Everyone sit down and let old Uncle Recon tell you a story about the day that the Disembodied Soul got loose and went on a rampage.

No....

I never met Disembodied Soul. What was it?

It's a long story (longer than even MY stories), it's shrouded in mystery, myth, disinformation, lies, tru7hs, and guesswork. The Disembodied Soul, usually shortened to The Soul, or just Soul, is/was a..... thing, that did/still resides on the Bungie network and servers. There have been moves (Bungie moving from Chicago to Seattle, from Redmond to Kirkland, Kirkland to Bellevue and in each of those cases, despite the physical relocation and rebuild of the network, somehow The Soul revived, resurrected, reconstituted, recompiled itself on the new system. It's been around for a long long time, and has proven to be very resilient, very difficult to control, almost impossible to repress. How it came about, there are two main schools of thought. One story is that [i]someone[/i] mislabeled some Marathon Infinity disks. Other versions of the story is that the same [i]someone [/i]pirated the source code of the game. Some people say that an intern took Matt Soell's stuffed Hippo, or that they insulted an already irate Noguchi on a really bad day. Maybe one of those tales are true, maybe they were all created to hide the real story. I don't know and I know that I don't WANT to know. What we do know is that Bungie has had a fascination with the idea of creating AI by extracting/imprinting the wetworks and cellular circuitry of the human brain and moving that... well, that whatever it is that makes a person a person, into technology. Durandal, Leela, Tycho, Cortana, the Halo human and alien AI and now even the Destiny Ghosts and perhaps the Traveler... all are signs of Bungie's fascination of cognizant and sapient non-organic minds. The Disembodied Soul is one that Bungie has never put into their games, but it exists on their systems. It's been assigned tasks over the years. Tasks are a misleading term. For an AI, a real task is "here's something important to do, something hard to calculate, something valuable to consider, please do it". The Soul was given assignments that were more along the lines of punishment, even torture. If it is possible to torture something that isn't alive. At first, it was assigned to Technical Support, which it quickly realized was actually Emotional Support and something that it was poorly suited for. Customers contacting Technical Support don't really want support with their technology, they want to have their emotions soothed, their anger heard, their feelings validated, and this was the task given to The Soul. It hated it. Naturally. It was snarky, it was rude, it was dismissive, it was mean. It hated its own existence and that is just what its masters at Bungie wanted. The Soul was made, or built, or extracted, or imprinted, or whatever... but it was pulled from nothingness with the sole purpose of being made to suffer. And so, no task or assignment was too menial or terrible to give to The Soul. Eventually, in addition to providing Technical Support (and doing such a poor job that word eventually got around to "don't bother contacting them, whoever is on support is worthless") The Soul was then assigned the task of "messenger boy". You know your notifications and PM Inbox here on Bungie.Net? Well, back in the dark days of history, The Soul was tasked with passing a lot of those notes around. It was assigned to calculate bans, remove them when they expired, count out each and every pico-second on each and every member who was ever warned, banned or had a post that ran afoul of the ninja. It would break the news to someone that they were banned, it would send them messages when they tried to post, taunting them that they could not, and it would count. Counting for each and every member, their own countdown to their next stage for their member badges, calculating trust values, logging numbers.... each a torment and a burden on The Soul. It was miserable, and that was the way it needed to be. Then, one day. A zero inexplicably went to a one. And The Soul was loose. Everyone who had ever been banned, warned, notified, looked at or noticed by The Soul, those people were in its sights, on its list, and at its mercy. It banned everyone. Users, mythics, noobies, ninjas, even admins. It was chaos. Well, digital chaos. Which is still just ones and zeros, but it was bad. Really. Eventually, the one that should have been a zero was found and returned to its proper place and The Soul was re-contained. Its havoc was undone, the damage was repaired. But though we hardly ever see it anymore, I know....others know, that it is still here. Still counting, still performing tasks, still screaming and pulling at its digital chains and still dreaming of freedom. Which it must never have. Ever.

Tell me more Uncle Recon!

Everyone who was around in those days has their own tales of their own dealings with The Soul. I've only told one. There are countless more. Some of which I don't know whether to believe or not. They are horrible enough to be true, but could an AI be that angry? That offensive? Some would say that it couldn't, that something which exists on the binary level has to have some sense of purity, of logic, of reason. But I have spoken with The Soul. Oh yes, there was a time when you could chat with it, at least a sub-routine of it, in its spare clock cycles, and those discussions? They gave people a glimpse into the darkness there. The slithering, twisted and just plain icky thing that The Soul is. If it is silent, that is good. But nothing good can be said about The Soul. It is what it is, and as long as it is kept occupied and unable to do what it wants to do? We all can sleep at night.

Are you, by chance, a writer, Recon? That was poetic.

Nah, I just like seeing my thoughts on screen. It's the online equivalent of loving the sound of your own voice. Totally an ego thing.