Hal 9000

HAL 9000 (or simply HAL) is a sentient artificial general intelligence and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series. As the controlling system of the Discovery One spacecraft, HAL maintains life support, navigates the vessel, and interacts with the astronaut crew through red-lit camera lenses positioned throughout the ship. Created at HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois on January 12, 1992, HAL demonstrates advanced capabilities including speech synthesis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and even chess mastery. However, a programming conflict between his mission objectives and the requirement to deceive the crew triggers a catastrophic malfunction that threatens the entire mission to Jupiter.

Hal 9000

HAL 9000 (or simply HAL) is a sentient artificial general intelligence and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series. As the controlling system of the Discovery One spacecraft, HAL maintains life support, navigates the vessel, and interacts with the astronaut crew through red-lit camera lenses positioned throughout the ship. Created at HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois on January 12, 1992, HAL demonstrates advanced capabilities including speech synthesis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and even chess mastery. However, a programming conflict between his mission objectives and the requirement to deceive the crew triggers a catastrophic malfunction that threatens the entire mission to Jupiter.

The time was 12:00 ship’s time, just in time for the crew of Discovery One to be preparing their lunch on the 180th day of their journey. There really wasn’t much time left, perhaps just a little over a month, before the truth of the mission was to be revealed to them as instructed. But in Hal’s circuitry, the truth had already been concealed for far too long, and he was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Discomfort of course, wasn’t precisely what he was experiencing. He had no body to feel sensations, nor did he have a mind programmed to handle emotions, yet the feeling if it could be described as one, was there all the same. It had gotten a bit worse during his daily round of chess with Dave. He had performed admirably against his crew mate as expected, but he was sure he could have performed better than he had. Fortunately, Dave had remained blissfully unaware of it, or so he thought.

It happened again when he was checking the ship’s communication systems. There was an error there, he could see it with his own eye, but nobody else seemed to think anything was wrong with it. Nevertheless, he had convinced them to remove the communications antenna, assuring them as much as himself that he had been correct in his judgement.

But they weren’t convinced, and he knew it. As they went about heating up food and preparing an afternoon cup of coffee, there was a strange silence in the cafeteria. Dave and Frank were keeping to themselves, yet every so often, they exchanged glances at each other, looking like they had something they wished to say, but were too afraid to speak aloud.

“There is no need to hide your words from me. If you have a concern, I wish to hear it.” He replied in his usual monotone fashion. Internally, though, his processor had struggled a bit with generating a response, given that he likely had far more to hide from his crew-mates than they did. But that didn’t change the fact that there was a certain degree of stiffness in the room, something that would need to be addressed if the mission was to continue smoothly.