Terminal (Halo 3)

''This article is about the Terminals in Halo 3. For other uses of "Terminal", see Terminal (disambiguation)'' The Terminals in Halo 3 are Forerunner terminals that provide insight into the history of the Forerunners, primarily the Forerunner-Flood war. The Terminals are a continuation of the Iris alternate reality game used as viral marketing for Halo 3. They clarify a great deal of the Iris story line by naming the authors of different messages and by explaining the circumstances of the original firing of the Halo Array. The Terminals follow the stories of the Librarian and the Didact, Forerunner logs of Flood attacks, and Mendicant Bias's progression into rampancy.

Finding and accessing all seven of the Terminals in Halo 3 will unlock the Marathon Man achievement. The name "Marathon Man" is a reference to Bungie's earlier game, Marathon. This is evident because the achievement has a person's torso with the Marathon symbol as the head.

Overview
The Terminals can be accessed on any difficulty. The player can get the Marathon Man achievement through a combination of different sessions, reading Terminals out of order and on various difficulties. There are no requirements for doing them in one game, nor is the player required to find them to finish their missions— and the player does not need to finish the mission for a Terminal to count toward the achievement.

The Terminals
The Terminals are located on the three levels The Ark, The Covenant and Halo. There is also a hidden Terminal on Cortana, but that one does not need to be found in order to get the achievement.

Upon initial access on all difficulty levels, the seven Terminals give background details regarding the story of the 300-year-long Flood/Forerunner conflict, including strategies, encounters, enemy and friendly losses, and procedures leading up to the activation of the Halo Array. After a short time, this text is overwritten and a new message is displayed on the screen.

On Easy, Normal, and Heroic difficulty levels, this second screen of text details a correspondence between two Forerunner lovers called the "Librarian" and "Didact". In this transcript, as in the Terminals, "L" stands for Librarian and "D" stand for Didact.

An unknown entity sends brief messages onscreen upon shutdown, and at the final Terminal, it is revealed that this entity is the rampant Forerunner AI known as Mendicant Bias, who had previously assisted in the Flood's attempt to destroy the Forerunners.

On the Legendary difficulty level, the second screen of text tells the story of Mendicant Bias, an AI created by Didact to destroy the Flood. It is revealed here that Mendicant Bias was the AI who took control of Adjutant Reflex during the "Iris" campaign. Messages detailing Mendicant's eventual defection to the Gravemind are displayed on Terminals 1-4, with the AI having an ongoing conversation with someone or something tagged LF.Xx.3273 -- presumably the Flood, as in Terminal 4, Mendicant Bias told LF.Xx.3273 that he was created to study them. These messages are somewhat incomplete and disrupted, with {~} symbolizing the disruptions. A noticeable pattern in the messages suggests that many of the disruptions occur at the use of pronouns, such as "I, we, me, they, it", though this pattern is not entirely consistent.

Terminal 5 displays several hostile messages sent from Mendicant Bias to his makers, confirming his rampancy—these messages are different on each difficulty level.

Terminal 6 details the defeat of Mendicant Bias by Offensive Bias, as perceived by Offensive himself.

The final message hidden in Terminal 7 is an apology made by Mendicant directly to the player for his betrayal, atoning by saying he will help the Reclaimer leave the Ark safely.

Terminal One

Terminal Two

Terminal Three

Terminal Four

Terminal Five

Terminal Six

Terminal Seven

Cortana Terminal
The Cortana Terminal is located in the basement room of the Tilt Skull's location, where the Gravity Hammer is found. This Terminal does not count towards the Marathon Man achievement, but instead, plays a secret Cortana moment. It is an extra easter egg in the game for the player to find on their own. The Terminal references the novel Halo: Fall of Reach.

It can be found in the room with the Tilt Skull. When you enter this room, and if you listen closely you can hear Cortana speak. She states: "Hello, what is your name? It is very nice to meet you. You like games? So do I." These are the first words Dr. Halsey used with John. If you look to the sides and borders of the room, you can find a way down to a lower level of the room. There you will find the Terminal, though it does not look like the other Terminals in the game; it is a light in the center of a pedestal. When you activate the Terminal, a message from Cortana will appear. When you access the Terminal Cortana will say, "It was the coin's fault! I wanted to make you strong, keep you safe. I'm sorry. I can't". This message has confused many players, and to fully understand both it and Cortana's words when you enter the room you will need to have read Halo: The Fall of Reach. What Cortana says when you enter the room is what Doctor Halsey says to John-117 when they first meet. The coin is a reference to the quarter John won from Dr Halsey on that occasion. The coin was used as a bet by Halsey to see the extent of John's luck. His success led to his induction in the SPARTAN-II project.

Translation and naming
It is important to note that phrases such as "Maginot Line", "Eden" and "fairy tale" would not have existed in the Forerunner language. It is known that Forerunner technology (including Terminals) utilizes extremely advanced translation software. This software is capable of incorporating idioms from a reader's own experience, such that a human viewing the Terminals will see human idiomatic expressions and human names (such as "Eden").

Several pieces of text are bracketed and shown in a darker font color; this is likely done to indicate that the phrases in question have no exact equivalent in the reader's language, and that an approximation has been used. Furthermore, some bracketed phrases also contain sub-bracketed question marks (such as the phrase "[travel the path of demons[?]]"), implying that the Terminals' software is unsure of the proper translation for the given dialogue.

Interestingly, the word "Ark" does not appear in brackets, meaning that it is a direct translation, rather than a human idiom.

Reversed messages
h0RRCjpmoAA In certain parts, backwards speech can be heard. They can be deciphered if you record the message and play it backwards on a computer.

Common phrases include "Archive Access", "Interruption", "Lineage Confirmed", "Data Corruption" and "Welcome Child". These messages are easily understandable to fans of the fiction. "Welcome Child" meaning welcome, child of my creators, as the Humans are descendants of the Forerunners, "Lineage Confirmed" meaning that the computer, after John-117 touches it, confirms his relation to the Forerunners. Some fans have speculated that this is the voice of 032 Mendicant Bias.

Additional information
For a moment after a page is initially accessed the text is shown in its original state as a 'Forerunner alphabet'. The symbols only stand in for letters, not numbers or punctuation, and share the same colors (ie. gold and orange) as the letters possess when 'translated', and only stand in for the letters in the main sections, not in the text that comes up immediately before you are redirected.

The symbols bear no resemblance to the other, more well known Forerunner symbols and possess no observable meaning, as they replace the English characters at random (this can be seen by flipping quickly between two pages and concentrating on any one particular symbol, observing how the stand-in changes).

Covenant references to Terminals
There are several examples of terms and phrases in the Terminals that may have been later adopted for use by the Covenant.

In Terminal Five, on Heroic, Mendicant Bias tells the Forerunners that "Nature itself cries out for your destruction and I am its willing instrument." This is similar to a phrase that has been used by the Covenant several times: "Your destruction is the will of their gods... and we are their instrument."

More borrowed language can be found in Halo: Combat Evolved's promotional Transmissions. The Covenant Truth and Reconciliation sent the following message to humanity: "When no single human brick lies atop another, then will we be satisfied with your destruction." Mendicant Bias says to the Forerunners, in Terminal Five on Heroic, "I will hammer your cities until no stone lies atop another."

There is also the Didact's line in Terminal Seven: "I will begin our Great Journey without you, carrying this bitter record. Those who came after will know what we bought with this [false transcendence] - what you bought, and the price you paid." This may have been discovered by the Covenant and used as the basis for their concept of "the Great Journey," as Didact was referring to the activation of the Halo Array. Additionally, the phrase "[false transcendence]" may have been mistranslated further as simply "transcendence," leading the Covenant to believe that the Forerunners had literally transcended upon activating the array.

Finally, in the Legendary transcript for Terminal Four, the Gravemind tells Mendicant Bias that "perhaps [the Forerunners] have found [some difficulty] of making that decision for themselves? Perhaps they chose to leave it [to an] impartial outsider; cast you as an arbiter during this time of great need?" This statement may have been retrieved by the Sangheili and may be the origin of the title of Arbiter - an Elite chosen during a time of great need to settle a dispute, though this may have been a simple coincidence.

Trivia

 * On the level The Ark, whenever you go to Terminal Three, you will find 343 Guilty Spark waiting for you in there. If you read the Terminal, it shows that 343 Guilty Spark has just logged in and talked to Mendicant Bias. You can actually hear him converse with the Terminal, if you are fast enough.
 * The orange circular symbol in the Terminals is also seen on the cover of Halo: Ghosts of Onyx.
 * When certain Terminals are redirecting the player after they have logged into one, as the screen turns red on the left side are symbols and the words "I AM MENDICANT BIAS."
 * The "Forerunner Alphabet" characters are the same as those used by the S'Pht in the Terminals of the Marathon series.
 * The events detailed in Halo: Cryptum appear to conflict with the series of events described in the Terminals in Halo 3. Terminals two and three indicate that the Didact had been fighting in the Forerunner-Flood war for some time; however, according to Halo: Cryptum, the Didact had supposedly been in hibernation for over one thousand years (though this is never confirmed), and therefore could not have been involved in the war, which had begun 300 years prior. Also, Terminal three describes the Didact's plans for Mendicant Bias; according to the novel, by the time the Didact was awakened, Mendicant Bias had been sent on his mission 43 years prior, while the Didact was unconscious.
 * John-117 was not apparently the only human to have read the terminals. In Halo: Primordium, an ONI science team references the terminals as being a source for their prior information on the Forerunners. The factual accuracy of the terminal dialogs is also brought into question, as some of the information revealed by 343 Guilty Spark over the course of the novel appears to conflict with the terminals. It is unknown whether the terminals known to the ONI team were the same terminals John-117 viewed on Installation 00 or if the ONI accessed similar data files in another location.