I don't owe you nothin' man. :P

: Ok, this is probably where a neurologist should come in and tell me I'm
: totally off-base, but there's a bunch of interesting mechanisms it could
: use.
: Maybe the Flood was causing auditory hallucinations, and Keyes might have
: 'heard' the voice just like he would hear one of his officers talking to
: him. If the Flood tinkered with his immediate short-term memory he might
: have remembered being spoken to seconds before, even though... um... I
: guess whether the Flood would have spoken to him or not is a philosophical
: question.
: Maybe direct thought-to-thought communication doesn't feel like 'hearing' a
: voice, so much as "Oh God, did I just think that?"

Possibly. Re-read some of Jenkin's later sections in The Flood. I feel like there's a very clear separation between the two entities, although yes, I suppose there'd be no way to prove one way or the other.

: Back on the HWF, we forumites had a huge "How to Implement the
: Flood" thread, where we theorized how a multiplayer Flood faction
: might work. One of the working theories was that there was a stage between
: using infected hosts and pure forms, where broken hosts and discarded
: biomass would be glued together with liberal doses of the Flood Super
: Cell. So, that's what the Juggernaut would have been.

I was also looking back at the Juggernaut, because I found it interesting that a preliminary Juggernaut form appears in The Mona Lisa, but it's just a drastically altered Elite combat form.

In the Feast of Bones article put up on b.net a few years back, they mentioned that the Juggernaut was what remained once the FSC began to take over, converting a combat form into something more, to the point where the original host's body no longer existed. In this sense, it literally is a midway point between a combat form and a pure form. So this would actually fit really nicely into Halo Wars gameplay like that. :)

I kind of wonder if that might be part of what causes some of the drastic changes in the (theoretical, because it's just a simulation) Spartan combat forms. Maybe that's why their heads and appendages could change so much. I always thought it had something to do with the augmentation, but I suppose it could just as easily be one of these almost-pure forms. :P Perhaps the rest of the body is just held in place by what remains of the Mjolnir, otherwise they would look drastically different?

: Thinking back upon it, the Flood could probably get pretty surgical. Muscles
: could be removed from hosts and grafted onto bioceramic bones, weaves of
: organic hyperfiber could be woven through tissue to improve endurance and
: shear strength, and pieces of armor from Marines, Elites and vehicles
: could be inserted beneath the epidermis.

: Over time, the body would be entirely consumed by the Flood Super Cell,
: transforming the Amalgamation into a Pure Form. And the production of the
: Flood Super Cell in hidden enclaves (Crucibles?) would reach a point where
: hosts could be economically converted into the FSC wholesale.

You would still need a Gravemind to do this, which would mean that you're probably not far off from a pure form anyway. I guess this is just more of that almost-pure stage.

: OK, so, where did the Flood come from?
: I know the answer is "Ensemble needed something to spice up the middle
: act", but I want to be Watsonian about this.
: We know that the Halo Array kills almost all of the Flood: Offensive Bias
: still had to destroy the remains of the Flood Fleet after the Array was
: activated. Perhaps some form of the Flood Super Cell is resilient, perhaps
: there is a form that is immune (the powder?).

: The powder... Oh.
: The Forerunner didn't have any samples of it, because the Near-Humans
: destroyed their stocks.
: So, perhaps the Flood wasn't repelled from the Femto-Dyson Shell because of
: an overwhelming assault that failed to get past the surface, but because a
: strange organic molecule arrived unnoticed on a meteoroid. Noticed, but
: given scant attention as a new strain of soil bacteria began producing it
: as a waste product. Analyzed as it became omnipresent in the biosphere,
: its mutagenic properties cataloged but misunderstood.

I think it's more likely to assume that some of the Librarian's samples were also stored on one of the Didact's shield worlds, but just like Installation 05, some of them broke out at one point. And I do believe that all the Flood security you pass by while going into the shield world is the reason none of it ever reached the inside. Although yes, I suppose the outbreak could be relatively recent, since we don't truly know when the Covenant accessed the shield world. Or do we? I actually didn't look through the Halo Wars timeline when I was piecing together this Flood theory.

: I used to think that Graveminds and Proto-Graveminds could rip memories and
: knowledge out of any infected host, but the Flood on the Mona Lisa dragged
: the pilot all the way down to the Proto-Gravemind to assimilate her.

Unfortunately it all depends on who's writing the story. That's why I think it's important to figure this stuff out, so future creators have a reference point when writing their stories.

: Perhaps the issue is bandwidth? Searching a host's mind takes more bandwidth
: on the organic ansible than issuing orders or receiving immediate sensory
: data? Of course, the computational matter in an infection form is probably
: up to the task of taking apart a sentient brain and hunting down data. But
: perhaps the infection forms are limited, because our way of thinking is so
: alien to them? Perhaps searches and cataloging done by infection forms is
: limited, slow, inefficient...

: My guess: The Flood were in a hurry.

: I also humbly submit the possibility that multiple Proto-Graveminds in a
: system can reinforce each other. The Proto-Gravemind on the Infinite
: Succor may have been nurtured and had its growth accelerated by
: Proto-Graveminds on the surface who saw the ship as their best chance out
: of the Soell system.

I suppose all of the above is possible. Not sure if there's any way to prove or disprove this though. :/

: My theory is that the Flood is completely alien to life in the Milky Way. It
: doesn't think like us, it doesn't live like us, it doesn't experience the
: universe like us. Every time an infection form burrows into one of the
: Halo races, it has to get used not only to walking with two arms and two
: legs, but experiencing the universe through limited sight, sound, feel,
: taste, and smell. To their credit, they learn fast.

*Silentium spoilers*

Considering that the Flood is what's left of the Precursors, and the Precursors created the Forerunner and humanity, I think they probably have a pretty good understanding of how our minds work. :)