unforum

[gheritt]

A serious answer from me this time: I think the "body" she's talking about may be metaphorical. (As so many things in this game are.) Right now she's stuck on a server and can't, I think, even venture onto the web on her own. I think she wants things like the webcam she caught Dana on (eyes), ways onto the global network (fingers/feet/whatever), that sort of thing. If AIs think of their ships as their bodies, then she's been put in a new body. She's trying to figure out what it can do.

[Knight Hawk]

Well, some AI's do have bodies.

At the beginning of the Cortanna letters she speaks in a very condescending tone about the MC. Calling him a weapon and other stuff. This may almost be wild spec but Melissa could be referring to a Spartan as being her body. The boy's face was her own could mean that the boys face was the Spartan whose body she was inhabiting at the time of the crash. The sand reference could be to the more intricate neural net of silicone and other things a Spartans brain and body parts are made up of.

Manticore though= Manti-Core= MC perhaps?

[Knofc]

Just wondering about the whole casket/capsule thang.

In Melissa's memories about bring the capsule in-board she gives it a scan and makes a superfluous statement about experiencing "a stutter of lag once in a while". Right after this she notices that something didn't feel right and alludes to something being on her system that shouldn't be there.

Now, I know that they go on to discuss that it could be a piggy-back on a covenant signal. But couldn't it have come from the object during the scan? I'm think flea here. A reasonably simple program which then goes out to dig for relevant info (or something).

This memory sequence also has Sorensen proposes the idea to bring in a "dolly-bot" to take the capsule to the hold. Also that the capsule will have to be warmed up (taken out of deep-space freeze I guess). What if this warming of the capsule allows SP to activate, but finds herself trapped in both the dolly bot, and in the hold?

In the Killer texts SP also alludes to the fact that she's used to hiding away and meddling (Killer 13: I am fine, have the necessary tools to hide hard in the darkness, to meddle in the affairs of dragons and run like hell This entity generally gives good results.). Perhaps her whole reason for being is to act as an invasive data gathering program?

[princeofthesword]

slightly off topic

[Kagehi Kossori]

Actually, I don't agree with the "only the AIs are here" idea at all. These things are complicated. Far more complicated and requiring huge capacities over what our current machines can expect to store. Maybe one of those G4TechTV/Screensavers projects that chain 5 drives together, for like 1,800GB, but even then it is only data unless there is an OS to run it. What do you think the likelyhook of them still using x86 based instruction sets in the future is? Maybe, but incredibly unlikely, these are military AIs, even if you assumed that the trend to include backward compatibility stretched that far into the future (really unlikely), there would be no reason to provide it in military ONI AI systems, where the architecture would need to be fundimentally different.

Put simply, no AI from the future Halo time could run on our current systems without a complete rewrite of the OS on a machine to support it. A smart enough program 'might' be able to code such an OS and thus allow an AI to exist on current hardware, but you can't just beam the stuff through time and have it arrive in any condition to run on such machines. Ok, maybe some really cheesy Sci-Fi movies would pull that sort of thing, but gamers (I would hope) tend to be smarter than that. Strange artifacts that warp space and time, maybe, but when it comes to future AIs teleporting into current systems... That is the sort of ultra-silly BS you got in old movies, where something that we can't even run now magically infects an bloody 8088 8-bit processor architecture and by its mere presence makes it function a thousand times faster. Wrong! The idea imho didn't fly in some of those lame shows and it is even less probable in the current context. I would really hope the PMs are not so lame as to make it happen that way.

[Astald]

The SPDR may have been able to do such a rewrite. Just my little bit of spec.

[Kagehi Kossori]

Yes the SPDR could have, but my point is 'not in mid tranmission'. Even SPDR needs some physical hardware to run on when starting out, it wouldn't just drop out of the sky as data and land on the network. At least not without using some really cheesy Sci-Fi that defies not merely time, but basic logic and common sense. This is the sort of thing that you could get by with only in a fantasy containing magic, or twenty years ago when people really didn't comrehend anything about computers. If you are making a Freddy movie, then you expect people to suspend reason a bit or at least hope so, but most true sci-fi wants to avoid the pitfall of people picking it apart after the fact and exposing all the holes. The idea that somehow, in transit, SPDR or anything else could zap itself and the AIs onto our architecture is a really major hole imho.

Oh, and as to Forerunner device = magic, which someone might bring up.. The point is that such a device may 'look' like magic to a primitive, but it still can't defy logic. Its effects must make some rational sense, even if the means to achieve them are out of reach. That is why it is called 'science' fiction, not fantasy.