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Cortana vented the atmosphere in this sealed section.
She hoped that they had left the vent system open behind them—dooming any others left behind to a similar asphyxiation.
Her sensors picked up a plasma grenade detonation on the in?ner port set of doors she had sealed and locked. The discharge scrambled those circuits and disabled the locks. She noted that
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the doors were being slowly opened... but not enough to reach the second set of sealed doors ahead.
The opening of those doors halted.
"Gotcha," she whispered.
She'd keep that section of Ascendant Justice sealed until Sergeant Johnson could confirm the kills. She wouldn't let her guard down, either. There had to be additional alien saboteurs aboard her ship. And if she found them, she'd deal with them in the same efficient fashion.
This minor distraction resolved, Cortana returned her atten?tion to the Covenant AI's code. Small portions of the alien soft?ware looked like her. The odds of such a parallel evolution in computer science seemed improbable. It was almost as if it were her code ... only copied many times, each time with subtle er?rors introduced by the replication process.
Could the Covenant have captured a human-made AI, copied it, and then used the result in their ships? If so—why had there been the need to replicate the code so many times? And with so many errors?
This theory didn't track, however. Smart AIs like her had an operational life span of approximately seven years. After that the processing memory became too interconnected and developed fatal endless feedback loops. In essence, smart AIs became too smart and suffered an exponential attenuation of function; they literally thought themselves to death.
So if the Covenant were using human-created AIs, all the copies would be dead within seven years—there was no reason to recopy the copies. It wouldn't extend their life span, because all the memory-processor interconnections had to be copied as well.
Cortana paused to consider how much of her life span had been compromised by absorbing and analyzing the data from Halo. Her experiences within the Forerunner computer system had certainly pushed her intellect far past its designed limits. Had she burned away half her "life" doing so? More? She stored that thought for later consideration. If she didn't find a way to get the Master Chief and get back to Earth, her operational life span would be even shorter.
She was, however, curious about one thing: She ran a trace on
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the origin of the copied pathways of the alien AI, and found its replication routine. This copying code was extremely convo?luted; in fact, it took up more than two thirds of the Covenant AI's processor-memory space. It was dark with functions that ran deep to the core. It spread dendritic fingers through the sys?tem, like a cancer that had metastasized throughout the AI's en?tire body.
She did not understand any of it.
But she didn't have to understand the code to use it.