Soren-066
From Halopedia, the Halo wiki
| Soren-066 | |
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Male[1] |
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Blond[1] |
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Blue[1] |
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S-066[1] | |
- "I don't want to be left behind."
- — Soren-066
Soren-066 was a candidate in the UNSC Naval Special Warfare Command's SPARTAN-II program who was gravely disfigured by the augmentation procedures.[3]
Biography[edit]
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Early childhood[edit]
- Catherine Halsey: "I'm a scientist."
- Soren: "Not a psy—, not a psy—"
- Catherine Halsey: "No, I'm not a psychiatrist. You've been seeing a lot of psychiatrists, haven‘t you? Because of your parents' deaths?"
- — Doctor Halsey identifies a source of anxiety for Soren.[1]
Soren was born in early or mid-2511. At a young age he was brought to the Outer Colony of Dwarka, a harsh world still in the process of being terraformed. There he was raised by his mother and her husband (his stepfather), who grew illegal crops on a farm in the middle of a forest preserve around one hundred kilometers from any other settlements. Soren spent a lot of time in the woods as a child, though his mother always warned him not to go far, fearing he might think the area was just as safe as the parks that had existed where they had previously lived. While in the woods he sometimes encountered the rotten remains of dead creatures. And though Soren often helped his mother prepare food, what their family ate was limited to prepackaged provisions—they did not harvest from the forest. While aiding her she would only allow him to use their sharpest knife with her direct assistance. His mother used to tell Soren various stories and fables. When Soren was barely six years old in mid-2517 his mother succumbed to a Dwarkan disease for which treatments were readily available. She had not been taken into town to see a doctor, however, because Soren's stepfather had been too worried about going to jail for his illegal farm. The law required that symptoms of the disease be reported to the planetary officials, after all.[1] By the time her husband became convinced he had no other choice but to seek medical attention for her after just a few days of observing her symptoms, she was already dead and he was sick. According to official records, both Soren's mother and stepfather had initially dismissed what she was experiencing as nothing more than a cold and it was thought they may have been unaware of the treatments that existed due to their remote and isolated residence. His stepfather seemingly refused to face the reality of his wife's loss, as he moved her body into their box room and locked the door, telling Soren that it was not possible to see her because she was too sick and needed to be alone to recover. A few days later Soren stole the key to the room late at night after his stepfather had had too much to drink. After creeping slowly through the door he saw the rotting corpse of his mother and cried for a while before sneaking back out and locking the door behind him. He returned the key to his stepfather's bedside table and snuck back to the kitchen, where he sat and brooded. Eventually he came to the conclusion that his stepfather must be responsible for his mother's death and it was this, among other thoughts, which led him to get up from the chair he'd been seated in and grab the sharpest knife from the nearby counter. It was big and heavy from his point of view and he'd even had to stand on his tiptoes just to reach it. He then slowly made his way back to his stepfather's bedroom and pulled a chair closer to the bed so he could stand on it and overlook the sleeping man. He stayed that way for what seemed like hours until light began to seep into the room. He waited a little more after that, but as soon as his stepfather rolled over to expose his neck Soren struck, falling forward and jabbing the blade between the sleeping man's neck and shoulder a little above one of his clavicles. The boy immediately took off running at that moment and vanished into the surrounding forest. Well-hidden within a clump of bushes, he watched as his stepfather emerged from their home and called out for him and demanded to know what was wrong with him. He'd removed the knife and sprayed his wound with biofoam. Soren remained completely still as the injured man passed by his hiding spot in search of him.[1]
The first night spent on his own was difficult for Soren. The cold air and sounds of the forest kept waking him up or kept him awake, but he still managed to get up at dawn to creep back to the clearing where his family's prefabricated house was. He might have tried to sneak back in to get some food, but the sight of his stepfather waiting for him through a window kept him from doing so. Turning back to the woods, his efforts next turned to catching his breakfast. He tried to snag one of the toothless squirrel-like creatures that inhabited the surrounding trees but they were much too fast for him. Neither sitting in wait for them to come to him or throwing rocks at them gave him any success. Soren eventually settled for eating larvae and worms discovered on the underside of a dry, rotten branch he stepped on. After a few hours had passed and he didn't feel sick, he elected to turn over more logs to eat his fill. Before night fell he started to experiment, moving a little farther away from the house and making several beds out of the leaves and needles of different trees. He found that one type of leaf raised a row of angry, itchy red bumps along his wrist after he touched it so he made sure to avoid it thereafter. He had to try out several of the beds he'd made before finding one soft and warm enough to let him sleep. After a few days like this, he had determined where exactly in his little patch of forest to search for grubs and when to leave a log alone to return to days later. Certain berries and plants he knew to avoid from watching the ghost squirrels, but others he only wrote off after they made him sick or just produced a bitter taste. Every morning and evening Soren continued to watch his stepfather from the bushes, and though he tried to break back into the house a few times, the windows were too strong.[1]
Weeks passed like this until one morning Soren's stepfather emerged from his home coughing badly and clearly sick. The man started to head back by midday, but suddenly fell to the dirt and lay still there before he could make it. After a long time he finally stirred and began to crawl toward his truck, but he could not lift himself into it. Lying on his back, he then was faced by Soren standing over him. He begged his stepson for help finding medicine but Soren remained unmoved. His pleas soon turned to threats and then flattery, but Soren only watched dispassionately as he finally slipped into unconsciousness. He then sat down by his stepfather and remained with him there until he finally was dead two days later. Soren thereafter used his stepfather's keys to reclaim the house, from which he dragged his mother's body to bury her outside. It took several days of slow digging to accomplish this task, leaving the young boy's hands blistered and bloodied. Soren also rolled his stepfather into a shallow hole where he had fallen beside the truck and mounded dirt high around him. For a few days following this he stayed inside, eating and building up his strength. When provisions finally began to run low he returned to the forest, slowly making his way in the direction he thought a town might be. For days or weeks he lived off berries and grubs, though he did manage to once kill a ghost squirrel with a carefully thrown rock and slit its fur off with another to get at the meat within. It was almost by accident that Soren came across a human-made track and followed it for a few hours to the edge of a small township around one-hundred and twelve kilometers from his family's home. When he emerged from the underbrush and the town's people saw him, they rushed forward out of concern for the dirty boy in tattered clothing. And though he was turned over to various psychiatrists for evaluation, Soren neglected to tell any of them the whole truth of his recent ordeal, instead merely claiming that for the nearly three months he spent on his own, both his mother and stepfather had been dead and that he'd buried them both according to his stepfather's dying wish.[1]
SPARTAN-II[edit]
- Catherine Halsey: "I'm trying to decide if you're right for something I'm working on. An experiment. I can't tell you what it is, I'm afraid. But if it works in the way we hope it will you'll be stronger and faster and smarter than you could ever imagine."
- Soren: "Why would you want to do something like that for me? You don't even know me."
- Catherine Halsey: "It's not for you, exactly. I can't tell you much more. It won't be easy; it'll be the hardest thing you've ever done—even harder than what happened with your parents."
- Soren: "And what have you decided?"
- Catherine Halsey: "I've decided to let you be the one to decide."
- — Doctor Halsey reveals enough about the Spartan-II program to make him consider joining voluntarily.[1]
In late August or early September, Soren was visited by Doctor Catherine Halsey after only a very short time spent in the custody of others.[1][4] Doctor Halsey, a civilian consultant and scientific adviser for the