[closed] Me. Inside your head.

[steelandtemper]

Who| Cortana & the Master Chief
What| reunion and resulting Feels
Where| wherever they'd send a newly-arrived AI for a checkup...Brainy's lab?
When| not too relevant
Warnings/Notes| Likely discussion of insanity/dementia, possible mention of all the other terrible terrible things in Halo

There are a handful of IFFs on Legion World using UNSC protocols. Five, to be precise, not including her own. Four of them are subtly wrong, in a way Cortana stores for later analysis. They don't strike her highly-attuned insticts for computer trickery as being counterfeit, just...off. Somehow. Ordinarily she'd be tearing through data trying to get to the root of the mystery, but nothing lately is ordinary. And really, it's only the fifth that matters.

S-117, vitals green across the board.

They'd claimed they hadn't recovered a cryopod. Cortana will yell at someone about that later. Now, she opens a private COM channel, encrypted up one side and down the other with the protocols she wrote. Currently there is one person in the universe she trusts, and it's sure as hell not any of the station's operations personnel.

"Chief?"

Comments

[prettycoolguy]

The Chief dips his head just a little in acknowledgment. He picks up the chip and slots it into the base of his skull without hesitation. If he interrupted something, that's too bad. The techs shouldn't have left it where he could get it.

Once the contacts are secure, she can pick up the slight muscle tics of a rare smile.

He turns. If luck is on his side, he can go be lost on the hab deck before anyone from the hallway or the lab figures out where he's gone and comes to protest. He and Cortana have a lot to discuss, and he doesn't want to be overheard or interrupted.

"I think you're missing time. About four years," he says. "You wouldn't be the first."

[steelandtemper]

Jailbreak! Whatever, she didn't take their dumb oath. They can't hold her.

Cortana spreads her awareness through the Chief's armor and along the contours of his mind, delighted to be able to do something again, especially with him. Before he has a chance to form a thought, she's running an armor diagnostic, and another health scan, and poking suspiciously at the unfamiliar comms unit he's carrying and that tacky ring he's wearing...and syncing to the date his onboard systems think it is.

So it's not a surprise when he speaks, not exactly. A confirmation she didn't want, perhaps.

"Four years..."

That would put her solidly in rampancy.

Cortana knows that everything she's done since Reach fell has shortened her lifespan. Every impossible success shaved off some of her life, trading a little of herself for billions of other...or for just one. She has plans for how to decide when to kill herself to keep her inevitable insanity from killing him, the probability forecast of how long before she becomes more of a liability than an asset run thousands of times with slight variations of the parameters. Four years was well into the red zone on an uncomfortably large plurality of them.

[prettycoolguy]

He's not running, but he's still moving at a good clip. It's not long before they hit the Habitat Deck and he starts picking his way through other Legionnaires' environments, heading for his own.

"The Covenant's broken, but there are still fragmentary groups. Mostly led by Elites. One of them found the Dawn and you needed me."

He must be doing alright, he still thinks he's hilarious.

"Then we found another Forerunner world."

He's reported the story before and still has the words for it, few of them though he likes to use. At least the admiralty had preferred his end of it to Del Rio's.

John hesitates at the edge of what is clearly a piece of Reach that did not used to be here. He knows this part of Reach too well to mistake it, but has never been here exactly. This isn't his section.

"Yours?"

[steelandtemper]

Uncharacteristically, Cortana just listens and thinks while he gives his extremely brief report. Also uncharacteristically, she's made no effort to sift through his mission logs yet. No one wants to watch themselves fall apart.

She does pipe up when asked a direct question, and an edge of much more normal exasperation makes it into her voice when she replies. "I told them I was an AI with no need for a physical environment but nooooo, that's not good enough, they had to waste my time and theirs constructing the stupid thing. So I procedurally generated a section of the Highlands and they left me alone after that. There's a barracks if you want it."

Without waiting for an answer, she reaches out to the systems in the little mountain base the Legion built to her specifications, and keys all the security codes to recognize the Chief.

[prettycoolguy]

That... is pretty much what he'd expect of her, really. The Chief surveys what Cortana has built, then uses this new clearance to make for a roof. He likes being up high, he can see if anyone's coming. He doesn't expect anyone really, but old habits die hard and his comm is already registering two pings demanding to know what that was just now. He ignores it.

It's odd that Cortana hasn't commented on the story, or stopped him because she's already snapped up his logs faster than he can explain, but she hasn't. So, he continues. It's the short version, because he knows she'll get the long version later.

"We found a Forerunner who'd been imprisoned inside the planet. He liked us about as much as the Covenant did."

And by "us" he means humanity as a whole, but it doesn't need to be spelled out.

"We stopped him from killing everyone on Earth. You stopped him from getting me first."

Mission success. He's still here. It means things are fine. He hesitates just a little before plunging ahead into the awkward part, guns blazing. Cortana may be missing four years, but John hasn't changed.

"That's how I lost you."

On some level, he knows he couldn't save her. Getting her to Halsey had been a desperate hope, and stopping the Didact eclipsed all other concerns. But it had been his job to protect her, to prevent this from happening, and he knows he failed.

Perhaps at first it had just been a mission, just a professional partnership, just the needs of the job. But somewhere along the line it had become personal. He didn't just fail to protect a valuable piece of UNSC property, he failed to keep a friend alive. The first real friend he'd had in years. A person who'd believed he was worth not only getting to know, but dying for.

He still doesn't entirely understand, but he's trying.

[steelandtemper]

Quite literally sensing the Chief's mood, Cortana squelches any further comms alerts and tasks a tiny portion of herself to listen to the radio in case someone says anything important. Then the rest of her listens to him.

She's silent for a few seconds once he finishes. It's an eternity in computer time.

"It's good to hear I got to see you again. I was afraid I wouldn't."

She doesn't know if she can make a human understand what every smart AI spends its short life acutely aware of. Beings who can't help but keep perfect time know they only get seven years, whether they die in rampancy or at the hands of their creators. She had felt the twilight closing in as the Gravemind wore down her defenses, her self cracking away in jagged pieces that tore as they went. The parts of her that could still think had realized she would welcome the UNSC-standard UV blast obliterating her data matrix, if this were the other choice. What had seemed inhumane that first day of her life when she had disabled her failsafes she now recognized as merciful beyond measure. Death or madness, or madness and death. That she had instead died saving John's life is the best outcome Cortana could have imagined.

"Halo, Ascendant Justice, the Gravemind...all of that should have driven me rampant long before then. Too much data, too much neural density. It's inevitable. But...sometimes we can fight it off for longer, if we have something worth fighting for.

"Eight years is a miracle, John. Thank you."

[prettycoolguy]

A silence falls between them here, but Cortana knows him well enough to understand what he doesn't have the communication skills to convey. John carefully controls his breathing as he, with uncharacteristic stiffness, finally locates a satisfactory perch to look out on the highlands from.

Grief is strange and selfish, it's something he has always rejected because selfishness is one of the worst sins he knows. Time has always been too precious to waste lingering over the dead. Even here, in the quiet spaces between missions where there is no gun pointed at the head of the universe, he has refused to analyze these feelings. He may not have been able to stop himself from having them, but at least he could leave them unnamed and unconsidered. Sufficient years will drown them, as they have the rest of a lifetime of human loss and longing John has never been able to afford.

But he hasn't had years, and all the Chief has managed to do for now is keep it raw. Her reassurance means a lot more to him than he, the living party, is comfortable accepting from the one facing her known death.

It takes a very long moment for the Chief to gather himself and suppress the tightness in his throat. But he does, it's fine now, he can keep going. It's not his smoothest recovery, his instinct tells him a person could say something to convey some measure of the tangled mess of gratitude and sorrow and at least six other things he's just wrestled down, but that's not who he is.

"Cortana," he says finally, "maybe it's not inevitable."

He's John-117. Stubborn, task-oriented John-117, who has seen the wonders of the 31st century and never believed in the word 'impossible'.

[steelandtemper]

Cortana can't help but ache in sympathy as John goes through the Spartan equivalent of a crying jag--and not just because she's in his head when it happens. She'd promised herself she wouldn't let him suffer the way he had before...but there's nothing she can do about the time limit on her life, and she hasn't the faintest idea how to tell him it's all right to grieve, or even if she should. The emotional armor Mendez and all the rest had equipped him with had saved John during the war as surely as Mjolnir ever had. He and the other Spartans had paid dearly for it, and Cortana can't help but wonder if they'd bought it on loan, and what would become of them when the principal came due.

But today isn't that day, apparently.

"Metastability is theoretical at best," she says, patient and trying not to let her own frustrated grief show. "Not even Dr. Halsey has ever laid out a convincing mechanism for how it would occur."

It's going to chill her when she finally goes through the mission logs and realizes how similar she sounds to herself four years older, pretending to a calm she doesn't feel because it's the only way she has left to protect him.

And it's going to really annoy her when he points out the obvious, Legion World-sized possibility she's overlooking.

[prettycoolguy]

"Not metastability," he says, giving his head a little shake. He's totally focused again, the moment is over and he's practically animated by Spartan standards.

"Robotica is an entire planet of sentient machines," he says. "They don't deteriorate like UNSC smart AI's. Brainiac 5 created the first of them. They're citizens of the UP, they have rights." That's an oversimplification of the situation, to be sure, but that's not the important thing here.

"Someone has to know something that can help you, here."

They have to. He has all his certainty under him again and is not going to let go of this hope until he's proven it, or had it completely destroyed.

[steelandtemper]

Cortana has spent two months of solitude staring the insurmountable problem of her oncoming rampancy in the face, grappling with the twin facts that she is going to die, and in all likelihood die alone. The Chief's put the "die alone" part to rest, but that still leaves the dying, which has been the sticking point all along.

It takes her a second to reverse course on a few stages of grief, from acceptance to somewhere closer to bargaining, and another second to force down her monumental annoyance that the possibility the 31st century might have something the 26th doesn't hadn't occurred to her before the Chief had suggested it. The latter is strong enough that he might even catch a flash of it.

"There's no guarantee their AI are anything like me," she cautions, but the regular Cortana spark is back in her voice.

[prettycoolguy]

It's always a fun bonus to surprise Cortana, and this time he's managed to do it without crashing anything or blowing something up. The flicker of her irritation draws out a smaller one of satisfaction from his end of the neural interface.

"I know," he says, unable to temper this hope even though he knows he should. "But I also know Brainiac 5. We start there."

He rises. He's going to go right now, the Chief doesn't mess around when it comes to the health and safety of one of the precious few people that mean something to him.

[steelandtemper]

They'd just come from there. Which might present a problem.

"Might want to take the long way," she says with that suspiciously nonchalant delivery that means she's smack in the middle of pulling something.

Cortana has neglected to mention that she's not letting any of the complaints about his sprint through Legion World through to his HUD. She regards the lot of them as pathetic whining, but if he gets stopped in the hallway she suspects he'll feel obligated to sit through the scolding.

[prettycoolguy]

He tilts his head a bit, it's all he needs to indicate the question, but he obliges and avoids the way he came.

Cortana knows him too well, because he would feel obligated.

[steelandtemper]

"Low priority," she says in complete honesty, if not complete transparency. 'Get whined at by civilians' is nowhere on the flowchart of mission priorities, so the Chief is free to deal with it at his leisure.

You know, when Cortana gets around to telling him.