in Halo 5 is causing vast amount’s of data corruption, now if anything can fight that an A.I that has survuived Rampancy can.
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> Me personally I think that Cortana should stay dead for Chief’s character development but him trying to cure rampancy in A.I’s and fix the terrible legacy of A.I’s going rampant since Forerunners could be interesting.
Find me the part in the fiction that states a geas can’t be transferred from host, to clone, to AI and we’ll mark it off the list of possibilities. Geas are definitely genetic, and Cortana was made from Halsey’s genes, so it’s still plausible. It’s really just reformatting information and storing it differently. In the cannon, AI made from living tissue definitely have something special about them that sets them way apart from other AI. No one has seen what that is yet, however. Black Box from the Kilo-5 saga had some strange thoughts and emotions that he couldn’t explain. Considering the scope of Halsey’s knowledge and the fact that she designed Cortana, it seems reasonable to think that a forerunner geas - currently unheard of by humans in 2558 - would be a wild card that Halsey could not have predicted. Halsey’s powers of deduction make even Sherlock Holmes seem simple. I’m sure that had she possessed any inkling of forerunner technology capable of imprinting one being’s consciousness inside that of another, that she would have considered such a possibility. Yet, she’s still stumped. A geas seems like the only possibility partially because it’s the only variable that the character Dr. Halsey is unaware of while we the readers know full well about it.