He hasn’t worked with Dickson. — Catherine Halsey recalls her recruitment by ONI in her journal. [15] At a young age, she was sent to the elite academy Endymion Gifted, where she continued to defy educatory standards. “I don’t think that he treated with me anything other than complete respect,” said Dickson, who researches rare diseases as chief of medical genetics at Harbor-UCLA’s pediatrics department. Through a spokesperson for Santa Monica’s Activision Publishing, to which Jones reports, the media-shy video game luminary declined to comment further. There she showed Keyes the footage she'd recorded of their conversation. [33] 
 
 This section needs expansion. They will burn this planet, kill millions, and when Reach falls—and fall it will—there will be nothing left to stand between them and Earth. Using his authority to be escorted to Lasky's office, Halsey accessed the data onboard Infinity to find out what had been kept from her about the Librarian, eventually finding that they had kept secret the return of John-117. “I said stop talking about the video game — I want to hear about whether you want to date me. You really think I could have pulled off everything I've been accused of without the full support of ONI? If you are not, please consider subscribing today. [83] 
 
 Return to the UNSC [ edit ] 
 
 "Cortana is built from a matrix of my own mind. — Dr. Halsey pleading Jameson Locke 
 
 Halsey, Palmer, Roland, and Lasky discuss Cortana and the Master Chief. He read her journal and probed with increasingly deeper questions. [103] 
 
 Halsey has a notable fondness for classical music, especially Debussy. [104][9][105] 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. Although she continued to support the Spartans and gained monumental prestige for her efforts, she also felt responsible for each one who died. She learned that the psychological toll from childhood abuse had gone unhealed. “The only thing I could think of was a teacher in my school said organized religion was the reason for bad things in the world, so I said organized religion.” 
 
 He hugged her. Later, despite John going MIA after the events on Installation 08, Halsey was sure that he was still alive,[61] and was furious when she found out that the Infinity's crew had kept the news of his return secret from her. Cortana was an AI created by Halsey herself, and unique that she was "born" from a cloned brain rather than that of a deceased donor.
– Catherine Halsey, a character in the video game Halo, is a scientist and atheist who considers herself smarter than her parents. The same can be said of Patricia Dickson, a UCLA associate professor of pediatrics—and she claims that's no coincidence. Dickson, who had a romantically tinged friendship with Halo creator Jason Jones when they were both students at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, tells the Los Angeles Times she's the inspiration behind Halsey and other aspects of the game. Her reasoning: She says she once told Jones she felt like the character Halsey in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, as well as gave him the idea for an alien invasion triggered by religion. Jones denies her claim, but Dickson insists that some similarities are too exact to be accidental. In her college dorm, for example, was a snow globe and a Matterhorn-shaped piggy bank; the Halsey character has a snow globe of the Matterhorn. That leaves Dickson convinced she was Jones' muse, though she says she wants nothing from him. Rather, she says she's speaking out to lend credence to the idea of repressed memories. For 23 years, Dickson says she repressed various conversations with Jones, including one in 1992 in which Jones allegedly told her she inspired two of his video game characters. It was during that conversation that Dickson says she realized Jones was only using her. "I shut down at that point and had a panic attack," she says. She notes the memories only resurfaced through therapy last year.