So my question is what is happening during Cortana/Gravemind moments in Halo 3? How are they able to contact John’s mind/suit or whatever they are using to cause John to have these “visions”? When these start both Cortana and the Gravemind are supposedly on High Charity near Installation 05 which is about a 2 week travel through slipspace. How the heck is John getting contacted? If anyone knows a canon explanation, please fill me in.
Interrogation, plain and simple.
I thought I saw some explanation before at some point (or it was fan-made, I don’t remember), but I can’t quite remember what it said…
I don’t think there is ever going to be a truly satisfying explanation of how the Gravemind contacted him other than just appealing to Precursor neural physics “space magic”, really. Which the Gravemind is able to make use of, once he/it becomes powerful enough.
Possibly the genesong the Librarian put in the Chief’s genetics had something to do with it, but the simpler explanation would just be the above.
There is a point in Halo 4 where the Didact talks to John remotely, and Cortana can’t hear the Didact talking – this likely is not space magic, but strikes me as similar in concept. Could be that it’s the Forerunner-embedded genesong.
Could the Gravemind have gotten radio frequencies from Cortana and just hijacked his way in?
The Flood communicates likely through neural physics (something carried over from the Precursors). It’s a fancy version of telepathy, and seems to be instantaneous somehow (which would explain how the Flood could be so effective in the Flood-Forerunner war). It’s not like the Gravemind has functioning vocal chords to speak with (even though it does move its mouth when speaking, this may just be artistic, as the Gravemind could never make the phonetic noises needed for English words with it’s mouth). So we infer from that that the Gravemind is communicating through thought, and that communication method somehow ignores distance and time.
As for why we hear Cortana speaking in those moments, well, it’s probably because she was connected to the Chief through the Gravemind (which is why you can hear the Gravemind’s voice behind hers in those moments).
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> The Flood communicates likely through neural physics (something carried over from the Precursors). It’s a fancy version of telepathy, and seems to be instantaneous somehow (which would explain how the Flood could be so effective in the Flood-Forerunner war). It’s not like the Gravemind has functioning vocal chords to speak with (even though it does move its mouth when speaking, this may just be artistic, as the Gravemind could never make the phonetic noises needed for English words with it’s mouth). So we infer from that that the Gravemind is communicating through thought, and that communication method somehow ignores distance and time.
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> As for why we hear Cortana speaking in those moments, well, it’s probably because she was connected to the Chief through the Gravemind (which is why you can hear the Gravemind’s voice behind hers in those moments).
This actually makes the most sense. It also somewhat implies that Cortana may have been using the Gravemind’s abilities to an extent and not just the other way around.
Thanks for all the replies so far.