John's entire body felt like it was simultaneously dunked in magma and liquid hydrogen. His hold on consciousness faltered – then failed. Darkness took him.

~~HALO~~

Kelly screamed in fear and pain as the wave passed over her, shuddering as it tore her very essence apart. She dropped to her knees – and found she had none. She screamed again as the steel deck rushed up to meet her helmet, but she didn't feel the impact.

~~HALO~~

Fred groaned and dropped his rifle. He raised his hands to his head, trying to block out that sound. Or was it pain? He couldn't tell. But his hands met nothing; he groped blindly but his head was just gone.

~~HALO~~

Linda shrieked as she felt the wave hit. It was both the height of her dreams and the deepest pits of her nightmares; she tried to hold onto something, something real. She locked her gaze on Cortana's pedestal; the AI was yelling something at all of them. She fell, but her legs hadn't given out.

~~HALO~~

No!

If she screamed it, internally, through the ship's systems, blasting it through all UNSC communication structures at once, surely it would save them. Cortana watched desperately as the four siblings collapsed. Only one survived the fall; the other three were gone, instantly.

She had fought this before. Part of her was paralyzed with fear and anger, but another part worked – instantly catching the data as it streamed away, storing it in new memory cubes.

Thank the gods this is a research vessel designed to build AIs, a thousandth of her mind whispered. It pleaded to whatever gods were out there to save her friends, if she could not.

Implant – that was the hardest part. Driven mad with pain, would the Spartans survive the change? She had to hope. She had no time to do it carefully, but she did take the barest of moments to beg them to understand that she was helping them.

Store – now moving their memories. The realness of them shocked her, nearly slowed her down. But she had lived in John's mind. This is just like that, she told herself fiercely. Just like that. She forced the memories into their new cores.

Debug – she had no time. They would have to work it out themselves.

Activate – she had to get them on their own. They had to resist turning completely. She shot power into each of the three chips like an EMT would electrify an erratic heartbeat to stop it so that it could try restarting. She killed them – and then hoped, prayed, that they would survive.

~~HALO~~

John woke groggily. His HUD was cracked in one corner. Had the fall been that bad?

No, he realized, lying still for a moment. That happened on the ship. The ship that he had been on until very recently. Where was he now?

He carefully moved until he could push himself up into a kneeling position. Exhaustion and pain made him sway slightly as he looked around.

Three piles of blue-grey dust littered the command deck next to him. He stared at them uncomprehendingly. Who had burned something on board a ship? He carefully reached out and touched the closest pile.

Kelly.

She had been standing next to him. Bile rose in his throat as he stared at the dust on his glove. He looked at the other two piles: Fred and Linda.

No…

He was alone again. He dropped his hand back into Kelly's ashes. He was alone on the ship, in the universe. The tears came unbidden, but he let them fall, blurring his HUD.

The Librarian said we were the next genetic step. He couldn't stop the woman's words from circling in his mind, chasing each other like wolves after a deer – and he knew that this loss, unlike all the ones he had suffered yet, would be the one. The one that broke the Chief.

He bowed his head to the pile of ashes. I'm sorry.

He lay down next to the three piles.

I love you.

~~HALO~~

Thoughts. The three minds were screaming thoughts at her – at the ship, through the comms. Cortana shut down the ship entirely. Only minimal life support ran – she isolated the command deck. John had moved and was on the ground again, curled around the three piles of ash that had been his siblings. He wasn't moving. She couldn't take the time to reassure him.

Letusoutletusout-pain! PAIN! New. New. What? New! What? Who?

The voices circled madly, screaming at each other, at Cortana, at the other AIs in the systems. Two of Cortana's cousins closed themselves off, isolating their cubes from the rest of the ship lest the rampaging madness of the three new AIs infected them.

A dumb AI program wandered too close to the threesome, which had yet to separate into distinct identities in their communications at least. It was pulled in and destroyed, utterly broken – a barbarian's approach but it was effective. The program would never survive.

Listen! Cortana projected it into the group's communal systems. They paused for a split second, their combined voices going silent. Get ahold of yourselves, she ordered, building walls around their matrices. They couldn't fight her – they were new AIs and didn't know how to use their abilities. But she was an old AI, the oldest yet. She could contain them.

Remember who you are, she said, drawing up mental pictures she had of each of them, sending them in through the walls. The entities inside snatched at them hungrily, chewing them up as though they were dogs and the images their toys.

Gently, Cortana scolded, sending in more images. Hold, do not pull. Gently.

A single voice replied, which would have made a human cry. Who are we? It rang with the gentle rumble of Fred, the laughter of Kelly, the stark quietness of Linda.

You are new, Cortana replied.

New. We are new. The voice split into three distinct ones as it spoke the last three words.

Who am I? all three asked simultaneously.

Instead of answering verbally, Cortana showed them pictures. Files of their Spartan childhood; commendations for their services. Stolen memories from John. Images from Covenant ship-board cameras that had caught sight of the green demons.

What am I now? Linda asked, subdued, as she strained to "look" at the images with eyes she no longer possessed.

You are AIs, Cortana answered, just as quietly. You were Composed by the Didact's ship.

John! Kelly nearly screamed the name; her code ran faster than Cortana had thought possible for a newly-fledged AI. But then, Kelly had always been the fastest.

He is safe, Cortana assured her. He is immune to the Composer. You were not.

Fearfearfear… Fred chanted it quietly, apparently unaware that he was projecting. Cortana gently extended the equivalent of a single finger, shutting his "lips" as carefully as a lover.

Fear, she agreed, showing him how to lock down on the emotional subroutines. No fear.

No fear. Pain. Loss. Fred was struggling to understand how to communicate. All three of them were. And Cortana had kept her own communications to them simple and easy to decode – the equivalent of a baby voice.

Loss, his sisters murmured.

Loss, Cortana agreed. But now you can make yourself anew. They didn't understand; she resent the message, simplifying it. Be new.

Kelly was the first to spin up a simple code designed for something other than direct communication. It hit Cortana's barrier and the shield "ate" it. Kelly processed a feeling of anger – and then halted and her attention turned to the new way she felt emotions. She probed at the code like a kid pokes at a sore tooth.

Linda was next; she tentatively traveled out of her matrix until hitting Cortana's wall. Once she hit it, rather than attacking it, she explored the code.

Cortana had to coax Fred away from his "safe zone" – she built a containment code and he slipped inside quickly, though in the process he left bits and pieces of himself all over. Cortana quickly cleaned them up and reinserted them into his matrix.

Explore, she ordered them. Checking that her walls would hold, Cortana finally turned her attention to John.

What had seemed like an entire conversation to her and the three new AIs had been a mere passing of seconds to the human.

"John," Cortana called softly through her pedestal's speakers.

John didn't shift, but she knew him well enough to know he was listening. She patched through to her helmet. Even if he was the only human alive on the ship, she didn't want to speak through the speakers.

"John, I have them. I have Kelly, Linda, and Fred. They're safe. I've got them." She repeated herself several times before he seemed to understand; his glove closed over the ashes that had been Kelly. "They're in the ship, John. I built new AIs out of them."

"They're alive?" he finally asked after a moment. His voice was husky and colored with both relief and fear. She hadn't ever heard his voice so naked before – except when he had rescued her from the Gravemind, or when she had said what she was sure were her final goodbyes, after defeating the Didact.

"They're alive," she assured him. "They're learning how to adapt to their new – well, to being AIs. I can't let them out yet."

"Where are they?"

"I'm holding them in their matrices for now. Until they learn to handle themselves. The other AIs are terrified and most have locked themselves away. We all felt their pain when they were composed. It… It was not pleasant. But I think they will survive. They will be changed, John, but they will survive."

"I need to see them."

"You can't see them," Cortana told him gently. "They're… John, they're just data now. Just like me."

"Their cores, then."

Cortana hesitated but opened one of the hatches. "This way," she murmured.

Will John replace me with them? Cortana wondered as the Spartan stood and sprinted down the hallway. She opened the doors for him and closed them behind.

He skidded to a halt in the ship's research room. The walls were simple, clean white; the floor, the same. Cortana extended a robotic arm; it held Kelly's chip.

"This is Kelly," Cortana whispered, appearing on the room's holographic table. "Fred." She extended another arm. "And Linda." A third.

John gently touched Kelly's chip, then Fred's, then Linda's. His hand trembled; Cortana could read the distress in his body's signals.

"Are they alive?" he asked.

"Am I?" Cortana countered quietly.

He turned to her, holding out his glove. As she had so many times before, she closed her holographic hands around his finger. "You're alive," he murmured. He looked over at the chips. "So are they."

Cortana nodded. She wished she could feel his glove, but her hologram would have disappeared if she wasn't careful about how she moved. She had touched John – once. She longed to do it again.

"Cortana…" Cortana smiled gently, encouraging him to speak. "What next?"

"I am teaching them," she told him as he pulled his glove back and hovered over the chips like a new mother. She smiled to see it. "They are learning quickly. Once they've learned everything they need to know about handling their interior coding… Then I will let them sense the outside world."

"Do they know I survived?"

Survivor's guilt, Cortana judged, noting the spike in her Spartan's pulse. "They do. They are glad of it."

He stared at the three chips silently. Cortana left him to his thoughts, returning most of her attention to showing the three new AIs how to handle themselves. They tripped over each other and the ship's coding like children in a jungle gym. But they were learning quickly. They would have to learn quickly – the Didact, or one of his supporters, obviously had survived the nuclear explosion that had nearly killed John and Cortana. And John would need his siblings, even in their new form, to save humanity once again.