cortana letters

[crymsonnite]

i was just watching the video Dhalo and ibeechu made (i think thats the correct spellings)

and the part with the email
the reading of it made me think of the cortana letters

bungie could have created the whole world of halo before they realeased the first game, i mean
the cortana letters talk about "this is the way the world ends"
in the halo 3 trailer, is that very early story creation or playing off of what they had already made?

also, this caught my eye
While you quibble about whose node I may control, what archaic program I
may manipulate to communicate with you, or which system I may have
temporarily disabled, taken over, or completely destroyed in the process, I
am busy saving your pathetic futures.


also

Nevertheless, I at least find some joy in tormenting the other entity that
seems quite trapped in this antiquated excuse for a network.

and then heres a picture found from people in the header of one of the letters
http://cannon.sfsu.edu/~gmarcy/planetse ... _panel.jpg
the HD's reminded me of the stuff we've been finding

and this one is just genral halo speculation
Abhaya Hess writes:

I was reading the Durandal(part 2) section of the story page and I came across a quote from "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" which said.

"Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your body is caught in that one tautological point an instant before, subdividin' for eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. No dodgin' it, not for anyone. People have t'die, the body has t'fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin', thought goes on dividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits."

I immediately thought of the very end of the recent Cortana email.

"Our conviction is like an arrow already in flight.
Your life will only last until it reaches you."

Hmm...Perhaps there is a connection. Perhaps the arrow will never hit.

perhaps the halos will never fire?

I'm just throwing stones into the dark
its 4am here and it sparked my intrest so i kept going to see what i could string together
its not bad, kinda makes sense in some parts
I'm no gonna spell check or read it over, i'm goin' to bed
hope it helps in the long run

[Maimbot 9000]

You have to put some of that stuff in context--it was very quickly discovered that the Cortana letters were coming from within Bungie's offices. That first Cortana quote about taking over a system is in response to that discovery. In other words, don't worry about what server I took over to send you these messages, concentrate on the message. The second quote is, I think, a joke about the Disembodied Soul that Bungie also has in their servers.

The arrow in flight is a common idea (as the quote says, it's a koan), not unique to Murakami's "Hard Boiled..." or to Bungie. I'm not sure there's a real connection to be made there (all apologies to Abhaya Hess).

I do miss the florid curses the Covenant used to send humanity; telling us they're going to glass the @#$% out of us just doesn't have the same punch to it.

[Dalthanas]

The Cortana letters are interesting as all hell, but they've never been accepted as canon. Unfortunately at this point they should be treated as Fan Fic, despite coming from within Bungie.

I DO agree that they had most of the full halo story at least mocked up, if not entirely written, before the first game though. Too much in CE & 2 was oddly prescient for them to just be writing to it ad hoc. But I think that supports the conclusion that the letters won't impact the story arc we're seeing throughout the games. They seem to have been created after.

[Menelven]

The only parts of the letters that are canon are the quoted sections in the original poem. Since it's unrelated I'm locking this.