Homecoming (TV Series)

Episode 04 is the fourth of five "episodes" in the Iris campaign. It can be found at. Once the page is loaded, there is a floating and rotating thing, with several Forerunner glyphs on it. Four of them link to files to download, and one links to a video that can be played. One of the files, Log4_Transcript.txt, contains the transcript of the video:

The Conservation Measure is the only sweet note in this discordant symphony we've arranged. {//} (IT'S THE ONLY CONSTRUCTIVE ACTIVITY IN DECADES OF DESTRUCTION) {//} (RESEARCHING THE ADVERSARY AS WE PROTECT THE WORTHY) We know that the Flood's biology is alien enough that it must be extragalactic in origin. But where did it come from? {//} (AND WHY DID IT COME HERE?) Another file, unknown.jpg, has been identified as picture of the Boomerang nebula originally taken by NASA. Another picture, StarImage4.jpg, is a picture of the stars with AdjutantReflex's avatar. Finally, there is a second text file entitled Sample1000101 and contains what appears to be mostly incoherent data. These are the first few lines:

 0001000  1011010  1110101  1000101

{anomalous correlation - negative} {additional CM analysis unnecessary}

01111010100010101001011011010110101 The rest of the document is a lengthy table. To the left there is a series of numbers progressing upwards in values of 60 (1, 61, 121, 181 etc). The numbers continue up until the value 16,741. Along each of the numbers there are six groups of ten alphabetical characters (made up of c,g,a and t only). (These letters probably correspond to Cytosine, Guanine, Adenine, and Thymine, which are the main nucleobases, or building blocks, of DNA. The fifth nucleobase, Uracil, is found only in RNA, which is used in DNA replication. Uracil's exclusion may allude to the nature of the Flood as parasites. It could be speculated that the Flood hijacks its hosts RNA sequencing to obtain the ability to replicate, like some terrestrial viruses). These are the same characters that display on the video. Presumably, the binary sequences are also.

None of the binary sequence numbers translate to anything meaningful. However, there is something of value in this document - the line 'additional CM analysis unnecessary'. In genetic studies, 'cM' stands for 'Centimorgan'. Centimorgans are used to study genetic linkage, and considering the nature of the videos, it appears a study was being conducted on Flood molecules. One of the text files of Server 4 contains binary code, when placed in a translator messages are decoded which is related to the text seen in the server 4 video, the translated text has been added to the transcript of the video.

Trivia
7 years later, on June 28, 2014, a 343 Industries employee under the guise of Catalog revealed the Boomerang Nebula is actually a Burn home to multiple star roads and "classis malum" (Latin for "evil group/class/fleet", supposedly referring to Flood-controlled fleets).