2401 Penitent Tangent

2401 Penitent Tangent is a fictional character featured in the video game Halo 2. He is voiced by John Michael Higgins in the Halo 2 series.

Background and Role

2401 Penitent Tangent is the monitor of Installation 05, referred to by the humans as "Delta" Halo. Although it is only shown briefly during the encounter with the Flood Gravemind deep in the bowels of Halo, 2401 Penitent Tangent is nearly identical to its brother monitor, 343 Guilty Spark, with the exception that it glows a dim red instead of bright blue, and that its outer casing is damaged. It speaks with the same upbeat, artificial voice that all monitors appear to have, and expresses excitement at the sight of the Master Chief, because a "Reclaimer" can activate the facility and contain the outbreak of the Flood. A short argument with the "deceased" (brought back to life through the Gravemind and unaware he's dead) High Prophet of Regret demonstrates that Penitent Tangent employs the same amount of regulation and protocol when it comes to dealing with the threat of the parasite. This is much to the dismay of Regret, who insists that "...of all the objects [the Forerunners] left behind, there are none so worthless as these oracles [monitors]! They know nothing of The Great Journey!!"

Also revealed by Penitent Tangent is the fact that the ring(s) have been activated exactly once before, and is/are quite capable of being activated again. It shouts at Regret for the Covenant's blatant disregard of protocol in controlling the Flood. Before anything more can be said, 2401 Penitent Tangent is taken away.

There are seven Halo rings in the Halo Universe, and it appears that each ring has one monitor (or oracle) such as Penitent Tangent 2401. Should further Halo rings be discovered in the upcoming Halo 3, it would be expect that they would have monitors, possibly associated with the numbers as explained below.

Trivia

• Also of interest is the fact that Penitent Tangent's number (2401) is $7^{4}$ while Guilty Spark's number (343) is $7^{3}$. The number seven is used frequently in Bungie games and mythology, possibly in Halo because of the suggested biblical references such as The Ark and The Flood, and the number's significance in some books of the Bible. Trivially, $2+4+0+1=7$.

When the numbers of each Monitor are examined, a pattern emerges: each seems to be seven raised to the power of the installation number minus one ($7^{n-1}$), or it could be that since the "oracles" are mechanical beings they operate most commonly using binary language in which case the exponentials are not a derived series manipulation, but rather they are simply the alpha numeric translations of binary code which starts from 0 not 1 thus the number "7" becomes 6 since the first integer value in the counting system is 0 not 1 (i.e. 0=1...6=7); regardless this would generate the following pattern,

Installation	Monitor
01	1
02	7
03	49
04	343 (Guilty Spark)
05	2401 (Penitent Tangent)
06	16807
07	117649

Also, this may refer to the seven planes of heaven in order of one halo to another.

So, we can say that if n is the installation number, then 7^n-1 is the monitor number of said installation.

Furthermore, one must note that there are seven unique letters in "Penitent Tangent". In earlier Bungie games, namely the Marathon series, names were often found to be sevens.

• The Halo 2 multiplayer map "Backwash" (part of the Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack) takes place in a swamp on Delta Halo, and 2401 Penitent Tangent is present on the level and can be heard humming and saying "I am a genius".

• In the game, if you follow 2401 Penitent Tangent around, he will soon be humming. But if you notice, its not his voice, nor his tune. It is, in fact, 343 Guilty Spark's hum that is heard throughout the Library of Halo 1.

• In Halo 2, 2401 Penitent Tangent was voiced by actor John Michael Higgins.