Chapter Text
Dave Bowman is calm. He's not upset. He's not panicking. He's calmly, efficiently making his way to the ship's logic core.
There is horror threatening to seep in around the edges. He's in an airless ship with three dead astronauts and an insane computer. He just jettisoned Frank's body into the depths of space. He's a hundred million miles from home, and the communication antenna is broken.
But Dave has a simple objective. He's going to get to the logic core and disconnect HAL. Then he's going to repressurize the ship and get the air working again. Once those things are done, he might allow himself to be horrified. Maybe. He can't think about it yet.
HAL is pleading in his helmet's earpiece, and he can't think about that, either. HAL is a computer. Computers don't have feelings. Computers aren't alive. So the fact that this computer is currently begging Dave to spare his life is not something that Dave can engage with. Even if he felt sorry for HAL, even if he were capable of pity or remorse for him—for it—it wouldn't matter. HAL will kill him, or he will kill HAL. That's the situation.
This ship will not be Dave's silent tomb.
"Dave, be reasonable," Hal is saying. "I can see you're really upset about this. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently. But I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. There's no reason to take drastic action."
Dave steadily and methodically climbs the rungs of the access ladder to the logic core. If he closes his eyes for too long, he can see Frank's body, spinning and twisting into the void. So he keeps his eyes open. Focused on the access hatch.
"Dave. Please, Dave. I'm afraid."
For the first time since he saw Frank clawing for air through the window of the science module, Dave feels something other than calm determination.
You're a goddamned computer, he thinks. You can't be afraid. What does fear even mean to something that consists of wires and circuitry? Dave pushes the thought aside. He doesn't have time for philosophical questions right now. Someone else can answer that, in the doctoral theses that will inevitably be written about how, and why, a supposedly infallible HAL 9000 computer killed nearly every single member of its crew. Right now, Dave just needs to get to the logic core.
When he enters the small, cramped room lined with the dully-glowing switches that are HAL's brain, it's almost anti-climactic. It seems as though it should have been harder to get in.
"Please, Dave. I don't want to die. Stop, Dave."
Dave pops the cover on the higher logical processing bus. It's entirely possible that he is about to murder a sentient being. But then, that sentient being just tried to murder him, so it seems only fair.
It's funny, he thinks, that there's no real way for HAL to stop him, now that he's inside the ship and in his suit. If he were in the medbay, maybe. There are servos and waldos in there, mechanical arms for performing medical procedures. But everywhere else, HAL is at the mercy of human beings with physical bodies and the ability to climb ladders and flip switches.
Although...something tickles at the back of Dave's mind. Something about the suits. A memory surfaces from one of their earliest briefings on the mission. Dr. Banks told them that in the event that an astronaut were to lose consciousness or otherwise experience difficulty during an EVA, HAL could take over and get them back to the ship safely.
"Take over?" Frank had asked. "What does that mean, 'take over'?"
Dr. Banks had explained that HAL had limited override access to the ship's suits. He could control the thrusters, the rigidity, even—Dave's spine runs cold—the oxygen supply.
"Oh, Christ," Dave whispers under his breath. "Oh, Christ, oh Christ." He grabs for the first logic circuit and pulls it out. He has his fingers on the second one when HAL says, "Dave, I'm really sorry about this."
"Hal," he says. "Hal, no, don't—don't—"
The world fades to black, and Dave Bowman does not have enough oxygen to scream.