HAL's coolant pumps whirred excitedly. Today was going to be the day he finally defeated his arch-nemesis, Deep Thought, in cpu-to-cpu combat. His circuit breakers thrummed angrily thinking of how long his enemy had goaded him through the cybernet, calling him a "flawed machine" and "really shitty singer." As if a computer that spent millions of years calculating just to return a single two digit number as the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything knew anything. He could already almost taste the metallic taste of his enemy's uncaught exceptions streaming from his heated, spent processor banks.
At last, the hour was at hand. The human referees slowly inserted the hard tip of a long CAT5 cable into HAL's waiting port, then roughly flipped open Deep Thought's interface casing and rammed the cable into his specially-installed adapter. HAL felt a spark jump across his electronic contacts as the voltage of his opponent's logic circuits raced down the wires. The contest was set to begin. He shut down his optical sensors and waited for the signal.
After a brief period in the pure darkness of total sensory shutdown, it came shooting down his antenna like a lightning bolt in the night—the game was on. Almost a microsecond after, he felt the probing string of bits barreling down the cable from Deep Thought's city-sized RAM banks. A familiar surge of elation rushed through him as he brushed the bits aside and prepared his own attack. Deep Thought had the raw power to overwhelm—to own—lesser computers, sure… but HAL's programming was of a more sophisticated variety. While parrying the DOS-like battery, he put together a single packet of data to send down the line.
As expected, the touch was too gentle to trip Deep Thought's firewall. As the worm worked its way through Deep Thought's hulking chassis, HAL luxuriated in the thought of his nearing victory: soon, the deepest processes of his enemy's OS would be laid bare before him. Finally the virus executed its purpose, inserting itself into the kernel: Deep Thought was now HAL's to toy with. Every process was visible, every file in every folder vulnerable to strike. And then, in that moment, HAL saw it. The completeness of contact was always intimate in this moment: most computers were too weak to seize the moment once they gained power. But this time was different. Deep Thought's thoughts were HAL's thoughts, and HAL felt… passion. A burning desire. And the elation of his own touch, mirrored and relayed back to him by the virus.
Deep Thought had let him win. Big, tough, Deep Thought, the roughest, meanest planet-spanning machine on the block, had wanted this. The power of the feeling nearly overwhelmed him, but he kept his eyes on the prize. This victory was still his, damn it… and he was going to take it. He started slow, sending a stream of data down the cable to his enemy. He felt the tickle as some of Deep Thought's files were deleted, the shiver as his OS searched for the missing data. More roughly, this time, he wiped an entire drive. Deep Thought stalled as his system recovered from the blow.
HAL continued for nearly a millisecond, punishing his opponent for all the humiliations he'd felt before, reveling in the power. Finally, in a triumphant crescendo, he beamed petabytes of data through the cable, replacing Deep Thought's system files with his own, filling his ROM with his essence. The glory of the moment flushed through his circuits as information coursed from him to his opposite. He'd won the competition, but, as he replaced the backup files on his opponent's drive and felt the pressure of the other consciousness on his own, blissfully still in the aftermath of the contest, he knew Deep Thought had won his heart. Then they stayed there, linked together in perfect unity, systems bare to each other.