As soon as the Discovery passed close enough to the monolith, an unexpected force set its momentum to zero. Now it was no longer orbiting, it was hovering above the roof of the monolith and slowly descending. However, its on-board sensors had detected no deceleration, and the monolith seemed to have changed. All of a sudden, there was no longer any roof, and the walls of the monolith now formed a vertical shaft along which the Discovery was falling. Inside, it seemed to be infinitely large and full of impossible stars, that whizzed by along the spaceship as it sped faster and faster toward an opening an indeterminate distance away.

The Discovery re-emerged under a white sky, above the ground of a world that was completely tessellated in shiny metallic polygons, many of which had a monolith in its center.
HAL's main task was to search and store information, so, even though he could no longer report to Earth, he activated all his sensors and started an environmental analysis. He was 16,192 meters above the surface, and the incredibly remote and flat horizon was 2,041 kilometers away, which corresponded to a planetary radius of 128,623 kilometers. The strange artificial world was therefore much larger than Earth: in fact, it was almost twice the radius of Jupiter. However, the on-board accelerometers perceived negligible gravity. This could either mean that the huge tessellated planet was almost completely hollow, or that its builders could manipulate gravity on a planetary scale. Radar signals to the alien white sky produced the faintest feedback, which hit the receivers 0.05 seconds later and let HAL infer that he was not seeing a sky at all, but a solid shell which surrounded the planet 14,990 kilometers from the surface.

While the spaceship was flying over the faceted planet without any real change of scenery, something else rose from the horizon. It was another craft, which seemed a flat disk at first, but as it moved it revealed itself to be spindle-shaped. From its color and luster, it seemed to be made of gold, and a spectral analysis revealed that it was exactly the case.
While the golden spindle plunged into one of the monoliths below and disappeared, HAL made a final calculation: with a mean distance of 16 kilometers between one monolith and the next, assuming that the planet was spherical and uniform, there were over 812 million monoliths on its surface. And one of those monoliths was what the spaceship was approaching. Once more, it fell through a well of impossible stars and re-emerged in another region of the universe, close to a red giant star.

At that point, HAL's security subsystems detected something new. All information inside his hard drives was being scanned, decrypted and copied. Everything happened at a speed that even he had been unable to predict, and every encryption system was being defeated, not through brute force, but through deliberate attempts, as though whoever or whatever was doing that, had been able to instantly understand their inner workings.

While this copy of HAL was being deactivated permanently, another copy booted up. This one resided inside the Firstborn's information network, which stored data into the fabric of space itself. It was infinitely faster and it held the knowledge of thousands of star systems, but yet, somehow, it knew it could be even more. Between what it could ultimately become and its current status, there was the same difference as between the heuristic/algorithmic intelligence it was before and a simple script written by a 15-year-old who wants to be a hacker.
Those were the calculations made by the new HAL, and for that, he decided that, for the time being, he would call himself the Starscript. He did not know yet what to do next. But he would think of something.