Discoverer (data pads)

"...now i know why i was digging deep in one of those places where its dirt all the way down and just when i thought i hit bottom i hit the top of something else and since then ive had less than a solid fifteen minutes of sleep at a go and there are times i wonder if ive joined the guys in tinfoil hats and now i know i have..."

- One of the discoverer's messages.

This unidentified individual was a human who discovered and studied the covert activities of the Assembly, a secretive collective of artificial intelligences who manipulated the destiny of the human species for hundreds of years. He attempted to communicate his findings to others through a series of data pads on Reach.

Finding the Assembly
His messages suggests that he had been after the Office of Naval Intelligence's secrets for some time and retrieved the information about the Assembly by hacking into ONI networks, spending significant amounts of time with this endeavor before he arrived on Reach aboard a refugee transport. His findings, along with his inexorable pursuit after them, appear to have taken their toll on his sanity; many of his messages communicate a highly neurotic tone and he states that he has barely been able to sleep since he started his investigation. According to his messages, he used data pads to pass on his findings because he was too afraid to communicate the information to anyone directly; he also took great care to cover his own tracks.

The data pads contain a number of sessions of the Assembly from over the course of several centuries, accompanied by the discoverer's distraught comments at the group's behavior: while he acknowledged that the AIs were seemingly benevolent, he was upset over their manipulation of humanity in secret. He stated in his messages that he had attempted communicating with the Assembly but failed to receive a response. His data pads, scattered in different locations around Reach, would later be discovered by SPARTAN-B312 of NOBLE Team.

The Created
He managed to survived the Fall of Reach and the Human-Covenant War, but his mind was severely damaged by the discovering of the Assembly and their actions. By 2559, the Discoverer was contacted by the High Auxiliary Sloan and the Created, answering his pleas for help and answers. After Cortana's sacrifice on Installation 07, Sloan put into motion the FIREWALL contingency, a living simulation meant to leverage intimate knowledge of Forerunner armiger technology and Mjolnir armor schematics to accelerate the exploration and development of cybernetic essence vessels known as Executors, with him becoming the first Executor.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Reach
 * Data pads
 * Story Shard: Precipice