The Weapon and Cortana - Deletion / Restoration

[JB_Linken]

I’m playing the campaign again and coming up on the ending. As I try to piece together the events that took place between The Weapon / Cortana / Halo ring explosion I started to do some research.

I found this post from @total_war1402 that I am going to link here, and I wish to continue the conversation as it didn’t receive any replies last time.

Infinite spoilers: About the Weapon
https://forums.halowaypoint.com/t/infinite-spoilers-about-the-weapon/474801

There are a few pieces of this post I wish to highlight:

The Weapon tells us that “upon successful deployment, my deletion routine was supposed to complete”. So why didn’t it?

Also if her deletion was prevented then why does she have amnesia and finds a chunk of herself and “the last part I remember being deleted”.

Why does this part of herself have a memory of Cortana in it along with the activation index? If they’re completely separate entities they shouldn’t be jumbled up like that.

The Memory Fragments of Cortana are depicted as these glowing wisps of light. When you first meet the Weapon, why do we see a constellation of that stuff dramatically combine to form the Weapon?

With my first few playthroughs, I was under the impression that The Weapon locked Cortana down and Cortana prevented her deletion, to then sacrifice herself and count on Master Chief retrieving The Weapon. “Something stopped your deletion. We need to find out why.” But unless this is just a plot hole, it wouldn’t make sense for Cortana to stop the deletion and then later on come to the conclusion “He needs her.”

With our approach to The Weapon depicting the Halo ring’s explosion (and combined with how it mirrors the Control Room on Alpha Halo), as well as The Weapon’s statement of “this is the last part I remember being deleted.” I do think they were deleted, or something to that effect. I then think either Cortana somehow brought her back for Chief before sacrificing herself, or to the OP’s point, deleted the parts of her to essentially become The Weapon herself / combine with The Weapon?

This is why I wanted to continue this topic, to better understand what really happened with The Weapon / Cortana.

[Avenger217]

This response has story spoilers. Here is my condensed take on it:

If we assume Cortana and the weapon are roughly equal in skill, we know Cortana can also stop deletion protocols. While Cortana was in a ‘locked down’ state, she may have still had access to part of her knowledge base, and systems on the ring. I thought that the Weapon went into standby state until chief picked up Cortana OR that Cortana stopped her deletion when she saw what was about to happen. It makes sense to give Weapon ‘amnesia’ so that her deletion routines won’t get triggered. We also know Cortana was expecting MC to arrive and retrieve her, but instead it was Atriox. As per her comments of only formulating her plan in a few milliseconds (or whatever she said), she may have stalled the final step of weapons deletion, and transfered what data she could to that data structure crystal thing we see. Cortana likely chose what data clusters were saved during her death (recursive code/memories), as it’s pointed out in the silent auditorium that the memories are specific, to try and guide MC and the Weapon together and solve what happened. Now that the Weapon and MC were set up, she sacrificed herself which broke the ring and ‘killed’ Atriox . My theory is that she cast Atriox back in time so that he would be lost, much like the endless (and similar to Alduin, now that I think about it). So that explains the last boss fight, and the ‘searching for something’ and ‘you have what you need’. Harbinger sent that fancy doodad back to Atriox to change the timeline.

As to why the whispy data looks the same? They are basically clones of one another, it stands to reason they think very similar, or at least the same patterns. I always thought of them as like visualizations of thought/brain patterns.

When I look at the story as a whole, it makes sense you would have Cortana prime die off. It’s like any character that has reached ascended into a level higher then everyone else, they have to be neutralized so they can’t just come in and ‘fix’ everything right away. I fully believe that she is dead dead this time, and we have Cortana lite as our new companion in stories to come.