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Another well-written, considered opinion on the nature of one our most relentless adversaries.
Tim Jones (tim.jones@branndc.com) writes:
Assume that, at the time of the Floods' first appearance in the galaxy, the Forerunner were the most advanced and itelligent life around. They would have observed (with growing alarm) the nature of the Flood infection and quickly established that if left unchecked, all sentient life in the galaxy (possibly including themselves) would be assimilated and ultimately destroyed.
How would the Forerunner devise a plan to escape?
Simply using Halos power to destroy all sentient life makes no sense whatsoever - if everything will die anyway, why go to all that trouble just to speed up the process? I believe that the firing of the Halo was the final part of a much more elaborate plan to rid the galaxy of the Flood. Furthermore, this plan would ensure the survival of sentient life.
Suppose the Forerunner built the Halo as a "Safe Haven" for samples of sentient life from all over the galaxy. Perhaps the Forerunner themselves ventured into the galaxy to select samples and create a "library" of all life safely hidden away on the Halos. Shortly after this process is complete, the Flood reach epidemic proportions across the galaxy and the Forerunner "Final Solution" is prepared. This is when the Halos are fired thus wiping out sentient life and the Flood along with it.
The life forms kept on the Halos are safe - this is a known fact, the Floods continued existence can only be explained this way. Once the galaxy is cleansed (reclaimed?) from the Flood, the Forerunner can go about sending all the sentient life back to its original habitat. This now makes perfect sense, the Forerunner actually had a solution to the Flood epidemic which allowed sentient life to continue unhindered in the galaxy. This can also be backed up by the potential timeline issue concerning the previous firing of the Halos. If they were fired to destroy the Flood 100,000 years ago, then that would mean that the Earth would have been affected at a time when it was supporting sentient life, the only way humans could have survived beyond this point is if they were saved by the Forerunner along with everything else - it would seem that Forerunner and Human have met before! (This could also explain GS343's excitment at finding a record of all "our" lost time)
What I like most about this theory is that it coincides pefectly with the Noahs Ark story. Could this Old Testament story be the only surviving record of the Forerunner saving Humans from the "Flood"?
Moving on...
The Forerunner plan was a great success, everybody wins, sentient life is spared, the Flood are no more but...The Forerunner, being a benign species, couldn't bring themselves to destroy the Flood completely, so samples of the Flood were saved along with everything else, a huge mistake.
The Forerunner were not foolish enough to repatriate the Flood, but retaining even a single living spore in high security is obviously dangerous enough. As GS343 says in The Library level:
"Of course, samples were kept here after the last catastrophic outbreak...for study. It seems that that decision may have been an error."
- no shit.
Anyway, my final piece of supporting evidence is simply this - if the whole point of building and firing the Halos to kill all sentient life in the galaxy was a desperate attempt to destroy the Flood, ie. the very purpose of this catastrophic action was to get rid of the Flood in one final massive holocaust, they how in Gods name could it be the only species the Forerunner chose to preserve? Why are the Flood still alive?
QED
PS Of course this means that the Covenant were also saved by the Forerunner- and that explains quite a lot too!
Ah, that most indecipherable of enigmaticly parasitic species, the Flood. What would we do without them?
-mnemesis
