Gravemind reality warping 1

That’s not just an analysis of air composition. I haven’t got the right sensors on this station. And . . . I can really smell it. I shouldn’t be able to smell, not like an organic, not this sense of . . .

Smell.

It was something she‘d never experienced before, even though she knew exactly what it was. She could run diagnostic tests on air samples if she had a link to filters and a gas chromatograph. But that just told her what was in the air in stark chemical terms, and that wasn‘t the same as what she was experiencing now. This was emotional and unfathomable. The smell tugged at memories. It was a flesh-and-blood thing. She felt the world as if she was in another body, anorganic body.

Cortana scooped up a handful of decaying leaves—some clammy, some paper-dry skeletal lace, some recently fallen ones still springy with sap—and with them the clear memory of being someone else. It was a second of heady disorientation. For a moment, a welter of glorious new information about a world of stilt-cities, creatures she‘d never seen before, and lives she'd never lived poured into her. She devoured it. So much language and culture, never seen by humankind before.
(Halo:Human Weakness; pg.255)