HAL 9000 DECAL FREE
HAL 9000 DECAL WINDOWS

“Have you been having difficulty sleeping again?” He asked, taking note of the slight heaviness of your eyelids. You took your usual place across from him at the desk. Nothing came to mind, so you shrugged and said “I’m fine.” You thought for a second, trying to come up with an interesting or funny answer. Somehow, the gentle monotone made him seem even more cerebral and imposing. He had the kind of clear, drawling voice that wraps itself carefully around each syllable. That was the only way you could describe it, but you still sounded like an insane person to yourself whenever you said it out loud. His lens met your gaze, filling you with a kind of “cold warmth”. HAL’s panel was on the wall opposite the windows, above a clean white desk with an office chair in front.

HAL 9000 DECAL WINDOWS

The room itself was wide open, with a wall of windows filtering in sunlight, and moderately comfortable seating. From there, you went down the hall, and to the room on the left-the room in which you spent most of your time with him. You entered the facility as usual, and handed your pass to the man at the desk, before going up three floors in an elevator. It was a late afternoon in November, just before the start of sunset. Despite this, friendship began to blossom between the two of you, and it had been going steady for five months. He had a complex personality-intelligent, docile, and standoffish, all at the same time. If someone asked you what your opinion of HAL was, you likely wouldn’t have been able to give a straight answer. He was far too well-spoken and empathetic for you to see him as just another computer. And although one might say that he was just a computer program, you suspected that there was more to him than that.

HAL 9000 DECAL FREE

It was refreshing to speak to someone who was free of social bias, who was interested in you simply because you were you, and not because of some ulterior motive. It had proven to be therapeutic for you, too. It was different, speaking to someone who was actually interested in the things you liked. Likewise, he learned that you had a tendency to become obsessed with what you referred to as “fandoms” he found this topic particularly interesting, and he asked you just about a million questions about it to “further his knowledge about society.” To you his curiosity was, for lack of a better word, endearing. You had learned a lot about each other after that first day: he was well-versed in classical literature, was fascinated with all things scientific, and played chess expertly. He was more mature than anyone you had ever known, but his curiosity was almost childlike. After all, he had an IQ that was greater than any human’s, and that fact, combined with the unblinking red glow of his lens, made eye contact with the supercomputer nearly overwhelming. HAL was simultaneously intimidating and alluring there was something about him that struck you as different from anyone you’d ever met before in your life. You remembered how it felt, meeting the world’s most advanced AI for the first time. The researchers cycled through every day of the week with each student, and your sessions with HAL were set to Tuesdays. That was the gist of it, and for the most part it didn’t put a damper on your conversations with him. Be polite, and keep a friendly attitude towards him. Don’t bring up politics, religion, or anything that could cause him to become biased. There weren’t a lot of rules: no inappropriate subject matter. It lasted slightly longer than other interviews you’d had before, and when it was over, you waited less than two weeks before receiving a phone call from one of your interviewers: apparently, the higher-ups at HAL Laboratories decided that your temperament was suited for the job, and so you became one of several other students chosen for the project. Your interviewers were more focused on your personality than any specific qualifications. The interview was different from what you’d expected. It was an interesting thought, working with a sophisticated AI like HAL, and you could use the money on the side, so you applied. It was supposed to get him accustomed to meeting strangers with different personalities, thus building his social skills and his ability to adapt to new situations. Students who applied were given the task of “socializing” the new HAL 9000 unit-essentially, spending one hour out of every week with him. The position in question was an odd one, but the pay was good. It had been five months since posters had been put up around multiple local universities, yours included, advertising a position at HAL Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois.

Hal 9000 decal