The Secret Story of Dustin Echoes

About the Fan Fiction

            I hope you enjoyed my Halo Fan Fiction, the Secret Story of Dustin Echoes. I also hope you have already read it, because this page contains a few spoilers.

            I was interested in the world of Halo from the very minute I started playing the first game. I was very curious as to what exactly Cortana was saying to Captain Keyes in the opening sequence and what it all meant. When I finished Halo for the first time and heard Cortana say "Just dust and echoes..." I immediately thought of the name Dustin Echoes. I said to my brother Ryan (who I was playing co-op mode with at the time) "Hey, you mean there's a Marine still out there named Dustin Echoes?" It was a good joke.

            Later, when the Halo novels were written, I learned more about the world, its people, organizations, and technology, and I felt inspired to write a fan fiction set there. I decided on a story about the name I'd invented, Dustin Echoes. But I felt like I did not have enough material. So far all of my stories typically involve a traitor, someone who makes the plot far more interesting because he has enough character to see that the goals of the group he belongs to do not necessarily match his own. But in the world of Halo, there could be no traitors. A human would not betray the humans for the aliens, and neither would an alien do the same. There might have been some traitors on either side, but they weren't as interesting.

            About this time there was a little thing called "I Love Bees," which was a sort of alternate reality game online using wav files where voice actors acted out a Halo storyline. It was sort of like a radio show of the old days, when all you heard were the voices of the characters in the story and a few sound effects. I thought the story was interesting, especially the part about a certain planet called Troy, which was destroyed by the Covenant. It was destroyed because the humans had been intercepting Covenant transmissions and decoding them, but to make sure the Covenant did not realize that they had cracked their codes, they had to let the aliens take a few worlds. This made me think more about ONI decision-making. I decided to make Dustin Echoes an ONI agent instead of a Marine.

            "I Love Bees" also introduced an AI named Durga, who was a very human-like AI. Just like in the books, she was formed from a human brain, from the brain of a Spartan trainee who died in the Spartan-making process. During the course of the "I Love Bees" story, Durga learns of her origins and becomes more human-acting than ever. She starts going rampant. So I decided to stick one of these AI in my story as well.

            Then Halo 2 came out. Though I was not truly completely satisfied with the game, and though I did not think that the Arbiter's betrayal of the Covenant was made sufficiently believable, it opened new doors for a fan fiction, because it showed that Elites could turn traitor. It even showed a whole group of traitor Grunts and Elites fighting against the forces of the Covenant. After I saw this, I invented the character of a traitor Elite, a master swordsman (my favorite!) named Rebas Noiproks. No, Rebas Noiproks is not a stroke of genius like Dustin Echoes; it's actually just "Saber" and "Scorpion" (spelled with a K instead of a C) spelled backwards.

            Now all I needed was a story. I wanted it to involve another Halo ring, as most Halo stories do. So I took a page from Halo 2 and made another Halo ring run by a green-glowing Monitor (the Monitor of Delta Halo in Halo 2 glowed red). I thought: what if Halo could actually kill the Flood themselves instead of killing "their food"? Still, I knew that if I made either the Covenant or the humans get their hands on the secret to killing the Flood with the Halo rings, it would totally screw up the real storyline of the games. And I wanted my fan fiction to fit properly into the Halo world without disrupting things. So I made the Index of this new Halo the goal, but an unreachable one. It was the attempt of Dustin Echoes and Rebas Noiproks to get the Index that made the story. It didn't matter if they failed; it was what happened in-between that mattered.

            So that is how I came up with the characters and the story for "The Secret Story of Dustin Echoes." I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Feel free to spread the word and show it to anyone you like; just link back to this page, and don't re-produce the fan fiction in full anywhere without specific permission from me. Thanks.