O’riley was alone in the dark. There was no light, no vibrancy; no emotion. Outside in the real world only seconds (4.119) had passed, but as an A.I. he could speed up his own processing. Subjectively he gave himself the equivalent an hour. It was a cold, lonely hour, devoid of life.

He could feel the pain of Monica’s death and it hurt, it hurt deeply, worse it distorted the world around him. A warning alerted him that his performance was being negatively impacted. He sequestered the offending information and put a triple-LCE buffer zone around it. Other parts of him were going dark. He let them.

The pain stopped immediately, trapped on the other side. Efficiency returned. He rechecked the status of Noble Six. She was dead, just another statistic for the UNSC. He uploaded the data to the nearest A.I., codenamed Lilith, shut down all non-essential processes and waited for retrieval.

A female voice whispered from Tex’s helmet, tinged with sadness. “It’s over. Monica is dead and O’riley’s gone. We can go.”