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| Flood nature. | |
| Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net> | Date: 1/26/08 10:42 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: The worst example is Floodgate (elpolloguapo) : Does that mean we shouldn't delve any deeper than the surface? Of course not. Not at all. I'd say mostly, though, this thread is getting sidetracked on a lot of picayune details, not delving deeper. Not entirely, but from time to time. : Well, there really isn't anything to indicate that he's omniscient or
Being a single galaxy-wide being does not necessarily imply omniscience or omnipotence. Nor does it need to. That he bothers to move his bulk around is merely evidence to the fact that he has a goal (the assimilation of all life everywhere) and that his existing biomass is progress towards that goal which will be lost if that mass is destroyed, even if that does not actually destroy his very consciousness or endanger the Flood as a life form. One may well speculate, I think quite logically, that Gravemind's entire agenda after the first Array firing is not merely to spread, but to prevent the Array from ever being used and to take whatever means necessary to protect as much as possible of his biomass from the Array should it be fired. Evidence in support of this: 1) In Halo 1 after the Flood are released on Installation 04 from the structures underneath the jungle, Guilty Spark teleports us to the Library to retrieve the Index. The Flood are already there in force. Presumably they were either already loose inside the structure (to prevent the Index from being retrieved) or massed there after release for the same reason. That they are assimilated human and Elite combat forms suggests the latter. That there are no pureforms would indicate either that Bungie hadn't thought of that idea yet, or that there is no large Gravemind mass present yet on 04 to spawn them. If we believe the Keyes blob was a proto-Gravemind then this is consistent. 2) In Halo 2 the Flood attack both the Human and Elite contingents are attacked by Flood units while making their way to the Library to retrieve the Index. 3) Gravemind sends an infected Elite cruiser to Earth, following Truth's keyship, then presumably sends other forces there to follow him through the Portal to the Ark. 4) From the Terminals we know about the final battle in space that played out between ships controlled by Flood infected organic beings and the AI controlled elements run by Offensive Bias. It is likely that through access to Flood infected Forerunner vessels, the entire nature of the Array and how it works is known by Gravemind. This is backed up by the Gravemind cutscene in H2. In short: Gravemind knows what the Array is and how it functions. He knows the Indices are essential. He probably knows the Ark exists and what it is, but not where. He probably knows that there are portals that lead there from various locations, but does not know where all these locations are. We know he knows what keyships are and how they work (also from the terminals). The movement of his mass from High Charity and eventually to the Ark does not mean in any way that his consciousness is limited, or requires proximity to be expressed through combat forms, pure forms, or any other aspect of the entire Flood being. It is an expression of the fact that as the locus of the Flood consciousness, the Gravemind body represents a signficant portion of the Flood's investment in the endeavor of infecting all life everywhere, as well as possibly the source of some of his higher functions. He moves it to the Ark because he knows this is a place of safety for him. In fact, I guessed this was his motivation back in H2 when I believed (as many did, and Ferrex has now revealed was the case at the time) that the Ark was on Earth. In the end he is undone by a fact he did not know: that a replacement for 04 was being built at the ark, was still there, and was functional. However one can argue that even had he know this, he would have been compelled to act in the same way in order to further his goals.
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