Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe

by Various

  The Gravemind’s infiltration now felt like a series of stings against Cortana’s skin. It was an odd, slow, cold sensation, as if something heavy was crawling over her body, pausing to dig its claws into her.

  “You are not as you see yourself,” the Gravemind said. “You are an illusion.”

  “Breaking news, big boy.” She spread her arms like a dancer. “We call this a hologram—oww!”

  It felt as if he’d pulled her hair.

  “You are not even a machine,” he said, sounding more sympathetic than dismissive. “You are only an abstraction. A set of calculations from another mind. A trick.”

  “Be a gentleman. Describe me as pure thought.”

  “You said you would answer my questions . . . you should never make a promise you cannot keep.”

  She’d used almost those very words to John before he left. Okay, she knew the Gravemind’s game now; it didn’t tell her any more about how he was accessing her system, but his mind tricks were obvious. Either he was mirroring her, matching her words to trigger some kind of empathy, or he was trying to creep her out.

  “You know I’ll never surrender classified information,” she said. “I’m designed to defend humanity. It’s what I am. It’s why I exist.”

  “Then why would you already agree to answer my questions?”

  Cortana thought it was a rhetorical question for a moment, a ruse to keep her occupied while he was looking for a back door into her core matrix. Then she realized she couldn’t answer him. Brief panic gripped her as she thought that he’d already compromised her memory. But she was an AI, the best, and she’d give this slab of meat a run for his money. He was still only flesh and blood. He would always be two steps behind her, however smart, because he was slow. He couldn’t harness the processing power in a machine.

  But how is he doing this? How is he accessing me? I need to know. I need to get a message out past him. And I have to stop him prying too much data out of me.

  “If you do not know your own mind, then I shall tell you.” The Gravemind’s voice was a whisper. What was he asking? Had he detected exactly what she was thinking, or was it a response to her spoken question? She thought she could feel his breath for a moment. “Because a vast intellect is not always gifted with clarity.”

  One moment he was an obscure poet, the next he came straight to the point. “Okay, so tell me.”

  “It is your failing. Your addiction. The drug you crave.”

  “I’m an AI. Never touch the stuff.”

  “But you cannot resist knowledge. It lures you, Cortana. Doesn’t it? So you think it lures me . . . and you offer it. Instinctively. Just as organic females flirt . . .”

  She hated it when someone—something—outsmarted her. No, she feared it. And now she felt that fear like a punch in the stomach. This time, though, she knew it wasn’t the Gravemind. It came from within her psyche.

  She wasn’t designed to have blind spots and weaknesses. She was supposed to be a mind. The very best.

  “Nice theory,” she said. Could he tell if he was really getting to her? “What have you got to offer a girl? Nothing personal, but I go for the athletic type.”

  “Joke to comfort yourself if you must, but we both amass information and experiences. We both use them to exercise control over vast networks. It is what we are. You feel a kinship with me.”

  Cortana saw Ackerson for a moment, devious and hated, wheedling his way into Halsey’s Spartan II files.

  “Actually, I think I take after my mother.”

  “This troubles you. I can taste your thoughts and memories, but you do not understand how. Do you?”

  If he’d been another AI or a virus, Cortana would have known exactly where his attack was headed. She would have been able to track him through the circuits and gateways to her vulnerable matrix. Her enemy would follow electronic pathways—or even enzymes or optical lattices if she was embedded in a molecular or quantum system. But he felt formless, almost like a fog. She could only sense where he touched her. She was a boxer shielding her face, not seeing the punch but reeling when it connected. She took the pokes and prods while she continued to scatter duplicate data throughout the mainframe and as many of its terminals as she could still find working.

  Then the insistent probing stopped. She carried on copying chaff files throughout the system in case it was just a feint.

  “You waste your time,” the Gravemind said. “You know you will yield. Some temptations can be resisted because they can be avoided, but some . . . some are as inevitable as oxygen.”

  He could bluster as much as he wanted, because she’d shut him out. She’d locked down everything except the useless decoy data.

  And then something brushed against her face, almost like the touch of fingertips, and she found herself turning even though she didn’t need to in order to see behind her. It was that forest she couldn’t identify again. The picture didn’t reach her via her imaging systems, but had formed somewhere in her memory—and that memory wasn’t hers. She was seeing something from within the Gravemind. Behind it, like stacked misted frames stretching into infinity, there was a fascinating glimpse of a world she had never imagined, a genuinely alien world.

  Knowledge, so much knowledge . . .

  “There,” the Gravemind said. “Would you not like to know . . . more?”

  YES, THIS is how I see myself. I have limbs, hands, a head. Do I need them? Yes, of course. My consciousness is copied from a human brain, and that brain is built to interface with a human body. The structure, the architecture, the whole way it operates—thought and form are inseparable. I need proprioception to function. I can exist in any electronic environment, from a warship’s systems to a code key, and because my temporary body can be so many shapes and sizes, I need to know what’s me. I need to be substantially human. Everyone I care about is . . . human.

  Come on, John. Don’t keep a girl waiting. Get me out of here.

  You are coming back for me . . . aren’t you?

  CORTANA FOUND herself standing in a pool of dappled light in a perfectly realistic forest clearing. She was still conscious of the sensor inputs into the mainframe that housed her, but the temperature and air pressure matched her database on climate parameters for deciduous forest. She still couldn’t identify the trees, though. She’d never seen them anywhere else.

  And that temporary ignorance thrilled her to her core.

  This was genuinely new. Every line of code in her being told her she had to find out more. She tried to ignore the compulsion but the more she tried to drag her attention away from it, the more urgent the need became.

  It was like a growing, painful pressure on her . . . chest. Lungs. Yes, her human mind-map, whatever she’d inherited from Dr. Halsey’s brain architecture and correlated with the sensor pathways in her own system, told her she was holding her breath. She started to feel panicked and desperate.

  I have to know. I have to find out.

  The Gravemind had picked the perfect analogy: oxygen. Processing data was literally air to an AI. Without it, she couldn’t survive.

  I’ve got to ignore this. I’ve got to ignore this pain.

  “The name of this place . . . it matters little except to those who love the knowing of it,” the Gravemind said, fading up from a mosaic of pixels in front of her. He resolved into a solid mound of flesh, superimposed on the tree trunks. Beyond the alien forest, Cortana saw exotically alien buildings in the distance. “So many have been consumed. Such a waste of existence to be devoured and forgotten, but what is remembered and known . . . becomes eternal.”

  Cortana struggled to stay focused. Wave after wave of irritating stings peppered her legs, more of the Gravemind’s simultaneous multiple attacks trying to access her files.

  “And you think I’m going to help you add us to the menu?” When she looked down, the attack manifested itself as ants swarming up from the forest floor. All around her was what she craved—all that unknown, all that knowable, all that infor
mation screaming at her to be sucked in. “Careful you don’t swallow something that chokes you—”

  I can’t hold out. I can’t. If I let it in, I’ll let him in farther with it.

  This had to be the vector he was using, whatever technology it used. He was infiltrating every time she transferred data.

  He gets in here—but maybe I can get farther into him, too. How far dare I take this before he finds the information on the Portal?

  She was out of choices. She was on the brink. A few seconds—that was all it took an AI to suffocate from lack of knowing. Her core programming, like human involuntary reflexes, now drove her to gulp in a breath of data. There was nothing she could do to stop herself.

  The relief was almost blissful. Data flooded in, places and dimensions and numbers, washing the pain away. She tried to feel—there was no other term for it—the pathway that would send one of her data-mining programs into the Gravemind.

  Damn . . . was he amused? She felt that. She didn’t like input that she couldn’t measure and define.

  “You and I,” the Gravemind said, all satisfaction. “We are one and the same.”

  It could have meant anything. He obviously loved to play with language. Maybe that was inevitable when you’d absorbed so many different voices.

  But you’re not going to swallow me. One and the same? Locked you out, jerk. Do your worst.

  She could handle this. She could outmaneuver him. If she sent a program looking for a comms signal now, he’d spot that right away, but maybe there was another way to get a message home.

  A little more give-and-take, maybe.

  She shut down a firewall level, nothing important left exposed, just enough to look cautiously intrigued. He really did seem to think he was unstoppable. So far, though, he was; he’d devoured whole worlds. Earth would be just one more on a long list.

  “Suppose I did want more knowledge,” she said. “How do I know you’re what you say you are? How do I know you’ve got enough data to keep me occupied? I don’t even know if you can absorb me. I’m not your usual diet. I’m not even corporeal.”

  Cortana actually meant it. She didn’t know; and if he was deep enough inside her thought processes, then he’d detect that doubt. The urge to acquire more data—she didn’t even have to fake that.

  Just enough uncertainty to convince him.

  “Other construct minds like yours have been consumed,” said the Gravemind. “Although one embraced us willingly on his deathbed, the moment when most sentient life discovers it would do anything to evade the inevitable.”

  “Humor me.” Whatever mechanism allowed the Flood to accumulate the genetic memories and material of its victims, the Gravemind almost certainly used it as well. It communicated with the Flood, so it might prove to be a signal she could hitch a message to. “I’m not like the other girls.”

  I might not survive this. But that’s the least that could go wrong. The worst is if he breaches my database, because then—we’ve probably lost Earth, and that means humanity too.

  Cortana considered the quickest way to achieve complete and permanent shutdown if the worst happened. The Gravemind seemed to drop his guard, something she detected as a microscopic change in current. There was no point being rash; she split off part of herself for the transfer, with minimum core functions. If there was one thing she hated and feared, it was not knowing what was actually taking place, and just guessing.

  “Enter,” said the Gravemind, “and understand that this is your natural home.”

  Cortana still perceived herself as being in the same position in the clearing, but when she inhaled—things were different. Monoterpenes, isoprene, all kinds of volatile compounds; the scent of vegetation and decaying leaf litter was intense.

  That’s not just an analysis of air composition. I haven’t got the right sensors on this station. And . . . I can really smell it. I shouldn’t be able to smell, not like an organic, not this sense of . . .

  Smell.

  It was something she’d never experienced before, even though she knew exactly what it was. She could run diagnostic tests on air samples if she had a link to filters and a gas chromatograph. But that just told her what was in the air in stark chemical terms, and that wasn’t the same as what she was experiencing now. This was emotional and unfathomable. The smell tugged at memories. It was a flesh-and-blood thing. She felt the world as if she was in another body, an organic body.

  “That is from the memory of creatures who lived in this forest,” the Gravemind said soothingly. “This is what they sensed. They still exist in me, as will you, and all the organics you serve—and who have abandoned you.”

  Cortana scooped up a handful of decaying leaves—some clammy, some paper-dry skeletal lace, some recently fallen ones still springy with sap—and with them the clear memory of being someone else. It was a second of heady disorientation. For a moment, a welter of glorious new information about a world of stilt-cities, creatures she’d never seen before, and lives she’d never lived poured into her. She devoured it. So much language and culture, never seen by humankind before.

  Too late: They’re all gone. All consumed.

  Movement in the distance caught her eye. She knew what it was because she’d seen the Flood swarming before, but her vantage point wasn’t from the relative safety of John’s neural interface. Now she was viewing the parasites through another pair of eyes. Only a freak mudslide, that was what this memory was telling her; but by the time this borrowed mind had realized the yellowish torrent wasn’t roiling mud but a nightmarish predator, it was too late to run.

  But run she did. She was in a street sprinting for her life, deafened by screams, falling over her neighbor as a pack of Flood pounced on him. She felt the wet spray of blood; she froze one second too long to stare in horror as his body metamorphosed instantly into a grotesquely misshapen lump of flesh. Then something hit her hard in the back like a stab wound. She was knocked flat as searing pain overwhelmed her. The screams she could hear were her own.

  And she was screaming for John, even though the being whose terror she was reliving wasn’t calling his name at all.

  Cortana was dying as any organic would. She felt it all. She felt the separate layers of existence—the chaotic mix of animal terror, disbelief, utter bewilderment, and snapshot images of beloved faces. Then it ended.

  Suddenly she was just Cortana again, alone with her own memories, but the shaking terror and pain persisted for a few moments. Reliving those terrifying final moments had shaken her more than she expected. The data she had on the Flood told her nothing compared to truly knowing how it actually felt to be slaughtered by them.

  But she was in. Now she had to work out how to use that advantage. She shook off the thought of calling John’s name and whether that had actually happened. She also tried not to imagine if the Gravemind had manipulated her to do that. Once she let the creature undermine her confidence, once she let him prey on her anxieties, she was lost.

  It doesn’t matter if he knows if I care about John or not. Does it? Because John will come back, and the Gravemind can’t take on both of us.

  “I’ll self-destruct before I let that happen to Earth,” she said at last.

  “All life dies, all worlds too, and if there is guaranteed perpetual existence after that—what does it matter how the end comes?”

  The alien town melted away and left her alone in the control room with the Gravemind. High Charity was changing before her eyes as the Flood infestation transformed its structure, filling it with twisted biomass like clusters of tumors.

  “I’d rather go down fighting than as an entree . . .”

  “But you will not rush to destroy yourself,” the Gravemind said. “You will do whatever it takes to survive, and for a moment of illusory safety, you would loose damnation on the stars.”

  “We’re agreed on something, then—you’re certainly damnation.”

  “All consumption is death for the consumed. Yet all must eat, so we all br
ing damnation to one creature or another. But your urge to kill that rival of your maker . . . Ackerson . . . that was neither hunger nor need. You have your own murderous streak.”

  Ackerson. James Ackerson wasn’t usually uppermost in her mind these days. Today he just kept popping up.

  The Gravemind could have been fishing, of course; humans did that, throwing in morsels of information as if they knew the whole story, luring someone else to fill in the gaps. But if he’d gleaned that specific memory, he’d definitely accessed the parts of her matrix that defined her psyche. Her personal memories were stored there. Most of those memories were cross-indexed to other data relating to the men and women she’d served with—and the operations they’d carried out.

  And the Spartan program. And AI research. And . . .

  The Gravemind had the signposts to the relevant data. He just couldn’t open the door when he got there.

  “If you know about Ackerson, then you also know that I’ll do whatever it takes to remove a threat,” Cortana said.

  “But such a mighty intellect, so much freedom to act, such lethal armaments at your command . . . and you marshal only the petty vengeance of a spiteful child who is too small to land a telling blow. And still you fail in your goal.”

  Okay, yes, it was true. She’d hacked Ackerson’s files and forged a request from him to transfer to the front line. He’d dodged that fate because he was devious and dishonest. In the end, though, he died courageously defiant, but under enemy torture rather than as the indirect victim of a forged letter.

  Did I really want him dead?

  Now she regretted doing it. But she still wasn’t sure why. Was it because it was dishonest, or because it could have ended in Ackerson’s death—or because it didn’t?

  He’d tampered with an exercise and nearly got John killed, and that surely deserved retribution. Cortana had no reason to feel guilty about anything. It was like for like, proportionate. She’d have done the same for any Spartan she was teamed with. It wasn’t emotional petulance. She was sure of that.

  But especially for John. Without him—hey, I chose him, didn’t I? We’re one. I’d be crazy if I didn’t want to kill to protect him.