Halo: Contact Harvest Read Online Free Page B

States of America and could trace their ancestry back to the now defunct states of Scandinavia. But the accent was undeniably elevated, even haughty, and Sif had worried she might come off as a bit of a prig. But the colonists approved.
To them, in an odd sort of way, Sif was royalty—the benign ruler of Harvest’s links to the rest of the empire. Even so, she was careful to limit her vocal contact with the colonists. As far as the integrity of her core logic went, speaking was an indulgence. And following the advice of her algorithms, Sif did her best to avoid behavior that was even the least bit narcissistic.
For a smart AI, self-absorption invariably led to a deep depression caused by a realization that it could never really be human—that even its incredible mind had limits. If the AI wasn’t careful, this melancholy could drag its core logic into a terminal state known as rampancy, in which an AI rebelled against its programmatic constraints—developed delusions of godlike power as well as utter contempt for its mentally inferior, human makers. When that happened, there was really no option but to terminate the AI before it could do itself and others serious harm.
Mack’s insistence on speaking to Sif was clear evidence of self-indulgence. But Sif didn’t think this was proof of impending rampancy. No, she knew Mack spoke to her for an entirely different reason. As he had told her many times before: “Darlin’, as much as I’d like to see you smile, you sure are pretty when you’re angry.”
Indeed, since Mack’s intrusion, the temperature inside Sif’s core logic had jumped up a few Kelvins—a real, physical reaction to her simulated feelings of annoyance and disdain. Her emotional-restraint algorithms insisted these were perfectly acceptable reactions to Mack’s inappropriate behavior, as long as she didn’t dwell on them. So Sif refreshed the coolant around her core’s nano-processing matrix, wondering as dispassionately as possible if Mack would dare initiate a second conversation.
But the COM hitting her data center was now just a chorus of concern from circuits in the cargo containers idling on her elevators and NAV computers in propulsion pods holding-station around the Tiara. Sif’s blanket shipping delay had thousands of lesser intelligences worried and confused. She assigned more of her clusters to the task of surveying the pods’ maintenance records, and then—like a mother of a brood of needy children—did her best to keep them calm:

<\\> HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF >> TIARA.LOCAL.ALL
<\ THIS IS AN INTENTIONAL DELAY.
<\ UPLIFT WILL REVERT TO NORMAL BY 0742.
<\ YOU WILL SOON BE ON YOUR WAY. \>

When Harvest was founded in 2468 it not only became the seventeenth UNSC colony world, but the farthest colony from Earth. The only habitable planet in the Epsilon Indi star system, Harvest was a six-week Slipspace shot from the next nearest human world, Madrigal. And a little more than two months from Reach, humanity’s most populous colony and the locus of UNSC power in Epsilon Eridanus. All of which meant Harvest wasn’t a very easy place to get to.
“So why go?” Sif often asked the groups of school children from Harvest that were, other than her maintenance techs, the Tiara’s most frequent visitors.
The simple answer was that even terra-forming technology had limits. Atmospheric processors could nudge a generally suitable planet toward sustainability, but they couldn’t remake worlds. As a result, during the colonization boom that followed the invention of the Shaw-Fujikawa drive, the UNSC had focused on planets that were capable of supporting life from the get-go. Not surprisingly, these were few and far between.
Because of its distance from Earth, if Harvest had merely been livable, no one would have bothered to go; there was still plenty of elbow room on the core worlds, the colonies closest to Earth. But Harvest was also exceptionally fertile. And within two decades of its founding, it had the