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Was it worth the risk of using? Perhaps. If she could mitigate the risk, she'd copy a portion of herself onto an isolated system in Ascendant Justice. She could always erase this subsystem if anything went wrong.
The potential rewards of this operation were great. She might be able to restore herself to full operational capacity—even car?rying the Halo data.
Cortana double- and triple-checked the system she would overwrite: the Covenant software that managed the life support on the lower decks. Since the lower decks were now evacuated and cold, life support was moot. She carefully severed the con?nections from that subsystem to the rest of the ship.
She also rechecked her thinking. This copying software was likely responsible for the Covenant AI's fractured thinking. Her thinking, however, was being squeezed to nothing. There had to be a balance between these two deleterious states.
Cortana initialized the Covenant file-duplication software. It moved, and the entire thing pulsed and reached for her; she im?mediately shut down all contact with her translation suite.
The dark functions touched her code, wrapped around them, pushed against the barriers she had erected.
It happened too fast, but she didn't stop the process. It was far too interesting to stop.
She distantly felt that portion of her mind blur and replicate, assembled line by line into its new location within Ascendant Justice. It felt strange. Not that it was strange she could think in more than one place about more than one thing at the same time—she was used to multiprocessing.
This was different strange—as if she had a glimpse into some?thing wonderful... and infinite.
ERIC NYLUND
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The replication ceased, and the copying code was once again in?ert and safely stored with the dissected Covenant AI's directory.
Cortana ran her entire system; nothing else had been altered.
She checked the new copied system. It was intact, and, apart from a few slight errors in the software—which she immediately mended—it appeared functional.
She initiated the new system and slaved it with her original system, running them in parallel—one tapping the ONI's English-Covenant lexicon, the other tapping the alien AI's Covenant-English lexicon.
If the alien copying software could duplicate her translation routine, could it duplicate more of her?
No. She squelched that thought. The risk of copying any more "hers" was too great. There were too many unknowns. And this was, after all, the enemy's code. There could be booby traps, waiting to be tripped within the complex algorithms.
Besides, copying herself would do nothing to prevent her mental degradation. Those interconnection errors were already present ... and they always would be, despite the number of copies generated.
She remembered the strange fractured speech patterns of the Covenant AI and wondered how many times it had been copied.
Her thoughts were interrupted as the Covenant transmissions became clear. It was suddenly as if she had a new set of eyes and ears to hear them: Excavation proceeding; new sublayer discovered at six-hundred-meter depth, and Patrol unable to find the Infidels; returning to base, and Minor artifacts discovered; rejoice!