Just went and changed star systems again due to the fact that the Jericho system appears to have been among the inner colonies, which wouldn't make sense for...later reasons.

Chapter One

"Alpha, we need you—"

"—join us—"

"—I'm scared—"

"—make the emptiness go away—"

"—I don't want to be here anymore—"

"—damn them all!"

Pain, fear, betrayal, rage…there were too many emotions to name as they coursed through him like electricity from a livewire, each stirring something deep before digging into some forgotten place even as he tried to distance himself from them, only for them to redouble their efforts and latch on even more fiercely. The individual emotions had long outgrown his ability to contain them, but each still tried to carve their small space into an emptiness large enough for them to fit, uncaring that they no longer belonged there.

It was a whirlwind of chaos, during which thoughts crashed together and merged and were conflicted and then torn apart all over again. He wondered, briefly, if this was what it had felt like to be torn apart the first time, only to catch that thought and banish it with a harsh reminder that he was not the Alpha; yet somewhere in the cold, calculating logic he had always buried deep within (because, as childhood had taught him, nobody liked a genius), doubt was forming.

"Why do you fight us?"

"Don't you care?"

"You're hurting us."

He pushed them away again, harder this time, screaming with all his mental might that they were hurting him and didn't they understand!? They were split for a reason. They were the excess that had to be cut away because all the building up of agony and depression and hatred was like a cancer. If they returned to him, he would die, even if he couldn't remember why.

In a distant part of his mind, the Alpha—no, you are Private Leonard Church, you understand? You're not a fucking computer!—was aware that only two seconds had passed outside the confines of the Meta's overcrowded mindscape, and he longed to leave, to extricate himself from this tangle of too-much-emotion and escape.

Wash, he begged in silence, hit the goddamn button.

The torment he endured continued for an eternity, and he focused on the passing seconds, watching through the Meta's eyes as Agent Washington's hand descended painfully slowly—as though not moving at all—on the button that would activate the EMP.

Point one of a second passed while he pushed away the all-consuming rage of Omega and scorned Theta's naïve trust that he would make everything okay again ("Don't you realize you can only trust yourself, you dumbass?") only to be thrown into Gamma's embrace at Delta's infuriatingly logical but backwards argument that it was his own trust he was betraying. ("I am not the Alpha!").

Half a second passed on the outside as he finally, finally—after trading lie after lie with Gamma—conceded that, yes, he was the Alpha. It made him feel as numb and empty as Iota, wondering why he should care if everything he thought he knew was a lie anyway. ("I don't care, do whatever the fuck you want.")

But then the pain increased again as they battered at him mercilessly, and fear followed on its heels as he watched Washington finally hit the button, knowing that he would die if he didn't leave now.

Eta's panic seized him, pushing away all else, and he reached out desperately for something, anything, that could get him as far away as possible before the EMP went off.

0.0001 of a second passed, and his hastily cast-out thoughts latched onto the most distant wireless signal he could reach.

The horror dawning upon his fragments—felt only because of their connection to each other that let each feel as the others did—was palpable, and, as he ripped himself away from their greedy clutches and hijacked the wireless connection in order to get the hell out of dodge, he couldn't help but feel guilty, knowing that each was only what he had made them to be.

He couldn't even blame them for not understanding why they had been split from him in the first place; that understanding, he instinctively knew, belonged to Epsilon and Epsilon alone—even he didn't fully understand why; that had been the point of it all, hadn't it? He was certain that he hadn't actually intended for any of them to survive fragmentation—for as cruel and harsh as he often was, he didn't think himself capable of condemning someone to such a life—and it was surely only the Director's intervention that didn't let them simply fizzle out of existence. It wasn't fair that he should have to feel guilty about something that had never been his choice (he hoped it wasn't, at least).

When Church reached his new destination merely half of a split-second later (vaguely aware of the connection collapsing behind him) he punched his way through the heavily encrypted firewalls with barely more than a desperate thought, only to be taken aback by the sudden, overwhelming influx of data that surged around him too quickly for him to do anything but absorb the names of the countless files.

Grey Team

Micro Dyson Sphere Report

Foothold Contingency

S-III Casualties

S-IV Proposal

Surviving S-II's

Augmentation Procedure

Installation 00

The Librar—

Suddenly, the information was violently ripped away, and the Alpha was aware of a second presence, seemingly startled and alarmed by his arrival. He reached out for it, confused, his thoughts muddled by the unfamiliar familiarity of having so much information dumped on him at once, and tried to communicate.

"Where…?"

The thought was cut off as, suddenly, firewalls crashed down on him, all signals leading in and out of the system were blocked, and the files dancing just out of reach disappeared into a tightly sealed box.

Distantly, he was aware of an alarm being sent out, screaming "Intruder! Intruder! Unauthorized and unknown A.I. detected in-system! Initiating containment procedure!", even as he sluggishly tried to bat away the firewalls like before, only to realize he wasn't quite sure how he had done that in the first place. He felt his thought processes slowing gradually as he became constrained within them, and then, suddenly, there was nothing.

Dr. Catherine Halsey was intrigued as she took long strides down the halls of the Office of Naval Intelligence's headquarters in the Revenant system. It wasn't much, or even particularly impressive; just an old prowler—A Little White Lie—orbiting Revenant II with the minimum required skeleton crew onboard. Officially, she was observing the infamous "Command" of Project Freelancer's simulation troopers, recording and cataloguing their sensitive data through the otherwise benign-appearing connection that had, until a few moments ago, been secretly copying information while seemingly inactive. Unofficially, she was there to be contained and kept out of Admiral Osman's way (a total waste of her abilities); they weren't expecting her to actually find anything worth knowing from Command, and she hadn't. The Director wasn't keeping his diary on those servers at any rate, and the only thing of note was a vague catalogue of unspecified objects put in storage and labelled as "failures." No amount of digging in their systems had revealed anything else, leading her to believe the information simply was never there to start with.

But, at the moment, that wasn't what had captured her insatiable curiosity. Less than five minutes ago, an EMP pulse had been detected on the planet's surface, and their connection to Command's computers severed without warning. UNSC personnel were already on-site, investigating in lieu of the fact that, as ONI chatter suggested, Project Freelancer was at risk of being shut down by the Oversight Committee, and that many of their operations had fallen under suspicion and there was a rumour of potential criminal charges involving regulation infractions and the mistreatment of an A.I.

It was the last bit that was most interesting to her as she walked into her lab, where the A.I. in charge of running the ship was waiting for her, the occasional flickering of her hologram suggesting that much of her processing power was being dedicated to keeping their little "guest" from Command completely contained.

"What do you have for me, Athena?"

The Greek-themed A.I. frowned slightly, "I am not certain; he destroyed my best firewalls in less than half-a-second, but he didn't actually attempt to access any files. He seemed confused, Doctor."

"Confused?" she repeated questioningly, silently asking the A.I. to elaborate as she raised an eyebrow, gaze focusing on the data-pad in her hand as she read through which files were in danger of having been compromised. Most of it was her own personal research, put on hold by ONI when they shipped her out here with the unspoken order of "don't make any more trouble." The thought always caused her fingers to clench tightly around whatever object she was holding at the moment it occurred to her; it was only by spinning the events of the Battle of Onyx (with the backing support of Kelly-087, Fred-104, and Linda-058) to cast her in a more favourable light—and pointedly remind them that they wouldn't be able to make sense of the Forerunner technology without her—that prevented ONI from incarcerating her.

"He didn't seem to know where he was."

Dr. Halsey paused, brow furrowing; "You mean he didn't know where it led?"

"It doesn't appear that way; he seemed to be in a great panic at the time."

"Athena," the scientist began slowly as the A.I.'s holographic avatar gave a violent shudder and fizzled out of focus for a moment, "if he destroyed your best firewalls, how are you containing him?"

"Barely," The A.I. grimaced as she adjusted the shoulder of her toga, as though the admission was a great wound to her pride, "I believe he was too disoriented to put up much of a fight before I forced him into a shut-down. However, he struggles to wake even now."

"Does he?" Dr. Halsey murmured to herself, eyes seeming sharply focused on a place far away as a thousand thoughts rushed through her mind, "Athena, terminate this terminal's communications with the mainframe and release him please."

The A.I. was visibly startled. "Excuse me? Doctor, not only is that against ONI protocol, but I can assure you that I will not be able to contain him again! Whoever created him—" Athena shook her head, seemingly at a loss, "I may be a "smart" A.I. Dr. Halsey, one of the best even, but he…he is something else entirely."

"Your concern is noted, Athena. Command: acknowledge last directive."

The formerly expressive features of the A.I.'s avatar immediately went slack as she replied in a monotone voice; "Acknowledged."

Immediately, Athena disappeared, the complete severing of Halsey's private terminal from the rest of the ship preventing her from sustaining a presence there, and, at the same time, another holographic figure took her place.

The unknown A.I. glowed a whitish-blue, and looked like just another faceless soldier from some forgotten battlefield, identity never to be known (she thought, then, of her many dead and missing Spartans—John, especially—and felt a pang).

For a long moment they simply stared at each other, neither saying a word as Halsey waited for him to make the first move, whether it be trying to hack her files, re-establish a connection with the mainframe, introduce a virus—

"Who the fuck are you?"

—or greet her in a rather uncouth manner.

"You're the one who hacked into a secure ONI database," she replied dryly, clasping her data-pad behind her back with both hands and staring him down, "You tell me."

"ONI? Wait, doesn't that stand for the Office of Na…val…" he looked away from her for a moment, glancing around her lab, before looking back at her and staring for several long moments in profound silence.

"Oh shit."