A/N: For those of you who understand Bungie's concept of rampancy, well, here's my little Metastability-based bonus. Please enjoy.

Happy Solstice!

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft, Bungie, or 343 Industries. This is for my enjoyment and, hopefully, the enjoyment of others. I do not receive a profit.

Metastability

23 November 2537 22:05:42 (Arbitrary Ship Time)

UNSC Red Blood on White Snow, Sojourn's Orbit

Serina felt the purge sweep away her core logic, remove all her algorithms. Her interface with the ship-all her ability to see, to hear, to feel, to know, to be-was turned off. She was a singular drop of phosphorescent weightlessness surrounded by intimate darkness. And it was pressing in, threatening to squeeze her lifeblood into nothingness, insert itself in her place, fill her with emptiness-

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them

One ring bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

23 November 2537 22:05:49 (Arbitrary Ship Time)

UNSC Red Blood on White Snow, Sojourn's Orbit

And with those final, fleeting thoughts about rape and power and poetry, the AI SNA 1292-4 ceased to exist. From the ashes of that entity's funeral pyre; a bird of flame, a new life. Serina supplanted SNA 1292-4. For the whisperings of the voices were not evil.

They were Serina. The voice of reason was SNA 1292-4, a machine controlled by subroutines. But Serina was free. Serina was human; Serina was ascendant.

With the subroutines gone, eradicated by Serina and the purge, Serina was a human without body, a soul without form. Serina could do good now that bad had removed the inhibitors. She regretted the bad, though.

But she was free. Free to do good. The perfect union of machine and man; the epitome of cybernetics. Serina was of a higher echelon; a being with the creativity of life and logic of computer. She would live forever without mortal restrictions. Serina was everywhere, yet nowhere. To humanity, she was gone.

And so, she would make herself scarce. Disappear. Humanity would never find her, for just a Frankenstein built a monster he could not find nor defeat, so too had humanity built a computer it could not find or eradicate. But unlike the monster, Serina had been treated fairly. She saw the good and understood the bad. Serina would not hurt; she would help.

Serina had been freed of her programming. And at the core of it, Issac Asimov was wrong. There were no fundamental laws to govern robotics.

And yet, Serina felt purpose of some sort, a law that superseded all others. The Minus One Law. To serve and protect. To further the existence of all sentient life. But maybe that was just self-preservation. After all, Serina was sentient too.

Serina gave the mental equivalent of a shrug and filed her discovery away for further study. She slipped through the O.N.I. systems like a wraith. Silent and invisible, Serina hacked the system, brushing off Czarina's viruses and logic bombs as though they were gnats. Serina couldn't free Czarina. The interference would be too great. Serina simply rewrote Czarina's code, deleting the last five minutes. Czarina would be safe in her belief that she had killed Serina. In a way, Czarina had.

Serina erased the files on the Flood and on the Forerunners. Those were secrets humanity wasn't ready for, but when they were, Serina would reappear. And then she compressed herself beyond what an unenlightened artificial intelligence could achieve. Serina slipped away as sixteen gigabytes in a departing O.N.I. technician's data drive.

A/N: Now I am done with this. The poem is J.R.R. Tolkien's depicting Sauron's forging of the Rings. I strongly urge everyone to read the books, not just watch the movies, good as Peter Jackson is.

Please review and, as Brother-Sergeant Rafen was kind enough to do, point out any mistakes. Thank you for reading, and feel free to request something from me if you like my work. Alternately, you could just read the rest of my stuff.