Well, I have an obsessive personality. I often run out of interest before I finish a story. Now, I have plans to finish every single fic I have posted, and many, MANY more that I have not. But I don't have time to work up an interest in everything I have extant fics or ideas on.
So I may finish this fic. I may not. But, and this is my single biggest complaint WHENEVER I post anything to this site:
ALL HITS, and NO REVIEWS, will surely make Gunshot STOP UPDATING.
Let the story commence.
X-X-X
Halo: I Need You
X-X-X
"We're adrift in half a ship, in unknown space. Our chances of rescue are nearly zero..."
John dropped his now useless MA5B assault rifle. Cortana could detect no emotion through the opaque golden visor. "There's always hope." He stepped into the open cryotube.
"Wake me... when you need me."
The tube hissed shut.
X-X-X
Cortana gazed from her holographic pedestal at the cryotube. A dusting of frost covered it, but the green armor was still visible underneath.
How long had it been?
Two years. She remembered. They'd been adrift in the Stern of the UNSC frigate 'Forward Unto Dawn' for two years now.
She was shocked at her own question. Was she really failing? Was the decay approaching? Cortana did not feel fear often - AIs were hard go kill - but she felt it now. It was like a spike of cold metal through her parallel processors.
For the first time in the two years they'd been adrift, Cortana turned the bay cameras away from John's lonely cryopod and on her own holographic pedestal. The view only intensified her fears.
Her once beautiful, electric blue holographic avatar had become an angry blood-red - the blue only remained in her eyes. The lines of code which once flowed over her 'body' fuzzed and flickered constantly. Occasionally the whole hologram flickered.
She gazed apprehensively through the camera at her own terrified expression. She bit her 'lip', noting with inane amusement how many human reflexes she'd picked up.
She watched 'herself' unconsciously rubbing her shoulders. The cameras turned, and she looked at the pod again. Her eternal companion, the master chief Spartan 117, lay just out of reach.
Sparkling blue holographic tears appeared at the corners of her eyes, and slid down her 'face' unnoticed. For the first time since they were set adrift, the bay speakers activated, and her voice echoed in the dead silence of space.
"I need you, John... I need you..."
X-X-X
Cortana blinked. Not her hologram - she did the digital equivalent of blinking and shaking her head.
She checked the timer. Adrift for 3 years, 10 months, 18 days, 12 hours, 58 minutes, 41 seconds, 167 milliseconds. It had been 993 milliseconds since her last true routine execution. Almost a full second of time where she had done nothing.
She'd been... woolgathering.
AI constructs did not suffer from short attention spans. AI constructs did not get... distracted. Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
She ran a quick diagnostic. Then a more comprehensive one. Then as full a check as she possibly could.
There was no doubt. Tiny sections of her colossal bank of stored data were, slowly but surely, decaying and going viral.
Rampancy was nearly upon her. It was a short slide from here into insanity and, eventually, death - either from the decay, or decommissioning by the UNSC to prevent her insane self from wreaking havoc with their computers.
She felt a spike of true despair for the first time in her entire life, as she ran the wake-up procedure for the cryotube in front of her.
X-X-X
John was aware of light on his eyelids, filtered through a dusting of frost on polycarbonate.
He was awake. Cortana had woken him from his icy sleep. He sat up as the glass opened, and opened his eyes groggily.
His eyes snapped completely open. The holograph pedestal before him held a sight that clutched his heart with an icy hand.
Cortana - her hologram - lay on her side, barely pushing herself up from the 'floor' with her arms. She was clearly suffering. But that was not the most disturbing to John.
He'd been told that a symptom of approaching Rampancy was changing of the hologram from the AI's chosen color to a blood red, leaving only the eyes in their original color.
Cortana's hologram, however, had progressed to a horrifying black. She raised her head to look at him, and irridescent red eyes stared, wide with desperation.
"John... I need you!"
The hologram flickered.
"How long now?" Asked John, his voice quiet.
Cortana hung her 'head' in despair. "If my calculations are correct... which they might not be... 39 hours. When I crack, you can't be in a cryopod. My insane self could kill you there without ever waking you. And... the bay will shut down anyway, without me to oversee power direction."
John sat heavily on the edge of the open pod. "So this is it? You're going to die, killed by your own systems, and I'm going to die of anoxia or hypothermia since the pod will be useless."
Cortana's hologram flickered again. "I... I want you to do it, John."
He looked up. "You want me to do wh- oh no. You don't mean... I couldn't..."
She gave the best smile she could muster. "I don't want to die insane. I don't want to have tried to kill you in the end. Please, John..."
Feeling as if his feet were made of lead, John stood and walked to the pedestal.
"Goodbye, John. I'm... I'm glad it's you that's here right now..."
"Goodbye, Cortana. I'm... I'm just sorry it has to end like this."
He tapped a sequence of keys, and Cortana's blackened hologram vanished. John finished the shutdown sequence, and then ran a data transfer.
The chip in its slot clicked and ejected into John's waiting hand. The chip, a half-inch of plastic and metal, now contained everything that was his closest friend and companion Cortana.
The tiny square sat in his armored gauntlet like a robin's egg in a scrap-metal crusher. If he made a fist - as she had asked him before he shut her down - Cortana would be dead, as surely as if he'd shot her.
Cortana was the most important person in the world to him, and his hand was around her neck. All it would take would be a quick squeeze.
His fingers twitched, and he felt sweat building up inside his armor.
A vision flashed through his mind - how it would feel to crush the chip. To feel the plastic bend, the aluminum crumple, the silicon crack.
He stared in horror at his illusory fist, tight around the wreckage of the chip. His shoulders shook as the vision continued, and blood began to well from between his fingers. Cortana's blood.
It's not real, he told himself. It's just a stress hallucination -
The sparkling crimson liquid trickled across his fingers and began to drip.
John screamed, screwing his eyes shut and shaking his head.
When he opened them, the hallucination had vanished. The chip lay, undamaged, in John's palm.
"Cortana, forgive me..." he said. "I can't do it."
She, of course, could not hear him. In her state of shutdown, she was remarkably similar to him in cryo - kept in perfect stasis until such a time as the chip was re-powered.
Perfect stasis...
She was 39 hours from rampancy... but only if she was powered up again.
John hefted the chip, then raised it to his helmet. He plugged it into the jaw port, making sure to engage the safety protocol that he had previously kept off at all times.
Green text flashed across his HUD. 'Foreign data repository detected. Activate? Y/N'
"No," said John firmly. The jaw port was as safe a place as he could put the chip which held Cortana's life, but he could not let it activate. "Lock chip in shutdown."
'Shutdown status locked. Please set password for lock.'
" 'Semper Fidelis.' "
'Password accepted.'
John sat once more on the edge of the cryotube.
Though the ship was pressurized, it was icy cold. His suit's internal heaters were designed for snowy environments, but not prolonged exposure to extrasolar space. He was running on the heat flash from cryo wake-up. In about fifteen hours, he'd be encased in metal that was far below 273.15 Kelvin.
It seemed that the password he'd set was probably going to turn out false. He was just as doomed as Cortana. More so, even, because Cortana stood a scant chance of survival if she was rescued - years, decades, millennia later, the intact chip pulled from his frozen armor.
He slowly stood up, picked up his faithful assault rifle from its resting place of almost four years, and walked to the back of the cryo bay.
He sat on the floor between two aft cryotubes. He had a clear shot at the only door. If the need arose - improbable as it might be - he would defend this position to the bitter end.
X-X-X