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| Re: Note about the Flood | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 9/13/06 9:24 a.m. |
In Response To: Re: Note about the Flood (UrsusArctos) : Hmm...you may have hit the nail on the head. After all, the Arbiter
If you mean that he recognizes his appearance-- sure. Obviously the Covenant have come across enough Forerunner artifacts to know one when they see one. More than that, they've identified Monitors specifically and given them the appellation "oracles". But again, that may just be them imbuing an item with no religious significance to the Forerunners with religious significance, either out of ignorance... or... heh... by design. The Arbiter has heard of Oracles enough to recognize
Well, you know what they say, a prophet is never respected in his home town. : He certainly may not be motivated to lie outright, because a lie would
He may not know all the truth. Or, consistent with some of his other remarks, he may already assume people know more than they do. That's already happened once. : But Halo is not a weapon of last resort! Remember what Cortana said,
In Halo 2, that is exactly how Spark describes it. The Arbiter asks what Halo is, and Spark replies "weapons of last resort". Certainly other weapons DO work on the Flood. You use them throughout the entire game, and the Flood are killed dead. However, in the long run this is ineffective because the Flood spreads faster than you can kill all the infected individuals. It's like a custom Zombie game. It's just a matter of time before the Zombies win. They almost can't lose by definition. Think about the events of Halo 1. Spark wants to activate the installation. But apparently we are led to believe that by detonating the PoA's engines and destroying it, the Flood were prevented from escaping the ring. That may or may not be so. However, if we take it on face value that this happened, then that was an alternative way of handling that particular instance. Likewise, the Forerunners may have had other methods of combating the Flood, such as the Sentinels and Enforcers. But as Spark says during the Library, these are effective as weapons against the Flood "only for a short time". One time, 100,000 years ago, those other methods failed, and the Forerunners activated their weapon of last resort-- Halo-- killing themselves in the process. However, their weapon was designed in such a way that although it would stop the active spread of the Flood, that specimens would be preserved so that the Flood would not be exterminated as a species. Spark also details that in the Library. The Halos are meant as flood-eradication units
I think you've got it backwards. If it were not for the ring's primary purpose of killing all potential Flood hosts, there would be no particular reason to contain or study them. I think the facilities for storage and study of the Flood exist on the Halo installations precisely BECAUSE they are weapons to prevent the Flood from spreading. It's a failsafe. We don't know much, say, about the life cycle of an infection form. For the sake of argument, though, let's assume that Spark is right, that the facilities on Halo to store the Flood are essential to their survival as a race. That would seem to indicate that, without these facilities, the Flood would have been eliminated at some point in time in the past. The logical candidate for this point is when the installation is used. One may infer from this that, say, infection forms have a finite lifespan before they must find a suitable host, and failing to do so, they die. If this were the case, when Halo was fired, all hosts were killed. All remaining free infection forms would eventually die. All remaining combat forms would also, presumably, eventually die. The Flood would be more than stopped-- they would cease to exist. This is why Halo exists. To stop the spread of the Flood without destroying them as a species. The preservation and study functions exist BECAUSE of the destructive function; there would be no need for one without the other. One might presume that this is achieved by keeping infection forms frozen, or in some kind of stasis-- something that prevents them from dying in the absence of potential hosts. Or, perhaps more diabolically, perhaps potential hosts are necessary periodically. That would go a long way towards explaining things like why the surface of the ring is empty when the Flood aren't loose, and why controls aren't tighter, and why Flood appear to be loose on Delta even before we get there-- a LONG TIME before we get there. : There's no doubt that such mechanisms to preserve sentient life exist. But
Indeed! However, I am inclined to think he already had all of that information anyway. Certainly he wishes his captives to believe so. : But Guilty Spark might have unearthed something in Cortana's data arrays that
I don't think he could get that from Cortana since Cortana was unaware of the firing before Spark revealed it. What he did get was a record of human civilization, covering the period from the last firing to now. I think it is logical to assume that with his masters extinct, Spark had little contact with whatever sentient life did exist in the galaxy after the firing. So in that sense, it is his "lost time". One can even see a touch of romanticism in Spark's use of the royal "we" there, presumably referring to himself and the Forerunners, or perhaps himself and the other Halo bastions, the Monitors. Knowledge of the
I think Spark already knows where the Ark is. He doesn't need Cortana to tell him. His shock at the Chief's ignorance comes from another source, I think. : Why do the flood need preservation? Or is it that they have some condition
I believe that this is one of the central questions to the entire story. Where did the Flood come from? Why did the Forerunners come up with a solution to the problem of their runaway expansion that seems so illogical? What does Gravemind want? : The Forerunners perhaps live on in humanity. Are they part of the human
I strongly suspect some of these we may never get a definitive answer to. Much more fun that way :) : Did Spark know all of the contingency plans from the outset? Or did he learn
I honestly don't think there's any indication that Cortana had access to privileged information in the Core that Spark doesn't already have.
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