[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

[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.