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ERIC NYLUND
197
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!
And there was one thing she had missed in her previous analysis
of the Covenant communiques, a second signal on the carrier
wave: They used the same symbols she had used to find the Halo
construct—the symbols that the Master Chief had discovered on
the alien artifact on Cote d'Azur.
She hadn't seen the simple dots, bars, squares, and triangles
before because the Covenant, naturally, had embellished the
clean symbols with their highly decorated calligraphied scripts,
and further with their overwrought religious allusions.
Cortana, with her new subsystem and her new translation lexi-
con, could, as Dr. Halsey might say, "cut through the crap."