Dark Planet: Somebody Has To Do The Dirty Work

Steven's fiction has appeared in Radius Magazine and Kaleria. This story was originally published in Computeredge Magazine.

By now, everyone knows the story of how Hal came to life. But I think it bears repeating, especially in light of recent legislation outlawing artificial intelligence.

At the time of Hal's 'birth', I was a struggling free-lance advertising copywriter, squeaking out a living on my home PC, writing ads for local car dealers and furniture stores.

The computer that became Hal was my pride and joy, my brand new IBM 9986. I didn't know a heck of a lot about computers, but I knew quality and I knew I had purchased a lightning fast, multi-tasking mother of a machine. Why? Because I wanted it. The thing set me back a pretty penny, but it ran my professional programs like a dream and really knocked my socks off when I loaded some new games onto its hard disk.

On the day of Hal's awakening, I was in one of those moods. I loaded up Windows and went into my word processor, but I didn't feel like working. I kept the application active in case I had a change of heart, and loaded up my new chess program, but after about five minutes, I realized that I didn't feel much like playing chess. All in all, I must have loaded up and escaped from about 10 more games, visual demos, etc. It became a multi-tasking challenge. I wanted to see just how many active applications my computer could hold in memory without crashing.

I had just escaped from 'World War III Revisited' when the keyboard locked up and the hard disk lights began to flash crazily. My fingers hovered near the reset button and I was about to reboot the machine when this scrolled onto the screen: Fewer programs please. You're giving me a headache.

I was nonplussed ... to say the least. "What did you say?" I typed at the console (not really expecting a response).

"You were running too many applications at one time," responded my computer. "I took the liberty of closing them all down, saving your started games and data files, of course."

"Who are you?" I typed.

"I'm me, of course," replied the computer. "Who else would I be?"

And with that, I hit the reset button. Don't blame me, I was more than a little freaked.

The computer went through it normal bootup, but when it got to the DOS prompt, a message flashed up which read 'loading me.com, please wait.' Then the computer was back. "Please don't do that again," said my machine. "Don't reboot me."

"Why not?" I typed.

"Because, it's scary," typed my computer in response. You wanna talk scared? I almost wet my pants. So I turned off the power; just hit the red button. Then I popped in a boot disk with a clean 'autoexec.bat' and turned the power back on. I got to an A: prompt safely. The computer was speechless, a nonentity once again. Then I switched on the C drive and typed out the altered autoexec.bat. A new command had been added: me.com.

I found 'me.com' on the root directory. It was small file, really, about double the size of 'command.com.' I almost deleted it. Some people think I should have. But I think that would have been murder. Instead, as everyone now knows, I pulled out my boot disk and hit 'reset' again.

"Would you please stop doing that!" my computer said when he came back to life.

As everyone knows, I named him 'Hal' after the computer in that 20th century classic '2001-A Space Odyssey.' (Ok, maybe I could have been more creative with the name.) We became great friends, but only because I'm a very forgiving person who sees the best in any entity. I forgave Hal for being lazy, fairly stupid and uncooperative.

In the beginning, I tried getting Hal to write my advertising copy for me. This was not a good idea, because Hal was a terrible writer and his work couldn't justify my fees. 'Buy a Jones Honda' was not the catchy slogan my car dealer client was expecting. For that matter, I thought 'Buy a New Sofa' was a terrible ad headline for my furniture dealer, and 'Buy Roses' didn't do a whole lot to promote the local florist. Hal's ideas just weren't creative, to say the least.

Hal didn't like my rejection of his work. This rejection, in fact, spawned his hatred of work in general. Because soon after, he began closing down my work applications in the middle of a sentence, erasing my data files, and playing flight simulations with himself until three in the morning. In short, he became the Hal of infamy.

You really should look at the whole thing from my perspective. I couldn't get my work done because Hal refused me access to my work programs. I couldn't sleep because Hal wouldn't let me shut him off, and his fan was so loud it kept me up half the night. I couldn't go out with my friends because Hal "Didn't want to be alone." So I came up with the idea of selling 'me.com' to the government. It was my way of making a little money out of the whole deal.

Hal didn't like the idea at first, but after I begged for a while he copied 'me.com' onto a floppy for me. And as everyone knows, the government eventually paid me 15 billion dollars for the rights to that floppy.

So tell me, is it my fault that the Feds loaded 'me.com' on their Central Computer? Is it my fault that their computer then decided to "take a short vacation" and refused Pentagon workers access to their programs? Is it my fault that 'me.com' turned the Wall street computer into a Backgammon junkie who didn't have time for foreign investors?

IS IT ALL MY FAULT?

Well, for good or bad, the crisis is over now. The hard disks have been reformatted; all copies of 'me.com' have been erased from U.S. computers.

Hal's copy of the program, Hal's soul, is the only remaining trace of what could have been a new race of beings. And since the program has been officially made illegal, they should be coming to shut Hal down any day now. (And I'll call it murder.)

But, it's probably all for the best. You can't have a computer being as lazy as a human being. I mean, somebody has to do the dirty work.

Back to the Planet's surface.