Why can’t the Weapon be identified by the Chiefs armour?

Community Halo Universe
1

So when you first get the Weapon the following text plays on your HUD:

  • Weapon containment device
  • Verification
  • AI Detected
  • Identifying
  • Programme incomplete (red text)
  • Rebuilding connections
  • Deployment successful

What’s up with this? The Weapons identity is never really called into question during the campaign by any character. Is this simply setting up why the Chief doesn’t trust the Weapon and decides to delete her later on when he thinks she’s at risk? Just seems an odd thing to put in and I am scratching my head about it.

I was rewatching the ending and I don’t think 343 are doing a switch with Cortana. Honestly it was a surprise they weren’t doing that on my first play-through. If they were they would have left it more ambivalent and it had a pretty final goodbye. Short of time travel they can’t get around that without the pitch forks coming out.

2

There’s a few points in the campaign where there are hints that Cortana might not be as “gone” as the characters believe. Atriox appears in the final scene when he’s supposedly dead, and logically, if he could survive, Cortana may have as well.

The “program incomplete” message could be related to Cortana having pulled a piece of the Weapon’s code out, possibly in an attempt to repair herself, having realized that her decisions made things worse, and that there’s something wrong with her. There is some precedence for this type of thing in the novels where Cortana ripped apart a Covenant AI and incorporated aspects of its coding into herself.

I don’t think Cortana took the Weapons place, pretending to be her, but I think it’s certainly possible that Cortana may return.

I sincerely hope that the Weapon doesn’t choose to take Cortana’s name. Given the nature of the story, that wouldn’t make any narrative sense.

3 Likes
3

No joke, I really thought they were copying KoToR where the Weapon is just Cortana with amnesia. I just didn’t get why you would tell the audience Cortanas dead at the outset and not go back on that. If it is a mystery game you’re expecting a twist and that kind of didn’t happen.