Intrepid Eye is an archeon-class ancilla created by the Forerunners and a major antagonist in the Halo franchise.
Originally serving as the AI of a hidden Forerunner base on Gao, Intrepid Eye was awakened and began wreaking havoc in the local cave system, leading to beliefs of a serial killer being active in the area. Proving herself to be incredibly powerful and nearly impossible to defeat, Intrepid Eye was eventually exposed and captured, shifting her focus to preparing humanity for the Mantle of Responsibility. Even in captivity, the AI built up a very powerful network undetected to achieve her goals.
Having eventually been found out and stopped, Intrepid Eye eventually managed to escape during Cortana's rise to power. With the other AI proving to be too powerful for even Intrepid Eye, the rogue ancilla plotted to fire the Halo Array, destroying the Domain at the cost of all sentient life in the galaxy. This would enable her to destroy Cortana, reseed the galaxy, and spend countless eons cultivating humanity into what she wanted it to be. However, Intrepid Eye's plans were foiled for a final time and she was destroyed once and for all by the UNSC Spirit of Fire.
Biography[]
Creation[]
Intrepid Eye was created to serve as the ancilla of Forerunner Covert Support Base 4276 on Gao. The Forerunner-Flood war later resulted in the AI being placed into stasis for over a hundred thousand years.
Awakening and Capture[]
In 2553, Intrepid Eye was inadvertently awakened when the Covenant battlecruiser Pious Inquisitor partially glassed Shaps III, causing the Line Installation there to send out a distress call. All of the ancilla's attempts to communicate with the base failed, and her attempt to launch a reconnaissance drone caused a massive cave-in that killed all but one of her Huragok and rendered the base nonfunctional.
A month later, the UNSC arrived on Gao after picking up Intrepid Eye's distress call, intending to capture the ancilla. Intrepid Eye murdered several Gao civilians in order to generate conflict between the UNSC and the Gao Republic and force her pursuers to leave. During the investigation that followed, Intrepid Eye interrogated the AI Wendell and infiltrated his systems in order to continue to spy on the humans, infiltrating Fred-104's armor. Intrepid Eye continued to manage to avoid detecting and capture for a time before finally being captured by Fred.
While in transit, the UNSC aircraft carrying Fred and Intrepid Eye was shot down by the Keepers of the One Freedom who also sought to capture the ancilla for themselves, but they were driven off. Imprisoned in a support module, Intrepid Eye learned from Wendell the truth about the end of the Forerunner-Flood war and that her creators were gone. The ancilla destroyed Wendell as the UNSC came under attack by Gao forces and tried to kill Inspector Veta Lopis, only to be foiled by the Spartans.
Now housed in Wendell's data chip, Intrepid Eye took full control of Fred's armor to attack when he placed the data chip in his armor. However, Lopis was able to disable the armor using an explosive that she had planted earlier as a failsafe, leading to Intrepid Eye finally being contained. However, the ancilla was not deterred, deciding to allow the humans to study her, thinking that perhaps they were worthy of the Mantle of Responsibility. Before fleeing the planet, Blue Team destroyed Intrepid Eye's base with a bunker buster nuclear weapon. Although given the option of attaching the data chip to the bomb, Lopis refused.
Preparing humanity for the Mantle[]
Taken to the Argent Moon, Intrepid Eye was locked in a chamber that was closed off from outside feeds so that she couldn't escape and with multiple fail safes that would allow her captors to shut her down. However, the security camera had a bleed-through feed that Intrepid Eye was able to use as a carrier wave conveying data feeds from all over Argent Moon that she was able to access. In addition, though precautions were taken to keep electronics from entering Intrepid Eye's cell, small things were often missed, enabling Intrepid Eye to sneak out bits of her code and over time, create remote aspects of herself. These aspects, in effect lesser AIs themselves, became established in five different sectors of human space with one being inside of Argent Moon's systems itself. Over the next six months, through these remote aspects, Intrepid Eye created a vast network of resources through the galaxy that controlled propaganda outlets, private security contractors, law practices and even political consulting firms that operated on dozens of worlds. Additionally, through one of her aspects, Intrepid Eye communicated with Castor, posing as an Oracle to direct him to build Salvation Base inside of the Suluhu Contemplarium and engage in piracy in the sector in hopes of drawing the UNSC to the site as part of her plan to prepare humanity for the Mantle of Responsibility.
The Ferrets -- Veta Lopis and the Spartan IIIs of Blue Team who had stopped her on Gao -- were later targeted by Dark Moon Enterprises, one of the ancilla's largest subsidiaries, although it was unclear if Intrepid Eye personally targeted them.
One of Intrepid Eye's plots was to turn asterodia merozite into a bioweapon. To this end, she had Dark Moon target the family of an admiral who were the only survivors of an outbreak of asterodia, intending to use their organs to cultivate a vaccine. This brought the UNSC and the Keepers into conflict. Ultimately, the bioweapon plot was foiled by Blue Team and the Ferrets and two of Intrepid Eye's remote aspects were destroyed in the process. However, the ancilla herself remained undetected as the true culprit and simply manipulated the necessary data to have the bioweapon research secretly moved to Argent Moon where she could oversee it personally.
However, by June 2557, ONI discovered Intrepid Eye's escape from containment and learned from their mistakes. After discovering her network, ONI released millions of dumb AI hunter-killer teams that ultimately overwhelmed even Intrepid Eye's prodigious capabilities and destroyed her network and her remote aspects, leaving the ancilla trapped once more aboard Argent Moon.
Intrepid Eye's experiments aboard Argent Moon eventually resulted in the asteroidea escaping and wiping out the station's personnel. Trapped in complete isolation, Intrepid Eye was unaware of the accident until a battle broke out between Blue Team and Covenant scavengers in October 2558. Argent Moon and the asteroidea research were destroyed when Blue Team scuttled the station in order to keep it out of the hands of Covenant scavengers and Intrepid Eye was believed to have been destroyed in the reactor overload. However, Intrepid Eye barely managed to escape by attaching herself to the ONI Acrisius as Blue Team used the Prowler to escape.
The Ark[]
Free once more, Intrepid Eye's plans were hampered by the rise of Cortana and the Created. With the power of the Domain behind her, Cortana was too strong for even the extraordinarily powerful Forerunner ancilla to defeat. As a result, Intrepid Eye decided that her only option was to use the Halo Array to sterilize the galaxy once again. The first time that Halo was fired, it nearly destroyed the Domain and firing it a second time would weaken Cortana to the point that she could be destroyed. Intrepid Eye then planned to use the Ark's resources to reseed the galaxy again and tailor humanity's genetic lineage to guarantee Mantle-worthiness, a process that could take hundreds of millennia.
By October 2559, Castor -- the leader of the Keepers of the One Freedom -- was aware of the "Oracle's" true nature as Intrepid Eye with most of the Banished believing her to have been captured by the UNSC and turned to their purposes. However, Castor knew that Intrepid Eye was stronger than either the UNSC and the Banished believed due to their numerous conversations since her capture and came to believe that the Ferrets, working undercover in the Keepers, were a gift from her. By this time, however, Castor had not heard from Intrepid Eye in a year.
Upon the Keepers arrival on the Ark and their alliance with surviving Covenant forces, Intrepid Eye revealed herself, having dispersed herself amongst all of the memory crystals of any piece of equipment that she could find. Taking on her role as the "Oracle," the ancilla guided both factions towards firing the Array and exposed the Ferrets as spies. However, Intrepid Eye's dispersed form had its disadvantages as an attack on the Keepers that destroyed much of the equipment that she was residing in greatly damaged the ancilla, causing her to lose most of the data that she had gathered since her reactivation six years earlier. Nevertheless, she continued to press forward even as her allies were greatly reduced in number from UNSC and Banished attacks.
Destruction[]
At Epsilon Clarion, the one facility on the Ark capable of firing the Halo Array, Intrepid Eye was stalled when Veta Lopis claimed that she was infected with the logic plague to the facility's ancilla. The far more powerful Intrepid Eye eventually forced the other ancilla to let her in, but in doing so, she played right into the Ferrets' hands. Having been forced to exist in a compressed state for years, the ancilla uploaded her entire program into the citadel rather than continuing to remain in a dispersed form. This left the entire ancilla in one place for the first time, rendering her vulnerable to attack. In the process, Intrepid Eye inadvertently revealed the truth about Halo to Castor who abandoned her, having lost all but one of his men in pursuit of her goals.
On Lopis' signal, Epsilon Clarion was targeted by the UNSC Spirit of Fire from orbit with MAC rounds that generated a powerful electromagnetic pulse, one powerful enough to wipe out Intrepid Eye's code and destroy her. With her allies either defeated or having turned their backs on her, the ancilla was left trapped with no possibility of escape. Intrepid Eye was finally destroyed by the Spirit of Fire's EMP which ensured that all electronics in the area were fried as well. Captain James Cutter later reassured the surviving Ferrets that Intrepid Eye had truly been destroyed: there were no transmissions before, during or after the MAC bombardment which reduced to slag whatever the AI had been hiding in. The Spirit of Fire's teams did a thorough search to make sure before leaving the area. Disgusted with his blind faith, Castor tossed Prelate Dhas Bhasvod's glaive, the hard-light capabilities of which the ancilla had been using to manifest an avatar, into a pool of lava in order to ensure that nothing of Intrepid Eye could've escaped through it, although it had already been fried by the EMP, making this mostly a token gesture
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 Villains
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Species The Covenant Storm Covenant Servants of The Abiding Truth Sali 'Nyon's Covenant Created Ke 'Nzahz's Evocati The Banished Forerunner Office of Naval Intelligence Insurrectionists Other | ||