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Did GM survive the Array?
Posted By: Capt Spanish <jon.wilcox@gmail.com>	Date: 6/13/08 1:37 a.m.
: I was about to be like "what do you mean we don't have any proof it : kills Graveminds..." when I realized we don't. I guess I just always : assumed it did. "You imply disparity where none exists." ~ Borg Queen - First Contact The flood is a hive mind. In terms distinguishing one form from another it is probably best to think of them in terms of intellectual processing power rather than separate entities. The infection spores are at the bottom of the Flood hierarchy. Like previously noted nothing more than mere animals. The extent of the infection forms intelligence is limited to finding and assimilating a host. Instinct is probably more appropriate than intelligence in this instance. Once a host is found the infection spore attaches itself and in doing so highjack’s the host's mental processing power. The infection spores are like a hard drive with no computer. Once they find a computer to highjack they can then use the computer to access all the stored data on the drive. But the processing power of an individual host is somewhat limited. And its ability to act on that stored information is also limited. Apparently the infection spores are like hard drives with wireless cards taped to them. So you get another infection form with attached host. Now you have a network. Distributed processing. So you add the processing power of tens and hundreds and thousands of hosts together. Massive amounts of raw processing power. At some point it becomes necessary to develop an entity capable of utilizing and directing that processing power. This is where the GraveMind comes into play. Biomass and sentience are two different things. Biomass is raw living organisms, there is no requirement for intelligence in Biomass. The infection spores require sentient organisms to infect. To climb the Flood evolutionary ladder. The GraveMind does not have such requirements because its processing power is the contained within the distributed network made up of the infected hosts. It needs only enough Biomass to sustain itself. So by that rational, and what we know of how the Halo Array functions, the Array very likely would not directly kill a GraveMind. But would kill all of the infected hosts, which are by default all sentient beings. This would effectively wipe out the GraveMind's processing power. Rendering it dumb and useless. The GraveMind would then be no more than a pile of dead rats/bugs/fish. Unable to reason or even interpret external stimuli. Think Flowers for Algernon. I would like to give the Forerunners (and Bungie) enough credit that if you're going to burn down your house to kill the termites you better make damn sure you get the queen.

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