Iratus

"For Doisac! For the three moons!"

- A personality shard of Iratus during a War Games simulation.

Iratus is an artificial intelligence construct, based on a Jiralhanae donor and aligned with the Banished.

Origins
"That project was a walled garden. No one on the outside should have even known about it."

- LV106, regarding the Iratus project.

Iratus was created by the Lux Voluspa company as part of an effort to research artificial intelligence creation utilizing brain donors from species aside from humanity. This included Jiralhanae donors, a decision considered by researchers "LV038" and "LV106" as something that was "always going to draw some attention eventually."

Banished possession
The Lux Voluspa facility was ultimately breached by a cyberwarfare attack, with an intrusion package deployed using internally-sourced encryption and displaying a Jiralhanae retrieval signature. The originators of this attack were later indicated to be the Banished, who were able to steal the Iratus AI matrix from the facility.

High Auxiliary Sloan of the Created would eventually discover the existence of Iratus while it was under Banished possession, contemplating if he should be considered friend or foe. He would devote resources to keeping watch over the AI.

UNSC control
After Cortana's defeat at Zeta Halo, Iratus was utilized to oversee Banished shipbreaking operations on Camber. When Spartan-IVs Sigrid Eklund and Hieu Dinh were deployed to the facility, they were able to trap Iratus inside of Dinh's neural interface, compromising his armor and cognitive functions. Eklund was ultimately able to commandeer an Eklon'Dal Workshop Phantom back to the Avery J. Johnson Academy of Military Science to seek aid from friendly forces.

Upon arrival at the Academy, Spartan Laurette Agryna took the injured Dinh indoors where Iratus aggressively introduced himself. Agryna found schematics of the Banished facility on Camber through him and uploaded it to the Academy's combat simulation. In an attempt to irritate Iratus to leave Dinh's armor and go after another Spartan instead, she ordered her Spartans to hit the simulations in hopes that Iratus would attempt to enter the neural interface of one of these Spartans. While Spartan Dinh was unconscious, Iratus forced him to relive several painful memories in an attempt to break him. However, the plan was ultimately a success and Iratus eventually left Dinh for another Spartan, only to be contained within one of the academy's servers along with a Banished archive.

At Commander Agryna's request, an instance of Iratus was isolated from the rest of the AI and was put into quarantine before being replicated and distributed to qualified Spartan-IVs as a Personal AI to test within War Games. On occasion, Iratus encouraged Spartans to join the Banished.

Unbound
"The entire history of the Spartan program. Your weaknesses. Your failures. And now...all of it...belongs to the Banished!"

- Iratus, after revealing his control over the secret ONI facility.

However, Iratus managed to release himself from the academy's servers and, using Dinh's memories, he learned about a hidden ONI Section Three facility buried beneath the academy. After multiple intrusion attempts, he finally managed to take control of the ONI facility, including a suit of abandoned Mirage IIC armor left inside a Brokkr Armor Mechanism. Spartan Dinh, hearing strange noises coming from the door leading to the ONI facility, enlisted the help of a Spartan recruit to investigate. Upon their arrival at the laboratory where the Mirage IIC armor was located, Iratus revealed that he had broken containment and claimed that all of the Spartans' secrets now belonged to the Banished.

Halo Infinite
Iratus was added into Halo Infinite multiplayer as a personal AI in Season 02: Lone Wolves.

List of appearances

 * Halo Infinite
 * Season 02: Lone Wolves
 * Season 03: Echoes Within
 * Story Shard: Precipice