Modification de Chronique:Canon Fodder - Armory Amore

*The diffusion and maturation of Mjolnir technology and standards. With little oversight and the promise of massive profits, even small industrial design firms and military subcontractors have begun exploring new directions and markets, using the common GEN2 Mjolnir software and exoskeleton as a springboard for their own innovations. For example, RKD Group designed the MIRMILLON-class armor, but contracted actual production with Korolev Heavy Industries and licensed the suit’s BIOS from Applied Heuristics. Even established, vertically integrated military-industrial concerns such as Beweglichkeitsrüstungsysteme no longer control all aspects of their suits’ tactical packages and software.

*Normalization of neural interfaces in the population. Expensive and requiring complicated surgery when first introduced, neural interfaces and their mediating computing systems can be fitted in a simple outpatient clinical procedure by 2557. High-bandwidth interfaces can be paired with advanced expert systems to augment – and even bypass – the human motor system, reducing the physiological stress of high-performance combat exoskeletons to levels that do not require extensive skeletal reinforcement. This innovation, initially a secondary line of research during Project: MJOLNIR’s early days, was crucial for SPARTAN-III and SPARTAN-IV.

*Proliferation of once-secret human augmentation techniques. Surreptitious recovery of Spartan tissue and organs, industrial espionage, independent research, and the release of some augmentation protocols for medical usage has substantially eroded the UNSC’s monopoly on super-soldiers. Though the knowledge and tools are now available for any sufficiently motivated (and wealthy) private party to replicate a Spartan-equivalent enhancement package, few see the need to match the recruiting standards and scope of enhancement afforded to UNSC Spartans – and are willing to settle for cheaper and more invasive augmentations with unknown medical drawbacks and psychological costs. Many of the gene therapies, artificial organ implants, and cybernetic enhancements used in the SPARTAN-IV program are also irreversible, with few within the military or government forecasting the impact these men and women will have when they leave military service and re-enter civilian life. It remains even more of an open question what will happen with potentially unstable, partially-augmented personnel that lack the training and support available to former Spartans.

*Fractures in the UNSC’s military power. With the Unified Earth Government stretched to the limits, it has afforded greater autonomy to the megacorporations – approving militarization of their security forces and greater exploitation of colonial subsidiaries in the name of stability and reconstruction. Corporate princes in the boardrooms of Liang-Dortmund, Sinoviet Heavy Machinery, Traxus, and Jakubaitis Standard Systems (among others) have exploited their freedom to expand business empires at the expense of colonies and citizens still reeling from war and economic dislocation. With their high-level business intelligence and planning already dominated by Smart AI’s, these titans of industry may also serve as useful proxies for the Created.

*Incorporation of alien knowledge into human industry. Even with an understanding of how to manipulate energy shields or generate plasma, many of the advanced sciences utilized by the Covenant and Forerunners are exploited by a tiny handful of corporate research facilities and UNSC labs – humanity is still in the process of producing the tools to make parts for factories that can begin to make these wondrous items! Even using relatively plug-and-play assembler vats acquired from the Swords of Sanghelios or Kig-Yar merchants requires a deep understanding of Covenant semiology and San’Shyuum pattern-language that is difficult to master. But necessity breeds invention, and study of alien wonders has broadened humanity’s understanding of physics and mastery of esoteric chemistry, allowing researchers to leapfrog centuries of trial-and-error experimentation and theory building.

 

*Syncretism and Forerunner technology. After ties deepened with the Arbiter and his allies, his Sangheili artisans began to reap the benefits of cheap and simple human automation aides, revelations of Forerunner language and command codes that had been locked away by the Prophets, and entirely new modalities of thought and systems of investigation. Using Forerunner knowledge reclaimed by humans a Renaissance has begun among Sangheili artisans eager to explore new (to them) avenues of knowledge, demolishing opaque rules and taboos that shackled their craft under the Covenant. Even as the Created move to control both species and safely circumscribe their destructive tendencies it seems inevitable that the combination of iconoclastic Sangheili artisans and insatiably curious human engineers will lead to wonders and terrors yet undreamed of.