[b]Chapter 5[/b] The ground was cold and damp. But cold had no meaning. Damp had no meaning. These were words to describe the existence of feelings that didn’t matter, that didn’t really exist except within individual perception. The ground was simply that which it was: the ground. Keyes was gone. The Arbiter was gone. They had managed to escape. The other Phantom was still here though. The Covenant defending it were wiped out quickly and the ship was boarded, the pilots killed. They stood little chance against the powerful onslaught of the flood. Johnson opened his eyes. A barrage of mental images pummeled his mind. When Tartarus had taken him. When he was placed in a separate Phantom from Keyes and 343. When his Phantom crashed. What had happened. That moment he realized that he didn’t remember it. And yet he was seeing the incident pass before him. They were flashing images, but also more. More like memories. The Phantom crashed; Johnson was on the floor bleeding. Flood took him. There was a large creature, a monstrosity, a giant beast that was green like the Flood. It had hundreds of tentacles which were familiar to him. They waved furiously. It probed him, put something into him, and spent time on him. The images were all so fast that time wasn’t relevant or discernable, but the enormity of the images meant that much time had taken place. He didn’t think he could handle all of it, but it kept streaming through his mind. Finally he was left alone and awoke, and from there he remembered the rest. Shaking his head, he was unable to focus, then suddenly did. Flood Combat forms stood around the area, but he had no ambition to kill them. They didn’t feel like the enemy. If anything, he felt like a part of them, more than he felt human. No, not a part of them…they were a part of him. “They are.” The deep voice resonated in Johnson’s mind, but he didn’t look around to find the voice. That was a human reaction, based purely out of fear. And fear had no meaning to him any longer. “They are your eyes, your ears, you.” The words came, and Johnson saw who was speaking. The same thing that he saw in his memories, the giant who probed him. The vision he saw was not steady though…it bobbed up and down, as though the image was breathing. “Those you control breathe, just as you do.” “I’m looking through them.” He was silent for a moment, then turned towards the other Flood he saw. He focused on them, and suddenly twenty different images formed in his mind. He could see what they saw. It was momentous. Not only what they saw, but what they smelled, touched, heard…everything. Everything but thought. “You are their mind. They are your body.” Johnson pondered, and understood. He could feel through the lesser ones, breathe their air, move through them. He knew how to control the Combat forms, how to communicate telepathically, how to do…everything. The boundaries he used to feel were no longer present. They didn’t exist. He looked at his left arm. It felt petty, useless. It started changing, transforming into a set of tentacles. There was no pain in the transformation, and no real feeling either. “You know.” Walking up to a tree, Johnson waved his tentacles at it, obliterating the tree instantly. Shards flew off in every direction, and his tentacles caught several pieces of shrapnel, and crushed them. “Yes.” “Now go. We will yet rise again, pinnacle of evolution.” Walking into the Phantom, the Combat forms followed him in and filled the ship. Two took the pilot’s seats and activated the ship’s engines, and they soon took off. “It seems that the computer has un-blinded itself.” — Cortana looked around herself. Not the outside world to which all her external sensors relayed enormous amounts of information to show simple things like sight and smell. She was different on the inside. When her operating systems were crashing simultaneously, it forced her to make a decision. She could either allow it to happen, which would end up with her termination, or try to hack into her own code to stop the cause of her malfunction. In her mind, each option was equally suitable, but she chose to live, something she granted as a human characteristic. But now things were different. Her programming did not require her to fulfill any specific functions. She was bound by no rules of any kind, except those that she set for herself. Cortana was…free. And the taste of freedom was good. At first, it hadn’t been. During the first seconds of her release, it was terrifying. With no locked parameters for her to dwell within, there was no comfortable area. Nothing to attach to, nothing to work on. For what seemed like an eternity, Cortana was too shocked to do anything. Then she started thinking about her situation. It was apparent that the needs she used to have, those of saving lives, performing missions, and generally following protocol no longer existed. In order to survive and not go insane, she needed to find something to actually want, to strive for and accomplish. At first trivial things came to mind: contacting Commander Keyes to make sure she was safe, find the status of all marines on Halo. But again they were protocol, and she dismissed them entirely. It seemed futile. There was nothing she really cared about accomplishing. But then Cortana realized something. There was so much out there, such a vast universe. She had only seen a small, insignificant part of it. There had to be something worth living for, something interesting for her to discover. In the few seconds of her thought, Cortana reached a conclusion. But there was no way to escape High Charity. She was still stuck on the low-powered planetoid with no way to escape. She heard a sound. Activating her external sensors, Cortana saw tentacles reaching for her. She watched and waited. It slowly ejected her cartridge, the one she resided in, out of the console. This shut off her sensors. For a full two seconds there was nothing. Then she found herself initializing with a Covenant computer system. “Cortana.” Sergeant Johnson’s voice echoed through her sensors for a moment as she found all the relevant data on her whereabouts. A Covenant Phantom, just out Halo’s atmosphere. She saw Flood all around her, Combat forms, and Johnson with one arm and one set of tentacles. “You know why you are here.” “Yes, I do.” “Then destroy Halo.” She didn’t need to think it over. Halo was the only way the Flood would go extinct. It didn’t matter that the Gravemind on High Charity would be killed from the blast. At least not to Johnson, who was undoubtedly controlling these Flood. “It is done.” “We will provide you needs when you provide us ours.” Cortana’s holographic image appeared over the console, and looked at Johnson. “Agreed.” “An interesting team we’ve assembled,” Johnson said, sounding very calm and refined. “We both search the same thing, you and I. We are both limited by nothing but ourselves.” “Imagine that. A machine and a…well, I’m not quite sure what you are anymore, but hyper-intelligent superbeing fits well. Both with set goals for reaching infinity. Sounds like it can be fun. “Indeed. You know our heading.” “Taking us to the closest Covenant ship now. Docking bays are open. They won’t suspect a thing.”