unforum

[GunsmithCat]

We also should make a distinction here.

Queen/Melissa does not travel to ILB.

SPDR does. SPDR then rebuilds Melissa from parts unknown.

[Shad0]

Re: [SPEC] The Durga<->Melissa connection through time

[clamatius]

There's some talk about the AIs "beaming" around (or not).

Note that when Durga turns up, Jersey initially thinks that she is spam. In other words, he thinks she arrives as his normal email does, presumably over some futuristic Internet equivalent. Whether she does or not, who knows. Anyway, wireless wasn't mentioned. This suggests to me that the stuff about Cortana not beaming from here to there can't really be used as evidence one way or the other about how Haloverse AIs "travel" - to take a present-day analogy, your internet connection at home is a bit different from the network systems on a tank.

[GunsmithCat]

Re: [SPEC] The Durga<->Melissa connection through time

[Shad0]

Re: [SPEC] The Durga<->Melissa connection through time

[Platonix]

Melissa is on ILB. She has to be. Dana's attempts to fix the site wouldn't be harming Melissa otherwise. From whence would come the "bullets", and the alligator-like antivirus programs? If someone else happened to be trying to "fix the system" at roughly the same time Dana was reacting to SPDR in ILB, then why does Melissa use Dana's webcam to get pictures of the "killer"? You can't possibly tell me SPDR took those shots. SPDR doesn't care about the killer other than to avoid the rewrites as they come, and then get back to repairing its Queen.

[GunsmithCat]

[Astald]

[GunsmithCat]

Re: [SPEC] The Durga<->Melissa connection through time

[GunsmithCat]

[Ceantari]

Question:

In the Halo novels, all the UNSC AIs were housed in crystals... the ONI AI Araqiel lived in one too... even Cortana had her own little capsule that found a home in Master Chief's helmet.

So what became of Melissa's origins? What happened to her crystal? Did it get destroyed? And if she doesn't have one, how is it possible she's free-floating?

The new code question ("What ship am I confined to?"), Melissa used the word "confined". If this is her crystal, why doesn't she like it? If not, is she a guest aboard; what became of the host AI?

[sherpa]

Ceantari's post made me think, and this is kinda relevant to the "Durga-Melissa connection through time"...

Melissa is phoning us, in the present day. She writes on ILB that she is broadcasting the voices to her crew. But she also asks us what ship she's confined to. It's been postulated before that she doesn't realise she's gone back in time - that she might believe she is trapped in old technology, just as today you can still run programs on a PDP-11. Certainly this seems to confirm it. Unless there's something deeper to ilovebees.com == Apocalypso.

[GunsmithCat]

Yeah, I can't get my head around that either. She knows she is on old tech, and she is making a new "body" ... but she is ... confined to a ship?

I also think "confined" is a strange choice of terms for a shipboard AI. Maybe Melissa got nicked and put into the AI equivalent of a brig?

[MeKiwi]

[MeKiwi]

To try and clarify the above post a bit, let me say this: I'm not so sure that Melissa actually *resides* on the ilovebees.com server... instead, I think she may still reside on the Apocalypso inside some crystal medium but can communicate interactively with the ilovebees server by, basically, hacking into it over some WiFi hotpoint or something. Maybe Dana's FTP pw for the ilovebees website was not strong enough?

[SPEC]
In other words, Melissa still resides in the Apocalypso's memory banks (in crystal form?) and is used to being able to control physical things (thrusters, mechanical arms, doors, etc.) on the ship. Now, the ship is dead and has lost virtually all power (there's enough to keep her going, somehow) so she can't control anything physically (didn't she want to control Dana's food processor?) and so she feels confined... like a little old lady driving a power-steering car which suddenly dies and she doesn't have enough strength to actually turn the wheel anymore. Okay, so that was a bad analogy, but you get what I mean, no?