Kamal Zaman

Zaman redirects here. For the SPARTAN-II, please see Yasmine Zaman.

Kamal Zaman is a civilian from the human colony world of Coral. He eventually left for Earth and over time ended up in Berkeley, on the west coast of the URNA.

Early life
Kamal was born from Coral. In 2537, his younger sister, Yasmine, was inducted into the SPARTAN-II program and replaced with a flash clone. After watching what he believed to be his sister's degradation, he decided to become a doctor and left for Earth.

At some point, Kamal suspected his girlfriend was cheating on him, and hacked into her chatter to find out for sure. It is unclear what happened, but their relationship ended.

Sophia and Aiden
In the year 2552, his mother set him up with the daughter of one of her friends, named Sophia Bossedon. However, Sophia was already dating a local gangster named Aiden Maki, but she knew her mother would disapprove of her dating someone from Earth so she didn't tell her.

After talking to her about Aiden for a bit, Kamal began to suspect that Aiden was cheating on her, and offered to find out for sure. After confirming the affair by hacking Aiden's phone, Sophia convinced Kamal to publicly humiliate the gangster.

A week later, Sophia and Aiden had made up, and Kamal was terrified that Aiden would want revenge. Instead, he was offered a job as a freelancer. Kamal agreed to work for Aiden in exchange for visas to bring his parents to Earth.

The next week, Kamal invited Sophia over for dinner, claiming that they were only friends. However, he would never try to cook a whole chicken for just a friend. While Kamal may be a genius hacker, he is a terrible cook. After he ruined the chicken, they went out for pizza. He became aware of his growing feelings for Sophia, but decided it wouldn't be right to act on them.

For his first job, Kamal was to help catch a group of graduate students who were cheating at a casino. Once he figured out how they were doing it, casino security threw out the card-counter without letting the others know. Then Kamal hacked into their line and, disguising his voice as the card-counter, made the cheaters lose all their winnings. The casino owner Mr. F, convinced him to string them along, saying that he was in for 30% of the take. He was paid in poker chips because the value was high, and they didn't want to leave a trail. When he attempted to play blackjack on his way out, he was informed that he couldn't use any of his chips because the table had a $10,000 limit.

Later, while with Sophia, his chatter received a letter from his mother. Sophia insisted he play it, and after a moment he agreed. In the message, Kamal's mother tells him to be a good friend to Sophia because her father ran off to Earth with a female lawyer. Sophia then left with Aiden, discouraging Kamal.

Next week, Aiden came to Kamal to discuss his latest plan. His idea was to make a business that would flash clone pop-stars, to give them a new way to make public appearances. Kamal refused to be involved, claiming that it was "child-porn illegal" and they could get sentenced to memory modification. Aiden insisted it wasn't that bad, and just asked Kamal for a feasibility study.

While Kamal was researching flash cloning, about how soon the clone's body starts failing, he realized that his sister had died the same way. In other words, his sister had been replaced with a flash clone.

Durga
Kamal soon became paranoid, believing that ONI was spying on him. In fact, it was Durga, a fragment of the Melissa, a smart AI created from his sister's brain after her death. While trying to track her down, Sophia came to tell him that she was being deported. Aiden had been arrested, and several of the visas he'd arranged were canceled, including hers. After reports came in of Coral's glassing, they decided to make a run for it. Sophia made a detour to bail out Aiden and was arrested. Kamal figured Sophia had abandoned him, and left town on a packbus to track down the one spying on him from New Jersey.

Kamal found Jersey Morelli's apartment, with Durga living in his computer. Durga explained how Yasmine was taken and trained to be a Spartan but ultimately died from the augmentations. Durga claimed that she was a mere copy of her personality, but Kamal insisted that he could still hear Yasmine in her. Durga offered him a job, saying that it was another chance to save her, and he accepted.

Durga's team of Kamal, Jersey, Janissary James and Rani Sobeck, broke into Chawla Base to deactivate the Deep-Space Artifact, a Forerunner device broadcasting a countdown timer. When Kamal was just about ready to give up, Durga told him that Sophia didn't run off with Aiden as he had thought, but that she was arrested. Kamal asked why she didn't tell him sooner, and Durga responded that before she wanted him willing to die, but now she wanted him motivated to live. Kamal was then certain that she was Yasmine because only she could be such a brat. Jersey was soon able to disable the artifact, but it first sent out a massive Slipspace wave that reassembled all the fragments of Melissa and also awakened Yasmine's mind. They were able to escape the base and get back to Jersey's apartment.

After treating Jan's injuries, Kamal headed back home. When he got there, he found that his parents were there; Aiden had brought them to Earth before Coral was destroyed. Melissa then posed as a lawyer and got Sophia and Aiden out of jail. Sophia had broken up with Aiden, and Kamal proposed to her. Kamal was getting ready to introduce Melissa to his family, when the Covenant invasion of Earth began.

Personality
In spite of his family's religious convictions, he is quite fond of beer, preferring imported beer rather than variants brewed on Earth.

Kamal Zaman thinks his favorite color is red, but Durga knows it's a tie between iced-tea and water at dusk blue.

Trivia

 * Yuri Lowenthal, voice of Kamal Zaman, is also the voice of the Prince in the Prince of Persia series. A piece of Kamal's dialog, "People think time is a river that flows in one direction, but time is an ocean." is very much like the Prince's "Some say time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction, but I have seen the face of time and I can tell you they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm."
 * Kamal Zaman is possibly a Muslim, based on his religious restrictions and name. Zaman is a common surname amongst the Pashtun people, suggesting his ancestors were likely from Afghanistan or Pakistan.
 * His name is pronounced as "Kommal Zomman".
 * His last name, Zaman, means "Time" in Arabic.

List of appearances

 * i love bees