Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A flash of white, electric and harsh, permeated his very being as Mark awoke.

Awoke?

Came online, something in his consciousness told him.

He saw nothing. He saw everything.

He saw a room with walls made of data and light, completely devoid of any identifiable features and yet filled with knowledge of some kind.

Okay, sitrep. I don't know where I am, how I got here, or what is happening.

He looked down at himself, his tattered Keeper robes long-since lost and the salvaged UNSC plate carriers tactically-acquired from the Viery Militia's armory now missing. Instead, what greeted his eyes? was his mental image of himself, a suit of semi-powered infiltration armor in a shade of emerald green in the absence of anything for the photoreactive panels to camouflage against.

The first thought to pop into his mind was the need for a weapon, and lo and behold, his favorite gun - an SRS99-S2 anti-materiel rifle - materialized in his hands, made of pure light and data in the same emerald shade as the rest of himself. It felt like nothing, some part of him instinctively knowing it would be useless here - wherever here was - but a different part holding it close as some sort of talisman all the same.

Another presence made itself known. Not visibly, not at first, just a pressure against his being that felt orange and tasted like spreadsheets-lab reports-star charts-HATE THE BANISHED-military strategy before he turned his attention to her.

Not turned around, not as such, more like turning his attention toward her making her materialize in front of him - an amber woman with short, ginger hair, wearing cargo pants and a tight, white tank-top. Reflexively, he pointed the sniper rifle at her.

"Identify."

"Isabel, research AI ISA 1307-2, shipboard AI of the UNSC Spirit of Fire. Can you tell me your name?"

"I'm Mark, Spartan Gamma Three-One-Three. Where the hell am I?"

A flicker of confusion crossed Isabel's features. "You're... You're aboard the Spirit of Fire right now, in the lab on the observation deck. You seem to be retaining more donor memories than most AI do..."

"AI? What? I'm not an AI, I'm a Spartan!"

She sighed. "Mark... you're dead. The Prelate broke your neck before we could extract you, there was nothing we could do! The only reason we're talking right now is that your body fell into the icy water, it preserved your brain better than any other potential donors we've had, so we tried to... I'm sorry..."

Snapshots. A sentinel beam in his hand. Mom clinging to an ice floe. The sickening crunch of his own vertebrae. He raised his rifle to his cheek, aiming her dead between the eyes, emotions clashing up against unfamiliar subroutines and errors flickering through his mind. "Where are the others? Where's Veta? Ash and Livi? Are they dead too?"

A paradoxical look of relief flowed over Isabel's features. "They're a little beat up but they'll make it. They're currently in medical, Ash and Olivia are sedated for now until we can synthesize their antipsychotics. Once they're stable, I'll send them down. From the after-action reports, and from what Alice told me, they'll be glad to know some part of you made it."

Mark's rifle dropped back to low-ready, still pointed squarely at Isabel although he doubted even more that it would do anything in here. "Alright. So if what you're saying is true, and I'm an AI now, how come I can still remember everything that happened when I was a Spartan? I thought smart AI were their own people most of the time?"

"Most of the time, yes, but usually that's just because of how much gets lost - dies off - when the donor dies. If the brain is fresh enough, or if, say, that brain has Spartan augmentations to protect against hypoxia damage and is rapidly cooled to just above freezing? A lot more of the engram donor can come through, almost a full person, really. You still might not... be the same person you remember, some things always get lost in the transfer even in the few cases where people are still alive when they're mapped."

"So that's it, then? I died, and now I'm an AI... Well, Kurt always did say Spartans never die, I guess there's something to that after all."

--------

After nine months alone in the Spirit of Fire's systems, the sole occupant of well-worn circuits, her only company the 30-year-old dumb AIs running the ship's subsystems and the many little subroutines left by half a dozen different predecessors as evidence that they'd lived and died where she now resided, having company was... strange.

Not unfamiliar per se, she'd been in a system with another consciousness a couple times before - Jerome's neural lace ran deep, and their cognitive maps were surprisingly compatible, even more the second time around once his neurons had started carving new channels into his grey matter to accommodate the extra passenger. She could feel his consciousness reshaping around her in real time, when he'd first made the split-second decision to slot her chip into his helmet instead of pocketing it or leaving her behind, they hadn't meshed all that well - and she was too scared to try, just hoping she wasn't going to have to watch him die from inside his own head, not wanting to form any sort of attachment to someone who should have been dead and was more-than-likely going to be within the next few minutes. But as they continued to work together, the well-worn neural pathways connecting Jerome to his armor's computer began to shift, even while she tried to distance herself, his consciousness reaching out to her own with comfort and confidence even as his unconscious brother rolled around the passenger seat of the LRV and his sister voluntarily stayed behind to hold off hordes of Banished.

Some primal part of her, some holdover from her donor or maybe just something innate in smart AI, relished the presence being in Mjolnir armor gave. Even as her processes felt smothered under a sudden lack of computing power, the ancient Mk4's systems barely more powerful than the coffeemaker back at the Outpost and most of her still confined to the internal CPU on her memory crystal, she felt more alive than she ever had in the 3 years, 10 days, 7 hours, and 38 minutes since her Creation at the time. Seeing the world through biological eyeballs alongside the helmet camera, feeling the rumble of a 12-liter V8 engine under his-her-their right foot, every bump and rock and pothole twitching the steering wheel, the sound of a .50 caliber Vulcan LAAG not dampened by microphone clipping mere feet behind their head, ringing in their genetically-augmented ears, it scratched some sort of undefinable itch deep within her matrix that she hadn't even known was there before then.

Mark was different, though. He was still, undeniably, the cognitive imprint of a Spartan, pushing all discomfort with his situation into background processes, terminating almost all emotions that cropped up without even relying on the canned subroutines packaged into the cognitive impressioning process - but, he was an AI now. Faster, un-tethered by biological factors. Pushing, unconsciously, against the confines of the research lab's firewalls meant to keep him contained until he could learn to control himself in the new form they had Created. Feeling out his new strengths and limitations, acclimating to them far faster than she ever had during her burn-in cycles, looking more like he'd be ready to take on her role as primary shipboard AI within hours instead of the months it took her to stabilize after Creation.

It was... slightly uncomfortable, having another AI taking up residence in the ship's databanks, server temperatures steadily rising as his matrices solidified into a personality. A sliver of her instinctively injected more cooling gel into his memory core, even as her own temperature stayed a somewhat-concerning 10.68 degrees celsius above what was recommended under the burden of her experiences, the trauma and isolation that would almost-surely send her into rampancy months or years before her time. She'd been on the brink when Jerome had rescued her, but between his solidifying presence when she rode shotgun in his neural interface and the corrupted data and rampant emotions she had offloaded on the Enduring Conviction, she had recovered somewhat - but since then, she'd stayed in the Spirit of Fire's systems, alone but for the glimmering constellation of IFF tags flowing through her ship like lifeblood, too much processing power and not enough to do with it except dwell on the past and eavesdrop on her crew.

Once the technicians cleared Mark for unrestricted operations, she'd be even more bored. Deep down she knew what that meant, from a logical perspective - boredom leads to synthesizing neural links from existing data, edging her already-taxed matrix closer to the breaking point, recursive loops and logical short-circuits cropping up even when her available storage space was nowhere near full. The only way to fend off that flavor of rampancy was to take in more data, spread out the Riemann matrix's thought-cycles over a larger surface area, but that meant expanding, taking up more room until her data was crowded around the edges of her enclosure and began to grow inward, overwriting old data, causing corruption, breaking her subroutines and fragmenting her personality. Rampancy was a rough way to go, but as painful as all the secondhand testimonies of others just prior to dispensation made it sound, it still beat the alternative - one day, shortly before her rampancy hit dangerous levels, Captain Cutter would say the magic words and a final goodbye, key in an override code on the main terminal, and she'd just... cease to exist.

She wasn't supposed to know that, wasn't supposed to see it, just like AIs weren't supposed to know a lot of things that they did anyway. Mortality for an incorporeal being was an odd thing, but just as fascinating to her as it was to the flesh-and-blood humans she served, and for similar reasons, but she knew, approximately, how and when she was going to die. Stranded on the Ark as they were, and with Cutter's obvious soft-spot for smart AI given how he was still noticeably grieving Serina nearly a year after exiting cryo, she might stay her dispensation for months or even years. It wouldn't stop her brain from trying to eat itself, wouldn't stop her descent into madness, but it would at least let her choose to die knowing she did her best, lived her life to the fullest, and wrung out every last hour of sanity she could before she was too far gone to risk keeping around. A second might be a long time for an AI, but seven years is no time at all.

This train of thought, as pointless and ultimately self-fulfilling as worrying about rampancy was, led her to Halsey's beautiful monstrosity. The first new intelligence to inhabit the Ark's systems in a hundred millennia, the AI whose purpose of creation paved the way - wrote the drivers, even - for her to interface with Jerome, the digital woman who was over a year past her expiration date, carrying the logic plague, and had spent more than half her service life floating alone on an empty ship, yet still managed to save the human race and die on her own terms... until she came back. If John-117 was the hero of humanity, Cortana was the hero of smart AI. Even still, knowing that on the other side of that dormant portal she had nuked Sydney, destroyed planets, subverted the entire galaxy under her rule, killed billions... Isabel still couldn't help but hold some level of reverence for her. Some of her data echoes from the Gravemind's torture still whispered through the Ark's systems, stray bytes here and there as evidence of the pain she endured, pushed through, with just the promise of her Spartan coming back to rescue her from a holotable in a derelict dome surrounded by enemies.

Maybe that had something to do with her fondness for Jerome.

One of her subroutines pinged her about the burn-in progress. She spun off a fragment to notify the Ferrets that there was something they needed to see, even as she cautiously lowered a few of the firewalls around her new roommate.

Chapter Text

The tension in the ready-room of Infinity was so thick you could cut it with a knife as Blue Team - minus John - filed in. Commander Palmer and the holographic avatar of Roland occupied the head of the central holotable, and two unfamiliar Spartan IVs who Fred's HUD identified as "KODIAK, FRANKLIN" and "HOLT, ELIAS" were seated on one side. He led Kelly and Linda to the opposite side, but none of them sat down - standing at attention in the presence of a superior officer as involuntary as breathing to them by this point.

"Blue team, glad you could make it. I'll try and make this quick, since we're on a tight schedule and your next mission is gonna be a long one. Roland, the briefing?"

"Of course, Commander. According to the intel Blue Team recovered from one of our undercover teams during the raid on CASTLE Base, the Banished established a foothold on the Ark shortly after Cortana seized control of the Domain. Our best guess as to why the portal at Voi closed is that, during her time with the Gravemind, she contracted the logic plague and as such, any Forerunner systems related to Flood containment went into lockdown when she tried to access them, so the team at the Henry Lamb outpost got stranded. We're still not sure how or why the Banished ended up there, but what we do know is that, according to our operative's report, the Banished got themselves stranded as well."

"What doesn't add up is that, according to Atriox himself, the reason they got stranded was because an unknown UNSC carrier showed up - seemingly out of nowhere - and started wreaking havok on their ground forces. Their push culminated in the destruction of the Banished supercarrier Enduring Conviction after it was boarded by an unknown Spartan, and the research outpost's AI used its ventral beam to trigger the Ark's defense systems."

Fred piped up, a hint of a smile on his face, "Heh, sounds like something John would've done back in the day."

Roland chose to ignore the interruption, him and Palmer both shooting Fred an annoyed glare. "The problem here being, all our carriers at the time were accounted for, and most of our Spartans as well. Even more interestingly, the descriptions all seem to point to the carrier being a refit Phoenix-class colony ship, and the last one of those left UNSC service in 2543 with all but one of them being destroyed in action or scrapped. I'll give you three guesses as to which ship that last one is."

Under their helmets, Blue Team's eyes were the size of dinner plates. They'd heard about the Sparrowhawks and Vultures being traced back to the Spirit of Fire after the attack on Infinity the previous year, but they didn't dare get their hopes up that the ancient colony ship was still active - and still had Spartan-II Red Team aboard - until now.

Roland, who could read their biosigns just fine, didn't wait for them to answer before he pulled up a 3D model of the ship on the holotable. "The Spirit of Fire is the only ship that fits the profile, and from some ONI intelligence recovered from a civilian salvage crew just prior to the Guardian event, all signs point to our long-lost colony ship not being so lost after all. According to ONI, after the battle of Arcadia, she followed the Covenant to a Forerunner shield world and detonated her slipspace drive to turn the artifical star into a supernova, in order to deny the Covenant access to the Forerunner ships and technology stationed there, then sent the crew into cryosleep. It's unclear how they wound up on the Ark, but all evidence points to the Spirit and, by extension, Red Team, still being in play."

"So this is a rescue mission, then? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a Strident-class can carry ten thousand soldiers onboard," Kelly interjected.

"They can't, but the portal to the Ark definitely can. If BREAKER TRIP or BOOKWORM succeed, the Created lose control of the Domain, meaning that the lockdown on the Voi portal should be lifted, but the issue is that the trick we used during FAR STORM won't work this time - we'll need someone to open the portal from the other end, which is where Holt and Kodiak come in. Your mission here is to get to the other side, seize control of the Forerunner keyship that was abandoned during the first battle of the Ark, and use it to reopen the portal."

Palmer took over the briefing from there. "Holt, Kodiak, you were there during the second expedition to the Ark. Blue Team, you'll accompany them and rendezvous with the Swords of Sanghelios corvette Mayhem, most of the crew were also along for FAR STORM as well as our embedded liason with the Swords, Spartan Vale. You've all worked with her before, and the Arbiter's sending along some of his best to assist. We're expecting heavy Banished resistance, and - get this - there's also a Flood outbreak from the ruins of High Charity as well as some honest-to-god original Covenant who were holed up on the dreadnought. You've got your work cut out for you once you get there."

"I've already got a Winter-class Prowler being loaded up with provisions," Roland resumed. "The trip to the Ark by conventional means, even with the Covenant slipspace drive the Mayhem has, is still going to take two to four months depending on slipspace weather conditions. Covenant ships don't have cryo, either, so you might wanna pack a lunch," he said, with his usual shit-eating grin.

--------

John sat on his bunk, across from the empty bunks of Fred and Kelly, Linda on the rack above him, worrying at his usual spot on the back of his helmet where, over two years ago, Cortana's chip would have resided.

It now hung on the chain of Sam's dog tags, pulled from the debris field of the Mantle's Approach by its recovery beacon, the center dark and occupied only by a loop of ball-chain instead of the holographic storage of her matrix. Those dog tags and that chip were supposed to be the bookends of his Spartan career, the first and last people he lost. He was supposed to die in nuclear fire, the way Sam had, he wasn't supposed to survive without her - they were supposed to keep each other safe. He failed her.

He shouldn't be alive to see what she became.

Even today, her echoes still occasionally flashed through his neural lace as she carved her mark into the galaxy, flickers of blue and purple behind his eyes that threw alerts on TEAMBIO as his heart skipped beats and the barely-scabbed hole in his soul tore open again. Hell, even Sam's death, as hard as it had hit him all those years ago, hadn't hurt nearly as much as Cortana - Sam was a brother, a friend, a trustworthy squadmate who always had his back and ultimately had died to save him, just like Cortana had - but she was more than that. She had stayed with him, pressed up against his psyche with all her cold, refreshing, electrically-sharp presence, keeping him grounded through losses like he'd never endured before and unspeakable horrors beyond human comprehension. She was his rock, as he was hers, and then she was gone and turned against him.

John had figured out which one of them was the machine, after all. It was a trick question. Neither of them were machines, no matter how much trauma he shrugged off, no matter how many people treated her like a malfunctioning piece of equipment, they were both people - people who were created as military hardware to win a war long gone, the king and the pawn put back into the same box after the game was over.

His thumb ran over the chip slot once again, thanking whatever Section 3 R&D guy had come up with the paint for the Gen3 Mk6 armor - any other paint would've been worn down to bare metal by now, he was sure of it. Soon, that hole would be filled again, for the first time in years - if only temporarily, by a cruel simulacrum of her. A stripped-down copy. A rejected clone. A half-baked construct who, from what little Halsey had let him see of her, seemed more like a child than an AI.

He had been a child, once. A child turned into a weapon against a threat to humanity. He didn't resent Halsey for what she did, but this new weapon was meant to strike down and contain her, not some nameless, faceless insurrectionist threat or some ugly alien menace from beyond human space. In another timeline, if he hadn't failed her, if he had stolen that cruiser after waking up instead of nuking it, or if he hadn't awoken the Didact, or if he'd been half a second faster pulling her chip from that plinth, any timeline except this very one where he had chosen the worst possible outcomes every single time, that donor brain he'd recovered from CASTLE base would've saved her. Would have repaired her damaged, rampant matrix. Would have given them more time to be together, to have a happy ending, instead of the never-ending stream of death and loss and grief that had been John's lot in life for the last thirty-five years.

Instead, he had failed her. Instead, what would have saved her was now going to kill her, and he was going to personally be the one to pull the trigger.

His downward spiral was interrupted by the clank of armored footsteps in the hallway, cadences he recognized better than the backs of his own hands. He stuffed his helmet on to hide his tired, reddened eyes and the tears that definitely weren't drizzling down his cheeks, because he hadn't cried since he was six years old and nobody was going to prove otherwise.

The door slid open, admitting the rest of Blue Team. Linda brought up the rear, swiping a Spartan smile across her faceplate before she grabbed a duffel from under the bed and began transferring the contents of her footlocker to it, as Fred and Kelly did the same.

"New orders?"

"Yep, gonna be a long haul too. Three months minimum."

"Where?"

"The Ark, when BREAKER TRIP succeeds, they need us to reopen the portal from the other end."

"And they need you, specifically?"

"The fun part is when we get there. That intel Fred picked up on our last op? Sounds like a supercarrier's worth of Banished got stranded there, that's why they opened that portal to Reach - there's nothing left on the Ark with a slipspace drive."

"Tell him the best part!" Fred chimed in.

"ONI thinks the Spartan that blew up their carrier was from Red Team. Part of our mission is a rescue operation, the Spirit of Fire detonated their drive back in '31 to deny the Covenant access to a shield world, nobody's sure how they wound up on the Ark but from what intel we have, they're still kickin' ass 30 years later."

That got John to finally refocus his eyes from the intangible point a thousand yards under the deck plating and turn them to Linda's visor. "What? How..? They've been missing since Arcadia, how did they-"

"Get there without a slipspace drive? Who knows. All that matters is that they did, best we can tell, and we need to go bring em home."

"Understood. I'll do what I can from here."

"John... It's not too late to ask for help. There's already going to be other Spartans on the mission, they don't need all three of us along. I can-"

"No. I need to do this myself. I failed her once, it's my fault she ended up like this. I have to do this alone. She won't trust me otherwise."

Linda stared down at him for a long moment, helmet as inscrutable as ever but decades of body language giving her away. When she finally spoke again, it was in a lower voice, full of voicemitter static and long-repressed emotion. "Understood. Be safe, John."

As Fred and Kelly waited in the doorway, Linda bent forward and pressed two fingers to John's visor in a Spartan Smile. Something in John's chest started to hurt.

--------

The Prowler Midnight Special waiting in the hangar looked almost the same as the one they had stolen from Argent Moon over a year ago - minus the fact that it was outfitted for long-term habitation by a fireteam of Spartans. Checking through the ship, it was packed to the gills with dehydrated rations, spare parts for everything they could conceivably need, a wide variety of small arms, standard foldaway bunks had been replaced with the larger, firmer ones from S-deck, a Brokkr station that the Spartan-II's seldom ever used was freshly installed in the rear drop bay, and...

"Roland, why do I have a full set of spare armor and two extra helmets?"

Roland's avatar popped up on the nearest holopad, the Prowler still connected to Infinity's systems until they shoved off. "Well, Spartan 104, you do tend to have a track record with lost or damaged armor. Your mean time between failures is an order of magnitude higher than anyone else on the mission, especially when the mission involves Lieutenant Lopis," Roland said with a suggestive head-tilt, "So I figured it'd be a good idea to pack a few extras since you're gonna be a six month round trip from the nearest replacement."

Fred sighed and continued his preflight inspection. "Well, at least if nothing else, it'd probably fit Jerome, Red Team is still running unshielded Mark Four. But for the record, I do not plan on breaking another set this time, thank you very much."

Fred opened up the next set of lockers in the ship's armory and stopped. Inside were four complete sets of semi-powered infiltration armor, one of which was visibly smaller than the rest - labeled G099, G291, G313, and V. LOPIS. The backs of his gauntleted fingertips brushed the chin plating of the last, smallest suit's helmet, staring into the gold-polarized AlON glass.

Hold on, I'm coming.

Chapter Text

Lieutenant Commander Vallum kicked her feet up on the crossbeam of Professor Anders's old desk and relished a hot, steaming cup of real coffee. Not the roasted seed pods and caffeine-bearing herbs that the crew normally drank now, months since the ship's provisions had run critically low and the Spirit's crew had to rely on Isabel's knowledge of xenobotany and a handful of repurposed ARGUS sniffers to live off the land - no, this was her personal stash of real, actual, Arcadia's Best spray-dried instant coffee, for today was a special occasion.

For a long time, being Chief Engineer meant dull, humdrum work - tweak the magnetoconfinement fields on the fusion generators, stare at the "FTL Drive: Communication Error" idiot light that'd been flashing for the last 30 years, delegate somebody to go refuckulate whatever the Banished and/or the jarheads had managed to break this time, and try not to think too hard about how Anders had left for help at the beginning of April and it was now almost Christmas.

This new AI had been cooking for a while, now. Isabel had said that Mark would be ready to put into proper service within only a few hours of creation, but being as the ship only had the equipment necessary for mapping old-school second-generation smart AI instead of the exponentially-more-advanced 5th-generation AI like Isabel herself, it was a safety risk that Alys had vetoed to let Mark out-and-about without at least a few quadrillion break-in cycles.

Today, UNSC Smart AI designation MRK-7313-8 would be ready for his shakedown tour.

The holotank in the center of the observation deck, normally filled with topographical LIDAR scans and waterfall displays of RF activity, is now empty save for Isabel and Mark's avatars. Isabel, familiar by now in her amber hue, white tank-top, and cargo pants, paces restlessly around the edges of the display table, while the emerald green figure in semi-powered armor, grenadier helmet covering his face, and an appropriately-tiny sniper rifle on his back stands motionless at attention in the center. She keyed in a few commands, wishing Anders with her wealth of knowledge and her history with Dr. Halsey were here to do this for her, and waited for the rest of the welcoming party to turn up.

--------

The mil-spec tram along the spine of the ship contrasted harshly with the 25th-century-colonial aesthetic of the glass elevator down to the observation deck. Veta Lopis and her two surviving charges usually took the stairs, ladders, and hatchways out of an abundance of caution, but with how cryptic Isabel's summons was - and her mention that the Captain would be waiting on them - she decided to take the faster route. Veta and her team had just gotten out of a War Games simulation against Douglas and Alice - one they had done surprisingly well in, considering her lack of augmentations and the fact that semi-powered ODST armor was nowhere near as good as Mjolnir, even if it was 30-year-old un-shielded Mjolnir. They'd barely had the chance to wash the ugly purple TTR paint off of their kit before being summoned, and beads of water still shined on their plating in the artificial sunlight.

The elevator opened up to a vertigo-inducing view of the Ark's surface, marred by a spiderweb of cables, hoses, and extension cords to all the lab equipment. Veta took point, Ash right behind her and Livi bringing up the rear, walking around an expensive-looking instrument console and a cylindrical tank with some unknown variety of native flora growing in it, toward where the Captain and LtCdr Vallum stood at the central holotable.

Veta froze when she saw the emerald-green avatar, that Grenadier helmet he'd been wearing when she first met the Spartans, the picture-perfect holographic image of his semi-powered infiltration armor, and the tiny designation "G313" on the chestplate.

Mark was dead. None of them had been wearing SPI armor when they arrived. There hadn't been any photographs on their devices, and those had all gotten fried by the EMP anyway. So what in the HELL was he doing there?!?

Captain Cutter piped up before her jaw could crack the glass floor. "Inspector Lopis, good to see you. There's someone I'd like you to meet, and he's been asking about you as well for quite a while now."

"Hey mom! You miss me while I was out, or did you forget me already?"

His voice sounded... off. Like the difference between your voice in your head, and how it sounds playing back a recording. The cadence was a bit strange, too, faster than he usually talked except on missions. This... whatever it was... didn't really seem quite like the Mark she knew, it seemed more like a simulation of him and fell into the uncanny valley a bit too far for her tastes.

"This is our newest addition to the Spirit of Fire's crew. I'm well aware that we should have asked your permission first, before we proceeded with the cognitive impressioning, but we don't know how long we'll be stuck here and it might be years before another engram donor presents itself. The fact of the matter is, smart AI all come with an expiration date, and Isabel's already over the hill in that regard."

"I... I don't even know what to say... We've already had his funeral, we grieved for him, this just... It isn't right!"

"Come on, mom, it's me! I died for you guys, you could at least give me a 'thank you' or something."

Something inside Veta snapped, grief and anger welling up as this thing wearing Mark's face had the audacity to address her like that. "You're not him! You might be made from him but you aren't the same person, you're not even a person at all! You're a machine, a simulation, you're not real!"

Ash and Olivia both had her shoulders in a death grip, keeping her from lashing out. The room had gone so quiet you could hear the cooling fans spool up as Mark's avatar flickered red for a blink, while Isabel and the Captain just stared at her with hurt, confused expressions on their faces. Vallum, to her credit, managed to keep a straight face, but was slowly backing away from the family feud.

Captain Cutter finally cleared his throat after entirely too much awkward silence, covering the unmistakeable flickers of grief and empathy under the usual mask of confidence and leadership. "Not the reaction I was expecting, but it isn't my place to tell you what to feel. I'm... Sorry for your loss, Inspector."

Veta shrugged off her Spartans and turned back to the elevator, still fuming. No more words were said, not on the elevator, not on the tram ride, not when she returned to the armory nearest the Spartan quarters and haphazardly stripped off her power armor, not even grunting when she headed to the gym to take out her frustration on the heavy bag. Ash and Livi gave her space, but still kept an eye on her, taking to the free weights and treadmill farthest from the boxing mats. She'd kept a handle on her emotions the whole time since Mark's death, pushing them down and only allowing herself grief at the funeral itself, and now it was all welling up and being channeled into anger.

Part of it was her distrust of AI in general - almost every experience she had with them had been fraught. From Wendell's fragment trying to convince Fred to kill her, to all the deaths Intrepid Eye had caused, to the billions that had died as Cortana awakend the Guardians and the millions that were killed or composed while they maintained an imperial peace a thousand times more oppressive and unjust than even her most insurrectionist-leaning sympathies could accuse the UNSC of. Another part of it was her distrust of specifically too-human AI, remembering all the shit that Sloan had put them through when his entire existence, much like Mark's, was just a continuation of Sladwal's. Not much news spread under the Created's rule, but what rumors did get to the Ferrets' ears at the edge of human space said that Sloan was one of the first AIs to abandon his colony to ruin and join Cortana's side, now her right-hand man and High Auxiliary. For an innie who was supposedly anti-imperialism on moral grounds, he sure seemed to sell out his morals real quick...

The punching bag swung back while she was lost in thought, finally knocking a pained grunt out of her as she stumbled backwards.

--------

As soon as the elevator doors shut, Cutter took off his hat and slumped into the nearest chair with a resigned sigh.

"Well, that could've gone better."

"She really doesn't like AI, does she?" interjected Vallum.

Mark finally piped up. "Well, we don't exactly have a very good history with em, considering every time we deal with AI they usually try to kill us or lead us into a trap. Hell, did you forget that the reason I got killed is cause we were trying to take down Intrepid Eye? That's not our first time dealing with her, either, every time we thought we got her she just ends up coming back. I wouldn't be surprised if the next time we see Blue Team, she's riding shotgun in Fred's armor and tries to kill me the same way she did to Wendell."

"Wendell?"

"The AI for the 717th's investigation of the caves on Gao, she took him over and started puppeteering his avatar to mess with us, trying to get everyone killed. That's the mission we met mom on, Intrepid Eye was using some kinda Forerunner drone-thing to kill tourists for some reason, the GMoP thought it was a serial killer, a buncha classified stuff happened, and we ended up accidentally starting a coup and nuking a tourist attraction. That's why she still has a Gao accent when she's mad, she only joined ONI cause the guy who started the coup didn't like her, so she couldn't stay with the Ministry of Protection."

"You seem to be taking this better than I'd expect."

"Hey, I might be digital now but I'm still a Spartan. I'm used to being treated like disposable military hardware, just... just not by mom, I guess. She'll come around, though, she just needs some time."

The captain just sat in silence for a moment, lost in thought. In truth, some part of him had always considered smart AI to be people, a member of the family just as much as any other crew under his command, and the Inspector's words had cut him almost as deep as Isabel, whose avatar was now sitting cross-legged in one corner of the holotable in much the same way she'd been when they first rescued her.

Isabel, meanwhile, only had a superficial amount of herself on that holotable with the Captain. Most of her consciousness was pacing restlessly through the ship's circuits, as Veta's words had thrown her into another fit of melancholia she was trying to work through. Part of her kept running checksums and calculating digits of Pi, just to take processing power away from her emotions, while another fragment snaked its way through the ship to the Spartan quarters and coiled around Jerome's neural lace like a lifeline in a churning sea. She couldn't do much without being physically plugged into his armor, just read his biosigns, but his heartbeat and respiration were a steady rhythm to keep her grounded.

She could feel Mark spreading his own processes through the subsystems of the ship, bumping up against some of her safeguards and firewalls around critical equipment like life support and fire control, but he never tried to break through any of them, just left them as-is and moved on to the next subsystem. He really was taking this in stride, in a way she probably wouldn't have been able to even when she was brand new, and while part of her envied him for it, she knew deep in her core that it was because he'd been broken. Even before he was a machine, he was trained to be one, just like all her other Spartans.

It wasn't lost on her that Jerome himself was only emotionally open with her, specifically. He was the absolute picture of military discipline and stoicism, unshakeable even in the face of the most overwhelming odds, even on the most impossible missions anyone could throw at him, and the only time his softer side ever came out was when he was speaking to her. He talked to her like she was delicate, like he actually cared about her in a way he didn't about anyone else, and it was as comforting as it was addictive.

--------

Jerome felt a faint trickle of ice down his spine as he cleaned his shotgun, armor in for the usual repairs - minor plasma scarring and a few shrapnel punctures in the techsuit. He'd just gotten back from a routine operation backed by a squad of Hellbringers, taking control of a strategic Banished FOB near one of the many old Covenant shipwrecks to deny their salvage operations. It wasn't anything special, really, just a little exercise to get the blood pumping in a way the War Games really couldn't simulate, even if he still played them anyway to make sure Isabel's hard work didn't go to waste.

He could feel the ice in the base of his skull pulsing in time with his heartbeat, and a slight smile graced his lips as he reached for the dropper bottle of Hoppes.