unforum

[Jacqueline]

[SPEC] Seek, evade, reveal, escape?

[GunsmithCat]

I think the common theory goes like thus:

Melissa's original military training teaches her to:

Survive Evade Resist Escape

If she feels she is behind enemy lines. Whether this is her original programming or she has already being effect by Flea is up for debate. The Haloverse factoid here is that AIs are supposed to follow the Cole Protocol. This says to protect earth all ships must evade the Covies by jumping randomly away from it and AIs should decide on self-destruction over capture. Melissa already seems to be defying that.

At any rate, when Flea infests her this time around, that mantra seems to change to:

Seek evade reveal escape

Which gets closer to what we've commonly associated with the Flea's mantra:

Seek the truth
Behold the truth
Reveal the truth

Which seems to match a Covenant's holy mantra to go seek out holy artifacts.

[Jacqueline]

Thanks for the info. I've never played Halo before so I'm sort of absorbing all the little bits of the info as I go

But whatever the actual source of the programming, it's still probable that it will effect her behavior; if we know enough her next move might be predicted. I can't think of many 'holy artifacts' here (or at least not ones the Covies would consider holy), so the question is still what is she seeking? And is she so far gone already that she can't logically see that it's obviously not on Earth in 2004?

[Edit: darn typos! That's it, I'm going back to bed....]

[clamatius]

The "truth" that the Flea is seeking is still a mystery. One spec on this is that this whole ARG is the backstory to how the Covenant find out Earth's location - and the Flea's "truth" is exactly that. Nothing really to back that up, sadly.

[GunsmithCat]

There is also a good chance a forerunner artifact is here on Earth, unknown to us but known to the Covenant.

It's Haloverse speculation, but the Covies have technology that can "glass" a planet from afar. Essentially heat an entire planet so much that much of it turns to glass. This is what they've done to the colonies, but they didn't do it to Reach because they wanted an artifact on Reach.

The Halo 2 trailers show a Covenant invasion of Earth, but they don't seem to be glassing it. So the thought is we have something they want.

[chaotic_mind]

[MusicToEat]

First, I don't think she is specifically looking for Dana with these coordinates. If she can access the web, she can see Dana's Blog, and if she can see Dana's blog, she can see where Dana linked to a page with her last known coordinates. Coordinates that are no where near the US. I think that if she was lookinfg for Dana all the coordinates would be circling out from Beijing, China (39:55:00N 116:23:00E)

Second, I'm leaning more and more away from these coordinates being a puzzle. They keep changing to much. The PM's can't expect people to spend all this time deciphering this stuff to only have the sites change because they can't proof read the site before they upload it. They would have at least made damn sure that the second group of coordinates was correct after the mistake in the first group. Instead the second group seems to have more errors then the first. It seems more likely that these coordinates are just points of interest to her. She gathers some info from one and moves on to another. It seems that many of the sites are Universities, and other educational faciliaties. Maybe some of the odd sites are unsecured PCs that she's managed to hack. That she's using for additional cpu cycles. I think she is building a new infrastructor. Gaining more memory space, and cpu cycles. She can then use this infrastructor to aquiring more information.

What does she hope to accomplish with this information is the real question. At this point I think she is just seeking general info. What planet is she on, where is her crashed ship, are there any other survivers, are there any enemies near, how can she contact home, who is Dana, why would she attack her, how can she use this computer environment she finds herself in.

[MusicToEat]

[Motoss]

Covenant glassing is very specific in the novels: the Covenant glass ANY place that they don't want to find something at, for the simple reason that they KNOW that the UNSC is stronger on the ground. With their air supremacy, the Covenant can get away with simply bombarding ground colonies while sustaining no casualties from surface-based missiles.


Of course, it HAS already been hinted at in the Haloverse that Earth has Forerunner facilities on it or in it. And seeing as how the game is an FPS, Master Chief doesn't have much to do if his environments get glassed.


If the Flea IS indeed Covenant (as it is beginning to seem more and more), then the location of Earth is probably what it is looking for. And since Melissa hasn't fulfilled the Cole Protocol, we know what happens next...

[princeofthesword]

As always, excellent thinking, everyone. Great thoughts Music to Eat, Chaotic Mind, GC and Clamatius, I love how we all point out different things to each other, (NO sarcasm here).

This is a tad off your topic, Jacqueline, but I wanted to spec about the "Truth," for a second. For all who don't know, there is speculation in the Halo community that the Forerunner either 1: are human, and seeded Earth a long time ago or 2: more likely just have something to do with us, in some important way that the Covenant don't like.

The Covenant HATE humanity and REVERE the Forerunner. Emphasis there because it's that potent. There's two important races, the Prophets and Elites. Elites are the warrior class, we kill lots of them in the game. Prophets are the PMs of the Haloverse in a way, and we supposedly don't see them until the second game, though they are mentioned quite a bit in the novels. They're mostly thinkers, "Space Popes" I believe one Bungie employee put it, and they honestly don't like the Elites much. *head over to Halo.Bungie.Org to read more about characters in the Haloverse, if you want. Do NOT post in the forum there about bees, though. Danger, Will Robinson.*

My point is that the Truth, from what we know, MIGHT be:

The location of Earth. The Covies have wanted to know this for a long time, and though we don't understand the timelines between ILB and First Strike just yet, it seems to me that they didn't find out about Earth from this ARG's story, though that could indeed be the entire point of all of this.

The "insert cool thought here" about humanity. I, no offense to anyone, but I don't see anything "truthie" about the location of Earth. It's not a lie, but a well kept secret. There's a subtly implied difference. I feel that there's more to this Covenant presence, indeed the presence of all the AIs here, than just discovering Earth. In fact I doubt Melissa knows she's on Earth, even if she did might have done as a clever poster suggested and messed up Cole Protocol and jumped instead STRAIGHT to Earth in a slipstream packet with all sorts of Time Travel crap messing up in the meantime. Spec for another time.

Here's a problem: the Covenant Elites are adamamant about exterminating the vermin of humanity. They want our extinction. The Prophets, well, now there's more going on there, as there usually is in the higher ups. They are into the Forerunner tech, which all of the Covenant worship (the Forerunner, not just the stuff). Question for another day is "why?" but moving along.

So here's the scary thought: what if someone in the Covenant suspected that the vile Humans had more in common with the Forerunner than previously thought? Maybe we're even direct descendents?!?! Wouldn't that make some holy-wannabe dudes mad! Hence, a quest for the "truth." Are we Forerunner related, or just vile? And even if we are related, there's religious powers that have bent a LOT of rules to get their way in the past. I'd say even if Flea found out "Hey, they're Forerunner after all!" he'd be deleted once his job was done, and we'd be exterminated anyway. And yeah, they only glass planets that don't have something hidden on the surface somewhere that they want. So yes, there's something on EARTH that they want.

Gonna move over to the Haloverse spec page with a huge/related question now. Chances are, we'll not learn the truth till it's too late, but maybe not if we keep at it. He's just a Flea, you know. Skin a cat, kill the Flea. Farewell.