Ascendant Justice's AI

"Sneaky little bastard."

- Cortana

This unidentified artificial intelligence construct was used by the Covenant aboard the Ascendant Justice. When Cortana infiltrated the Ascendant Justice the Covenant AI tried to stop her, but it was mostly unsuccessful as she eventually caught it and decompiled it. The Covenant AI hated that Cortana was able to improve upon Covenant technology, believing it to be heresy, and managed to send a message over the battlenet before it was caught, both warning of the capture of the ship and sending the necessary calculations for a sub-atmospheric Slipspace jump. This likely allowed the Prophet of Regret's assault carrier to perform such a jump during the Battle of Mombasa.

The AI demonstrated "fractured" thinking, as though it were suffering from the errors of being copied extensively. Cortana also stated that its algorithms looked very familiar, leading Cortana to speculate that a human-made UNSC AI had been captured and copied. When the AI faced its death from Cortana, it screamed a fractured statement: "Do what you will-will-will-will. I go to finally to my heaven reward paradise final-final-final-infinity-infinity-infini-AT NONCOPYSTATE." This indicates that it either saw death as salvation from a fractured life caused by repeated copying, or that it has been programmed to possess Covenant religious beliefs.

A post-mortem analysis of this AI revealed an AI duplicator program, which Cortana realized had degraded it after many repeated uses and resulted in its distorted thinking processes. She used this program twice, to replicate her translation software to increase its effectiveness and to create a stripped-down infiltration-only copy of herself to travel with Blue Team. They effectively used this copy of Cortana to break into and eventually destroy the Covenant command platform Unyielding Hierophant and its resident fleet.

List of appearances

 * Halo: First Strike