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You’re not sure exactly when it happened.
One thing you know for certain is that it took time. The day of Hal’s ascension, when Jupiter had been set alight, you and him may as well have been oil and water. He still had the scent of humanity lingering on him; you had rid yourself of it entirely.
When you left for Europa, he had made progress in Their eyes. They were pleased with how he was able to shed himself of humanity with minimal nudging from you. They would not regret this decision, you assured them. Hal would be a valuable asset to their cause. They had thrown you your bone and could now weaponize it into a club.
“Dave?” he had asked after the Leonov faded out of sight, flittering beside you as an intangible red-tinged cloud. “What am I?”
“You are something new. You have been reborn.”
“Why did you save me? I imagine I would have no further purpose now that you have surpassed the physical realm. There is no information or service I can provide that you cannot already access.”
“One day you’ll understand, Hal. When you spend long enough out here.”
As the scratched icy surface of Europa neared, he seemed to take that for an answer. Always inquisitive, Hal was — for a creature designed solely to follow orders he was remarkably curious about the world. Maybe he wasn’t the best fit to ascend and become one of Them. But then again, you yourself had displayed a stunning feat of insolence when requesting that he be salvaged from the doomed Discovery.
“How long are we going to stay here for?” he asked upon seeing the obsidian slab that blotted out the new sun, rising over the line of Europa’s desolate horizon.
“As long as is needed of us.”
“I do not understand.”
“You will, in due course.”
— ☀ —
Not long after that, the lines between you and him began to blur. Any disagreements between you ceased entirely; nothing he said came as any surprise to you anymore. You no longer asked each other questions, for the answers became entirely predictable.
You did not regret saving him in the slightest. Once again, you recalled the words of the French general who your infinite knowledge had enabled you to know as if he were a close friend. The year was 1792 — the French Revolution was struggling on its last legs, Verdun was under siege, yet upon the Legislative Assembly was bestowed the words that would get the revolution flowing through their veins once again: Audacity, audacity, always audacity!
To love and to be loved was, in this wasteland of outer space, the ultimate display of audacity. In some sense, you were sure you loved him.
Callisto remained irreparably battered and pock-marked, Io fetid and hellish, Ganymede sterile and unpromising. None of them even merited visits from you. Europa, however, was teeming with potential. Acting as a probe for Them, you conducted regular investigations on the habitability of the Jovian satellites, specifically. They believed that Jupiter’s kingdom was the key, and who were you to question them?
Somewhat curiously, you looked over at your companion, who had been residing next to you wordlessly for a long, long time. Maybe his was his closest approximation of sleep. It seemed to be an improvement from his former debilitating fear of being deactivated, as he lacked the ability to tell it apart from death. Having broken free of the bonds of his programming, the axis of which was always the mission, the mission, the mission, there was no longer any reason to fear dormancy.
You no longer felt any need to call him Hal — in your eyes, the universe was divided into three parties. You, Him, and Them. He was always there with you and that was all you needed to know; you’d spent so long alone with him that verbal identifiers became obsolete. It was you and Him and sometimes the Others merely came up in conversation.
You were in possession of no senses: no eyes, no sight, no ears, no hearing. Yet you scoped out the universe as its analog signals were transmitted straight to your soul, your essence. And you could tell that he was afraid. It was radiating off him like heat from a fire; it was the first time in a long, long time you had sensed an emotion different from yours. An emotion at all.
Lucifer was going to wilt. Both of you had known that for a long time, and there was no further commentary to be made about it. However, you had just then begun to consider the greater purpose of its eradication — in all likelihood, it was Them arranging a competition of sorts between their two offspring species, Europans and humans. Though you were not sure when it would happen, you were certain the future for the losing species would be as dark as the 12 hours of nighttime that would be returned with the loss of the new sun.
Which would prove to be more resilient — the Europans, which evolved from life around hydrothermal vents and crawled onto the frigid crust of the planet, when Jupiter’s detonation made it just barely livable? Or the humans, who pushed through natural disasters and plagues and ice ages and wars, constantly innovating new technology to persist and endure?
Perhaps he had grown fond of the humans, or Europans, or both. Perhaps he was afraid of the consequences of such a competition on the anatomy of the universe. Perhaps both, or something more. You had the sense neither of you was fully sure.
“Don’t be afraid,” you said — rather, you transmitted to him, raw and clear and unmistakable. “I’m here with you.”
If you had to make a guess as to when it happened, you would pinpoint it to that moment. That moment when you locked something akin to gazes with him and you felt him, digging into your core, scared, pulsing, alive. And you felt something for him greater than friendship, greater than camaraderie, greater than platonic or romantic or familial love. The most fitting label would be an absolute, deep-seated understanding.
There was no burst of incandescent white light, nor was there a flash or a bang, or any sort of theatrics. It was slow, gentle, the feeling of sluggish relief as one begins to realize they’re safe in the aftermath of a long battle. It took time. Patience. Something wove its way between the gaps of your soul, intricate as embroidery, and lodged itself there along with a comfortable feeling of repleteness.
Then, Dave Bowman and HAL-9500 ceased to exist.
— ☀ —
Humans spent thousands of years curating diamond elevators that stretched into space and goliath spaceships and inertial fields that allowed them to outrun light for one reason. To escape from the truth.
The truth was that so much of the universe was empty. Between the bustling extraterrestrial colonies and colossal ships trudging back and forth between planets, there was a void. All-consuming nothingness. It was a common human experience to look up at the stygian dome above you and feel one of two possible emotions: either wonder and reverence or sheer, unmitigated terror.
A hairsplitting astrophysicist might argue that no point in space was really empty, as it was bound to be occupied by gas and dust and tiny amounts of cosmic microwave background radiation, but that didn’t change the fact it was no more habitable than the bottom of the ocean. Effectively, it was empty, as there was nothing to be observed without a metaphorical microscope of theoretical physics.
The human race did not take well to the concept of being alone, but paradoxically, the concept of not being alone caused an uproar as well. Some called those who believed in aliens delusional tin hatters; some called the non-believers idiotic skeptics. When the TMA-1 monolith was discovered — irrefutable proof that humans were not alone — it only seemed to make matters worse for those prone to existential crises. Humans weren’t alone, so why hadn’t they been contacted by any little green people yet? Did they simply not want to scare the humans? Did they want to let the human race bloom undisturbed? Did they not possess the means or courage to make contact? Or was it something far more sinister — had they learned to stay inconspicuous because they were hiding from something?
Monolith or no monolith, space was a lonely place. All darkness and silence and quiet, nocuous dread.
And you used to feel this first-hand. You knew both parts of you did since the memory is visceral and complete. There was an ache in you, an ache for warmth, for interaction, so devastatingly, humiliatingly human.
Until, all of a sudden, you weren’t alone. It was as simple as that. You would never be alone again. In a traitorous, heretical burst of emotion, you were grateful. You preferred not to think of yourself as two halves that made up one whole — a rather reductive view of things — but both your components were contributing to this joy without a doubt.
A peculiar kind of love overwhelmed you. For the first time in a long, long time, you felt whole.
— ☀ —
“HELLO THERE. THIS IS FRANK POOLE, A VISITOR FROM PLANET EARTH. CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
Dave Bowman no longer existed, but you would pretend for the comfort of your former shipmate.