6 Things From The Halo Universe You Probably Didn't Know
5. The Mona Lisa
If you thought watching marines get infected by the Flood on the Floodgate mission of Halo 3 was gruesome, then the short story of the Mona Lisa in Halo: Evolutions is bound to send shivers down your spine.
After the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, the ever dark and mysterious Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) decided it would be a great idea to try to control and weaponise the newly discovered Flood parasite (spoilers: it wasn’t). The subjects decided to be the best candidates for the parasitic procedure were the prisoners onboard the Mona Lisa.
Holding both Human and Covenant inmates, the Mona Lisa was a converted freighter transporting prisoners through space to penal colonies. The Mona Lisa’s capability to be moved far away from any substantial population the Flood might attempt to infect, as well as an abundance of captive test subjects, made the ship the perfect setting to conduct an illegal and morally questionable experiment without the general public ever finding out. So, ONI commandeered the ship as a laboratory and began exposing the helpless prisoners to the parasite, taking notes as it took control of their nervous systems and mangled their bodies beyond recognition.
However, like many other experiments of the clandestine variety we’re familiar with in pop culture, something went wrong. (I’m looking at you, all of the Jurassic Park movies. Seriously, just stop trying the dinosaur thing.) The Flood broke quarantine, as we see them do time and time again in the games, and began building a proto-gravemind like the one we find Captain Keyes stuffed into in Combat Evolved.
As the Flood are a hive-mind, all of them sharing one individual consciousness, their first priority is to learn more by infecting and combining the bodies of sentient life and absorbing their knowledge. A proto-gravemind is a mass of bodies, a kind of central intelligence, and only one step down from the hyper-intelligent Gravemind that brings The Arbiter and Master Chief together in Halo 2. With a proto-gravemind on board, the Flood would reach an intelligence level sufficient to take control of the ship and spread to more heavily populated areas of space.
Fortunately, that bleak state of affairs is avoided after a squad of Marines discover the Flood infestation on the ship, and it’s subsequently destroyed with a nuclear missile. Either way though, the moral of the story is that it’s probably best not to forcefully infect people with an ancient, potentially galaxy-ending organism, however much you might want to.