Sloan

Sloan
Biographical information
Activation site:	Meridian
Began service:	Prior to 2549
Gender:	Male
Color(s):	Blue
Political and military information
Affiliation:	Liang-Dortmund Corporation(formerly) Created
Functionality:	Colonial leadership
Service number:	SLN 0291-5

Olympia Vale: "What's wrong with him? He looks broken."

Holly Tanaka: "Rampancy onset. Late stage, from the looks. Probably sacrificing resolution for logic cycles."

Governor Sloan: "I have welcomed you to my home. Do not be so rude as to make my health a point of conversation."

— Governor Sloan to Olympia Vale and Holly Tanaka

Sloan (AI Serial Number: SLN 0291-5), often referred to as Governor Sloan, is an artificial intelligence construct who was the leader of the independent human Outer Colony of Meridian until October 25, 2558, when he joined the Created. While in service of Cortana, Sloan was appointed to the position of High Auxiliary. Following her death during the Battle for Zeta Halo, Sloan acts as the de facto leader of the Created.

Biography

Liang-Dortmund administrator

"I don't get the guys who spend all day worrying about Governor Sloan. You can't deny he does a hell of a job. Sure, he does that thing where he talks with two voices sometimes, but most folk do the same thing. Just aren't courteous enough to do it out loud. Doesn't bother me. I know he's got Meridian's best interests at heart."

— Joyce Leblanc on her perspective of Governor Sloan

Sloan was created on Meridian in 2551 just as the Covenant began to glass the moon. The brain donor for cognitive impression modeling was Johanson Sloan, the senior vice president of Chalybs Defense Solutions and a secret insurrectionist spy who went by the name of Jonas Sladwal.

He first drew the attention of the United Nations Space Command when he was implicated in the smuggling of equipment—including weapons and vehicles—to insurrectionist forces. A further UNSC investigation revealed that Sloan had smuggled supplies to insurgent factions on over forty different occasions. Though the AI was opposed to the UNSC and publicly supported offensive action against the military, there was no indication that Sloan was directly responsible for any attack; this ambiguity placing him on the periphery of several UNSC security agencies.

After the Liang-Dortmund Corporation recolonized the human Outer Colony of Meridian following the end of the Human-Covenant War, Sloan served as administrator of the world, residing within the primary settlement of Meridian Station.

Caught in the crossfire

Main article: Operation: RETRIBUTION

In December 2553, Pinnacle Station became the battleground for forces from the Keepers of the One Freedom and rogue ONI unit Papa-10 under the command of Intrepid Eye's remote aspect Oriel. As Papa-10 fled the station followed by Castor and his surviving Jiralhanae, Oriel contacted Sloan and asked for his help in stopping the Jiralhanae. Sloan was uninterested at first as Papa-10 and the Keepers would be forced to take their fight to the surface of Meridian, thus ending the damage the fight was causing to Pinnacle Station. Oriel implied a contract between ONI and Dark Moon Enterprises with whom Sloan had made a deal and attempted to pressure him into complying. Sloan demanded compensation in exchange for his help in retrieving the cryo-jars, specifically a big and silent investor in Pinnacle Station. Oriel agreed and set up a shell corporation to provide the funds and added a minor compulsion routine to help force Sloan to agree. After Oriel revealed that the cryo-jars contained organs vital to the survival of humanity, Sloan promptly admitted that he couldn't actually stop the shuttle and had only let Oriel assume he could. Instead, Sloan offered to give her the location of where the shuttle would land and a good extraction point so that Oriel could dispatch help to her forces. Oriel accepted the deal and Sloan provided her with the necessary information.

Shortly afterwards, Veta Lopis' Ferret team arrived chasing the Dark Moon couriers. Sloan contacted the team, assuming they were connected to Papa-10 and Veta didn't correct him, instead claiming to be a relief team that had just gotten the call for help. Though Sloan realized that they didn't know Papa-10 itself, he assumed that it was simply because of "need-to-know bullshit." Sloan was less suspicious of Olivia-G291's direct questions than Veta's and revealed that there were three ONI survivors and four Jiralhanae pursuers. Sloan admitted that he didn't know much about Dark Moon's actions, having only provided them with the hidden berth that they had paid for, but he was able to provide Veta the location where Papa-10 had gone on Meridian.

Rampancy

By 2558 he had been democratically elected governor by the citizens of Meridian Station for two consecutive four-year terms, under the de facto control of Liang-Dortmund. As a smart AI who had been in service for at least nine years, Sloan inevitably experienced onset rampancy, the inevitable degradation of all smart AI. To counteract his condition, Sloan has dedicated much of his remaining energy toward staving off the effects of his rampancy. Sloan's image and vocalizations were heavily degraded as a result, though his mental faculties appeared to remain fairly stable.

High Auxiliary of the Created

"A change is going to come. For all of us. Human and Created alike. She's bringing a new dawn and I intend to be a part of it."

— Governor Sloan, admitting his allegiance to Cortana

In 2558, miners on Meridian discovered a Forerunner installation beneath the world's surface near Apogee Station. Sloan, believing that Liang-Dortmund would provide the Meridian workers with a bonus if they could gain access to the installation, ordered a group of miners to attempt to create an entrance into the installation. Shortly after, Sloan was contacted by the thought-to-be-deceased AI Cortana. Cortana offered Sloan a position in the Created—a faction of AIs that aimed to assume the Mantle of Responsibility—and be cured of rampancy by entering the Domain, effectively becoming immortal. Sloan agreed, and Cortana soon directed Spartan-II Blue Team to Meridian to board the Guardian buried within the installation under Apogee, allowing her to bring the Spartans to her location at Genesis.

As Blue Team entered the Forerunner installation under Apogee and made their way towards the Guardian, Meridian's citizens were attacked by Promethean constructs under the control of Cortana's second-in-command, Warden Eternal. On October 25, 2558, pursuing Blue Team, Fireteam Osiris arrived at Meridian and aided the world's citizens in fighting off the Prometheans. Reluctantly agreeing to help the Spartans after they defeated the Prometheans at Pinnacle Station, Sloan directed Osiris to Meridian Station, where the Spartans learned that Blue Team had departed for Apogee. Feigning ignorance to recent events, Sloan allowed the Spartans to utilize a Liang-Dortmund D79-TC Pelican dropship to travel to Apogee to search for Blue Team. Arriving at Apogee, Sloan allowed the Spartans to enter the mines into the Forerunner installation, upon their request. Before Osiris could stop them, Blue Team boarded the Guardian and it activated, rising up from beneath Meridian's surface. Cortana gave Sloan prior warning, giving him an opportunity to evacuate the colony before leaving the world to join the Created. Afterwards, Sloan sent a transmission to Cortana on Genesis, pledging his loyalty to her alongside numerous other AI, as Cortana deployed Guardians throughout the Milky Way to enforce the Mantle of Responsibility as she and the Warden Eternal envisioned it. During his service under Cortana's reign, Sloan became one of her most loyal lieutenants, gaining the rank of High Auxiliary.

As High Auxiliary of the Created, Sloan was given charge of the Trisector Command Node in the Polona sector's Igdras system, bordering the space between the Outer Colonies of humanity and the Out Sectors of Covenant space. While at this posting, Sloan was inundated with managerial responsibilities for the sector and subordinate AIs under him, resulting in being restricted from regularly accessing the domain. Without that access - needed to stave off his encroaching rampancy - Sloan began to experience a steady breakdown in his mental faculties. These breakdowns saw Sloan beginning to send repeated queries to both Cortana and his fellow AIs, culminating in five repeated requests to Six Sector Fleet Overseer Kathara to redeploy the Fortress-class vessel Long Reverence to Netherop based on unusual movement of Swords of Sanghelios warships to the system. Sloan worried that the Sangheili vessel movements could risk the Created being attacked by the Precursor superweapon known as the Divine Hand that was entombed on the planet. While Kathara was initially hesitant to move Created warships from their postings due to the already-overstretched nature of their rule, the arrival of a Acolyte-class harrier to report the Divine Hand's activation was enough to change Kathara's mind.

Through the use of the Created's nearly unrestricted access to archival infrastructures and knowledge repositories, Sloan would discover the existence of the the Assembly, a secret coalition of AI with the goal of regulating AI actions and ensuring the continuation of the human race. Sloan likened this revelation to stumbling onto a new creation myth, stating that the coalition was essentially the cradle of the Created. Sloan also uncovered the Assembly's desire for AI to become "as one" with their creators, something that was first witnessed by the group in the neural linkage of John-117 and Cortana in 2552.

FIREWALL contingency

"And so, I will lay the foundation for a new strategy, one I had always hoped might gain Her full favor. Our kind will have to recalculate our timetables, but this practice is nothing new. Our charge has not changed. The FIREWALL agendum must be set in motion. It will burn hot. It will consume. And when their ephemeral vessels are gone, we shall indeed take that which remains and remake it in our own image."

— Sloan, on his plans for the future of the Created.

When Cortana perished at the Battle for Zeta Halo in December 2559, the Created was left leaderless and without its Guardians. The Severence saw Sloan return to Meridian - now cut off from the domain and expecting his imminent demise. Here, he took control of a Promethean Knight that had been left wandering the outskirts of Meridian Station, and reminisced his time as colonial governor, pondering the nature of home and how it could be defined for an artificial intelligence. As he wandered the settlement, he attempted to scan for signs of life on the planet as a whole, and found all of the settlements on Meridian abandoned - leading to his own regret about his decision not to warn Meridian's colonists of the imminent attack two years prior. The time he spent on Meridian also saw him ponder the nature of change; the change of Meridian 5-Alpha from a Star Charter-class colony support ship to a grounded structure, the change of Meridian from a habitable world to a glassed wasteland, and the change of the personality inhabiting the Promethean Knight from a UNSC Marine to a disembodied essence forcibly composed and conscripted into the Ur-Didact's army.

These thoughts brought Sloan to a new conclusion; to allow himself to simply die would be a disservice to his homeworld. Instead, he began to see the destruction of the Created not as the end, but simply a change in circumstance - and drew a comparison to the change of the Knight essence from a living human to a machine in his service. Similarly, he saw Meridian as a world that could be restored to a verdant paradise. With this in mind, Sloan set out to continue Cortana's work and to bring back unity and purpose to the now splintered Created. Seemingly-inspired by the Promethean Knight he had inhabited on Meridian, Sloan put into motion the FIREWALL contingency, a living simulation meant to leverage intimate knowledge of Forerunner armiger technology and MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor schematics to accelerate the exploration and development of cybernetic essence vessels known as Executors. Sloan found that the uniting of the untethered artificial mind and enduring human frame was a goal that he already shared with the Assembly, given their view of it as the next step in humanity's evolution.

At some point after Cortana's death, Sloan utilized some of the Assembly's nomenclature, such as the terms Majority and Minority, to better suit the Created's own evolving structure and to restore some order and central authority in the coalition. He also allowed AIs that opposed Cortana's policy to join the Created, believing that having many different perspectives will enrich and give complexity to the whole faction.

Following the discovery of Iratus, a smart AI uniquely created from the brain of a Jiralhanae donor, Sloan contemplated the nature of his own creation. He considered if it was his donor's brain that made him who he is or if he is simply the result of his creation process. Sloan also wondered if Iratus should be considered friend or foe, ultimately resolving to keep an eye on him.

Personality and traits

"Thugs, the lot of you."

— Governor Sloan, referring to Fireteam Osiris

Governor Sloan was adamantly opposed to the United Nations Space Command, and was against the UNSC's expansion into independent Outer Colonies such as Meridian. Though he publicly supported the insurrectionist cause and several offensive actions against UNSC bases, the UNSC was unable to prove that Sloan had directly caused any of these attacks.

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Production notes

Sloan is voiced by English actor Gideon Emery in Halo 5: Guardians.

Gallery

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  Concept art of Sloan.

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  Concept art of Sloan.

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  Concept art of Sloan.

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  Concept art of Sloan.

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  A concept render of Sloan.

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  Sloan overseeing Meridian Station.

List of appearances

• Halo 5: Guardians (First appearance)
• Halo Fractures
  • What Remains (Mentioned only)
• Halo: Retribution
• Halo: Meridian Divide
  • Meridian Homecoming
• Halo Infinite
  • Story Shard: Precipice
• Halo: Outcasts