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Wado SG has offered up some forum speculation regarding the importance of the Reclaimer being organic (versus a robot), Flood AI/construct/computer infiltration, and the safeguards put in place to at least delay further Flood infestation:
In hisco scopea's post on the HSP, it is speculated that those that built the facilities on Reach are not the same as those that built Halo.
Regardless of that being true or not, it appears that the same conclusions were reached in the context of a catastrophic Flood outbreak. Now from the books and game we know that the Flood can infect organic life AND steal the memories from those infected. We also know that the Flood can infiltrate electronic/computer systems. Given it might be the knowledge stolen from the infected hosts that gives the Flood the ability to infiltrate the computer systems, there is still evidence of further "adaptive" abilities of the Flood such as the Keye's Blob and Gravemind to interface with electronics/computer systems.
Now Halo has some safeguards against the Flood taking over purely on their ability to interface with electronics. Protocols did not allow constructs to be in the core and important tasks such as the re-unification of the Index with the Core are reserved for only the Reclaimer(s), who happen to seem to only be humans. Humans, of course are organic, making them subject to Flood infection.
So what is to keep an infected human from being a Reclaimer? Well conversely, what good would a security system be if all you needed was "body parts" to get by it?
To keep the Flood from gaining control, I believe the creators of Halo and the creators of the facilities on Reach came to the same conclusions. First, limit the access of computers/constructs/AI's. And second, encode the security protocols to something that cannot be used if altered by the Flood.
The first limit is demonstrated by the role of constructs on Halo, and in the facilities on Reach there were no holographic projectors or access points for constructs. Imagine the fear the creators must have had to cause them to cast away their own technology and live on dirt floors (underground on Reach) knowing the Flood was out there and that their own constructs could be used against them.
The second limit is evidenced in the controls of Halo, how the Reclaimer could just intuitively use the controls and how a Reclaimer must unify the Index with the Core (other organic creatures tried but it did not work for them). Also the mechanisms for opening the secured doors in the Reach facilities had something to do with blood which seems to tie into a genetic encoded system as the key. Any presence of Flood alteration would likely set off alerts and keep the doors locked down.
Sound off in the forum post here.
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-Finn
