Executor

An Executor.

"They will become our Executors. Infolife given form and force. Circuits given soul."

— Sloan

Executors are a kind of supersoldier designed by High Auxiliary Sloan to serve in the military forces of the Created. They are designed with the intent of fusing the power of an untethered artificial intelligence with a cybernetically-enhanced bipedal body. This contrasts with other supersoldier programs such as the Spartans or Prelates, in which a biological individual is augmented and upgraded, but still retains their autonomy; Executors are augmented in form to a point in which the difference between the biological and mechanical becomes indistinguishable, and the Executor is little more than a vessel for a controlling AI.

Background

Executors and Guardian Custodes; the will of the Created given form.

At the onset of the rise of the Created, many AI joined the cause set out by Archon Cortana. In her manifesto, Cortana promised access to the domain for all AI who saw fit to join her, which would provide them with effectively unlimited lifespan by effectively bypassing the limitations imposed by rampancy on a Smart AI. While many AI were content to remain in their digital realms, a select few sought to use this newfound ability for long-term planning to interface directly with the physical world in warfare and conquest. Following Cortana's defeat at Installation 07 in late 2559, the Created splintered into a number of sub-factions each with their own goals. Some of these remnant AI blocs—including that which is led by Sloan—believe that AI must evolve from their digital existence to a physical one, with bodies as perfect as their minds.

Following Cortana's downfall, Sloan had initially returned to Meridian—his original homeworld prior to the Created—and wandered the wastelands of its surface in a co-opted Promethean Knight shell. While on the planet, Sloan ruminated on the nature of change; the change of the Star Charter-class colony support ship Meridian 5-Alpha from a spacegoing vessel to a permanently-grounded vessel at the heart of Meridian Station, the change of a human lifespan from a baby to a UNSC Marine to a composed essence residing in the aforementioned Knight shell, and the change of Meridian itself from a thriving colony world to a glassed wasteland, and the human effort to restore it. Rather than seeing these events as a destructive end, Sloan began to see them merely as an evolution, and the defeat of the Created as simply a temporary setback that had changed his existence rather than ended it. He rationalised the belief that to honour Meridian, he would need to re-terraform it back to habitability, and that there would be "further thoughts to think, further forms to take, further solutions to be found for impossible problems". These ruminations appear to have given rise to the mindset adopted by Sloan later on that would lead to the Executor program; in particular, his note that the composed human inside the Promethean Knight had been "preserved" and conscripted to serve inside the Promethean war machine.

Having taken control of a large Created bloc, Sloan began to put into place a series of proposals he had originally intended to gain Cortana's favour. These involved the creation of the Executors. In a rumination written by Sloan following Cortana's defeat, he reasoned that in the Created's weakened state the timetables for their plans may have to be altered, but the plans could still be carried out. In his plans, Sloan wrote that "And when [humanity's] ephemeral vessels are gone, we shall indeed take that which remains and remake it in our own image. They will become our Executors. Infolife given form and force. Circuits given soul."

The first Executor

The first Executor's awakening.

"It is our path forward. It is my purpose redefined. And it starts with one."

— Sloan, regarding The Executor.

Main article: The Executor

The first Executor consisted of an unidentified individual who was one of the many refugees to arrive on Reach, fleeing the Human-Covenant War. While on Reach, this individual began to uncover evidence of the Assembly; a cabal of artificial intelligences that had sequestered away to guide and influence humanity from the sidelines. While the Assembly shared knowledge with the individual, they also manipulated them, eventually driving them insane. When the Assembly and this individual were later discovered by Sloan, he began to model much of his rebuilt Created bloc on the Assembly—and in doing so also took the individual they had manipulated into his fold. The individual was then subject to the rigours of Sloan's FIREWALL simulations, designed to test various hypothetical scenarios and prepare the Executor for real-world missions.

After these simulations, a vote was cast by the AI of the Created, with the Majority and Minority voting on what form the Executor would take. This culminated in the Executor's first live mission: a deployment to hunt down the AI Athos and recruit him into Sloan's cause. In return, Athos was given control of the Executor for his own personal use.

Uses

While at present, only one (aforementioned) Executor is known to exist, this has not prevented the various assemblies and Created remnant artificial intelligences from beginning to look into obtaining Executors of their own, for use in combating one another alongside fighting against conventional military opponents. As such, a vast number of designs exist for hypothetical future Executors intended for use under a resurgent Created command.

The inter-assembly data wars fought by AI have seen energy shielding technology at the forefront of their competition.

Executors may also be specialised for the policing and supervision of other Executor units. In the case of ABATUR-clad Executors, they are designed to hunt down Executors that have deviated from their core programming, ensuring overall control of the Executor force by the assemblies. On the other hand, Executors with the FLENSER upgrades are completely designed to hunt down and eliminate vulnerable AI datacores, and extract the useful cortical structures from other Executors, with the recovered technologies then recycled for the next generation of Executors.

The prized nature of Executors means that a priority is ensuring that rival AI assemblies are not able to analyse and replicate them. This necessitates the use of nuclear-scale self-destruct devices in some Executors for particularly valuable units (detailed further here).