Installation 04

''Installation 04 redirects here. For other uses, see Installation 04 (disambiguation)''

"Whoever controls Halo controls the fate of the universe."

- Captain Jacob Keyes

Installation 04, also known as Alpha Halo, was one of a series of gigantic ring worlds, the Halo Array, left behind by the enigmatic, technologically advanced, and apparently extinct Forerunners.

The Covenant reverentially described Installation 04 as either the First Holy Ring or the First Sacred Ring. After its destruction at the end of the Battle of Installation 04, the Ark started to construct a replacement for Installation 04.

Overview
The purpose of Installation 04, along with its brethren, was to preclude and thwart the parasite forms known as the Flood from consuming all sentient life in the galaxy by destroying all sentient life to prevent eventual consumption. In the event of a Flood outbreak, one of the seven installations could be triggered (in turn triggering the remaining Halos) to annihilate all sentient life within a radius of 25,000 light years. In the event of an unexpected shutdown, all remaining rings would go into a "standby state", in which they could be fired at once from the Ark if need be.

Installation 04, until its destruction by John-117, was controlled by the Forerunner artificial intelligence construct (Monitor), 343 Guilty Spark.

The climate of Installation 04 was very similar to Earth's climate. There have been hurricanes over the oceans on the ring. The weather was, however, extremely unpredictable - rain and snowfall could occur at random, leading Cortana to wonder if the weather was intentionally irregular, or if it followed a pattern such as snow being deliberately made at the control room to slow the Flood.

Installation 04 orbited the massive gas giant Threshold, and was suspended in the Lagrange point between Threshold and its largest natural satellite, Basis. The installation had a 24-degree axial tilt from Threshold's orbital plane. Due to this, any given point on the surface of the ring received sunlight from the star Soell for half of the time it was on the sunny side of Threshold, and none when was on the dark side. This created a somewhat unusual day-night cycle for the ring, in which it was dark three-fourths of the time and had no sunrise or sunset similar to those of a planet.

With a diameter of 10,000km and a surface width of 318km, the ring has a surface area of 3,180,000km2.

Ancient history
Installation 04 was built by Installation 00's Foundry before 100,000 BCE. When the IsoDidact activated the Array at the Forerunner-Flood war's conclusion, ending the centuries-long conflict, Installation 04 was the first to fire, followed shortly after by the other six Halo rings. Installation 04 lay dormant for a hundred thousand years, with 343 Guilty Spark and his Sentinels ready to keep the Flood confined in the Flood containment facilities and keeping the infrastructure of the Halo in perfect working order.

Intermediate period
After eons of uneventful existence on Installation 04, 343 Guilty Spark eventually found himself bored. For his own amusement, Spark began an experiment in which he evacuated entire sections of the Installation into space; according to Spark, these were experiments to measure the geologic effects of exposure to the vacuum of space and the eventual biological recovery of the evacuated sections, in order to gain insight into emergency response scenarios.

Around 40,000 BCE, an unidentified alien vessel crash landed in Sector 1215. Sometime prior to the crash the ship started broadcasting a distress signal. After attempting to translate it, 04-343 Guilty Spark blocked the signal, as no communication revealing the location of any of the Halos was allowed. After no lifeforms exited for several days, Spark had a large sarcophagus constructed around the vessel.

Between the activation of the Array and the arrival of the UNSC and the Covenant, a number of space-faring species stumbled across the installation. Although they reportedly explored the facility and recorded their findings, all of these species eventually left without breaking containment.

Discovery and destruction
"Halo... It's finished." "No, I think we're just getting started."

- Cortana and John-117 after the destruction of Installation 04.



The Covenant discovered the location of Installation 04 after the Covenant Fleet of Particular Justice followed the, which was fleeing from the Fall of Reach through slipspace. The Halos are deeply ingrained into the Covenant's religious dogma, but prior to this discovery they had never actually found one. Due to the Covenant's faster slipspace capabilities, they arrived before the Pillar of Autumn.

The Pillar of Autumn arrived around September 19, 2552 and was promptly shot down by the warding Covenant ships. Shortly thereafter, the Covenant ground forces on Installation 04 accidentally unleashed the Flood from captivity. Humans, Flood, and the Covenant fought massive battles against one another as the Forerunner constructs tried to control the outbreak by activating Halo. The ring's monitor, 343 Guilty Spark, tried to convince the Master Chief to activate Halo. Not knowing the truth of what it did, he attempted to light the ring but was stopped by his AI friend and companion Cortana who was in the Core. She informed the Master Chief of Halo's true purpose and stashed the Activation Index in her memory banks. The Monitor betrayed the two and tried to kill the Master Chief and retrieve Cortana, but the two escaped and started plotting against him.

In the conclusion of the battle, John-117 detonated the Pillar of Autumn ' s fusion reactors in order to destroy the ring. The explosion critically damaged the superstructure below it; the resulting shockwave and damage to the ring's systems destabilized the ring, shattering it into pieces.

Only a handful of humans and Covenant survived the battle. 343 Guilty Spark floated through space to a gas mining platform over Threshold, where he stumbled upon a Covenant expeditionary force. Inspired by his words, they began a heretical rebellion against the greater Covenant. Installation 04's destruction is seen as the first step in the chain of events that led to the Great Schism. The Heretics were quelled by Arbiter Thel 'Vadam who silenced their leader, but the seeds of a rebellion were planted. The Monitor was then captured by the loyal Covenant and later defected to the humans' side until he was destroyed on the replacement Alpha Halo by SPARTAN-117 with the help of Sergeant Johnson.

Installation 04 was the first Halo installation encountered by humanity, as well as first to be destroyed. Its destruction triggered the activation of a portal leading to Shield World 006 within Onyx, and also caused the Ark to start constructing a replacement ring.

Post-destruction
There is now a large field of debris where Installation 04 was, though a few large chunks of the ring remain. Some smaller pieces of the Installation 04 have landed on Basis, while others have burned up in Threshold's atmosphere upon entry.

The UNSC's peace treaty with the Covenant forbids either party from landing on the remains of Installation 04.

The Mona Lisa
Following the return of the survivors from the battle, the Office of Naval Intelligence learned of the Flood lifeform. Section III sought to establish a research laboratory in order to control the Flood parasite and possibly weaponize it against the Covenant. A science team headed by Major John Smith was authorized to take command of the prison vessel Mona Lisa. After bringing a group of Covenant prisoners aboard, they jumped to the wreckage of Alpha Halo in the Soell system. Some Flood specimens had survived the ringworld's destruction and were recovered to be experimented on both human and Covenant prisoners. However, the Flood soon broke quarantine and infected the ship. ONI later dispatched a prowler, the, to assess the status of the Mona Lisa under the pretenses of investigating Halo's debris field. On October 25, 2552, the prowler was forced to destroy the overrun vessel with a Shiva-class nuclear missile.

Replacement
Shortly after the destruction of the Halo, Installation 00 began to automatically construct a new Halo to replace Installation 04. This exact copy of the first Halo ring was nearing completion only a few months after the first ring was destroyed, but was also subsequently destroyed when it was fired before it was ready by the John-117 and Cortana. 343 Guilty Spark attempted to prevent this, but was finally destroyed by the Master Chief with the help of Sergeant Johnson in this new ring's Control Room.

Lost fragment
When the Pillar of Autumn ' s reactors went critical, Installation 04 attempted to activate a safety measure and make a slipspace jump. However, this self-preservation protocol was only partly successful, and only a small portion of the ring—a shard with a surface area of 96 km2, later designated the Alpha Shard—managed to enter slipspace before the Autumn ' s reactors overloaded and destroyed the ring. The surviving fragment of the Halo reentered normal space in the vicinity of a red giant star some distance away from the Orrichon system and was caught in the giant star's orbit.

Despite the extreme temperatures and radiation produced by its vicinity to the star, the Halo shard managed to sustain a habitable environment, although only when the terraformed side was facing away from the star; the fragment's spin about itself produced a day-night cycle in which the terraformed side was in shadow for approximately sixteen hours, during which the temperatures remained high but survivable. However, when the habitable side rotated to face the star, not even the ring's systems could sustain livable temperatures or protect the occupants from the stellar radiation. Despite this, the UNSC took note of the ring's impressive redundant systems in functionalities including but not limited to those involved in maintaining gravitational field integrity, atmospheric composition, and even biodiversity levels.

While most of the debris of Installation 04 either fell into Threshold's or Basis' gravity wells or remained in the orbital debris field, at least 30% of the mass and curvature remained unaccounted for by the UNSC. In late 2555, the Office of Naval Intelligence took note of information recorded by an Automated UNSC Scout Vehicle, Recon-14, in an area designated Location 6201. Recon-14 had been deployed from the Pillar of Autumn before the ship's crash-landing on the Halo installation. The signal data from the drone was analyzed by multiple ONI specialists, among them ONI attaché for astrophysical phenomena Dr. Madeline Tress. She correctly concluded that the signal originated from the missing fragment of Installation 04, indicating that a part of the ring either generated or was enveloped in a significant slipspace event, one far exceeding the capabilities of either human or Covenant technology.

Uniquely, the extreme heat of the Autumn ' s explosion, comparable to temperatures produced by a supernova, caused the formation of an entirely new element in a small area of the fragment—one not found elsewhere in the universe. This element was later illegally mined from the fragment and smuggled to human colonial space, specifically Sedra. It was discovered that the element caused catastrophic breakdown of DNA in certain humans but did not affect other species. The element was refined into a bioweapon which a Sangheili terrorist unleashed in Sedra's capital city, killing or hospitalizing many of the planet's citizens. A joint ONI-Sedran Colonial Guard team led by Lt. Commander Locke embarked on a mission to the Halo fragment in order to capture the smugglers who mined the element and destroy the deposits with a HAVOK nuclear warhead.

Anniversary redesign
While the design of the Halos has stayed largely consistent across all post-Halo: Combat Evolved media, Installation 04 underwent a significant visual overhaul in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. The entire superstructure of the ring has been redesigned. To wit, the surface features are completely different and much more pronounced, including additions such as rows of prominent prongs lining the ring's edges and large-scale patterns of bluish light, in contrast to the more subdued original design in which the features on the outer surface appear largely flat due to the immense scale of the ring. This redesign has not been carried over to post-Anniversary media: the prongs are absent from Installation 03 in Halo 4; a visual allusion to the Halos in Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn follows the original design; in Halo 2 Anniversary, Installation 04 has received some visual changes (including prominent blue lighting in the circular patterns on the ring's outer surface) but is otherwise closer to the original version than the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary redesign.

Miscellaneous

 * Sergeant Johnson humorously describes Installation 04 as "God's own anti-son-of-a-bitch-machine" and a "giant hula-hoop".
 * Except for Boarding Action and Chiron TL-34, all Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer maps are set on Installation 04.

List of appearances

 * Halo: The Fall of Reach
 * Halo: Combat Evolved
 * Halo: The Flood
 * Halo: First Strike
 * Halo 2
 * Conversations from the Universe
 * Halo Graphic Novel
 * The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor
 * Breaking Quarantine
 * Halo: Ghosts of Onyx
 * Halo 3
 * Halo Legends
 * Origins
 * Halo: Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe
 * The Mona Lisa
 * ''Halo: Reach
 * Halo: Fall of Reach
 * Invasion
 * Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
 * Terminals
 * Halo 4
 * Halo: Silentium
 * Halo: Broken Circle
 * Halo: Nightfall
 * Halo 2 Anniversary
 * ''Terminals
 * Halo 5: Guardians