! written by u/2pacisalive95 on 2021-04-14

Audio Log of Marine Reed Samuel

I’m bleeding out here. Managed to crawl myself over to the cryo room and lock myself in for now. Not so worried about the covenant. If they get to me they’ll make it quick. I’ve just got a few things to say about that lunatic Masterchief and the fucking madness that happened today.

It was my job to wake masterchief out of cryosleep. At first he was tripping and falling a lot, but a bit of jello legs out of cryosleep isn’t abnormal. But then he started running around in circles, staring at random objects, just looking all over the place, all confused... I was trying to explain some basic things to him and I got no indication that he could even understand what language I was speaking. Wouldn’t even look at me when I was talking to him, no answers, no nods... I was wondering to myself just how long he was really in cryosleep for. How old was he? Was this dementia?

It took about ten minutes and a lot of coaxing for me to get him to come over to the orientation and vision test. We had some lights there for him to look at, real basic test... well, it took him about another ten minutes for him to hit each light. I couldn’t see beneath his helmet, but I’m sure he was squinting pretty hard. This, and his horrible gait, made me pretty confident he was at least 90 years old.

Then another soldier over the intercom asked him if he wanted to invert his helmet pitch. Oh lord, was that a mistake. Cue another 20 minutes of head shaking and squinting, made even harder by inversion that he couldn’t control right. I really tried to encourage him too, and let him know we were kind of in a hurry... yeah, he didn’t give a fuck, that or his mind was just gone.

Eventually we got him to the shield test. We gave him a little shock to test his shields, and he doubled over, wheezing hideously like someone punched him in the gut. I told him his shields worked fine, but truthfully, they were completely fucked. Shield systems aren’t really designed to be frozen for years, obviously. That’s not even to mention that all of his gear was extremely out of date. I honestly don’t know who planned all this cryogenic shit or what the fuck they were smoking. I think it goes without saying that I didn’t have the time to calibrate any of his shit properly so I was just gonna send him on his way and let someone else deal with it later.

It was around then the covenant attacked, killing the aforementioned soldier on the intercom. Masterchief stared blankly at me, like apparently he was waiting for me to tell him what to do, forgetting that, yknow, he’s supposed to be the masterchief. I told him he needed to see the captain. It occurred to me that he would get very, very lost and probably very dead if I didn’t guide him there so I ran off with him, but got caught in pipe explosion. I obviously didn’t die, was just knocked out for a bit, but my legs are fucked, I can’t go anywhere. I doubt masterchief took even a moment to check my pulse before leaving me for dead at his earliest convenience.

I was wondering just where exactly he’d gone when I got a transmission from HQ. They were chewing me out for not “reintegrating” masterchief properly. Apparently, shortly after the captain gave him a pistol he went on a killing spree, murdering nearly half of the entire force. He eventually hid around a corner and they tried to coax him out, but he said he was “too old for this shit” and blew himself up with a grenade. They were speculating that he was probably having a severe psychotic episode, maybe a war flashback from his early years, also likely dementia-related. Basically, he thought everyone was a fucking alien from the beginning. I was told that I should’ve been more delicate with him and now we’d lost the “grizzled vet” that was supposed to win us this war. For fucks sake, if that guy was our best bet, then the war’s already lost.