As we saw in the E3 2021 trailer, Halo Infinite will introduce a new AI partner for Master Chief. While this AI looks remarkably like Cortana, the discussion between her and the Chief clarifies that she’s a new character. So who is this new AI in Halo Infinite? Is she Cortana? Is Cortana dead? We’ll discuss this below.
Who is the new AI in Halo Infinite?
In the latest campaign teaser for Halo Infinite, Master Chief crawls through some wreckage and finds an AI that appears to be Cortana. However, they have a strange conversation that clouds things up:
- Chief: What happened? Where’s Cortana?
- AI: The rogue AI known as Cortana is gone. She’s been deleted.
- Chief: How? By you?
- AI: Of course not. Did you hit your head or something? Don’t you remember? My instructions were to enter this installation, imitate Cortana, and lock her down for retrieval. Yours were to take her back to the Infinity for deletion. So, if it wasn’t you… Ok then…
- AI: There’s something else. On successful deployment, my deletion routine was supposed to complete. Still here…
- Chief: Good.
- AI: Good?
- Chief: Something stopped your deletion. We need to find out why.
- AI: But, this wasn’t the mission.
- Chief: The missions change. They always do.
- AI: Are you sure?
So, the new AI in Halo Infinite isn’t Cortana, at least not the one we know. This AI was partnered with a Spartan and tasked with acting as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate and lock Cortana down so she could be retrieved and returned to the UNCS Infinity for deletion. Upon the success of her mission, she was meant to self-delete, but that didn’t happen.
The strange thing about this situation is that the AI acts as if she knows the Chief, but he obviously doesn’t know her. We don’t know what her identity is for sure or why the Chief doesn’t remember her, but we know that she’s not Cortana. In fact, she seems to be a weapon fashioned against Cortana.
