- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PST
The Forerunner are an advanced (beyond our wildest dreams) singular race that span the galaxy and have many settled (previously uninhabited by sentient) worlds. They take it upon themselves to look out for everyone else but don’t interfere with anyone in any direct way - similar (but not the same) to the Prime Directive from star trek. If any force is to interfere with how the Forerunner, any other species, or the galaxy as a whole is meant to evolve (more on that in the next paragraph) they will step in and get involved only at that point. This galactic protectorate and vision of where they and all other species are headed is called The Mantle(?).
On the Forerunner's tiers of technological advancement (http://imagewtf.com/668/free-image-hosting/) the forerunner place themselves on Teir-4; and have a belief in a race called the Precursors that are on Teir-5. This race was far more advanced then the Forerunners, being able to instantly travel from galaxy to galaxy and can manipulate the destiny of societies and races and whole galaxies unnoticed. They achieved true transcendence; a possible technological ceiling; almost god-like in nature. The forerunners strive to evolve to this state and their belief has them looking for pretty much anything to do with the Precursors, including any effect or evidence of their past presence or existence. If they become like the Precursors, they could that much easily help guide the destiny of the galaxy towards that same existence. I think the forerunners look up to the precursors the way the covenant looks up to the forerunner, minus the religious zealotry and mistaken interpretations. (I believe, and will get into this in another post, that the Precursors and the Forerunner belief in them play a much larger role in the whole story arc then is obvious or thought about - and has a lot to do with why the Forerunner view humanity they way they do.)
At some point the Forerunner encounter the Flood - a parasite and disease they believe to have originated outside the galaxy. They do not warn or directly involve themselves with any planet or society, instead, as usual, choosing to take the burden on alone and to defend the galaxy against the parasite and its interference with where they and the galaxy should evolve. First they build structures like the one in the atmosphere of the gas giant from Halo 2 when you first play as the arbiter. While the flood infection begins to spread (starting around the center of the galaxy and moving outward), they do very little to control it, instead deciding its best to study it in labs and to see what it does as worlds get consumed by it. Back at that point they did not have any idea a grave mind would ever exist and believed, like any other disease/parasite that they would end up getting the better of it. The ends justify the means, and a few thousand worlds falling to the plague (for observation and because the forerunner don’t really know what to do yet) so that millions of others can survive is a more then fair trade off to preserve the galaxy and evolution of all species in the galaxy towards a Teir-5 existence.
At some point, the outbreak across the galaxy crosses some threshold where the Forerunner decide action and not just study alone is necessary. The parasite spreads out like a typical infection, consuming worlds more and more, from the center of the galaxy outwards. Unsuccessful at controlling the outbreak because usually control and containment means the genocide of a race or society, they setup a defensive perimeter that is spherical in nature called the Maginot sphere, or line. They put up many defenses that don’t allow random flood infestations past the point, but leave any world on the other side to their doom. The sphere is more of a containment sphere, meant to keep the flood from spreading out any further then the boundary they decided on that was acceptable in size/location in terms of worlds lost vs. saved and to give them breathing room for more study and planning. The line holds because the flood do not have any directed attack at any one point along the sphere, and the forerunner at this point wouldn’t anticipate them to. From what the forerunner know at this point, the parasite absorbs the intelligence and knowledge of the host on a per-person basis, and as the infection spreads quickly and aggressively across a world or society, infected hosts act together to use the tech at their disposal to reach other worlds for infection. Very impressive and dangerous, but not unlike a larger scale version of what a typical virus does - invade, reproduce, live on local resources, spread and don’t attack each other. (Horrible paraphrasing, but I’m not doctor :-P )
During this time, after the Maginot sphere is defined, they construct the Halo network and the Ark. As a last resort, the Halo's will fire and kill all sentient life in the galaxy that is capable of sustaining the flood - starving the parasite unto extinction. Not wanting this last resort to mean the end of all life, which isn’t really all that better then the flood consuming the galaxy and no one reaching Teir-5 in either case (or is it?) - they construct the Ark. They also send out forerunner's to catalogue and index all life in the galaxy, including sending back many samples of sentient life from each world so that if they must fire the halo's, some can remain on the Ark to survive and then can be sent back to their native planets for repopulation. It should be noted that at this time, the Forerunner are not yet aware of humanity or earth, yet all of their structures contain earth-like atmosphere's and roughly 1-G. I'll leave speculation on that to a following post when i go into some theories about the Precursors.
Didact (a forerunner) is stationed at the ARK and is very intelligent, and probably very high up in the forerunner "government". A great friend or (more likely) love-interest of Didact is a forerunner named Librarian who is heading up the indexing effort: running around the galaxy indexing species and sending samples back to the Ark via portals and traveling via Keyships. The Keyships are the only kinds of ships that can span the vast distances to the Ark and to any location in the galaxy in short time-span. The Ark is stationed outside of the galactic rim beyond where the halo's can have effect and far, far beyond the maginot sphere. At some point, Librarians' duty takes him/her across the Maginot line into the sphere of unprotected space where the flood infection is left to spread unchecked. With most of the galaxy indexed and sampled it’s time to get to the worlds in the sphere that are not yet touched and that lie on the far side of the galaxy. Librarian continues her effort(i will just say Librarian is female and Didact is male for now on although gender is unspecified), accelerating the pace as she believes that time is running out and that the halo-plan will inevitably be enacted as the flood continue to spread and the maginot sphere inevitable gets pushed back and breaks. All of this is to the dismay of Didact as he is not sure the effort is worth it and believes that he can come up with some other way to defeat the flood. Didact believes that defeating the flood directly is the better option, compared to the halo option - especially considering that Librarian continues to index and sample and if the halo's DO have to be fired, then Librarian will die without Didact ever seeing her again. Of course, there is also the risk that the flood will attack her while she is out on her mission.
Things go from bad to worse when Didact discovers something from studying the outbreak pattern of the flood: instead of the parasite just spreading out in all directions and infecting any system it randomly finds with sentient biologics (expanding spherically), the parasite is expanding logically to only systems with sentient life and in a spiral with the exact shape of the galaxy. In other words, its only moving outwards with exact shape of the galaxy to systems with sentient life, and ignoring everything else. In reaction to this data, Didact has forerunners fleets attack the outbreak at random sections across the galaxy. Most of these fleets are destroyed and consumed by the flood, but the attacks lead to an interesting behavior. When attacked, the outer regions of infection recoil towards the much-denser center while some stay behind to inundate that attacker. This denotes some sort of shared (Borg-like) conscience. A blessing and a curse, because how horrible to find out that wiping out anything less than all flood will actually get rid of it and that it’s actually thinking; but how wonderful because if the parasite has some sort of central mind - it can be attacked and exploited. Didact also notices that the Maginot line is given more breathing room when the spiral ends retracted which is an added benefit as it gives him more time to come up with and construct is last-ditch effort.
Didact believes he has come up with the answer - he creates Medicant Bias (MB), a 'contender class' AI capable of commanding an entire fleet of ships and can also analyze and collect vast amounts of observational data with regards to the flood. MB is given a keyship and a crew and sent into the maginot sphere to observe and study the flood without interfering in anyway, and Didact assembles a rescue party who will sit just beyond the maginot sphere waiting for the right time to retrieve the Librarian after MB has come up with a solution and begins to implement it. Too bad things (and AI) don’t go the way you intend them to...
AT some point during all of this, The Librarian discovers earth...
I thank Nightzephyr for this :P
AND FOR GOD"S SAKE LOOK AT MY LAST POST!!! MARATHON AND HALO ARE ONE!
[Edited on 10.16.2007 5:47 PM PDT]