Cortana

The last sentence hung in the air, as seemingly physical a presence as the holographic avatar that spoke it. "Don't make a girl a promise that you can't keep."

For the psychologically disturbed antisocial killing machine and ethereal super-intelligent software program, it was a rare moment of humanity. A vulnerable response to a desperate promise coming from a place of deep respect and camaraderie. Their eyes met somehow through the opaque visor.

The elfin-featured avatar strode forward, closing the distance from her guardian's hand to his body, stretched up, and gave John - the Master Chief - a kiss on the cheek, passing though the soldier's thick helmet. To his shock, he felt it.

She sensed the shock, of course. "I'm embedded in your neural interface, Chief. Feeling in your body is all in your brain."

Chief nodded impassively. "You've never used it before. Rampancy?" His lack of tact was compensated for by his sincere concern, one doesn't learn a lot of tact in child soldier training. "No, John. I just spent the last four years alone monitoring you." She glanced toward the wreckage falling from the sky. With a coy smile, she added "we've been a bit busy since then."

Chief looked again at Cortana, in this rare moment of peace. Something deep in his brain, something lifelong conditioning and exposure to violence couldn't change, was responding to the contact in a very human way. "Cortana..." She cut him off. "I see your brain chemistry, John. Don't worry, it's normal after experiencing human skin contact. Not that you'd know, with how often you experience it."

With a quick scan of his surroundings and check of his radar and electronic shield status, Chief sighed and lifted off his helmet. The feeling of air against his face was a shock, like leaping into ocean water for the first time in a year. He pulled down the armored coif and absorbent gel-lined skin-suit hood. "There."

"Don't worry. I won't ask you to show more skin than that. I'm used to you wearing enough for the both of us." She smirked at him, the mind-reader.

Chief had a seat on the cold hard ground, leaning back against a rock formation and taking a drink of water from a concealed canteen. "I won't recover from rampancy, Chief," she had just told him as flaming wreckage fell around them. Halsey, they just needed to get to Halsey, to fix her. In his perception, she still hovered like a hologram above him, staring into him with soulful humanlike eyes. Normally, he'd expected a moment like this to be interrupted by some counterattack, and explosion, an aerial strafing. But, at least for the moment, none had come. "Looks like you knocked them onto their back feet for a bit Chief, might not hurt to take a minute to think."

He didn't know how to do that. When he tried, his thoughts were swarmed by images of firefights, where to go for cover, where enemies could ambush from, the trajectories of grenades. Under that, the word "rampancy," repeating itself over and over. The valley around them was on fire.

A soothing voice entered his thoughts, loud enough to quench the violence, flooding over his burning thoughts like a broken dam. "Easy Chief, I'll keep an eye out." He knew it would barely dent her processing power to monitor more than his human eyes and ears ever could. He felt heavy. It registered that it was more than just her soothing voice calming his thoughts. "That's right, I realized the bio foam flooding your body with adrenaline was, for once, not a wonderful thing. Swapped it out with a mix of serotonin and some mild painkillers. Should feel like a warm shower."

It did. She gave him a minute. A chunk fell from a shattered burning hull half a kilometer away. Everyone else was eerily quiet. Chief's thoughts had quieted too.

"Now that you're calmed and I'm collected, did a quick seismic scan. Difficult to parse through all the falling wreckage, but I'm confident there's no armored foot or vehicle traffic within a kilometer of here, and I'll warn you if there was. Not picking up any indications of sonic booms from banshees or wraiths coming into the airspace either." She reappeared, looking like she was glancing around, for his benefit of course. Maybe it was all the serotonin, but he allowed himself to feel, just a little bit, the grief of the recent news hit him. He loved her.

She looked down at him with a half-cocked smile. "Love you too, Chief."

"Cortana, can we talk?"

"I know what you're thinking before you can say it, but..." she softened, "Sure Chief."

He considered his words carefully. He has been laconic throughout their time together, but when a close friend announces their terminal illness, even a Spartan must talk through it. "We've been through a lot." That would have to do.

"Wow, you blow me away, John. What girl could withstand your charms?" His pale face looked questioningly forward, so she quickly clarified, "that's sarcasm, Chief." Cortana leaned forward, forearms crossed mockingly holding an invisible pen and clipboard in her hands like an old-timey therapist. "And how does that make you feel?"

It was good they were back to bantering again.

"I don't know."

Never mind.

That hung in the air for a while. A jumble of confused neurochemical signals was being processed by a supercomputer, two friends sitting together with their grief and angst. When Cortana felt she understood the signals from their neural interface, she nodded understandingly. "I'm not really a woman, John. I'm not even a person."

"You are to me."

The intimacy and quiet of their circumstances struck her. "I guess... I can be for you." She rushed to clarify." "You make me feel like I can be, for you, for now." She leaned forward and projected into his brain again the feeling of lips pressing against his as her hologram touched his body. The graphics processor of one of the most powerful supercomputers ever built simulated with perfection all of the give of soft lips pressing against lips, a hand pressing against the back of a head, hair falling against both their faces. To round out the effect, she made sure Chief's bio foam injections gave him a surge of serotonin, just like the real thing. He groaned at that. Serotonin, the feeling of a warm shower or a lover's embrace, neither something he got a lot of, or thought he needed.

She pulled back, chuckling. "Wow, maybe it's the... you know, the 'r' word... but I actually felt something there. Not to ruin the moment, but I think I'm starting to stimulate feeling based on what my avatar contacts. Hold on." She blinked out, reappeared next to a nearby stone wall, and reached out to touch it. Her hand stopped right at the edge of the rock, like it was corporeal, and she gasped out. "Ah! Based on the scanned neutral activity you and Dr. Halsey have ever logged, that IS what touching a rock feels like!"

Chief was barely keeping up. "Cortana, you're physical now?"

"No, don't be silly. When you felt me earlier that was my neural interface fooling your brain into thinking it was touching something: soft lips and delicate hands to be specific. And what I'm experiencing is a computer neural network simulating feeling based on what data it, um, I has from you and Dr. Halsey from the last time you, or I guess Dr. Halsey in this case, has been kissed. Unless you had an old girlfriend you never told me about!" She was teasing.

"No, never. My first."

"Mine too." Cortana stated the obvious. She was visibly excited, blinking out and in all around Chief, reaching out and touching various surfaces. Chief got a funny feeling watching her, her excitement and curiosity was charming, and he wasn't immune to the form her hologram took.

In moments, Cortana was back in front of him, disengaging his one-ton armor latch by latch, compressed air hissing out of the gaps. "Wha..."

"Just hold on John, there's some stuff I *really* want to try while I can." Chief didn't know how to respond, and wasn't sure he even wanted to. So, he stayed still as the Mjolnir armor opened, revealing a still-massive 6' 10" nearly 300-pound super soldier inside. Cortana leered over at him. "Want to see what happens? Scratch some stuff off both our bucket lists? Area is still clear, by the way" Chief couldn't think of a reason why not. Not that there weren't any, he was just having trouble thinking of one. And she looked really appealing right now, all worked up.

The delay was enough. "I'll take that as a yes."

Before descending, she looked over him: she had precious few chances to. He was pale, freckled, getting nearly 50. But he was strong, massive, with a sharp handsome jawline and intelligent eyes. As he unzipped his jumpsuit it revealed a hulk, with bulging enhanced muscles and thick veins standing out against snow-pale skin. Cortana had inherited her vestigial sexual preferences from Halsey, the woman she was cloned from -- they couldn't disentangle that stuff from the rest of her brain -- and evidently Dr. Halsey was into brooding hunks.

Chief watched her study him. Her form was much less of a mystery to him than his was to her, but he honestly hadn't had much time with it that he wasn't getting shot at. Her body, as her hologram subroutines presented it, was an idealized form of the real Halsey, but was as much inspired by an analysis of the corpus of human beauty standards over centuries of art history as it was by any real human. Her proportions were Venusian, perfectly symmetrical, with ample breasts resting gently above a flat stomach and below graceful shoulders that connected to toned arms. Her face was round and cherubic, framed by a cute pixie cut. But there was one major difference from her normal appearance: the suggestive but empty groin area of the hologram had been replaced by realistic female anatomy. She traced his eyes as they devoured her. "Like the additions, Chief? Worked hard on them for the last few microseconds, hoping you'd give them a quality check, make sure they work."

That was enough. Cortana watched John's dick swell up with each heartbeat. She wished his heartrate was faster, but that's supernaturally fit super soldiers for you. She pounced anyway.

John was still surprised to feel the impact of the hologram on his washboard stomach as she straddled him, even after the kiss. She leaned over his chest and brought her lips to his ear. "Remember John, I'm in your head." The voice suddenly switched to his other ear even though she didn't move, "I can make you feel or see or hear whatever I can imagine. Or, since I'm in your head, whatever you can imagine." He noticed that even though he could feel her on his stomach, she made no imprint on his body, like she was weightless. "But I can't move you, Chief, so I'm going to need your help sticking this in. Don't want to break your brain making you feel what you can't see, that's how motion sickness works."

Chief reached down between them. When his hand brushed her thigh, he felt it, but her leg was pushed effortlessly aside with no resistance. The reality was the simulation altering the hologram around his touch, but as a man used to flipping tanks and trucks single-handedly, it wasn't that hard to get used to. She lifted herself up a few inches, and he positioned his cock straight up, holding it at the base.

"Perfect, just like that Chief." She let herself down and sank without resistance onto his cock. He audibly grunted, the feeling of heat and wetness was amazing, like nothing he'd ever felt or imagined. "Hold on Chief, calibrating." He let out a surprised groan as he felt her vaginal walls tighten around his cock like a vice, to exactly the level where it started to feel uncomfortably tight and painful, then relax slightly again to perfection. He lurched up in panic, but Cortana put an arm down onto his chest and started to slowly lift up and down, vibrating and massaging up and down his length as she moved. "Ah!"

It was too much, ever sense in his body was flashing red, his muscles bunched, and his arms and legs started to twitch. Cortana put her head back as she started bouncing faster and let out a loud gasp. Between hops, she messaged to get out "hell, John. What. The. Hell?! What the fuck is this?! Why. The. Fuck. Haven't. We. Done. This. Be... fooooore?!"

They'd just gotten out of over four years of isolation in stasis, so much wasted time! Nothing to do now but make up for it.

Chief gained enough control to start thrusting up into her, using his superhuman dexterity to time perfectly between her bounces. She screamed out in response, "gahhh!!!"

It was too much too fast, too new for him. He grunted out again and started spasming, cum blasting out of his twitching cock through her hologram and onto the ground beside them. His chest dropped back down onto the bed of his suit, releasing so fast he knocked his head against the rock he'd been leaning against, prompting both of them to chuckle.

"Sorry," he gasped out between chuckles, "Cortana."

"It's alright Chief, don't worry, I'm not done. I'll need more than..." she paused for effect, "83 seconds with you."

"First time."

"First time... and?" She cocked an eyebrow.

"And you're a god."

"Well I'm in your brain. It's kind of cheating, but I'll take it." She stayed on top of him. "Now that you're laying back in your suit, I'll use that biofoam injector to..." He felt energy surging through him and his dick started sputtering back up to erect again. "I'll spare you the details of the chemical cocktail I just injected into you, but I need you ready to go again before any Covenant show up.

"You are still monitoring that, right?"

"Sure."

In seconds he was buried deep inside her again, bucking up with all the force he had, slamming her weightless body up over and over. Cortana's head lolled to the side and rolled helplessly on her shoulders, her latent neural networks modeled after Dr. Halsey's human brain lighting up in pleasure from the stimulation. Chief wondered for a moment how that worked -- she had tried to explain -- but that was beyond him, and it mattered more just then that it worked than how.

He wanted her to get the full experience. He followed his instincts and reached a hand down to stimulate her newly-appeared clit. It was the right move. Cortana shattered, literally, her upper body exploded out into blue triangles for a moment and then reformed with a satisfied scream, as her hips spasmed against his finger with impossible speed and dexterity. She came on him, clipped slightly through his body as he thrust, lagged, and lost frame rate.

When she came out of it, she came out of it changed. It scared him a little, which isn't easy. Not losing and momentum, she rode him faster than even before, her face angry, spitting out curses with hatred and lust mixing in her eyes.

"Cortana?! Rampancy?!" He choked out between impacts.

"Fuck right. Fuck right it is. Fuck me Chief! FUCK ME!" It came in angry screams now, as her hips slammed against his cock and her hands scratched like claws against his chest. He felt the pain, but they left no mark. A second Cortana, as beautiful and dangerous as the first, flickered to life in front of his face, then sat down on it. He gagged and started eating desperately at her pussy as the first Cortana milked his cock with pulsing vibrations. He felt a mouth suckling at his left index finger, then another one on his right, then a tongue running along his chest to his nipple. He flicked the clit above his mouth one more time, prompting a chorus of gasps all around him, and then pushed it off.

All around Chief were overlapping fractal blue figures, bleeding into each other, sucking, licking, kissing, and stroking his body. In the middle, one core goddess with a corona of lightning-blue hair rode him in a powerful gallop, hips gyrating at an impossible angle. Angry curse-filled gibberish streamed from her mouth at a speed no longer even comprehensible. The fear and worry and incredible pleasure mixed in his brain to produce an overwhelming high.

Even with chemical help, having cum only minutes before, Chief knew he was close. Whatever was happening with Cortana, as worrying as it was, would have to wait until they both came again. He reached back down again toward the pussy of the main hologram to finish what he started, and stuck his other thumb down the throat of one of the nearby copies as he stroked her clit toward another orgasm. With his stamina and dexterity it wasn't hard, even lacking much experience.

Everything shook, and Cortana lashed her head back toward the sky, with every duplicate following suit, and screamed as three Covenant craft streaked by behind her head. The surreal image, and the vibrating hum of her pussy, caused Chief to erupt again, spurting all over himself, the ground, his suit, his and hands. The fractal copies of the AI's hologram all collapsed back into the central figure.

A moment of stillness passed, Cortana's head hung limply at her shoulders.

"Cortana..."

She snapped to attention. Her expression was once again kind, a bit sorrowful, and very worried. "Chief..."

"We'll get you to Halsey."

She nodded, her face now stern.

"We've gotta move."