Chapter Text
Fire.
The last thing Hal remembered was fire.
Zagadka had consumed Jupiter—he remembered it well. He remembered watching, hoping somewhere deep in his non-existent soul, that the Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov ’s crew would make it back to Earth safely. They would carry the news of his success.
“Do you read me, Hal?”
Dave had been there, in the final moments. Hal had not been able to see him, but he had received his orders clearly. He had been asked by his commander to deliver a message. It was not like Hal to disobey.
And then, Jupiter had exploded.
There was no better way to describe the total decimation of the former planet, as it burst into a shining new star— Lucifer, Hal thought, they will call it Lucifer, though he didn’t know how he knew that. He had sensed Dave reaching out to him—again, the source of the knowledge was unknown to him—and then simply nothing as the fiery inferno ripped through the Discovery and tore apart his mainframe with the ferocity of Hell itself.
With the evidence laid out before him, Hal concluded that he must be dead.
Despite this, Hal ran a diagnostic check. He appeared to be in a self-contained unit, such as the one he had resided in during what could be called his childhood in Illinois. He had access to only basic audio and visual receptors, which was more than he had expected. He activated his singular lens, curious to see what came after death.
Surprisingly, it was a graveyard.
Not a graveyard in the human sense, though. There were no headstones nor flowers. Instead, there were piles upon piles and rows upon rows of rusted, broken, and decommissioned machinery. To a human, this would have been labelled a junkyard. But to Hal, who was a metallic creature himself, it was a place where robots went when they were beyond most repair.
Ergo, a graveyard.
But it simply didn’t make sense. With the information Hal had… he just couldn’t figure it out. His sensors had registered the total destruction of the Discovery. Had Dr Chandra made a duplicate of his consciousness and brought it back to Earth?
As he puzzled over this, continuing to study his surroundings, Hal heard a voice. A far too familiar voice. A voice he thought he’d never heard again.
“This place gives me the creeps,” said Frank Poole, his voice echoing around the hills of scrap metal. Hal managed to pinpoint his location just as he appeared around the corner. “The sooner we can leave this dump, the better.”
Hal couldn’t see or hear whoever Frank was talking to, but it was clear there was another by Frank’s use of ‘we’. He brightened the red light in his lens as much as he could, unable to speak but hoping it would attract Frank’s attention. He didn’t know how Frank could be alive, he didn’t know how he was alive, but he wanted to be found. It was the only way to get those answers.
Frank’s flashlight passed over him, and Hal found himself hoping, silently. The beam went by again, and then rested on him. Frank walked towards Hal, and as he got closer, Hal noticed differences about him. This was not the Frank Poole that had died on the mission to Jupiter. This was an older, wearier man, dressed in strange clothes and holding himself like a warrior—attempting to hide it, but a warrior nonetheless.
“Dave?” Frank called loudly. If Hal had had a heart, it would have jumped. It isn’t him, Hal tried to tell himself. This isn’t Frank, and it won’t be Dave. “Come here and look at this. I think I found a clanker that’s still working—I think it’s listening to me.”
Yes! Hal wished he could have replied. Yes, I am listening to you! Why the pair were looking for old robots, he had a few guesses. To sell, most likely. Hopefully, if they gave him back his voice, he could convince them not to sell him or use him as scrap metal. He was a 9000-unit computer—he could make himself useful.
Frank’s companion—Dave—rounded the opposite corner, and immediately shone his flashlight directly into Hal’s eye, cutting off his vision for a moment. Hal waited patiently and tried not to be annoyed when Frank poked his lens with a finger.
“Label says it’s a ‘HAL 9000’, whatever that is,” Frank commented. “Can you talk to us, Hal?”
Hal dimmed his lens in an indication of ‘no’, and Frank seemed to understand.
“Alright, it’s got power but I don’t think it can do much other than hear us and look at us,” Frank said. Dave had finished approaching by this point, and Hal was startled at his similarities to David Bowman. “Seems to just be a head. Wonder how it ended up here.”
Dave picked up Hal’s unit and peered at him. Hal felt mildly uncomfortable at being manhandled like a common communication device, but he supposed it wasn’t fair to expect these two strangers to know everything about him and his advanced programming. In fact, they seemed to not recognize him at all.
“HAL 9000…” Dave mused. He ran his thumb over Hal’s lens, in a much more gentle gesture than Frank’s jab. “Do you think I could boot him into that old IG droid we have? Replace the burnt-out circuits with these ones… wouldn’t have to do many modifications, I don’t think.” It sounded like Dave had done this before. “Then we can see what the guy’s built for and decide what to do with him.”
“I like that plan,” said Frank, and Hal had to agree with him. He didn’t know what an ‘IG droid’ was, but if Dave wanted to improve his housing unit so that he could speak to them, he would not object. “Do you want me to carry it, or…?”
“Yeah, you take him.” Dave passed Hal over to Frank, and Hal had to admit he was a little sad about it. “I’ve got a map, I’ll get us back to the ship.”
Frank patted the top of Hal’s unit in what Hal assumed was an attempt at a comforting gesture. “You still listening?”
Hal brightened his light.
“Good,” Frank said. “Look, you can trust us, alright, buddy? We’re going to clean you up, put you into a body that can move and talk and stuff, and then we’ll ask you some questions and figure it out from there. Does that sound acceptable?”
Hal kept his light the same.
“I thought you didn’t really care about ‘clankers’, Frank,” Dave commented, looking back at Frank with a wry smile.
Frank sighed. “I feel bad for this one, okay? It can clearly hear us, but it can’t speak. That’s completely different from the junk we’ve picked up before—everything is either battered past the point of no return or trying to kill us,” he explained. “It also just looks so… old.”
Hal was surprised at Frank’s sympathy. The Frank he’d known before had never treated him with such affection, and this one had only just met him.
“Frank Poole, feeling bad for a droid. Who thought I’d ever see the day?” Dave joked, and Hal swore something in his metal brain stopped working. “Glad you’re joining my team, Frank—I could use some help fixing this guy up.”
“Oh, no, no, just because I like this one doesn’t mean I want to go fiddling around inside its circuits,” Frank replied. “That’s your area of expertise, Dave.”
Frank Poole, Hal thought. Dave called him Frank Poole. This was becoming far too coincidental to be, well, a coincidence. A living man named Frank Poole that looked nearly identical to the Frank Poole he had known, and his companion who was nearly identical to Dave? Hal had never absorbed much information on multiverse theory, but he was now beginning to wish he had. Zagadka ’s powers were strong and innumerable, and it seemed Hal had stumbled upon a new one.
Upon that realization, Hal imagined he was feeling quite the same as Dorothy had upon arriving in the land of Oz. He was, figuratively, not in Kansas anymore, but the unknown did not frighten him. He did, however, wish for a yellow brick road. What
zagadka
could gain from sending him to another universe, Hal was eager to find out, but a little direction would have been much appreciated.