It's a beautiful image, and the perfect inspiration for a farewell from a dying AI to his lost love.Īnyway, I thought it was a great way to close the novel. It's an appropriate choice of poetry, basically saying that though beauty fades, and lovers die, the words written about them will give them eternal life. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, When in eternal lines in time thou grows. Nor shall Death brag that thou wanders in his shade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owns. Sometimes too hot the sun in heaven shines,Īnd every fair from fair sometime declines,īy chance, or by nature's changing course untrimmed. Rough winds might shake the darling buds of May,Īnd summer's lease has all too short a date. > NOTATION KEYWORD SEARCH: 'AO.AI' 'MACK'įor anybody wondering about that last part, it's a reference to Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, which Sif told Mack (via Loki) to look up in the moments before her destruction: As the robots are destroyed one by one, his dwindling fragments compose a loving eulogy to Sif, a ten-part message which is intercepted by a UNSC drone and reported back to someone codenamed 'CHARLIE HOTEL' (Catherine Halsey?). Meanwhile, the remnants of Mack's core logic are watching the bombardment, distributed across the planet's thousands of JOTUN farming machines. Their forces are now glassing Harvest's uninhabited surface. So, for those who opted for the audiobook over the print version and missed out on this crucial piece of plot, here is the entire text (transcribed from Amazon's online reader) in all its bittersweet glory.Ĭontext: After destroying the Tiara (and killing Sif), Loki and his reactor complex have been taken out by the Covenant. Which is pretty disappointing, since it was (for me, at least) the most powerful part of the story.

If it weren't for that, I would've completely missed the fact that the (print) book has a bonus post-epilogue section that the audiobook lacks. I'm also really glad for the Halo wiki, which is one of the first things I checked out after finishing the book. Not to mention the superb talent that narrators Holtor Graham and Jen Taylor brought to the production - they did a great job handling the various voices. Being written by Bungie's chief storymaster, it was easily the best Halo book yet, and, unlike the self-contained adventures of Nylund's novels, actually had many important revelations on the main story arc. I finally got done listening to Contact: Harvest the other day (yes, I got the audiobook, I'm lazy). ( Contact: Harvest spoilers below, for anybody who has yet to read it)

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