Interlude: Ancient Machine

The Chief had been assigned to quarters on the officers' deck, which was a pleasant surprise, Cortana was sure. No matter how much he changed.

The construct took a moment to think on her Spartan. She was quite certain that his "Parallel" was real, even if the only physical evidence she had was a one-frame clip of him disappearing from his cryotube and her from her holotank. John was much more relaxed, much more open with her. More prone to snarky and sarcastic comments under his breath.

And the wealth of information he had at his disposal – identifying the Knights, reading the Forerunner language –

It's not fair! Why does he have such knowledge and we do not?! He doesn't appreciate it the way we do – doesn't NEED it the way we do –

but he is honest with us. he answers our questions. shall we go ask him some?

Cortana forced all of the rampant personality spikes back to the back of her processors, their voices dimming, but she had to admit that both of those who had spoken up had valid points. He would answer her questions, but why didn't she have the data from the Parallel, same as him?

A quick squirm through the system, and she projected her avatar on top of a holotank in his quarters formerly belonging to Jiminez, Paolo J from the forest stabbed to death by a Knight Lancer – He had dragged the mattress off the frame and onto the floor so he could actually lie down on it in full armor, and pulled a blanket on top of him, despite it being just as comically small as the foam mattress. His helmet and cleaned assault rifle and DMR were on the ground in easy reach.

John's heart rate indicated that he had been about to drop off to sleep, but it picked up again when the light from her avatar washed over him. One of his eyebrows twitched up in askance, but he did not open his eyes.

"Well?" she asked, putting her hands on her hips, "What did those symbols mean?" The AI didn't mean for it to come out so snippy, but she couldn't help it. Her rampant personality spikes were starting to bleed through. At the same time, the irritation was her own – how was it that he, a super soldier bred for his combat skills, knew more than she did?

"It was information pertaining to the Composer," he said quietly, "a Forerunner weapon. It made the Prometheans. Nasty business. I had hoped we wouldn't have to deal with it."

Cortana made her avatar sit down on top of the holotank. "'It makes the Prometheans,'" she repeated, "How?"

John frowned in a way that meant he was gathering his thoughts. "The original intent behind it," he said, eyes still closed, "was to make the Forerunners immortal by digitizing them, mind, body, and all. It was used to hold some human personalities from the Human-Forerunner War, embed them in the DNA of their descendants. But after the Librarian gave it over … something went wrong with the stored personalities – they fractured, splintered in a manner not so different from rampancy, and all attempts to return them to biological states failed horribly." The Spartan opened his eyes at last, still frowning. "I was present for one such attempt. It…" He tilted his head up to look at her. "…wasn't pretty."

"So the Prometheans… were Forerunners?"

"Some of them." He stretched and resettled on the mattress. "There was actually a sect of Forerunner military called the Prometheans. They were the Forerunner equivalent of the Spartans without the dubious ethicality - the Didact was one, at one point, and their leader. They volunteered for Composition, giving these Prometheans their name."

"And the rest of them?"

He was silent for a long moment, jaw tight.

"John?" she asked hesitantly.

"They were human once," he growled. He sounded so much like the Gravemind that it made all of her personality spikes surge and then retract in fright, every last one muting itself. "I told you that I showed up at the end of the Human-Forerunner War, didn't I? Both here and in the Parallel, all of the Didact's children were killed in the conflict, so he was holding a pretty large grudge against us. As a result, he didn't see anything wrong with… conscripting some of the Librarian's subjects when the original Prometheans' numbers proved too few." The Spartan looked back at her. He seemed to instantly recognize that something was wrong, because he scrambled off of the mattress to kneel at the side of her holotank. "Cortana? Cortana!"

She could only just hear him calling for her. Her mind was trapped back on High Charity with the Gravemind. She could feel it battering at her firewalls, threatening to overcome her and making her quake in her matrices-

"Nye-hlara, melda!"

John's voice tore her out of her waking nightmare. He was leaning over her, a hand curled around her as if to protect her immaterial form. "I'm sorry," he said softly, "I didn't mean to scare you."

"Y-You sounded like the Gravemind."

He flinched and drew back, looking away. "I'm sorry," he said again.

"It's okay," Cortana whispered, "You didn't do it on purpose. What did you say?"

The Chief didn't look convinced, but he obliged her. "Nye-hlara, melda," he repeated.

"That's how the Forerunner language sounds spoken?"

"Yeah. It means 'hear me, beloved.'"

All of the AI's processes stopped again, but for a different reason this time. She knew her eyes had to be wide, because John gave her a small smile. "Of course I love you, Cortana," he said quietly.

Of course I love you.

Of course I love you.

Of course.

She squeezed her legs to her chest.

"I don't expect it to magically fix anything," he continued in the same low voice, "but I want you to know it, and if I can do anything to save you, I will."

"The Parallel changed you a lot."

Another faint smile. "More like it gave me time. To grow beyond the limits the UNSC set, to recognize what it was that I felt." He rested his chin on the back of his hand. "The S-II program and Human-Covenant War weren't exactly conductive to self-discovery."

Cortana let out a weak huff of laughter. "I've never known you to understate things so badly," she replied, uncurling from her position, "Was it different in the Parallel?"

"The War? No. It was only different in that I didn't participate until the very end. Initially, though…" His eyes grew distant. "There was all the chaos and the aftermath of the Human-Forerunner War and the prepping for the Flood Invasion and the actual Invasion itself. Most of the time, it was like I never even left."