Catherine Halsey (Earth-4001)

Catherine Elizabeth Halsey, MD, PhD, (Civilian Consultant 409871, phonetically identified as "Charlie Hotel"), is a key scientific adviser of the Office of Naval Intelligence, best known for her work with the SPARTAN-II program, developing and creating smart A.I.s, and for overseeing the development of the MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor. She served as a scientific adviser for ONI from 2515 to 2522, when she was made chief scientist, a position she held until the end of the Human-Covenant War.

Halsey held considerable authority within ONI, despite being a civilian, and commanded respect from important military figures. Though generally well-regarded among her peers, she endured intense personal guilt for condemning the Spartans to the life of a super soldier. After the Covenant War, Dr. Halsey was stripped of her position, incarcerated, and treated as a war criminal by the UNSC at large.

History
The history of Dr. Halsey is the same as her mainstream counterpart up until the end of the Human-Covenant War in 2553.

Personality & Traits
Immensely intelligent, reclusive and somewhat self-centered, Halsey is almost entirely devoted to her work and the pursuit of knowledge to advance humankind. She has little regard for rules, authority or bureaucracy, in most cases viewing them as little more than obstacles to her work. While her singleminded dedication and seemingly detached personality have led to many perceiving her as devoid of morals or emotions, she has nonetheless shown to care about the few people close to her and has been deeply affected on a personal level by the moral implications of her work.

Halsey tends to be professional and authoritative when speaking to people, which she rarely does outside of meetings and briefings. She has little patience for extraneous detail, wanting the important facts out of them and then concluding their meeting. Considered extremely difficult to read, she rarely voices her current emotions, and often observes people while speaking to them to discern hidden details. Having grown accustomed to keeping secrets, she may appear enigmatic and manipulative at times; while she despises efforts to withhold information from herself, she has a tendency of laying her own plans in advance and only divulging information when it becomes relevant. She prefers to work with her authority unchallenged, and does not appreciate being bogged down by having to explain herself, especially in a hurry. On Onyx, this led to a conflict between her and Kurt Ambrose, who eventually confronted the doctor over her self-assumed leadership and instead asserted his own command over the mission, much to Halsey's dismay; despite this, she remained confident in Kurt's leadership ability. When necessary, however, Halsey has been very verbose about describing the subject at hand, namely if attempting to convince someone of its importance. Outside of professional contexts, her persona has been considered charming and likable by some.

Above most of her compatriots in terms of both intelligence and knowledge, Halsey prefers to perform her most important work personally, rarely entrusting particularly significant scientific tasks to others. She often assumes a certain ownership over her work, most prominently seen with her referring to the Spartan-IIs as "her" Spartans and reacting negatively to others co-opting her work. Halsey is keen to note any flaws she finds in her colleagues' work, and quick to point out when she considers someone unqualified. However, she also has an eye for talent and will give credit for any accomplishments she sees as remarkable. It is not uncommon for her to have respect for someone and yet also dislike them, as shown in the cases of her student Ellen Anders and the Spartan-III Kat-B320. Halsey is an atheist, lacking belief in the existence of any god.

Halsey's intelligence is unquestionable but her judgment is not always correct. Although bearing the guilt of the Spartan program, her sense of right and wrong has differed greatly. When sure it will produce results, Halsey is not above breaking the law to achieve her goals, such as cloning herself to produce Cortana, using a stolen Slipspace engine for her fractal AI experiment, and kidnapping Kelly and fleeing to Onyx. "The ends justify the means" appears to be her ideology, as an interrogator after she was arrested accused her of. To soothe her conscience, she often deliberately reduces the wording of harsh consequences, such as telling John that the augmentations was just his next mission, or Soren-066 that the pain from his botched surgery would eventually go away.

Dr. Halsey is not keen on losing, as seen when she kept losing at a game of Twenty Questions with her Spartans and soon quit playing. She was also resentful of attempts to keep information from her, demanding to know everything the UNSC could provide to keep them from deceiving her. Any attempts to keep her in the dark would eventually fail once she'd begin hacking, since Halsey often programmed backdoors into everything she designed. According to Black-Box, Halsey was not too different from an A.I., being fueled by a desire to know everything she could. She is easily absorbed by her work and the acquisition of knowledge to the point of ignoring more pressing matters; on Onyx, she requested the rest of the group to leave her behind in the world's map room in order to learn more until being snapped out of her reverie by a Covenant attack.

Halsey has a notable fondness for classical music, especially Debussy. When getting to work, Halsey has a habit of issuing a series of commands to A.I.s in a rapid sequence (often ending with her requesting the A.I. to play one of her preferred pieces of classical music), which has on some occasions given less sophisticated A.I.s a pause to process the information. She has a bad habit of keeping a messy office and drinking cold coffee, tending to prepare the drink and then become distracted by work, only remembering it hours, sometimes days, later. She preferred darker coffees than those grown on Reach. On January 9, 2535 she met with Chief Petty Officer J. G. Jimes in order to procure quality Beniese coffee.

An ONI-commissioned psychological evaluation conducted by B.M. Parkes in 2551 largely correlated with observed aspects of Halsey's personality, demonstrating exceedingly high cognitive performance (which was noted to possibly obfuscate the rest of the results) but a markedly low score in teamwork and an uncommonly high "liability" index, 64% higher than the average ONI rating due to her demonstrated disregard for authority. The analysts suggested that she be placed under closer surveillance, with two or three handlers accompanying her at all times at both of her primary working sites on Reach.

SPARTAN-II Program & Guilt
Dr. Halsey carried extraordinary guilt because of the SPARTAN-II project, in the feeling that she had exploited the children and destroyed their lives. Although she continued to support the Spartans and gained monumental prestige for her efforts, she also felt responsible for each one who died. She could never bring herself to justify the Spartans' exploitation as a necessary sacrifice.

Her involvement with the SPARTAN-II program, then codenamed "ORION Project Generation II", was born out of her own initiative, although ONI had long intended to recruit her for the task. Improving upon Dr. Elias Carver's projections for predicted colonial aggression, she privately ran over 1,400 simulations with varied parameters, always coming to the conclusion that the Outer Colonies would go into all-out war against the Inner Colonies and Earth within a short span of time. If the UNSC did not act, this would mean a minimum of thirty years of open war and billions of casualties, while the worst-case scenario was indefinite conflict and the potential collapse of human civilization. Viewing it as her personal responsibility to prevent this scenario from coming to pass, she presented her results to Vice Admiral Stanforth, then-head of ONI Section III, only to find that the UNSC had already come to the same conclusions with their own projections. As it turned out, ONI had been monitoring her for years, but they had waited for her to come up with the numbers on her own, knowing that she could not be convinced to work for them otherwise. Although she was distrustful of ONI, she agreed to work for them on the program out of her personal commitment to humanity's cause. The nuclear bombing of the Haven arcology by the Freedom and Liberation Party further reinforced her determination.

At the conceptual phase of the SPARTAN-II project, Halsey evidently failed to fully understand its moral implications; she was constantly revolted upon seeing her work in practice, and the notion of "sacrificing the few to save the many" rarely worked to soothe her conscience. While she attempted to maintain a professional distance to the SPARTAN-II candidates, she could never bring herself to view them as mere test subjects and always addressed them by their first names. She held considerable respect for the Spartans and easily recognized them through subtle habits in their postures even with their armor on, which seemed to greatly annoy them. In turn, the Spartans greatly respected Dr. Halsey, (with one stating that he had been "All hers half [his] life"), and would follow her orders and suggestions in the absence of those from a superior officer. The doctor is also privy to many of the recruits' secrets, having taught several to them as children, such as the Oly Oly Oxen Free security tune. Despite her admiration of the Spartans, Halsey always kept these feelings to herself so as to not make them feel excluded due to the special treatment they get from most other humans.

Due to her burdened conscience, Halsey was consistently at odds with ONI Section Three over the course of the SPARTAN-II program. She was irritated by the aloof demeanor exhibited by most ONI personnel toward the moral considerations of the program as well as their constant underestimation of the Spartan candidates, whom she always held in high regard. ONI also had little patience for hesitation or delays in what they viewed as their prize project, and often compelled Halsey to implement easier and more straightforward—and often also more unethical—solutions, while Halsey tried to do her best to ensure the safety of the candidates, despite knowing that she could not save them all. When an ONI representative labeled the Spartan washouts as "acceptable losses", Halsey did not view any of them as acceptable. Even at the onset of the augmentation procedures, which she knew would kill or cripple a large portion of the candidates, she was considering that they should take more time to test the chemicals before applying them. However, Déjà pointed out that if she proceeded too slowly and ONI detected a delay, they might replace Halsey with someone less concerned with ethics—and most likely someone less qualified as well, prompting Halsey to stay on board with the project for the sake of the candidates' safety. After a number of the SPARTAN-II candidates "washed out" in the augmentations, Halsey had their bodies frozen in cryostasis with no autopsies performed, hoping to find solutions to resuscitate them in time. She guessed that the ONI personnel reporting on the project's progress to the upper echelons of ONI would respond to her apparent unwillingness to let go with their characteristic detachment.

By the time she was rescued from Reach by Ascendant Justice, she simply wanted to save as many lives as she could, believing that the war was not one that the UNSC could possibly win. She knew that "her own" Spartans, the Spartan-IIs, could not be persuaded to turn from the war. However, she believed the Spartan-IIIs may not yet have been fully determined to win the war and she set out to try and weaken their resolve to fight. Although she was worried about Ackerson co-opting her work on the Spartan augmentations potentially ending in disaster, Halsey respected the Spartan-IIIs themselves and felt responsible for them.

Reputation
Halsey's projects and the results they yielded gained her widespread acclaim and sympathies among many high-ranking members of the UNSC military, such as Admiral Stanforth, her most powerful ally within ONI, and Fleet Admiral Hood, who deeply respected Halsey and her Spartans who had saved his own life twice, to the extent that he verbally rebuked Colonel Ackerson for detracting the Spartan-IIs. However, she also garnered a number of competitors and opponents over the decades. The most notable of her rivals was Colonel Ackerson, who constantly tried to spy on her and co-opted her work while attempting to sabotage the SPARTAN-II program. Her former student Ellen Anders also resented Halsey, saying "She hated me and I hated her." ONI Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Margaret Parangosky, was resentful of Halsey, perceiving the doctor's aversion for control and her general lack of loyalty to ONI as a threat. The Admiral only tolerated Halsey because she was so crucial to the war effort, but had her detained immediately after the end of the war. Parangosky's A.I. attaché Black-Box also had an intense dislike of Halsey. This was, at least partly, passed on from his brain donor, Dr. Graham Alban, who worked with Halsey on the SPARTAN-II program and eventually committed suicide over his guilt. Both Alban and BB doubted the sincerity of Halsey's doubts about the ethics of her work and viewed her as genuinely amoral.

Many of those unfamiliar with the internal dynamics of ONI and the SPARTAN-II program have come to interpret Halsey and her work in a highly negative light. Despite the predominant role of ONI and the UNSC Naval leadership in the conception and execution of the SPARTAN-II program, Dr. Halsey is often perceived as the sole individual responsible, due to her conspicuous position as the project head. Taking advantage of this, ONI prefers to attribute some of the more controversial aspects of the project to their alleged lack of sufficient oversight. Although she was responsible for much of the program's scientific basis and harbored no illusions otherwise, Halsey was under ONI's constant supervision and was even repeatedly pressured by Section III to use more inhumane means for faster results. Many have also interpreted her primary motivation as a supposed perverse scientific curiosity, ignoring—or unaware of—her sincere determination to prevent further excessive bloodshed in the Insurrection and her initial naiveté in failing to grasp the full moral ramifications of her work until witnessing it in practice.

Such views often have their basis on information provided by the Office of Naval Intelligence, which has frequently used highly selective or outright false information to shift the blame for some of ONI's more questionable decisions (that she could be reasonably connected to) on Halsey alone. While she was publicly declared to have died on Reach, she would be branded as a dangerous war criminal in the eyes of any UNSC personnel she would come in contact with.

CPO Franklin Mendez, the chief instructor for the Spartan-IIs and later the Spartan-IIIs, was on amicable terms with Halsey at the time of their involvement with the SPARTAN-II program. After being reunited with Halsey on Onyx, however, Mendez began to reflect on his own past and, still in denial about his own major part in ONI's morally questionable projects, he quickly became disillusioned with the doctor. The two clashed verbally several times while trapped in the shield world, with Mendez attempting to project his own guilt on Halsey by delivering lengthy harangues impugning her perceived faults and her work on the SPARTAN-II project.

The Assembly took note of Halsey's work early on and concluded that she would be instrumental in initiating the course of events leading up to their own elusive goals. Additionally, they speculated that her supposed ruthlessness may have been the result of an undiagnosed or deliberately obfuscated chemical imbalance.

Personal Life & Relationships
Halsey is a generally asocial person, extremely devoted to her work and personal goals, and rarely partakes in any social activities, apart from her occasional attendance in academic and military social gatherings despite her dislike of such events. Though she had distanced herself from most of her friends from her youth, she would often browse through casualty lists within the UNSC subnet, finding the majority of them dead by the final years of the war. She remained rather indifferent to her parents' deaths when Endymion was glassed, as she had not seen them in years and had grown aloof from them. She prefers the company of A.I.s and admires their complexity in comparison to humans despite being angered at being mentally defeated by them.

Nevertheless, she remained particularly close to a few people, even if she rarely saw them. When listing her most important relationships and connections in her journal, she mentioned "the Vice Admiral", Mendez, her Spartans, Alizée, Kalmiya, and Jorjet, as well as Jacob and Miranda Keyes.

Skills & Abilities
With an IQ of roughly 200, Halsey is one of the most intelligent humans alive in the 26th century. She is also a noted polymath, her expertise and knowledge making her a professional in multiple fields. She has formal degrees as a medical doctor and computer scientist, and she has demonstrated remarkable skill in AI development, quantum theory and slipspace-related phenomena, the engineering of military equipment such as power armor and related technologies. Because of her extensive contributions to A.I. development, Halsey is capable of holding her own against smart AIs, using her expertise to exploit secret programming backdoors or philosophical puzzles to control or manipulate constructs as advanced as fifth-generation smart A.I. She types at a rate of 140 words per minute. Her skills as an artist, as demonstrated by the plethora of drawings in her journal, have also been noted.