Lost Signal

The fireteam had made headway into a deeper part of Nessus, following a cave system that had opened up after seismic disturbances hit that sector of the planet. Failsafe followed their progress, keeping track of their location via a local feed. She saw what they saw and heard what they heard.

They were a stoic bunch, Failsafe thought to herself. Didn't talk much. She kinda liked that. But only kinda. She always felt as if she had to fill the silence. Was she annoying? Did she talk too much? Failsafe reviewed every fireteam feed she had ever recorded, running a thousand queries simultaneously, each one as useless as the last.

Look at yourself, she said, pushing aside a barrage of query results that put strain on her processor. An AI with anxiety. Only the Golden Age could have produced something as ridiculous as that.

"A large Vex force is amassing ahead," she said helpfully. The fireteam signaled an acknowledgement but said nothing. Another set of notifications and queries began processing, and she turned her attention to them, reviewing and dismissing each one individually.

The fireteam should have engaged the Vex by now, she thought. But there was no audio. It had suddenly dropped to silence.

Concerned, she tried to pull up a visual on the fireteam leader's location, but was met with a patchy network connection and the pitch-black interior of some long-forgotten cave.

Losing connection to a feed felt like dropping a bowl of soup. That's the way she described it to Ikora, who had looked at her curiously before changing the subject. Failsafe had seen many bowls of soup dropped when her crew was alive. The cautious, careful adjustment as the soup gets too close to the lip of the bowl. A hissed expletive as a splash of hot soup hits skin. The involuntary jerk as the bowl tips over and crashes to the floor. Then no more soup. Just a spill that needed to be cleaned up. A smear of incomplete data in need of deletion.

The soup was too close to the lip of the bowl. She adjusted her sensors, widened her parameters. Balanced the data stream. There was nothing. Just nothing.

"Fireteam leader," she called out. "Please reestablish uplink to the H.E.L.M.!"

The visual feed stuttered. Waves of static dissolved into an empty, grey wall of noise. Panic.

"Fireteam leader," Failsafe chirped. "Please respond!"

There was no answer. She let the silence linger for too long. The connection was failing completely. She felt it hiss and spit. A power surge. Then it was over. Just a smear of data and a blank feed.

"Hello?" The AI called into the empty feed, her voice small. No answer. Quietly, she retreated from the silence and the dark and back to the bright lights and familiar hum of the H.E.L.M.