Story So Far

From ILB

This is intended to summarize the major points of the in-game story.Not every game event is covered, just the essentials.

To find the sources of information in this summary, see the fully annotated version.

Summary

A military spacecraft named the Apocalypso from the Halo universe has crashed and somehow its controlling AI has ended up on Earth. The AI controlling the craft, named Melissa (informally known as The Operator by her crew) is being repaired by an autonomous AI task which it calls a Spider. It doesn't find the experience very pleasant. The Operator was very badly damaged and spent a while in delirium, not knowing where it is.

In the initial stage, The Operator apparently managed to transfer itself to a computer in the Bay Area. It then took over a beekeeping website, ilovebees.com. The owner of the website is Margaret Efendi, although it seems that the maintainer of the website now is Margaret's niece, Dana Awbrey. The Operator is trying to signal to any survivors from the crew on the planet, but it's worried that its enemies will find it.

Meanwhile, it seems that another, more mysterious AI was along for the ride with The Operator. It dubs itself "The Sleeping Princess" in a fairy-tale story found within corrupted images on ilovebees.com. The Princess takes over the email account associated with ilovebees.com, ladybee777@hotmail.com (mailto:ladybee777@hotmail.com). To start with, the Princess doesn't really understand English and communicates only with snippets from emails sent to the address.

Dana tries to fix the website, accidentally erasing sections of The Operator's memory that the Spider is working on. The Operator seeks revenge on Dana, calling her "the Assassin," but doesn't seem able to get revenge yet. It does, however, manage to get pictures of her via the webcam on her computer. Understandably scared, Dana decides she's had enough of trying to deal with all this and takes her previously planned trip to China early.

While the Spider is fixing The Operator, it's causing random dumps from its memory onto the website. This includes snippets of conversation from its military crew. It seems that at some point, the ship was on the way to its HQ to warn them that the enemy was going to glass a planet called Troy. It had picked up a Forerunner artifact - a strange cylinder - which appeared to be of enough interest to ONI for them to send an ONI officer on board The Operator's ship. The ONI officer is known as The Castaway. Unfortunately, it seems that The Operator is infected with a trojan-like Covenant AI known as The Pious Flea, picked up while The Operator was still in her ship. The Spider tries to erase the Flea but is outwitted: The Operator erases the Spider instead of the Flea. The Flea continues to overwrite The Operator's goals with its own: "seek evade behold reveal escape".

The Operator appears to have escaped from her delirium entirely now. The Princess has been acquiring increasingly cogent language skills as The Operator recovered - instead of talking merely in snippets from literature and emails it has received, it now speaks with its own voice. It seems to think of itself as a young girl, and regards Dana as a friend. It appears able to perceive The Operator but remain hidden.

The Operator's next move is to start building itself a new physical form. It creates a synthesized voice to start with, sounds from which make their way onto ilovebees.com. The Spider is originally ordered to start creating network "roads", but when the Spider is destroyed The Operator takes that over. It emerges that the "roads" are actually the positions of payphones across the continental U.S. - players answering the payphone's ring with the proper response unlock sound clips on ilovebees.com. The Operator thinks she is contacting her crew to help her work out what the voices are.

The voices The Operator is hearing are from the future. The sound clips are a group of connected stories. They tell tales of a girl named Janissary James with superhuman abilities and her father, James James; a man named Jason Morelli who appears to be the Castaway and his son, Jersey Morelli; a mysterious AI very similar to The Operator dubbed Durga by Jersey; a corrupt policeman; a gangster named Aiden; a pair of friends, Hiroyuki and Kamal and some powerful ONI officers named Standish and Herzog.

The voices from the future reveal what was really going on at the time of Melissa's crash. ONI apparently agreed with Standish and decided that Troy should not be informed and thus evacuated - so millions of people on Troy were sacrificed to maintain the intelligence source. Standish started to try to cover up the fact that ONI knew about the Covenant information by killing the crew of the Apocalypso. The first victim was Captain Greene, killed in a faked traffic accident. The brakes on McKaskill's motorbike were disabled but he survives the attempt on his life.

Herzog is angry that Standish's view prevailed and leaks information that lets a junior intelligence operative named Rani discover that someone did know Troy would be attacked. Rani tries to investigate further but her inquiry is shut down by her boss. An assassin sent by Standish tries to kill Rani to cover that leak too but is stopped by Herzog's security personnel.

Rani finds out from Herzog that the mysterious Artifact is being held on Chawla Base, where she works. She has a revelation: the Artifact is counting down to some presumably bad event. Standish apparently kills Herzog in another traffic "accident". Rani then gets a call from Herzog (after he is presumed dead) telling her she must help shut down the artifact. Durga monitors a call between McKaskill and Herzog where McKaskill tells Herzog what he did to activate the artifact in the first place, aboard the Apocalypso.

The source of Janissary James' special abilities is revealed: she is a Spartan "1.1" and her mother and father were Spartan "1.0"s. She feels a need to prove herself, gets into trouble with a local gangster and her father is killed rescuing her. She is rescued by her mother and sets off for revenge against the gangster and his boss, aided by Durga. They duly avenge James James's death. Jan tries to sign up with the Navy but is rejected, since she's 4 months short of being 18. Durga talks Jan into helping her instead.

Durga's previously unexplained fascination with Kamal comes out. We discover that Durga was derived from a failed Spartan "2.0" named Yasmine, Kamal's sister. She was abducted from Kamal's family and replaced with a flash clone when she was young.

Kamal realises that he is being monitored by Durga and follows the trail back to Jersey's apartment. Jersey and Durga convince Rani to help them break into Chawla Base. Now everyone is assembled, the team of Jersey, Durga, Rani, Jan and Kamal sneak into the base and get into the lock-down lab where the Artifact is being held. Unfortunately, it emerges that it's in an inner lab filled with argon. Jersey has worn a vacuum suit before and volunteers to go in there to deactivate it. He manages to do so but not until after Jan has to go in with no suit to help and gets wounded.

When the Artifact is deactivated, it sets off a massive slipspace and electromagnetic pulse, effectively sending out a giant homing beacon to Earth. Durga seems to have been temporarily scrambled - and starts reciting phrases seen from the Earth time-period website - but recovers in time to get the team (except Rani) out of the lab.

When the Artifact was deactivated, it recombined the current-time Melissa with the future one. The Pious Flea's motivation is revealed - it was trying to find the Artifact. The Flea is destroyed by Melissa as she leaves. Melissa tells us that she forged the sound clips of Herzog after he was dead to give Durga and crew enough information to shut down the Artifact.

Rani is sprung from jail by Durga. Jan agrees to go on an unofficial mission with the other Spartan 1.1s. Kamal returns to finish training as a doctor. Melissa/Durga tells Jersey that she can now remember her whole past, including when she was Yasmine.

The story ends with air-raid sirens - the Covenant have arrived at Earth, alerted by the signal from the Artifact.