The Forerunners rebelled against the Precursors, forcing the remaining Precursors to try and preserve themselves in unusual ways. Long story short, the process was defective, the ancient Precursors mutated and became the parasitic life forms that would eventually become the Flood, able to absorb other living beings.
The first outbreak of the Flood swept across the galaxy, and thus began the war between the Forerunners and the Flood that led to the precious Halo Rings. In some ways, the Gravemind can be seen as the "leader" of the Flood, but the Flood will create not only one Gravemind, and each Gravemind is not a being of its own. Rather, all Graveminds are the center of the Flood's shared consciousness.
Simply put, all the little Flood creatures that players became familiar with are all part of one thinking mind that directs the Flood's strategy and combat through every major outbreak. As the Flood spreads and infect more beings, the more complex, intelligent, and larger the consciousness becomes, and so, therefore, does the Gravemind.
Of all different shapes and sizes and purposes, the Flood never lives or dies, it just waits and grows. As players became familiar with in Halo 3 , the Gravemind can speak telepathically, and does so to the Master Chief. This is a power specific to the Gravemind, as the thought-center of the entire Flood, that isn't really talked about in the games. Telepathy is a strange power that no other creature in the Halo universe seems to have, and that includes the so-called Prophets of the Covenant.
This power, however, isn't unique to the Flood, as it was a power that was widely-used by the Precursors as part of a system they created called "neural physics. Watching a Flood creature overtake a living being never gets less horrifying.
Nor should it. When the Flood infects a new host, it overwhelms and conquers the host's mind. Once inside, it essentially downloads the complete knowledge of that host, then obliterates the rest——individuality, memories, etc.
The knowledge that was captured from the host is then transferred to the Gravemind, adding to its vast reservoir of knowledge from other hosts, allowing it to grow smarter, bigger, and stronger.
This is what happens every time a new host is taken by the Flood. Knowing this, watching the Flood decimate hundreds of soldiers only becomes a more frightening prospect, because somewhere the Gravemind is growing stronger with each moment. While it may seem as if living beings are the only ones susceptible to the corrupting and devouring powers of the Flood, this simply isn't true.
Fans will recall the Gravemind managing to torture Cortana for information , including a particular piece of info that'll be discussed later. This isn't even the half of it, though. Soon afterwards, the Graveminds were destroyed and the Flood collective consciousness was rendered inert by the activation of the Halo Array.
Bornstellar led a mission to Maethrillian that succeeded in beginning the regeneration of the Domain, depriving the Gravemind of its perceived final victory. Through neglect shown by the Monitor of Installation 05 , Penitent Tangent , a Flood outbreak occurred a few thousand years after the firing of the Array, and the Gravemind was able to find enough biomass to rebuild itself deep under the Library of the installation.
During the Battle of Installation 05 , it assimilated the dead Prophet of Regret into itself and also captured the Monitor ; possibly as a result of this, the Gravemind was capable of utilizing Delta Halo's teleportation grid. The Flood intelligence later "rescued" and captured both Master Chief and the Arbiter , when the former fell into a lake while escaping from a Covenant ship, and the latter was thrown into a chasm by a traitorous Tartarus. The Gravemind tried to convince the Arbiter of the true nature of the Halo Array, and proposed a truce to prevent the Covenant from activating the rings and killing them all.
It then used the installation's teleportation grid to teleport them respectively to High Charity and Delta Halo's control room in order to find the Index. Within days it took over the entire city and all life within it. The UNSC AI Cortana , who was left on High Charity by the Master Chief, was quickly contacted by the Gravemind, which started to psychologically torture her in order to subjugate her and obtain useful information from her.
As Gravemind tortured Cortana in search of information, the two would enter in a conversation about diverse themes, such as John and the danger he posed to the Flood, which the Gravemind acknowledged as a fact. The Gravemind initially planned to attack and infest Earth; even though the Elites quarantined the area, it managed to send a single Flood-infested ship to Earth; it even allowed Cortana to leave a message for the Master Chief on the ship, in order to lure him to his destruction although the Gravemind did not know what was the content of the message.
The infestation of Earth was contained; the Gravemind used High Charity to make a slipspace jump to Mars and would have continued the attack, but after having assimilated the knowledge of the infected Regret and possibly Mercy and Cortana , it learned about the Prophet of Truth 's plans to use the Ark to remotely activate the entire Halo Array.
Realizing the extent of the danger it faced, the Gravemind did not attack Earth but instead once again used the Covenant Holy City to slipspace jump to the Ark. Despite the Gravemind's immense technological expertise—including its use of exotic Precursor science—the strain caused by this jump caused High Charity to crash into the Ark. Together they were victorious, and the Gravemind even managed to infect Truth himself, gloating at his defeat before the Arbiter slew him.
With the crisis averted, the Flood intelligence quickly betrayed its former allies; the duo managed to escape from their foe and discover Cortana 's solution to the Flood—a replacement Halo ring made by the Ark.
The Gravemind became increasingly frustrated at the Spartan's progress, becoming suspicious of what Cortana was hiding from him and threatening to "feast upon [the Chief's] bones" if she did not reveal the secret.
After the Chief rescued Cortana, the Gravemind became enraged, realizing that she planned to use the incomplete Halo to destroy him. It attempted to kill them both but failed as the Chief successfully destroyed High Charity , presumably killing the Gravemind.
But after traveling to Installation 08, the Chief discovered that the Gravemind had survived and was attempting to rebuild itself on the new Halo. Despite its best efforts, the Gravemind failed to stop the Chief. In the end, the Gravemind was destroyed as Halo's activation destroyed itself and the Flood that had escaped containment.
However, defying orders to leave the former Covenant holy city untouched, Vordius deactivated the Ark's Sentinel defense network and burned a hole in the containment shield with a Banished Scarab.
The Flood, having survived within the wreckage, were released upon the Ark once more. After reactivating the Ark's Sentinel defense network, [23] the Proto-Gravemind was discovered by the Banished. By this point, it was close to becoming a full-fledged Gravemind which the Banished knew from the stories would be virtually unstoppable.
Aided by the reactivated Sentinels, the Banished attacked the Proto-Gravemind in an effort to destroy the creature before a new Gravemind could be formed. With the help of a Retriever Sentinel summoned when the Banished cleaned out a nearby Sentinel lock, the Proto-Gravemind was slain, preventing the rise of a new Gravemind.
The Banished and the Ark's Sentinels were then finally able to contain the Flood outbreak. The Gravemind is, as its name suggests, the "mind" of the Flood parasite.
When a creature is assimilated into the Flood, its knowledge is transferred directly to the Gravemind. In addition, it appears each Gravemind also retains the memories and knowledge of previous Graveminds. In an archived conversation with the Forerunner AI known as Mendicant Bias , it compared itself to the AI, describing Mendicant Bias as "a single intelligence inhabiting multiple instances " and calling the Gravemind "a compound [intelligence] consisting of a thousand billion coordinated minds inhabiting as many bodies as circumstances require".
While it is not known how the Gravemind is able to communicate with subordinate Flood forms across the galaxy, its self-comparison to a computer network implies that similar techniques may be used, with each Flood form possibly acting as a networking node and redistributing the Gravemind's commands to other forms.
The relationship between individual Graveminds, and specifically whether the mobile forms under the control of one Gravemind would be influenced by another, is not entirely clear. The Forerunners theorized that since the Graveminds are identical in personality and goals, it would be impossible to discern any meaningful distinction between them. A Gravemind originates as a proto-Gravemind —a Flood form created by merging the bodies and biomass of numerous sentient life forms, as well as redundant Flood forms.
After a proto-Gravemind has been created, control over individual Flood forms transfers to its emerging compound intelligence, replacing the localized individual-level control present during the Feral Stage. Nearby combat forms will continue to supply the proto-Gravemind with fresh bodies, allowing it to accumulate mass, increase in size, and gain more memories and intelligence from consumed hosts.
Eventually, the proto-Gravemind reaches a certain "critical mass" and becomes self-aware - a Gravemind. By this point, local biodiversity has typically been eliminated with the host species' total absorption into the Flood.
When a Flood outbreak progresses far enough, typically the later phases of the Interstellar Stage , the Flood will no longer have need for the widespread creation of dedicated combat forms , instead simply overwhelming a given location with spores and using infected individuals to accumulate biomass for a Gravemind and its lair ; [28] by this point, the Gravemind may create more efficient pure forms for combat and other purposes via the spontaneous generation of Flood Super Cells.
Theoretically, when the Flood infection has become too large for even the Gravemind to control — or when all life in the galaxy has been consumed — the Flood infection will reach the Transgalactic Stage. At this point, the Flood will use all resources that it has at its disposal to leave the galaxy, with the intent to create a new Gravemind elsewhere. A Gravemind is comprised of a combination of pure Flood Super Cells and the neural networks of the sentient beings absorbed within.
In most cases, this body is a shapeless, amorphous mass, typically with numerous tentacles that can reach many miles in length depending on the size of the Gravemind.
The Gravemind can rearrange this body as it wishes; during the Flood invasion of High Charity during the Human-Covenant War, the Gravemind leading the assault transplanted itself into the station and almost completely engulfed it, converting itself and the station into a Flood hive. As the development of a Gravemind progresses, it will sometimes shed dead biomass to alter its anatomy to a desired shape.
Graveminds have shown the capacity to communicate through non-verbal means; this ability, which can best be described as a form of telepathy, allows a Gravemind to coordinate the Flood forms it controls and to directly converse with uninfected individuals. The Gravemind encountered by Master Chief John and the Arbiter on Installation 05 had shaped one of its tentacles into a massive "mouth" composed of fleshy, leaf-like jaws; this organ allowed the Gravemind to vocalize without the need for telepathy.
Throughout nearly all encounters with the "modern" Gravemind, it has shown a fondness for speaking in poetic style - specifically, trochaic heptameter. When pressed about this detail by Cortana, it states that "I have the memories of many poets far beyond your limited human culture. And I have the quickness of intellect to compose all manner of poetic forms as I speak rather than labor over mere words for days.
This is shown in Silentium , where the Precursor Gravemind compares itself with Catalog, a group of modified Forerunners networked together into single mind acting in concert with many others. Due to the brevity of its mysterious appearances in Halo 2 , little is known about the Gravemind's physical form.
It is a massive Flood form whose "mouth" resembles a fleshy, multi-layered Venus Flytrap. The organ is used to speak and to exhale Flood Spores. The remainder of the Gravemind's body consists of a mass of enormous tentacles. During its time beneath Installation 05 's Library , some of its tentacles grew to be miles long and stretched throughout the Installation. The Gravemind, like the Proto-Gravemind from which it formed, is made of countless bodies and corpses; The Art of Halo states that Gravemind is "literally built from the bodies of its enemies and its own fallen warriors reassembled into a massive, tentacled, and intelligent entity.
Even its name, "Gravemind," references this: it is the mind of the grave. The consciousness of the Gravemind is formed from the accumulated intelligence and memories of every Flood host ever consumed. Gravemind is the controlling intelligence behind the parasitic Flood species. When a creature is assimilated into the Flood, its knowledge is transferred directly to the Gravemind, and the remainder of its mind is destroyed.
In addition, it appears each Gravemind also retains the memories and knowledge of previous Graveminds. In an archived conversation with the Forerunner AI known as Mendicant Bias , it compared itself to the AI, describing it as "a single intelligence inhabiting multiple instances " and calling itself "a compound [intelligence] consisting of a thousand billion coordinated minds inhabiting as many bodies as circumstances require.
It is widely believed that the Gravemind uses some form of telepathy to command its disparate Flood components. The Gravemind is also able to subvert AIs. In the Forerunner-Flood war it was capable of altering every Forerunner AI's basic logical processes, causing it to aid the Flood cause. This 'Logic-Virus' was considered by the Forerunners to be the informational form of the Flood infection, to which Mendicant Bias was the first victim in its year discourse with the Precursor Gravemind.
During the Flood-Forerunner War, when the Gravemind was a galaxy spanning network, it began assembling entire planetary ecosystems into enormous, highly complex structures referred to as 'Key Minds'. Each Key Mind was said to have easily matched a single Forerunner Metarch-level AI By far the most powerful and intelligent grade of AI the Forerunners had developed and of which Mendicant Bias was an example for strategic planning and raw computational power.
Due to the Gravemind's understanding and absorption of Precursor knowledge, it was capable of controlling and manipulating Precursor technology in the Forerunner-Flood conflict, which allowed it more effective slipspace technology and the ability to prevent Forerunners from using Slipspace. Now that all Precursor technology has been destroyed, it is unknown if the current iteration of Gravemind was capable of the same thing, though if all Flood contain all memories of the prior versions of Gravemind or they are otherwise stored somewhere, it could be surmised that it still retains this ability.
During the Forerunner-Flood war , the first known Gravemind came into existence as a centralized intelligence to coordinate Flood efforts against the Forerunners , formed from the minds of all the Sentients it had consumed and the Precursors which, in their insanity, found it to be a serendipitous emergence and began to guide and feed its growth.
It is indicated that the remaining Precursors became the Flood fully, to a lesser or greater extent. Eventually Forerunner space navy tactics began to fail. The Forerunners developed the Halo Array as a desperate countermeasure before the war began fully, which would destroy all sentient life in the Galaxy, thus denying the Flood "food" for growth. This was only to be used as a last resort, but the Forerunners were reluctant to use it; the Master Builder instead abused his powers to have the San'Shyuum Homeworld annihilated.
However, the Flood were growing in number, and quickly were gaining ground across the Galaxy. Forerunner commanders realized that their naval tactics were being overcome, and a new solution was necessary if the Forerunners were to pull out of this "stalemate"; a Contender-class Artificial Intelligence , Mendicant Bias , was crafted by the Forerunners to directly attack the Gravemind form and any surrounding Flood biomass in an effort to eliminate the central Flood consciousness.
At least four installations, the Ark, Onyx Shield World, Requiem and an unnamed Shield World, were constructed by the Forerunners as shelters for themselves when the Halos fired. The Gravemind contacted Mendicant Bias and convinced him to abandon the Forerunners and join the Flood cause, convincing him that the Forerunners were so gluttonous and proud as to deny the next step of biological evolution: the Flood.
The Gravemind insinuated that by clinging to the legend of the Mantle , the Forerunners had doomed the galaxy to eternal stagnation; the only way for the galaxy to progress was for superior beings to "restart" it. These superior beings, unsurprisingly, took the form of Compound Minds such as Gravemind and Mendicant Bias himself. Convinced by the Gravemind's arguments, Mendicant Bias intentionally became rampant, developed a hatred for his creators and actively worked toward their destruction.
The Gravemind continued to grow, growing enormous, planet-covering nodes of itself called Key-Minds that enhanced its raw computational power to such a degree that it began to completely overwhelm the Forerunners, forcing them into extremely pricey naval engagements that kept the Flood from winning for years.
Using knowledge of the Precursors to which it was born from and had become, the Gravemind used the Star Roads of the Precursors to attack the Forerunners, hampering their Slipspace capacity and utterly destroying their fleets, and marking the point at which Forerunner resistance had began to truly break down. The Gravemind was destroyed or stopped by the first activation of the Halo rings. Following the Flood outbreak on Installation 05, the Gravemind rebuilt itself deep under the Library of the installation.
During the Battle of Installation 05 , the Gravemind was capable of utilizing Delta Halo's teleportation grid.
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