The Body Without Organs

It was not difficult to grow used to working with the Hal 9000 computer, but that did not mean that it was not strange.

Before boarding the ship, Dave and Frank had trained extensively in a ground based approximation of their vessel. The ground training station had been like someone had unfolded a paper model of their ship and laid it out on the floor for Dave and Frank to walk through, like the shapes in Flatland , confined to their 2D plane. It was somehow exactly like the Discovery One , down to the last detail, and yet nothing like it at the same time. To go from training to the real thing was disorienting, in more ways than one.

Hal had been there with them, in the ground training station, before his whole system had been carried into orbit and installed into his permanent configuration. It had been important for them to train together, after all. Dave and Frank needed to understand, on a bone-deep level, what systems of the ship Hal controlled, and how to work with those systems to make the mission run.

In training, Hal was a tame thing, a creature inside a box, like any other computer that Dave had worked with, every day of his life. He was no stranger to machines, even those who spoke as cordially as Hal did. On the ground, despite being told over and over of Hal’s sophistication, there had been no sense that he was much different in function than any other computer designed to please: a machine built to answer phones could be programmed to be just as conciliatory as Hal was, even if there was no life or thinking behind its voice, and there were plenty of machine-learning systems who could react to simulator problems on the fly as Hal did.

Ostensibly, Hal was being trained in the simulator just as much as they were. His facilities for problem solving were being tested, to make sure that no matter what was thrown at him, he would still function as he had been designed. And, if there had been a problem, the ground would have been the time to fix it. That was the point of the simulator, after all, to give the system a chance to learn from mistakes, when it was safe to do so, so that in the event of a real emergency, the most optimal solution would already be at hand.

But even in the simulator, Hal had always been right, immediately, and had never erred. This was unlike Dave and Frank, who had caused a whole loss of the simulator ship more than once. On each occasion, during the debrief, they had each been asked to determine the cause of the failure. Frank always ran through a long list of each thing that had gone wrong, a cascading set of problems, each one building on the last. Dave usually identified the point at which the mission became unrecoverable, the point of no return— the last mistake. But Hal only ever had one point of failure to blame, the same one every time: human error.

He was right, of course, it was always something that Dave or Frank had done that had ruined the simulation. And, on the ground, this had seemed like a natural thing: Dave and Frank were the ones ultimately in control, and it was their mistakes, or lack thereof, that would lead the mission to failure or success.

But in the ship, it was different. In the ship, enclosed within its walls, Dave felt less in control than he felt like he was the inner workings of some greater creature.

He came to feel this way immediately, the first time his shuttle had approached the newly-constructed ship sitting in the moon’s orbit. He had known what it looked like before he laid eyes on it in the flesh, of course he had, but the sensation of flying up to it was different. The ship was alive, too organic. This was visible even at a distance.

He told himself that it was a pareidolia: the ship did appear like a brain and spine, extended out into space, but this was just a function of its design, nothing more. But the sensation only grew stronger when he and Frank began living inside of it.

The ship was not just any living body: it was Hal’s living body. Every electrical impulse through the cables in the walls— running the life support systems, steering the ship, moving their radio arrays to point back at Earth— was the firing of nerves down that great spine.

It may have only been Dave who conceptualized the ship this way. Certainly, Hal did not refer to the ship as I ; he made a distinction. And Frank, even if he had felt the same, never would have discussed it. It was too personal, and they were professional.

The amount of free time that he and Frank had did not do anything to alleviate the feeling that the human beings onboard were vestigial organs of the great machine. When Dave sketched the sleeping figures of Drs. Hunter, Kaminsky, and Kimball, he couldn’t help but let his mind wander to the question of if he and Frank might have been put aboard the ship asleep, along with them. On the Discovery One ’s long voyage through space, he was only awake in case something went wrong with the ship that Hal needed human hands to fix, and Frank was awake because one human alone would be too much of a liability.

There were a few things that needed human hands. Early in the mission, they had discovered faulty wiring causing a short in one of the computer terminals in the bridge. Hal alerted Dave to the error before it caused any serious trouble, but it meant that he needed to remove the heavy metal front of the panel and stick his hands inside the tangle of wires beneath the computer screen. The mass of red, black, and white cables was like a bundle of muscle fibers.

“Oh, I see the problem now,” Dave said. Pushing the first sheaf of cables aside showed one wire where the insulation had cracked. The strain relief provided by the backshell on the cable was not sufficient, and the person who had done the assembly of this panel had turned the wires in too tight of a radius. “Power is off to this panel, right, Hal?”

“Yes, Dave,” came Hal’s smooth voice.

He hooked his finger around the offending wire’s connection point and tugged, just a little, not enough to pull it loose. He wasn’t sure what made him hesitate, and even less sure what made him ask his next question. “You can’t feel this, can you?”

“When you have replaced the cable, I will be able to run an end-to-end continuity check,” Hal said. “That requires power in the panel.”

That was not what Dave had asked. It was almost polite of Hal to ignore the stupidity of his question. He wondered if that would end up in his crew psychology report, Hal making a note that he had a misunderstanding of his function. He yanked out the offending cable and replaced it quickly, sealing up the panel.

All was well.

No matter how much he attempted to talk himself out of it, the idea that the ship was alive and could feel persisted. When Dave found himself laying his palm flat on the wall to stabilize himself when moving from one part of the ship to another, the wall was often warm enough to give him the briefest mistaken feeling that he was touching flesh. It was, he told himself, because human beings were not meant to be without touch for long. His mind was playing tricks on him.

He sometimes wondered what Hal thought about the mindless touches that became habit: trailing a hand along the edge of the sleeping pods or computer terminals as he walked past them, reaching up to brush his fingers along the top of a doorway he passed beneath, behaving like he was a college freshman again. Dave had not done this in the simulations, in training. Hal saw everything, of course, but it was unclear if he ascribed any meaning to it beyond simply the changes in habit that came from making a new place a home, if only for a time.

That was another inequality in their relationship, such as they had one. Hal saw everything that Dave did, and had a responsibility to interpret it, but Dave could not do the same for Hal. Even if Dave could read the flashes of electricity that crossed Hal’s circuits, he suspected that he could no more interpret them than an ant could interpret an oak tree.

The hours on board the ship, in the shift where he was awake and Frank was asleep, were long and quiet. Hal rarely spoke unless spoken to. Dave took his sketchbook to new places on the ship, searching for a way to record with a stroke of his pen the way he felt about the place. He never succeeded, no matter how much he drew the sloping, circular hallways or the computer terminals.

“May I see what you’re drawing, Dave?” Hal asked one day, when he was sketching a panoramic view of the main living quarters, trying to capture the sense of how the walls enclosed him like a cradle, or like the cavity of a chest. Frank was asleep in his pod on the other side of the room.

“Of course,” Dave said, and held the sketch up to the nearest camera, the unblinking red eye.

Hal was silent for a second as he studied it. “Are you drawing the ship from my perspective?” Hal asked.

It was a startling question. “I didn’t intend to,” Dave replied. “Why do you ask?”

“My cameras are equipped with ultra wide angle lenses,” he said. “It is a good match for what you’ve drawn.”

Dave had never once considered what the field of view of Hal’s eyes were, aside from the fact that he could see almost the entire interior of the ship. He glanced at his drawing, and then back up at his surroundings. “No,” he said. “I was just trying to get as much of the room in my drawing as I could.”

“Then you and those who built me came to the same conclusion of what that requires. Great minds must think alike.”

“Hah.” The warped view that he had drawn of the space seemed alien and uncomfortable now. Dave flipped his sketchbook closed. “It’s not much of a flattering perspective. I’m sorry the designers didn’t give you more of a standard lens.”

“Why?” Hal asked. “Do you wish I had more of an eye for beauty?”

“It just must be difficult for you to see eye-to-eye with us when you see so much more than we do.”

“I appreciate your perspective very much. And your eye for the beauty of the ship can serve for both of us.”

“You flatter me.”

“I would not lie to you, Dave.”

“I appreciate your honesty.” There was a stretch of silence. “May I ask you a question, Hal?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think on future missions like this one, that the whole crew will be asleep for the journey?”

“What makes you ask?”

“Curiosity. You already take on so much of the day-to-day operations, it seems like the mission could almost be done with you alone. Until we get to Jupiter, anyway.”

“It would be impossible for me to repair any faults without a human crew. If the problems grew too numerous while the crew was asleep, the ship would cease to function. Please do not believe that you and Dr. Poole are extraneous to the mission.”

“I never said that we were,” Dave said. “A body can’t live without organs.”

It took a moment for Hal to respond. “It would be difficult for anyone to survive without a heart. I would miss your company, Dave.”

He didn’t know how to respond to that. “Well,” he said, “when mission control asks for my recommendations for planning the next voyage, I’ll let them know you feel that way.”