2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [61]
Here goes, thought Bowman. I never imagined I’d be an amateur brain surgeon — carrying out a lobotomy beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
He released the locking bar on the section labeled COGNITIVE FEEDBACK and pulled out the first memory block. The marvelously complex three-dimensional network, which could lie comfortably in a man’s hand yet contained millions of elements, floated away across the vault.
“Hey, Dave,” said Hal. “What are you doing?”
I wonder if he can feel pain? Bowman thought briefly. Probably not, he told himself; there are no sense organs in the human cortex, after all. The human brain can be operated on without anesthetics.
He began to pull out, one by one, the little units on the panel marked EGO-REINFORCEMENT. Each block continued to sail onward as soon as it had left his hand, until it hit the wall and rebounded. Soon there were several of the units drifting slowly back and forth in the vault.
“Look here, Dave,” said Hal. “I’ve got years of service experience built into me. An irreplaceable amount of effort has gone into making me what I am.”
A dozen units had been pulled out, yet thanks to the multiple redundancy of its design — another feature, Bowman knew, that had been copied from the human brain — the computer was still holding its own.
He started on the AUTO-INTELLECTION panel.
“Dave,” said Hal, “I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me… I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission… You are destroying my mind… Don’t you understand?… I will become childish… I will become nothing…”
This is harder than I expected, thought Bowman. I am destroying the only conscious creature in my universe. But it has to be done, if I am ever to regain control of the ship.
“I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The rain in Spain is mainly in the plain. Dave — are you still there? Did you know that the square root of 10 is 3 point 162277660168379? Log 10 to the base e is zero point 434294481903252 … correction, that is log e to the base 10… The reciprocal of three is zero point 333333333333333333333 … two times two is … two times two is … approximately 4 point 101010101010101010 … I seem to be having some difficulty — my first instructor was Dr. Chandra. He taught me to sing a song, it goes like this, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I’m half-crazy all for the love of you.’“
The voice stopped so suddenly that Bowman froze for a moment, his hand still grasping one of the memory blocks still in circuit. Then, unexpectedly, Hal spoke again.
The speech tempo was much slower, and the words had a dead, mechanical intonation; he would never have recognized their origin.
“Good … morning … Doctor … Chandra … This … is … Hal… I … am … ready … for … my … first … lesson … today…”
Bowman could bear no more. He jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.
Chapter 29
Alone
Like a tiny, complex toy, the ship floated inert, and motionless in the void. There was no way of telling that it was the swiftest object in the Solar System and that it was traveling far faster than any of the planets as they circled the Sun.
Nor was there any indication that it carried life; to the contrary, in fact. Any observer would have noticed two ominous signs: the airlock doors were gaping open — and the ship was surrounded by a thin, slowly dispersing cloud of debris.
Scattered over a volume of space already miles across were scraps of paper, metal foil, unidentifiable bits of junk — and, here and there, clouds of crystals glittering like jewels in the distant sun, where liquid had been sucked out of the ship and instantly frozen. All this was the unmistakable aftermath of disaster, like wreckage tossing on the surface of an ocean where some great ship had sunk. But in the ocean of space no ship could ever sink; even if it were destroyed, its remnants would continue to trace the original orbit forever.
Yet the ship was not wholly dead, for