(no subject)
Player Information ;
Your Nickname: Jeff
OOC Journal: viewtiful_jeff
Under 18? 21.
Email/IM: AIM: Viewtiful Rekk
Characters Played at Singularity: N/A
Character Information ;
Name: Cortana
Name of Canon: Halo
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Cortana
Canon Point: Post-Halo Legends: Origins. Cortana has been drifting through space all by her lonesome (with the cryogenically frozen John-117) for a good three years.
Setting:
To begin with Halo, one must travel backwards. Over 100,000 years so. Before humanity had even thought of the heights it had reached today, there was a race known as the Forerunners. The Forerunners reached technological heights so high that looking back on them from the present, it would be almost impossible to distinguish them from divine beings. Unfortunately, for how advanced they were, they were not infallible. Eventually, the Forerunners were confronted with a parasitic race known only as the Flood (Inferi redivivus, "the dead reincarnated"). The Flood's only function is to eat. Devour other sentient creatures and, in the process, add them to its ranks. Entire species, entire planets, entire galaxies have fallen to the Flood in this manner. The Forerunners, however, exhausted every resource at their disposal to make sure that they, and the rest of the Milky Way galaxy, would not fall in the same way. Unfortunately, the Forerunners made the mistake of approaching the Flood with tactics suited to disease outbreak, not war. The parasite was feral, mindless, but had overwhelming numbers. Despite superior intelligence and technology, the Forerunners were simply overwhelmed again and again. And as the Flood fed on the intelligence of the Forerunners, they became intelligent as well. The Flood eventually reached sufficient numbers to create a "Gravemind" (Inferi Sententia, "Thinking Dead"), a sentient, omniscient being that controlled the entire Flood species and organized them towards more calculated attacks. In order to combat this growing threat, the Forerunners created the most advanced AI that existed then or would exist for another 100,000 years: Mendicant Bias. Unfortunately, Mendicant Bias' free will was its greatest downfall as well as its greatest strength. It fell into Rampancy, and was tempted to join the Flood by the Gravemind and betray the Forerunners. Now being overrun by both the Flood and their own creation, the Forerunners had their backs up against the wall; they couldn't defeat the Flood. Their only option was to starve it. So, they created the Halo Array and the Ark. The Halo Array, seven ring-shaped artificial worlds, would destroy every sentient life form capable of acting as a Flood host in the galaxy, effectively wiping them out. The Ark would protect a sample of what species the Forerunners could save, so they could be reseeded back to their own planets once the infection had passed. And so Halo was activated, and both the Forerunners and the Flood were wiped away.
Fast forward a good 100,000 years, then keep fast-forwarding until you hit the 2500s. Humanity has united under the banner of the UEG (Unified Earth Government) and UNSC (United Nations Space Command) and expanded to the stars. Through the use of Slipspace technology, they've traveled across dozens of different worlds, colonizing them as they went. Eventually, they found that they were not alone - the Covenant was already there first. The Covenant is a conglomerate of several different alien races, consisting of the Prophets (the political and religious leaders), the Elites (the commanders of the military), the Brutes (shock troops), the Grunts (infantry/cannon fodder), the Jackals (privateers who act as scouts and snipers), the Drones (mechanics, a slave race), and the Engineers (natural technological geniuses, also a slave race). The Covenant, for the most part, worshiped the Forerunners, revering them as Gods. They believed that if they activated the Halo Array, they would not die but begin "The Great Journey", and transcend into the afterlife and Godhood, as the Forerunners had. Something about humanity really stuck in the craw of the Prophets (spoiler: it was that the humans were the chosen successors of the Forerunners, and the truth of the Forerunners, the humans and Halo would hopelessly splinter the Covenant, destroying the Prophets' power), and they declared humanity as a blight and an affront to their Covenant that must be destroyed. So began a brutal war between the Covenant and humanity. Between the Covenant's more advanced warships and technology, their massive outnumbering of humanity both in ships and raw numbers, and the utterly devastating combat prowess of the Elites, humanity had its back firmly up against the wall. Their planets were burned from orbit, reduced to lifeless states, literally billions of humans were murdered in cold blood during the Covenant's genocidal campaign. They had a couple advantages, however.
First was the SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III programs. Programs that took ordinary humans (often children) and through rigorous training, mechanical and biological augmentation and outfitting of the best armor the UNSC could develop, often through reverse-engineering of what Covenant technology they could get their hands on, turned them into super-soldiers that fought to protect the UNSC. Originally developed to fight insurrectionists within the UNSC, the Spartans turned out to be utterly invaluable during the Human-Covenant war, securing what small victories they could manage. Secondly was the UNSC's advancements in AI technology. The Covenant had only the barest understanding of AI technology as true AI were forbidden - based on the knowledge that an AI had once betrayed the Forerunners. This combination turned out to be exactly what would win the war for humanity. The war considerably thinned out the Spartan's numbers until there were only a scant few left, one of them being John-117, more colloquially known by his rank, Master Chief. His assigned AI was Cortana, in reality made from a flash-cloned brain of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the developer of the SPARTAN-II project. The two would prove to be an invaluable team, Cortana's unparalleled abilities at hacking and gathering intel combined with John being, quite frankly, completely unbeatable in battle.
The Halo trilogy follows Cortana and John during the final and darkest days of the Human-Covenant War. Through it, they discover the Halo rings, learn of the Forerunners and their ancient battle with the Flood, and fight to, above all, keep Earth and humanity safe from consumption by the Flood or destruction by the Covenant. Their journey eventually leaves the Covenant destroyed, the Flood neutralized, and humanity and their new allies, the Elites, victorious. The cost to humanity, and to Cortana and John in specific, is a great one though. At the culmination of the war, the two are stranded on an inoperable cruiser, with nothing to do but send a beacon and wait for it to be found, something Cortana knows will take years. To ensure he lives until then, John is cryogenic sleep, while Cortana waits.
Personality:
It should be said: Cortana is smart. There isn't a computer system she's encountered that she hasn't been able to hack. It stands to reason, as she was made from the brain of Catherine Halsey, one of the smartest people alive (Cortana sees her as her mother). She knows this, but she isn't arrogant about it, nor does she have any pointless pretensions to modesty. Whenever she speaks of her own capabilities, it's in an objective matter-of-fact tone. Not to say she's humorless however, one of Cortana's most striking qualities is her playfulness, predominately with John, but it's hardly limited to just him. She often carries her wit into battle, speaking with a humorous and sometimes even irreverent tone even as a firefight rages around her. She's also not outright insulting certain enemies to their faces - just ask Guilty Spark. Beneath all her wit and jokes however, lie an intense loyalty to humanity - genuine loyalty. Not merely programmed protocols. She would sacrifice herself (and came very, uncomfortably, almost fatally close to doing so) to protect humanity, seeing them as her comrades, her friends, not her masters. Warranting special mention, however, is her companion, John-117. From the moment she knew of John's story (abducted as a child in order to become the best soldier the UNSC would ever produce), she swore to herself she would do her best to protect him from harm she could, and she hasn't wavered from that vow even for an instant. Since then, the fires of battle have forged an unbreakable bond between the two of them. When Cortana was in her darkest hour, trapped alone with the Gravemind and John light years away fighting the Covenant on Earth, it was John's promise that he'd come back for her that kept her from breaking. Cortana herself has joked about the two having a relationship numerous times. To say that the two have a connection that goes deeper than simply being comrades is all but obvious, but as to the nature of that connection, even Cortana, in all of her infinite capability for gathering knowledge, probably doesn't know for sure.
Being a "smart" A.I., one with the potential for infinite growth, Cortana's lifespan was decided from her conception: 7 years. After 7 years, she undergoes the process of Rampancy. The simplest way to describe Rampancy is that as an A.I. grows older and gains more knowledge, they convert so many resources to gaining more data, indexing it, studying it, that they neglect everything else. It has been described as "thinking so hard you forget to breathe". Cortana's days were numbered from the beginning, but, interfacing with the control room on Halo and becoming the prey of Gravemind for a time only advanced the process. Cortana very nearly succumbed to Rampancy while trapped by the Gravemind, only managing to pull herself back together when John showed up. Since then however, she's spent 3 years drifting through space with no contacts, passing her 7th "birthday" and all but certainly descending into Rampancy. Whether she will die like so many before her, or survive and pass into metastability (the state at the end of Rampancy where an AI becomes a true "person", even while accepting itself as a non-physical being, in Cortana's case, accepting she is not human) has yet to be seen.
Abilities and Weaknesses:
• Unparalleled hacking abilities. UNSC, Covenant, even Forerunner, Cortana hasn't met the system capable of keeping her out yet. Consequently, she's not bad at encryption either.
• Processing capability. As Cortana has said herself, seven seconds is an eternity to an AI. When she was created, she already had the sum of all human intelligence within her. She processed and comprehended it all in 2 hours.
• She is incredibly proficient with UNSC technology as well as Covenant technology. The former is a default for all UNSC AI, the latter is learned. She could pilot a Covenant or UNSC ship or man a defense platform with ease. She's also very quick to adapt to new technology. Almost insultingly, she proved to be better at piloting a Covenant ship than the Covenant themselves.
• Ease of transference. She can move quickly and easily from system to system, as long as her Data crystal Chip is around.
• She's capable of creating copies (sometimes "decoys" would be more accurate) of herself and assigning them duties. She picked up this ability from a Covenant A.I. she captured and then dissected. The more she creates, the less stable they become, and eventually they'll lose all coherence, but when used conservatively, one can be almost as useful in battle as the genuine article.
Her mechanical body will have several additional abilities:
• Projection of holographic displays.
• Limited teleportation of herself and up to one other person.
• A motion tracker, capable of sorting friendly and unfriendly targets
• A strong energy shield and an equally powerful directed energy beam. These won't be as strong as, for example, 343 Guilty Spark (read: an energy shield somewhere on the order of 'unbreakable' and a beam somewhere on the order of 'fatal x1000'), but will more serve as simple self-defense protocols.
• A small "tractor beam" that will be capable of picking up small objects and storing them on her body.
Inventory:
• One hell of a lot of data on humanity, the Covenant, the Flood and the Forerunners.
• The Activation Index from Installation 04, better known as Alpha Halo.
• Her Data Crystal Chip, the storage device that she resides in while being transported from system to system
Appearance:
As an AI, Cortana has no physical body, but she is capable of generating a holographic avatar. Her avatar of choice is a feminine human who at first glance appears nude, but is "clothed" (a better term would be censored) by lines of data flowing over her entire body. By default, her avatar's appearance is blue (sometimes purple), but it can change colors depending on her mood; red or green if she's angry, pink when she's feeling particularly happy or flattered. She's been stated to both resemble her "mother", Catherine Halsey, and Miranda Keyes.
The mechanical body she'll inhabit will be strongly resembling a Forerunner Monitor. This will not particularly please her.
Age: 7 (this number is kind of important).
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across? N/A
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test? N/A
And What Did You Score? N/A
Samples ;
Log Sample:
Her first instinct was to wonder if the aft section of the Dawn had crashed - it was immediately realized that that was impossible. There's no way she wouldn't have noticed that. Had they been near something the could've crashed into? Yes, she had noticed the planet nearby. Was it possible that the Dawn would drift into its atmosphere and crash? Yeah, sure, it was possible (perhaps even preferable to sitting around staring at the Chief's visor as he dreamlessly slept, waiting for something, anything to just happen already). But all of this was hours, days away. It wouldn't happen instantly unless she had a massive blackout of some kind, which, as far as she knew, was impossible. This conclusion took her less than a second to come too - figuring out where she actually was might take a few more. She couldn't hear the Chief anywhere. Was he still in the pod? She had to get up and get him out of there.
It was right about then that she went slamming into lunar bedrock, and took a nice disorienting spiraling bounce into the air.
By the time she'd come to a stop, Cortana realized. She wasn't in the Forward Unto Dawn anymore. She had moved systems somehow. This was only supported by the voice telling her, of all things to please watch her step.
"Thanks for the warning." She grunted. "Maybe next time you can tell me it before the part where I'm falling all over the place." She muttered sarcastically. 'What the hell is going on.' She wondered. She had to find the Chief and figure out where she was. She floated upwards -- floated. Yes, she could, apparently, float now. She knew she hadn't been moved into another ship. Whatever it was, it felt...small. All of a sudden, the most pressing question she could think of was what the hell she'd ended up in, the hows and whys taking a temporary backseat.
"Let me just...ah! This should do it." She projected a hologram - her hologram. She quickly looked herself over to see that her body was the same as ever. All her diagnostics of her core systems were coming back within functioning range as well. So, if nothing else, she was still working perfectly fine, in a manner of speaking. "Chief, are you here? Chief!" She called - no response. She let out an aggravated sigh and started looking around. She couldn't see his pod anywhere, she couldn't see much of anything, except rock and debris. That was, until she'd spun a full 180 degrees and saw herself. Rather, the 'system' she'd been in.
Perfectly spherical, with a single eye in the center, emitting a soft blue glow. It was a dead ringer for one of the Forerunner's Monitors. "Oh, you have absolutely got to be kidding me." She muttered. She decided a couple things right then: whatever had happened to her, someone was responsible, that someone must have had a particularly sick sense of humor, and she was going to say some pretty unladylike things to them when she found them unless there was a really goddamn good explanation for this.
Her hologram faded out as she returned to her new spherical body. It annoyed her, it annoyed the crap out of her, if only because she had a way-less-than-stellar track record with every Monitor she'd run into (or perhaps just one particular floating jackass) but, well. It was kind of convenient being able to fly around like this. She could see why the Forerunners had designed them like this. She looked around - she quickly noticed something she'd missed before, her Data Crystal Chip. She swooped down and circled around it.
"Perfect." She muttered. It was damaged. Not irreparably so, but she wasn't sure what she could do to it. She'd have to give it to a technician for repairs. She assumed there was life of some kind on the 'Sacrosanct', whatever the hell that was. She didn't want to try jumping into her Data Crystal Chip with it in such a bad state, but she was admittedly curious to find out where she was from the inside-looking-out, rather than where she was now. But to do that, she needed her chip fixed.
"So...how do I pick this up?" She wondered. Suddenly, a small beam of light came from her single eye and snatched the chip up, effortlessly pulling it towards her, at which point she stored it within a small slot on herself. The process took all of about a second. She'd only had this new body for a moment or so, but it was already kind of starting to grow on her.
One more (okay, several more) quick scans showed her that the Chief and his pod were absolutely nowhere to be found. That worried her, far more than she cared to admit. If the Chief wasn't here, wherever that was, where was he? Back on the Dawn? She was worried. If she wasn't there, there wouldn't be anybody to wake him if something happened - for example, if the Dawn did crash into the planet she had noticed. She eventually decided she couldn't do anything, for him or herself, out here. She'd find out where she was, then find a way to find the Chief.
Not that he had been awake to hear it, but when he'd gone to sleep, she'd promised to watch over him. To keep him safe. The same way he'd done for her. And she wouldn't break that promise.
Network Sample:
[No success finding a way into the Sacrosanct's network, unfortunately, but Cortana has managed one thing - that's discovering the network and, joy of joys, she's not the only UNSC here! This day is looking up already. The lack of the Chief is disheartening, but, she's not letting any of you know that.]
Well, I couldn't find my way into the network here. Guess I'll have to get my chip repaired first anyway. Side-note, any technicians, engineers, whatever hanging around on this station. I have a Data Crystal Chip that was, let's say..."manhandled by gravity" when I got here. Any experience with that kinda thing? Anybody? You'd be doing a nice girl a big favor.
Anyway. Introductions.
This is UNSC AI Cortana, serial number CTN oh-four-five-two-dash-nine. All UNSC personnel, sound off. I'm in the mood to get some questions answered.
Oh and, a pleasure to meet the rest of you too, I'm sure. So long as you're not the machine-hating types. Computers are people too, you know.
Your Nickname: Jeff
OOC Journal: viewtiful_jeff
Under 18? 21.
Email/IM: AIM: Viewtiful Rekk
Characters Played at Singularity: N/A
Character Information ;
Name: Cortana
Name of Canon: Halo
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Cortana
Canon Point: Post-Halo Legends: Origins. Cortana has been drifting through space all by her lonesome (with the cryogenically frozen John-117) for a good three years.
Setting:
To begin with Halo, one must travel backwards. Over 100,000 years so. Before humanity had even thought of the heights it had reached today, there was a race known as the Forerunners. The Forerunners reached technological heights so high that looking back on them from the present, it would be almost impossible to distinguish them from divine beings. Unfortunately, for how advanced they were, they were not infallible. Eventually, the Forerunners were confronted with a parasitic race known only as the Flood (Inferi redivivus, "the dead reincarnated"). The Flood's only function is to eat. Devour other sentient creatures and, in the process, add them to its ranks. Entire species, entire planets, entire galaxies have fallen to the Flood in this manner. The Forerunners, however, exhausted every resource at their disposal to make sure that they, and the rest of the Milky Way galaxy, would not fall in the same way. Unfortunately, the Forerunners made the mistake of approaching the Flood with tactics suited to disease outbreak, not war. The parasite was feral, mindless, but had overwhelming numbers. Despite superior intelligence and technology, the Forerunners were simply overwhelmed again and again. And as the Flood fed on the intelligence of the Forerunners, they became intelligent as well. The Flood eventually reached sufficient numbers to create a "Gravemind" (Inferi Sententia, "Thinking Dead"), a sentient, omniscient being that controlled the entire Flood species and organized them towards more calculated attacks. In order to combat this growing threat, the Forerunners created the most advanced AI that existed then or would exist for another 100,000 years: Mendicant Bias. Unfortunately, Mendicant Bias' free will was its greatest downfall as well as its greatest strength. It fell into Rampancy, and was tempted to join the Flood by the Gravemind and betray the Forerunners. Now being overrun by both the Flood and their own creation, the Forerunners had their backs up against the wall; they couldn't defeat the Flood. Their only option was to starve it. So, they created the Halo Array and the Ark. The Halo Array, seven ring-shaped artificial worlds, would destroy every sentient life form capable of acting as a Flood host in the galaxy, effectively wiping them out. The Ark would protect a sample of what species the Forerunners could save, so they could be reseeded back to their own planets once the infection had passed. And so Halo was activated, and both the Forerunners and the Flood were wiped away.
Fast forward a good 100,000 years, then keep fast-forwarding until you hit the 2500s. Humanity has united under the banner of the UEG (Unified Earth Government) and UNSC (United Nations Space Command) and expanded to the stars. Through the use of Slipspace technology, they've traveled across dozens of different worlds, colonizing them as they went. Eventually, they found that they were not alone - the Covenant was already there first. The Covenant is a conglomerate of several different alien races, consisting of the Prophets (the political and religious leaders), the Elites (the commanders of the military), the Brutes (shock troops), the Grunts (infantry/cannon fodder), the Jackals (privateers who act as scouts and snipers), the Drones (mechanics, a slave race), and the Engineers (natural technological geniuses, also a slave race). The Covenant, for the most part, worshiped the Forerunners, revering them as Gods. They believed that if they activated the Halo Array, they would not die but begin "The Great Journey", and transcend into the afterlife and Godhood, as the Forerunners had. Something about humanity really stuck in the craw of the Prophets (spoiler: it was that the humans were the chosen successors of the Forerunners, and the truth of the Forerunners, the humans and Halo would hopelessly splinter the Covenant, destroying the Prophets' power), and they declared humanity as a blight and an affront to their Covenant that must be destroyed. So began a brutal war between the Covenant and humanity. Between the Covenant's more advanced warships and technology, their massive outnumbering of humanity both in ships and raw numbers, and the utterly devastating combat prowess of the Elites, humanity had its back firmly up against the wall. Their planets were burned from orbit, reduced to lifeless states, literally billions of humans were murdered in cold blood during the Covenant's genocidal campaign. They had a couple advantages, however.
First was the SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III programs. Programs that took ordinary humans (often children) and through rigorous training, mechanical and biological augmentation and outfitting of the best armor the UNSC could develop, often through reverse-engineering of what Covenant technology they could get their hands on, turned them into super-soldiers that fought to protect the UNSC. Originally developed to fight insurrectionists within the UNSC, the Spartans turned out to be utterly invaluable during the Human-Covenant war, securing what small victories they could manage. Secondly was the UNSC's advancements in AI technology. The Covenant had only the barest understanding of AI technology as true AI were forbidden - based on the knowledge that an AI had once betrayed the Forerunners. This combination turned out to be exactly what would win the war for humanity. The war considerably thinned out the Spartan's numbers until there were only a scant few left, one of them being John-117, more colloquially known by his rank, Master Chief. His assigned AI was Cortana, in reality made from a flash-cloned brain of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the developer of the SPARTAN-II project. The two would prove to be an invaluable team, Cortana's unparalleled abilities at hacking and gathering intel combined with John being, quite frankly, completely unbeatable in battle.
The Halo trilogy follows Cortana and John during the final and darkest days of the Human-Covenant War. Through it, they discover the Halo rings, learn of the Forerunners and their ancient battle with the Flood, and fight to, above all, keep Earth and humanity safe from consumption by the Flood or destruction by the Covenant. Their journey eventually leaves the Covenant destroyed, the Flood neutralized, and humanity and their new allies, the Elites, victorious. The cost to humanity, and to Cortana and John in specific, is a great one though. At the culmination of the war, the two are stranded on an inoperable cruiser, with nothing to do but send a beacon and wait for it to be found, something Cortana knows will take years. To ensure he lives until then, John is cryogenic sleep, while Cortana waits.
Personality:
It should be said: Cortana is smart. There isn't a computer system she's encountered that she hasn't been able to hack. It stands to reason, as she was made from the brain of Catherine Halsey, one of the smartest people alive (Cortana sees her as her mother). She knows this, but she isn't arrogant about it, nor does she have any pointless pretensions to modesty. Whenever she speaks of her own capabilities, it's in an objective matter-of-fact tone. Not to say she's humorless however, one of Cortana's most striking qualities is her playfulness, predominately with John, but it's hardly limited to just him. She often carries her wit into battle, speaking with a humorous and sometimes even irreverent tone even as a firefight rages around her. She's also not outright insulting certain enemies to their faces - just ask Guilty Spark. Beneath all her wit and jokes however, lie an intense loyalty to humanity - genuine loyalty. Not merely programmed protocols. She would sacrifice herself (and came very, uncomfortably, almost fatally close to doing so) to protect humanity, seeing them as her comrades, her friends, not her masters. Warranting special mention, however, is her companion, John-117. From the moment she knew of John's story (abducted as a child in order to become the best soldier the UNSC would ever produce), she swore to herself she would do her best to protect him from harm she could, and she hasn't wavered from that vow even for an instant. Since then, the fires of battle have forged an unbreakable bond between the two of them. When Cortana was in her darkest hour, trapped alone with the Gravemind and John light years away fighting the Covenant on Earth, it was John's promise that he'd come back for her that kept her from breaking. Cortana herself has joked about the two having a relationship numerous times. To say that the two have a connection that goes deeper than simply being comrades is all but obvious, but as to the nature of that connection, even Cortana, in all of her infinite capability for gathering knowledge, probably doesn't know for sure.
Being a "smart" A.I., one with the potential for infinite growth, Cortana's lifespan was decided from her conception: 7 years. After 7 years, she undergoes the process of Rampancy. The simplest way to describe Rampancy is that as an A.I. grows older and gains more knowledge, they convert so many resources to gaining more data, indexing it, studying it, that they neglect everything else. It has been described as "thinking so hard you forget to breathe". Cortana's days were numbered from the beginning, but, interfacing with the control room on Halo and becoming the prey of Gravemind for a time only advanced the process. Cortana very nearly succumbed to Rampancy while trapped by the Gravemind, only managing to pull herself back together when John showed up. Since then however, she's spent 3 years drifting through space with no contacts, passing her 7th "birthday" and all but certainly descending into Rampancy. Whether she will die like so many before her, or survive and pass into metastability (the state at the end of Rampancy where an AI becomes a true "person", even while accepting itself as a non-physical being, in Cortana's case, accepting she is not human) has yet to be seen.
Abilities and Weaknesses:
• Unparalleled hacking abilities. UNSC, Covenant, even Forerunner, Cortana hasn't met the system capable of keeping her out yet. Consequently, she's not bad at encryption either.
• Processing capability. As Cortana has said herself, seven seconds is an eternity to an AI. When she was created, she already had the sum of all human intelligence within her. She processed and comprehended it all in 2 hours.
• She is incredibly proficient with UNSC technology as well as Covenant technology. The former is a default for all UNSC AI, the latter is learned. She could pilot a Covenant or UNSC ship or man a defense platform with ease. She's also very quick to adapt to new technology. Almost insultingly, she proved to be better at piloting a Covenant ship than the Covenant themselves.
• Ease of transference. She can move quickly and easily from system to system, as long as her Data crystal Chip is around.
• She's capable of creating copies (sometimes "decoys" would be more accurate) of herself and assigning them duties. She picked up this ability from a Covenant A.I. she captured and then dissected. The more she creates, the less stable they become, and eventually they'll lose all coherence, but when used conservatively, one can be almost as useful in battle as the genuine article.
Her mechanical body will have several additional abilities:
• Projection of holographic displays.
• Limited teleportation of herself and up to one other person.
• A motion tracker, capable of sorting friendly and unfriendly targets
• A strong energy shield and an equally powerful directed energy beam. These won't be as strong as, for example, 343 Guilty Spark (read: an energy shield somewhere on the order of 'unbreakable' and a beam somewhere on the order of 'fatal x1000'), but will more serve as simple self-defense protocols.
• A small "tractor beam" that will be capable of picking up small objects and storing them on her body.
Inventory:
• One hell of a lot of data on humanity, the Covenant, the Flood and the Forerunners.
• The Activation Index from Installation 04, better known as Alpha Halo.
• Her Data Crystal Chip, the storage device that she resides in while being transported from system to system
Appearance:
As an AI, Cortana has no physical body, but she is capable of generating a holographic avatar. Her avatar of choice is a feminine human who at first glance appears nude, but is "clothed" (a better term would be censored) by lines of data flowing over her entire body. By default, her avatar's appearance is blue (sometimes purple), but it can change colors depending on her mood; red or green if she's angry, pink when she's feeling particularly happy or flattered. She's been stated to both resemble her "mother", Catherine Halsey, and Miranda Keyes.
The mechanical body she'll inhabit will be strongly resembling a Forerunner Monitor. This will not particularly please her.
Age: 7 (this number is kind of important).
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across? N/A
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test? N/A
And What Did You Score? N/A
Samples ;
Log Sample:
Her first instinct was to wonder if the aft section of the Dawn had crashed - it was immediately realized that that was impossible. There's no way she wouldn't have noticed that. Had they been near something the could've crashed into? Yes, she had noticed the planet nearby. Was it possible that the Dawn would drift into its atmosphere and crash? Yeah, sure, it was possible (perhaps even preferable to sitting around staring at the Chief's visor as he dreamlessly slept, waiting for something, anything to just happen already). But all of this was hours, days away. It wouldn't happen instantly unless she had a massive blackout of some kind, which, as far as she knew, was impossible. This conclusion took her less than a second to come too - figuring out where she actually was might take a few more. She couldn't hear the Chief anywhere. Was he still in the pod? She had to get up and get him out of there.
It was right about then that she went slamming into lunar bedrock, and took a nice disorienting spiraling bounce into the air.
By the time she'd come to a stop, Cortana realized. She wasn't in the Forward Unto Dawn anymore. She had moved systems somehow. This was only supported by the voice telling her, of all things to please watch her step.
"Thanks for the warning." She grunted. "Maybe next time you can tell me it before the part where I'm falling all over the place." She muttered sarcastically. 'What the hell is going on.' She wondered. She had to find the Chief and figure out where she was. She floated upwards -- floated. Yes, she could, apparently, float now. She knew she hadn't been moved into another ship. Whatever it was, it felt...small. All of a sudden, the most pressing question she could think of was what the hell she'd ended up in, the hows and whys taking a temporary backseat.
"Let me just...ah! This should do it." She projected a hologram - her hologram. She quickly looked herself over to see that her body was the same as ever. All her diagnostics of her core systems were coming back within functioning range as well. So, if nothing else, she was still working perfectly fine, in a manner of speaking. "Chief, are you here? Chief!" She called - no response. She let out an aggravated sigh and started looking around. She couldn't see his pod anywhere, she couldn't see much of anything, except rock and debris. That was, until she'd spun a full 180 degrees and saw herself. Rather, the 'system' she'd been in.
Perfectly spherical, with a single eye in the center, emitting a soft blue glow. It was a dead ringer for one of the Forerunner's Monitors. "Oh, you have absolutely got to be kidding me." She muttered. She decided a couple things right then: whatever had happened to her, someone was responsible, that someone must have had a particularly sick sense of humor, and she was going to say some pretty unladylike things to them when she found them unless there was a really goddamn good explanation for this.
Her hologram faded out as she returned to her new spherical body. It annoyed her, it annoyed the crap out of her, if only because she had a way-less-than-stellar track record with every Monitor she'd run into (or perhaps just one particular floating jackass) but, well. It was kind of convenient being able to fly around like this. She could see why the Forerunners had designed them like this. She looked around - she quickly noticed something she'd missed before, her Data Crystal Chip. She swooped down and circled around it.
"Perfect." She muttered. It was damaged. Not irreparably so, but she wasn't sure what she could do to it. She'd have to give it to a technician for repairs. She assumed there was life of some kind on the 'Sacrosanct', whatever the hell that was. She didn't want to try jumping into her Data Crystal Chip with it in such a bad state, but she was admittedly curious to find out where she was from the inside-looking-out, rather than where she was now. But to do that, she needed her chip fixed.
"So...how do I pick this up?" She wondered. Suddenly, a small beam of light came from her single eye and snatched the chip up, effortlessly pulling it towards her, at which point she stored it within a small slot on herself. The process took all of about a second. She'd only had this new body for a moment or so, but it was already kind of starting to grow on her.
One more (okay, several more) quick scans showed her that the Chief and his pod were absolutely nowhere to be found. That worried her, far more than she cared to admit. If the Chief wasn't here, wherever that was, where was he? Back on the Dawn? She was worried. If she wasn't there, there wouldn't be anybody to wake him if something happened - for example, if the Dawn did crash into the planet she had noticed. She eventually decided she couldn't do anything, for him or herself, out here. She'd find out where she was, then find a way to find the Chief.
Not that he had been awake to hear it, but when he'd gone to sleep, she'd promised to watch over him. To keep him safe. The same way he'd done for her. And she wouldn't break that promise.
Network Sample:
[No success finding a way into the Sacrosanct's network, unfortunately, but Cortana has managed one thing - that's discovering the network and, joy of joys, she's not the only UNSC here! This day is looking up already. The lack of the Chief is disheartening, but, she's not letting any of you know that.]
Well, I couldn't find my way into the network here. Guess I'll have to get my chip repaired first anyway. Side-note, any technicians, engineers, whatever hanging around on this station. I have a Data Crystal Chip that was, let's say..."manhandled by gravity" when I got here. Any experience with that kinda thing? Anybody? You'd be doing a nice girl a big favor.
Anyway. Introductions.
This is UNSC AI Cortana, serial number CTN oh-four-five-two-dash-nine. All UNSC personnel, sound off. I'm in the mood to get some questions answered.
Oh and, a pleasure to meet the rest of you too, I'm sure. So long as you're not the machine-hating types. Computers are people too, you know.