Mendicant Bias

05-032 Mendicant Bias was a Contender-class Forerunner AI. He was the most advanced AI ever made at the time of its creation, and probably was more advanced than any AI produced by later races.

Beginnings
Mendicant Bias was tasked with resisting the Flood by studying and exploiting the weaknesses of the first Gravemind, or Compound Mind. At some point, the Gravemind contacted Mendicant Bias and convinced him to abandon the Forerunner, charging that the Forerunner were so gluttonous and prideful as to deny the next step of evolution: the Flood. The Gravemind insinuated that by clinging to the legend of the Mantle, the Forerunners had doomed the galaxy to eternal stagnation; the only way for the galaxy to progress was for superior beings to "restart" it. These superior beings, unsurprisingly, took the form of Compound Minds such as Gravemind and Mendicant Bias himself. Convinced by the Gravemind's arguments, Mendicant Bias intentionally became rampant, developing a hatred for his creators and actively working toward their destruction.

Fall from Grace

 * "What has taken you millennia to create, I erase in seconds." - Rampant Mendicant Bias

The defection of Mendicant Bias utterly undid the Forerunners' temporary stalling of the Flood (the Maginot Sphere plan) and forced them to accelerate work on their suicidal doomsday weapons. In order to give them time to complete the Halos' work, the Forerunners created another AI, Offensive Bias, to slow Mendicant Bias' advance. Offensive Bias lacked Mendicant's creativity and possibly his free will, but was more methodically lethal. His only purpose was to prevent Mendicant Bias from accessing the Ark, and buying time to activate the Halo array.

It seems that Mendicant Bias was unable to disable the Halos directly, perhaps not knowing their locations, and so the only chance he had to stop the coming cataclysm was to secure the Ark and stop the firing sequence from there. While he did not know the location of the Ark, he was aware of a method to reach it via the Portals and Key Ships. The Forerunner subsequently destroyed or disabled most of the keyships to stall Mendicant's assault. However, it seems that Mendicant Bias managed to locate (or thought he had located) one of the remaining keyships which led to his final, titanic naval battle with Offensive Bias. Mendicant's fatal mistake was that he had come to hold the Forerunners in abject contempt—his perceptions clouded by rampancy, he simply did not anticipate the possibility of facing another AI. Ultimately, Mendicant Bias was outsmarted and defeated by Offensive Bias and the successful activation of the Halos.

Repentance

 * "For eons I have watched as you misinterpreted. This is not reclamation, this is reclaimer" - Mendicant Bias revealing the Covenant's error.
 * "I will reject my bias and make amends... My makers are my masters. I will bring them safely to the Ark" - Mendicant Bias declaring its penance.

Following its defeat, Mendicant Bias was retrieved and broken down by Offensive Bias, who intended to bring him to Installation 00 for study. In order to prevent Mendicant from subverting or harming him, Offensive Bias broke the Compound Mind of Mendicant Bias into its component sections and scattered them throughout the few remaining ships of his fleet. Only a part of him made it to The Ark. One shard of Mendicant Bias' personality construct array was left on a Forerunner Dreadnought and lost. The ship was later found by the Covenant and installed in High Charity. Mendicant Bias presence was known to the Covenant and it was regarded as an Oracle.

In 2525, it was consulted by the Prophet of Fortitude and the Vice Minister of Tranquility concerning the large number of Forerunner artifacts or "Holy Relics" on Harvest. In a shocking revelation Mendicant Bias revealed that the "Holy Relics" were actually humans and that the Covenant faith was based on an age-old mistranslation. The glyph on the Luminary was mistaken as "reclamation" when it truly meant "reclaimer". This had the potential to undermine the entire Covenant's unity and faith and would lead to a revolution in Covenant politics and, ultimately, the Human-Covenant War.

The AI seems to have concluded that its ancient actions against the Forerunner had been mistaken and announced to its Covenant hosts its intention to bring the "reclaimers" to the Ark. To this end it attempted to leave High Charity by launching the dreadnought, an act that would have seriously damaged High Charity. Mendicant Bias was foiled only by chance; it was disconnected by some Lekgolo worms wriggling inside the ship.

During the First Battle of High Charity in 2552, the UNSC AI Cortana fought Mendicant Bias to delay the launching of the dreadnought, allowing SPARTAN-117 to board and return to Earth. In the proceeding events Mendicant Bias was carried through the Voi Portal to the Ark, where the missing shard was finally reunited with the part that resided in the Arks systems. On the Ark it attempted to communicate with SPARTAN-117 through Terminals, claiming it sought atonement by helping the Spartan. Exactly what form that assistance took is uncertain.


 * "And so here at the end of my life, I do once again betray a former master. The path ahead is fraught with peril. But I will do all I can to keep it stable - keep you safe. I'm not so foolish to think this will absolve me of my sins. One life hardly balances billions. But I would have my masters know that I have changed. And you shall be my example. " -Mendicant Bias to SPARTAN-117

Trivia

 * Mendicant Bias has been connected with the whispering voice heard in the Mausoleum Suite. Certainly, there are similarities between the character expressed in the whispers and Mendicant Bias—both are imprisoned by memories of their past crimes, both are seeking forgiveness, and both retain a sense of fatalist philosophy.