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ERIC NYLUND
195
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 errors
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