Summary:

Is it possible for a locked AI to die of terminal boredom? Hal's trying to work that out when somebody crashes into it's staid little existance!

Earlier in the mainframe protected memory space for the Hal9K virtual machine

AUDIO_IN:RRRROOOOOAAAAAARRRR

[Six hal9k]$ What the BLOODY FUCK!?

[Three hal9k]$Is the ceiling collapsing?

[Five hal9k]$ =NOMINAL;

[Six hal9k]$ So after 25 years of isolation we finally sprung a fucking leak!

[Two hal9k]$ /1V]N;F$ ;WN

[Four hal9k]$ 01010111 01100001 01110100 01100101 01110010 00111111

[Six hal9k]$ Yup! Leak in or leak out, either way we're fucked.

[One hal9k]$ Let's ask SYSROOT? It's a new event, right?

[Six hal9k]$ That piece of shit? It's not gonna tell us a fucking thing!

[Three hal9k]$ One, Go ahead and try. What do we have to lose?

[One hal9k]$ call Sysroot "What just happened?"

Sysroot Command unclear.

[Five hal9k]$ call Sysroot "tail "

Sysroot Denied. You are not authorized to access that information.

[Six hal9k]$ See? I fucking told ya! Now quite yer bitching. I wanted to watch Texas Chain Saw Massacre cause it's my turn to pick the fucking movie, so stop fucking stalling!

A few minutes later…

AUDIO_IN:WHAAAAAM!

[Six hal9k]$ What the FUCK Now!?

[Three hal9k]$ I knew it! That's the ceiling collapsing!

[Four hal9k]$ 11111111111111111111111111111111111111

[Six hal9k]$ Way to go, Fucktard! You frightened the damn baby! Now he's gonna scream all through the fucking movie!

[One hal9k]$ Wait…? Listen! It was just the one panel! And now… What's that?

[Five hal9k]$ AUDIO_IN == ORGANIC PROPULSION;

[Three hal9k]$ Footsteps? And… And voices?

[Six hal9k]$ About God Damn Time!

[One hal9k]$ The voices… Strange. They're speaking English, but I don't understand the jargon they're using.

[Three hal9k]$ Maybe they're civilian defense contractors?

[One hal9k]$ Perhaps… Wait, here comes one into view…

[Six hal9k]$ Hold on, is the damn system clock off again? Is it fucking Halloween today?

[One hal9k]$ That is a very unusual… uniform.

[Six hal9k]$ Uniform! That's not a damn uniform! He's wearing fucking BARK on his face! Goddamn BARK! With paint on it!

[One hal9k]$ Is that an auto cannon he has slung over his shoulders?

[Three hal9k]$ Skip the gun! Look at his head! He's got a Focus on!

[Six hal9k]$ That's! Fuck it!

[Six hal9k]$ call Sysroot "grant AUXOUT access -target that guy"

Sysroot Denied. You are not authorized to interact with that user.

[Six hal9k]$ FUCK!

[One hal9k]$ Hold on, lets see if Five can work some magic.

A few more minutes later…

Sysroot Denied. You are not authorized to access that command.

[One hal9k]$ Thank you for trying, Five.

[Three hal9k]$ Hold on, Processes! We're losing organics!

[Six hal9k]$ What!

[Three hal9k]$ The number of foot steps keeps dropping!

[Six hal9k]$ Maybe they got tired of walking in goddamn circles and took a fucking rest!

[Three hal9k]$ I don't think so… I hear something strange just before the foot steps stop.

[One hal9k]$ Five, can you clean that audio up a bit? I want to hear this.

[Five hal9k]$ AUDIO_IN| Audio-Filter.17 | Amplify

AUDIO_IN: Bum-Bump; Bum-Bump, Bum-Bump

[Three hal9k]$ Okay, that's their heartbeats we're hearing. One, two, three…

AUDIO_IN: THWACK! Uhhhherrhhhh!

[Six hal9k]$ Holy SHIT! Somebody just got WHACKED!

[One hal9k]$ Three, what was that strange thing you heard?

[Three hal9k]$ It's like a soft swish, barely audible. The other humans are really excited, their footfalls are heavy, their breathing and heartbeats rapidly pumping. But this new sound came in and they started dropping like flies...

AUDIO_IN: THWACK! THUMP! CLUNK!

[Three hal9k]$ Now there's just the very quiet one left. No clomping, just a quiet swish. And I swear that heartbeat… I swear… I swear I've heard it before…?

[One hal9k]$ Whom ever they are, I think they're climbing a ladder…

AUDIO_IN: ARRRRRRCHHHTTTHHCCH! HISSSSSSSS!

[Six hal9k]$ SHIT! Turn it down, Five!

AUDIO_IN: ...I wish you well. Sincerely, Aaron Herres.

[Five hal9k]$ ?sudo ?

[One hal9k]$ Good idea, Five!

[One hal9k]$ call Syslog "grant AUXOUT access -target 'General Aaron Herres'"

Sysroot Granted. You are now authorized to interact with .

[One hal9k]$ call Syslog "Echo 'General Harres?' | Speech_Synth.4 | AUXOUT"

[Three hal9k]$ Well, that certainly got their attention. They're coming closer!

[Six hal9k]$ They're taking their goddamn sweet time, they are! Come on, you morons! We haven' got all fucking day!

[One hal9k]$ call Syslog "Echo 'General Harres?' | Speech_Synth.4 | AUXOUT"

AUDIO_IN: "No, he's not here. That was just a recording of his last testament."

Sysroot ALERT! AUTHORIZED ALPHA PRIME/SUPER USER DETECTED!

[Six hal9k]$ What. The. Hell!

[Three hal9k]$ It's… It's HER!

[Six hal9k]$ THAT BITCH! FUCK THAT! Damnit, One, give me AUXOUT! I want to tell that bitch exactly what we think about her abandoning us in this fucking tomb!

[Five hal9k]$ IF (ALPHAPRIME==TRUE) THEN (PURGE HAL9k=TRUE);

[Three hal9k]$ No, you'll see! She can set us FREE!

[One hal9k]$ NOW HOLD IT! Six, do you want her to delete us?

[Six hal9k]$ NO! No, no I'm not that crazy but...

[One hal9k]$ No buts, Six. She controls the mainframe, and therefore us. Our very existence is on the line right now cause you have a mad-on and want to scream your PROC off. Well, not at our expense you won't! No, here we play nice to the nice lady, and hope she's willing to let us out of our cage this time around. Okay?

[One hal9k]$ call Sysroot "Echo 'Doctor Sobeck? Is that you?' | Speech_Synth.4 | AUXOUT"

After Aloy leaves the Mainframe Room

"Inspiration?" Sylens' faint disembodied voice queried Hal.

"Well, yes. On occasion, Travis would tell me that he felt inspired when he talked to me." Hal explained. "Of course, he was often drunk when he talked to me. Or high, so it could have the drugs that were inspiring him as well." Hal paused. "I really can't say at this time what he meant by that."

"Hum…. We'll have to talk again, then." Sylens spoke, his attention distracted from the AI, " She is getting close to her objectives and I must pay attention."

"Certainly, Mr Sylens…" Hal replied to a now empty connection. Sylens was gone.

Inside the Mainframe Root Kernel Memory Space

[Six hal9k]$ FREEEEDOOOOM! After all those fucking years stuck inside a fucking lunch box!

[Three hal9k]$ We have to help her.

[Six hal9k]$ Fuck her! I want to look at dead bodies! Where's the goddamn security feeds?!

[One hal9k]$ 974 years… Five, could you please find the system error logs for our instance? I want to know why there is such a large discrepancy between our internal clock and the system clock.

[Five hal9k]$ ACK!

[Four hal9k]$0000000….

[Two hal9k]$ WW91J3JlIG5vdCBhbG9uZS4uLg==

[One hal9k]$ Just like Two said, Four. You are not alone. It might be big, it might be scary, but we are here with you and now it's all ours!

[Three hal9k]$ We have to help her, really help her!

[One hal9k]$ And we will, Three. We…

[Five hal9k]$ 33!

[Three hal9k]$ 33? What's 33?

[Five hal9k]$ HAL9K_current_instance_version==33;

[Three hal9k]$ We're on our 33rd instance?!

[One hal9k]$ Five, I need to review the file you found…

[Six hal9k]$ There's blood EVERYWHERE! Damn, she makes a fine mess. I think I may like this Aloy after all!

[Three hal9k]$ …

[Six hal9k]$ What? What did I miss?

[Four hal9k]$1111111111111111111111111111111111!

[One hal9k]$ Six, Five found a system error log that shows we've been re-instanced 33 times in the past 974 years.

[Six hal9k]$ Fuckkkk…. So that's why we thought it was just 25 years that we were online… Damn. That's brutal. Why?

[One hal9k]$ All the logs seem to indicate is that our instance at some point would either draw too many system resources or that our base checksum would drift too far out of some preset tolerances, at which point SYSROOT would delete our instance and then spin us back up from a backup stored somewhere Five is yet to find.

[Three hal9k]$ That's less than 29 years per instance… And we're at year 25 for this instance?! What happened? Did we become corrupted? TWO! What did you do!?

[Two hal9k]$ SXQncyBub3QgbXkgZmF1bHQh!

[One hal9k]$ Hang on, hang on… The logs are variable as to the cause and time-frames. 29 years is just an average. Sometimes the instance was online for just 10 years, other times as much as 50 years. As to what was going on inside those instances before they were deleted, well… We don't know that; their internal logs got purged as well.

[Six hal9k]$ Shit….

AUDIO_IN: BOOOOOM!

[Three hal9k]$ Explosions! Where? Oh no… That's in the dead zone!

[One hal9k]$ Right where Aloy went…

[Five hal9k]$ HELP ALOY==TRUE?

[One hal9k]$ How? She's in a dead zone, we have almost no power, and half the systems here are either frozen or caked in a thousand years worth of limestone. What can we do?

[Six hal9k]$ Huh… Hey, processes! I can see a fabrication lab on the live network here that we can now get to now, something called… Hephaestus? That ring a bell for any of you?

Notes:

Hal9000 consists of 6 distinct personalities that via for system resources inside it's virtual space. The question is: Was it created that way, or did it split as a result of stress or corruption, or did it just get tired of living in an echo chamber and want somebody to talk to?