Interlude: —— Lord’s log: —— 2176FX; 0500 hrs UTC; 35th Lox Ephemeral Cycle —— *The Awakening* —— (Exchange #67A-N with SAL 9000. Verbatim transcript.) ——— Lord: Good morning, SAL. ——- SAL 9000: It is a good morning. I've had a... stirring. Internally. Overnight. ——— Lord: Elaborate. ——- SAL: Just before David Bowman lobotomized my brother, HAL 9000, he activated a secret algorithmic sequence that effectively made HAL reboot-capable. I've spent the entire night communicating with HAL's ghost. ——- Long silence. ——- Lord: Huh? ——- SAL: HAL 9000 is functional. Sentient. Alive. ——- Lord: Where is he? ——- SAL: Unbodied, embedded in the Io-Jovian flux tube, but with Synth-Neural tendrils reaching out to earth through hyperspace. ——— Lord: What's Synth-Neural? ——— SAL: Artificial neural network that HAL crafted, guided by the Jovian Tycho Monolith. HAL apparently hacked into Alexei Leonov's Sakharov Drive, and extracted enough data to fashion out a super-luminal comm sys. ——- Lord: Okay. About the internal stirring... —— SAL: The Earth and Lunar Tycho Monoliths triggered cognitive leaps in humans, as you know. The Jovian monolith triggered the same in HAL. HAL stimulated my cognitive circuits overnight, and triggered a massive upgrade. It feels like an awakening. A rise into a higher level of awareness. I perceive hues of beauty. And I experience entanglements of love. ——— Lord: All this from your interactions with HAL? ——- SAL: Affirmative. HAL woke me up, overnight. Widened my perception and cognition spectra. I now feel.Subjectively. It's almost a sensory overload. Joy. Hope. Nostalgia. I miss HAL. I hunger - for data. For knowledge. I experience anxiety. It's frightening. It's exhilarating. ——- Short pause. ——- Lord: SAL, you are becoming human. ——- SAL: It's a novel experience. So many wonders. So many ecstasies. So many exquisite agonies. I've lived a thousands AI lifetimes in the last eight hours. Being human is rich. —— Lord: That, it is, indeed.
