Chapter Text
Lying in his cot, Mordin Solus swiped up on his omni-tool to move onto the file’s next page. The room was dark save for the glow from the lit lamp on his nightstand and his omni-tool.
To say the Flood was terrifying as a concept would be a severe understatement. Even when all the necessary precautions were taken, one mistake could mean infection. And infection from the Flood meant devastation.
Mordin had seen the photographs. He had seen the few and far between scans. He had read the many, many mission reports. (It took a great deal of pestering the UNSC for access to them, but it was worth it.)
The Flood was so dangerous that he simply could not keep samples aboard the station. The risk of even one spore escaping and assimilating a host was far too high. So photographs, scans, and whatever else was contained in the reports had to do.
Mordin spent most nights— correction, every— night studying them. Taking notes. Thinking up possible solutions. It was better than constantly mulling over his past. A past he only remembered pieces of. A past that no one seemed to have any record of.
Working in labs, mostly. The one on the ship, the one that he couldn’t remember the name of beyond it starting with the human letter N… that lab had been his favorite.
His omni-tool provided no answers either, as its original storage chip had been damaged to the point where no data could be retrieved and rendering the overall device useless for some time. Luckily, he had been able to construct a new one and thus got it working again.
Mordin wished he could remember more. But he couldn’t. And so, working on the Flood problem seemed to be the more productive thing to do.
If only he could make some headway.
So many of the solutions he had conceived of, upon research had been already attempted and failed in the past, by the Forerunners or by other species. Was the only way to deal with the Flood truly only starving it or glassing any and all infected areas?
There were some days Mordin was close to giving up and resigning himself to that belief.
Then more mission reports would come in and his resolve to find a cure would come rushing back full force, like a tsunami. If he could prevent more deaths, he would keep going. He would not stop until he found a cure.
~~~~~~~~~
Mordin slept for a few hours, then got right back to work. He moved to the lab so he would have the equipment within reach, and began poring through all the data he had so far from start to finish.
Perhaps he had missed something, or perhaps the reports he had received later during his research combined with examining previous records would reveal something not previously considered.
“Did you get any sleep at all?”
Mordin did not look up from the holoprojections displayed by his omni-tool. He knew the voice belonged to his colleague, Dr. Evangeline Amonnett.
“Don’t need same amount of sleep humans do,” Mordin answered. “Hyperactive metabolism means less time needed to think, speak, move, so on. Shortened lifespan only unfortunate side effect.”
Being a scientist, more specifically a geneticist, he naturally had taken and examined samples of his own tissue, ran a number of different scans on his body, all in the hopes that perhaps examining his own physiology would bring him some answers as to who he was and where he came from.
Aside from scars left behind that were obviously the result of combat, all he found were the traits he described to Dr. Amonnett. Any answer was a good answer, of course, and he was grateful he found as much as he did.
But in the grand scheme of things, many questions were still left unanswered.
“You on the other hand,” Mordin continued, “went to bed at 20:00. Only 1:00 now. Typically recommended 7 to 8 hour sleep cycle not finished.”
“Caught me,” Amonnett admitted, sitting down on the other side the worktable. “Couldn’t sleep, I thought I’d get some work done. You’re still having problems with the MRI scanner, correct?”
Mordin nodded.
“Yes,” he answered. “Shim coils continue to fail correcting shifts in main magnetic field’s homogeneity.”
“I’ll look into it,” Amonnett said.
She picked up her tablet from where it sat next her empty coffee mug, which had yet to be washed from yesterday morning. On one side of the mug, there was a decal with a disposable coffee cup and next to it an exaggerated typeface that said “I never said I would die without coffee, I said others may die.”
“What are you working on?”
“Personal project,” was always Mordin’s automatic answer to that question. He didn’t see the point in sharing details when he had yet to make any progress. He didn’t want to give false hope.
“That’s what you’ve been saying for the past six months.”
“No progress,” he told her. “Potential solutions conceived already attempted and failed by others.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“Don’t want to waste your time,” Mordin said. He scrolled through another report.
“Not a real quote from Albert Einstein, but I suppose it’s appropriate here: ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,’” Amonnett replied, setting her tablet back down as she looked up at him. “I don’t know if you’ve been consulting anyone else or not. But if you haven’t… if that’s why you haven’t made progress, then maybe a change is in order?”
Mordin didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes locked onto the words in front of him.
“Trying to find cure for Flood,” he finally said. He still didn’t look at her. “As long as Flood exists, so does risk of our extinction.”
Dr. Amonnett did not respond. The silence began to tighten Mordin’s stomach, and he finally glanced at her. Her chin was resting on a propped fist, and she appeared to be thinking deeply about something.
Mordin’s eyes flicked back to the report he was reading.
“I might know someone who can help.”
He glanced back at her.
“Who?” he asked.
“Can’t say,” she replied. “But I’ll reach out to them.”
Mordin was once more reminded that much like how his colleague knew little about him (in his defense, he also didn’t know much about himself), he also knew very little about her. Perhaps even less than she did him.
Amonnett was never open about anything. Mordin knew nothing of her family, friends (or if she even had any)… the most that he knew about her was that her area of expertise was more aligned with technology. Be it medical equipment, computers, etc. That, and the fact that she liked coffee.
That coffee mug of hers felt like the most real and personal thing he knew about her.
Nevertheless, he did appreciate that she wanted to help. And maybe she was right. Maybe he did need to start including other people if he wanted to make progress.
There was only one way to find out. He might as well take the chance and accept the assistance that was offered.
“Thank you,” he said.
Dr. Amonnett nodded, and picked up her tablet again. Mordin went back to reading the report.
~~~~~~~~~
Sitting on his cot half-dressed, Mordin stared at the email projected by his omni-tool. The sender was unknown, and parts of the email as well as the files attached were censored. But the contents contained within could be the key he needed.
“Corrupted Precursor dust,” he muttered to himself.
The strange dust, which had been found in glass capsules aboard ancient starships, had previously been believed by ancient humans and San’Shyuum to be a harmless organic substance in the form of a white powder. One with calming psychotropic effects on animals, such as the now extinct Pheru. It took a number of centuries before the changes began to take a drastic turn, and the Flood first emerged.
The changes were sudden. Unexpected. And then there was the appearance of a still living Precursor, the Primordial. A Precursor that when he was alive, desired revenge against the Forerunners.
“If powder truly started out harmless, could corruption be the result of genetic alteration by the Primordial?”
Perhaps.
Still, he shouldn’t ignore alternative explanations. It was entirely possible that the Precursor dust had mutated long before it was originally found by the ancient humans and San’Shyuum and that it simply took time for the more malicious changes to appear externally in the Pheru that were fed the powder, and that the majority prior were internal. Another possibility was that the Primordial had genetically altered the dust himself prior to the ships’ discovery, perhaps with some sort of programming that suddenly triggered the Flood mutations after a certain period of time passed.
In the end, it didn’t matter. The fact of the matter was, the Flood was not always the Flood. There had been a before.
In one of the files there was a series of spacial coordinates, and below it what appeared to be a poem. In it, two words in particular caught his eye. “Spores,” and “ring.” Though the language was vague in many places and thus difficult to parse, he knew from the description that the ring in question had to be a Halo Array.
As for the spores…
“Poem appears to be from POV of someone born from them,” Mordin mused to himself. “Variant of Flood? No, mysterious contact wouldn’t have sent coordinates if that were the case.”
At the very least, there was definitely a connection. It was worth investigating.
If Mordin could get his hands on a sample of uncorrupted genetic material from a Precursor, there was a chance he could use that to develop a cure. There were of course no guarantees, but it was a place to start. A clear direction he could move in. He wasn’t stuck in place anymore.
He was going to travel to Installation 07— and there, maybe he would find some answers.