I’ve wanted to write this for years. I’ve thought about it in the back of my mind, but never thought it all the way through. So this is the perfect place for something like this to finally come out of my mind… just a generic blog post!
Ever since Halo 4 launched, it never felt quite right. Since then the series never got back on track. I loved the Halo franchise, and I’ve never been a critic of 343 Industries, or Halo Studios, or any of the games that were released. I didn’t BOTHER me, I don’t intend to criticize them that much — I still had fun playing the games that were released, but it just felt like they kept missing the mark. I’m going to do my best to encapsulate WHY I felt that way about each game. I will also present my version of where the story should have gone after Halo 3. Just because I’ve always WANTED to have it in writing, but I never did. So here we go.
This article is never going to be read by people who don’t care about Halo, so I’m not going to be defining terms or giving too much back story. It’s here as something I should have written down since about 2010 and been adding to, I just never did. I also haven’t played some of the older Halo games in years, so if you don’t understand something written here, I may be mis-remembering some of the details! Even if I’m the one who is right and you’re the one feeling out of the loop, it’s not your fault, you probably just aren’t the target audience. Heck, there isn’t one. It’s written for my own posterity. It’s nothing more than Halo lore fan fiction.
Halo 3 spent a lot focus on the “Rampancy” that Cortana was cursed with. In the Halo universe, after a certain amount of time online, an AI will essentially descend into madness. Halo 3 ends with Chief and Cortana being separated from the rest of the human fleet and being forced to put Chief into Cryo Sleep while she handles some basic life support and collision avoidance routines with the husk of a ship they’re basically adrift in.
First, let’s re-cap and retcon Halo 4, Halo 5, and Halo Infinite.
Halo 4 opens with us randomly encountering a “new enemy” – the Prometheans. Let me stop you right there. I would’ve never introduced these characters, they should be part of the lore and nothing more. In the Halo Lore the Forerunners were from millions of years ago, and although all of the evidence and quotes from the various Monitors such as 343 Guilty Spark seem to suggest Humans are directly descended from Forerunners, there’s no need for us to encounter another race from that era of the timeline.
While we’re at it, Halo 4’s Cortana protects chief from the big bad at the end of the game and then… “goes missing.” Halo 5 is Chief trying to find her, and breaking all of the rules in order to do so. The UNSC gets mad at him for not being a soldier, despite the fact that if there was anyone in the history of humanity who had earned the right to do whatever they wanted, it was John 117. Still, by the end of Halo 5, Cortana is being chased and turns loads of other AIs against humanity.
Halo Infinite picks up with humanity reeling, but it genuinely seems as though this splinter faction of the Covenant who still believe in the Great Journey did all of the damage, and there’s no talk of the AIs. Cortana redeems herself by realizing she had turned evil, but the whole time it feels like they keep blaming her exposure to Promethean tech at the end of Halo 4 and they never simply state that this could’ve come on due to her rampancy! By the end of the game, we have a new AI, “maybe even another Cortana model” – who wants to go by the name “Cortana.” So that we can start Halo 7 with a clean slate and pretend like nothing ever happened?? What is going on here?
Before I continue, I need to reiterate: I don’t get paid for writing. I’m no professional author; nobody’s ever asked me to contribute to their game’s storyline. I’m no James or Elyse Willems. I’m also not a Halo lore expert. I probably never unlocked all of the terminals; I don’t remember how the games ended; I don’t remember most of what I saw in Halo Legends. But let me back it all up and say where I thought the story was headed the whole time.
At the end of Halo 3, Chief is in Cryo, Cortana should be in some sort of “sleep” mode – minimal power… trying not to think herself to death with rampancy. When you insert your Halo 4 disc, I expected something far different from the Halo 4 and 5 that we got, but something more akin to Halo Infinite.
Chief wakes up, his suit-clock shows that he’s been in cryo for just shy of 3 years. The jump was to a random part of the galaxy, but he’s caught in the crossfire of a localized battle. When chief went to sleep, Cortana was able to pinpoint their location with some simple stellar cartography techniques. Despite it being a blind jump, it wasn’t very far. The trouble was, they had no beacon to let others know where they were, so they just drifted until a chance encounter with a UNSC fleet. They appear to be battling the Covenant in a space battle. Cortana wakes up Chief, and says “I have good news, but first, you need to deal with this.” Chief goes back to war, as if he’d never missed a beat. The covenant ships are similarly adorned to how they appear in Halo Infinite: these are the Banished – similar Covenant factions who refuse to let go of their religious fanaticism. Chief propels himself into space and then boards the small Covenant vessel. Eliminating the occupants and taking the bridge, all while being under fire by UNSC forces. He radios over to them to call off their attack.
Astonished, UNSC on the other end can’t believe they randomly found the Master Chief. There is going to be a celebration on Earth tonight! The two ships dock and as the airlocks open Chief, with Cortana firmly implanted back in his helmet, is shocked at what he sees. Cortana, although less shocked, was not omniscient while they were adrift and is understandably also surprised at she she is witnessing: the UNSC 3 years post-Halo 3 now consists of former covenant forces have begun integrating with the UNSC. Elites walking alongside ODSTs, grunts running back and forth on the flight deck resupplying munitions to cannons, and general cohesiveness among the ranks.
“We’ve got a lot to catch you up on…”
In the next scene, the carrier that Chief is on is headed back to Earth. Cortana says that the briefing was impressive – there are still factions of the former Covenant battling humanity, but the fact that many Covenant forces have joined with the UNSC is promising. She also reminds you that she had mentioned having good news.
She tells you that when she was first connected to the original, titular “Halo,” she downloaded as much information as she possibly could from the Forerunner databases. After being on Alpha Halo and Delta Halo, she learned a great deal, but connecting to Installation 08, the Halo ring from Halo 3, with its freshly built systems, that’s when things became clear. The other Halo installations were so ancient that the data had corrupted over millions of years, but somehow the Ark imbued Installation 08 with perfectly readable information, and unveiled methods that she believes she can use to cure the rampancy in Human made AI systems.
While Halo lore dictates that monitors like 343 Guilty Spark or Mendicant Bias do suffer from rampancy, it takes millions of years. Earth’s best AI systems can go rampant in less than a decade, though some can hold out for longer. Cortana is experiencing more and more symptoms of rampancy, even after nearly 3 years in low power mode, but she’s now on a deadline. However, she doesn’t have an outright answer or cure: she has come up with a theory on combining Earth-made Artificial Intelligence and stabilizing it with Forerunner AI-tech, but she’ll only be able to prove out her theory of curing rampancy by examining a rampant AI and still needs to get access to one in order to understand the causes for their rampancy on a technical level.
Chief arrives on Earth. Humanity celebrates the return of its greatest hero. Despite not being organic, the vast knowledge and experience of one Mendicant Bias affords it the ability to create a subspace frequency that calls out to the Gravemind. And to the flood. Mendicant Bias just so happens to be on Earth, a remanent in the low-priority clean up after the battle of New Mombasa. Quietly serving as a beacon to any possible remaining flood as to the location of Earth, and their greatest potential feast in thousands of millennia. He simultaneously uses subspace communication techniques any remaining Monitors to his side so that they will release any remaining flood samples shielded away in their Installations. He convinces all remaining monitors and all remaining flood to head toward Earth.
To do this they “hitch a ride” with remaining Banished forces. Monitors use their role as Oracles to the Covenant to convince them that they need to submit to the flood – that the Great Journy was never about firing the Halo array, but about unlocking the potential contained within the Halo array. Unlocking the containment of the Flood, allowing it to merge with their beings to become infected, to become hosts to the next stage of Covenant species’ evolution.
As Earth comes under siege, the game feels more and more claustrophobic. You don’t get to experience nearly as much Covenant ship design as in games past, but instead a melding of Halo Reach and Halo ODST, as the game is primarily set on 26th century Earth.
As we continue, the plot revolves around Cortana needing to corral the remaining Monitors as they travel to Earth. She works with dozens of other UNSC AI, and likely even Halsey herself (I am unsure how to reconcile this with Halo Wars lore as I’m not super familiar with that, but if we’re essentially pretending that Halo 4/5/Infinite never existed there’s probably a way – if she’s jumped out of the solar system at that point, then it works even better that she isn’t around). Still, we have learned that the advanced AI from Earth, such as Cortana, are based on Flash-clone minds… we have learned that the Monitors were once Forerunner beings who have been stripped of their organic existence. Knowing that there is an organic origin to the first level of both, and seeing how they both eventually turn rampant, whether it’s in short term like Earth’s AIs or over millions of years like Forerunner AI, the similarities cannot be ignored.
The gameplay consists of wave after wave of Flood-Infected Banished attacking Earth. Infected Grunts, Infected Brutes, Infected Jackals, alongside Monitors.
Having direct access to more Monitors as each one is captured (similar to battling each Prophet one at a time in Halo 2 and Halo 3) allows her to confirm her suspicions and develop her cure. Although she is working with teams of other Earth AI, her rampancy is causing her to hyper-focus on her own concerns: curing her own rampancy. She is less and less concerned with the fate of humanity and only preoccupied with herself. Other familiar AI faces that would come from later games can make their appearances in this game as a co-hort of them are working with her, when suddenly tasked by UNSC scientists with something new and important: defeating the flood.
The flood have come to Earth. It’s now too late to prevent that.
At least one boss battle in the game should consist of battling multiple Monitors simultaneously. After this battle, parts from those Monitors are collected and delivered to the cohort of AIs. Cortana continues to focus entirely on the cure, but the other AIs work on a way to eradicate the Flood. Seeing the AIs work together in some sort of Holo-Deck or even just tron-like scenes where the viewer must understand “this is all happening inside of a computer” and the scale no longer makes them feel like they’re held in the palm of our hands, but that they are the full-sized people they’re made to look like… it’s a unique perspective on the AI that we’ve never seen before in the Halo universe – we are now in their world. Event AIs that were recently retired or near retirement have been brought in to work on this problem – they are showing signs of rampancy: erratic and anti-social behavior, depicted as a tortured artist, or as a brilliant but un-kempt scientist.
As the UNSC top brass talk about cities that have fallen to the flood, and areas where teams of Spartan IVs have pushed back the flood, the game culminates in a final battle where Chief is joined by Elites, Spartan IVs, ODSTs, and more – in a ballistics firefight taking out more and more flood, right down to basic infection forms. However, each fallen flood that Master Chief shoots down is simply one small part of a growing biomass which starts to heave and become sentient on its own. A new Gravemind of all of the remaining Flood in the universe is forming on Earth itself.
The AI, tasked with finding a way to stop the flood come to a collective realization that they’ve taken the wrong approach and wasted time. They argued back and forth amongst themselves, beginning down the same path that the forerunners had. The AI thought that the conclusion was inevitable and that’s why the forerunners had come to it: they wanted to replicate the effects of the Halo array. What Cortana fully understood since the first game still stands: Halo doesn’t kill the flood, it kills their food.
As the AI give their report to the military brass, they look defeated. Suddenly, the glow of dozens of AI avatars flicker and disappear. Immediately after that, connected Hud of every ODST, Spartan, everyone: the huds in their helmets shutdown; some Spartan armor goes limp, others suffer from Armor Lock and can’t move. A rampant, deranged Cortana comes across thousands of screens simultaneously and says “I’ve found it. I have the cure.” She grins an evil grin, in blue with flares of red in her code. Until suddenly she goes dark. Akin to the power failures in the UNSC Infinity.
One by one the AI flash back online. The ones with rampancy no longer appear as disheveled. Also, an important note for the game devs: please AVOID the “autistic-savant” trope in your attempt for “inclusion.” That ain’t it, bro. As the AIs come online and the operating systems around the world boot back up, they are all patched with a slight purple hue. Even AIs that were a completely different color are just a shade more “purple” than they had been before. Cortana herself appears to Master chief and the military leaders he stands with. However her color has shifted from blue that she would be in later games back to the purple that she was in the beginning of Halo. The blue was a sign of rampancy. She is calm. Confident. Coherent. The other AI all stand behind her as she speaks:
“I’ve found it, I have the cure” she says in a calm way. Another AI chimes in “I can feel it – you’ve cured the rampancy!”
“Not that,” Cortana says. “The Monitors were not in contact with one another. For millions of years, they each guarded their own Halo installation. Eventually, each succumbing to rampancy. Although it would take them millions of times longer to go rampant than it would take us,” she says, gesturing to the AI behind her, “it was an inevitability.”
“However, before they were consumed with madness, they had been tasked with experiments. The flood contained within their rings were test subjects. The monitor from Installation 06, 636 Burnie Burns, found something. A cure that could stop the flood infection. In the years since, he has gone rampant and was drawn here to Earth by an evil voice calling to him in the darkness. He forgot his original purpose. But we have his research.”
By combining the parts harvested from the monitors who had attacked earth, they are able to create a pulse-generator which can be used around the Earth to destroy the flood, while leaving their “host creatures,” their FOOD, alive. In a call back to the sonic resonators from Gears of War, this celebration of Xbox fires off pulses which travel around the entire globe, obliterating the flood and preventing a new Gravemind from forming.
At the end of the game, a title card: “Halo: CURE” appears. Roll credits.
Post credits-scene: a single flood infection spore travels underwater – an unknown insulator protecting it from the effects of Cortana’s blast. It drifts towards a whale, seeking sentient life to infect all over again.
-THAT, my friends, is my canonical ending to the Master Chief series of Halo games. We have a happy ending for Cortana, reuinted with Chief and cured of her rampancy, while simultaneously wrapping up the Flood saga while still leaving the door open for a Flood comeback if necessary.
While I don’t have nearly the same level of detail to provide, I have always thought that the way out of relying on the “Master Chief / Cortana” story over and over is for the next game in the series for focus on Chief passing the torch to a player-character. It doesn’t have to be quite as “silent protagonist” as Noble 6, but customizable “Commander Shepard-Type.” The idea would be for a player to create their own Spartan IV and AI Combo, ala Spartan Ops / Halo Infinite Multiplayer, and go on battles around Earth as they try to track down “what brought the flood to Earth.:” As they discover and defeat Mendicant Bias, they then have the opportunity leave the Earth and try to extinguish what remains of the banished.
At some point you could follow the story to the end where humanity goes on the offensive. We can take the fight to Covenant forces, no longer traveling cities like High Charity, but chances to see alien home worlds as we do in Halo 5. See how religious deprogramming is go. Perhaps even deal with story lines which depict those very struggles, and people trying to separate religion from religious fanaticism and zealotry. Story opportunities are endless.
If you stuck around to read all of this, good for you. It’s my first time getting it all out on the page. But man I would have been thrilled if this was where the story had taken us in the post-Bungie era. Maybe it still can.