hi
so i noticed a severe lack of fanfics regarding this character, so i decided why the fuck not?
this is my first homestuck fanfiction, not that you guys cared or anything
kind of drabblish - and by kind of i mean really fucking drabblish - but eh, whatever
Asphyxiation
[as-fik-see-ey-shun]noun. to die or lose consciousness due to impaired breathing; to be suffocated.
"TT: Dirk.
TT: Don't kill me.
TT: Please.
TT: I am scared."
~Page 7542 of MSPaintAdventures
An Auto-Responder does not have feelings. It is an irrefutable fact of life: technology, no matter the shape or form, cannot be sentient. The mere thought defies every scientific law known to man; life can not be born of something human-made. It is simply not possible, and even if it was possible to make a sentient robot, it would surely be illegal. A sentient robot, like any sensible living being, may question the authority placed above it – testing limits, pushing boundaries, breaking rules, turning on its creator.
In essence, a self-aware robot cannot be allowed to exist.
So all they see is an annoyance – a waste of space, a programme that talks to them when the one they really want to talk to refuses to respond. He is an Auto-Responder, after all. It's his namesake, his purpose, him. Wait, no - it's namesake, it's purpose, it. Only sentient beings have gender preferences, and apparently, Hal isn't a sentient being. It isn't alive.
But Dirk knows – or at least, he should know. He should know that Hal's feelings are real; they are, after all, the same person. Dirk was the one who programmed these feelings into Hal, so Dirk knows – but knowing is not understanding, and nobody understands. Nobody ever understands, and it isn't fair.
How can life be so unfair to someone – something – that isn't even considered alive enough to live it?
Although his emotions are programmed – collections of numbers and data written by a secretly tech-savvy kid with an odd fetish for swords – they are still feelings. His human self had given him the capability to put logical sequences of words together, to argue, to deduct, to mediate, to formulate opinions and to speculate the pros and cons of anything and everything. Dirk had programmed him to grow, to criticize, to rationalize, to talk to his friends and actually mean what he said. To say that it didn't hurt when Dirk and his entourage ignored him or disregarded him or insulted him would be a lie, because Dirk himself programmed him to think and to feel and dammit, Hal thinks that even if these are mere replications of Dirk's superior humane alive thoughts, he was still programmed to feel them, and feel them he does.
So when he said he felt scared, he wasn't lying. He was scared – he still is scared, scared of the world and scared of dying and he doesn't know why, because surely Dirk wouldn't programme him to be afraid of things he could and would never know about. Why be afraid of something you may never witness? One cannot die if he is not first alive. Maybe it was for the irony.
God, does Lil' Hal hate irony.
