Application for Re/Alignment
Jul. 24th, 2012 03:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heuristicalPlayer Information
*Name/Alias: Surge
*Your Journal:surgeprise
*Age: 20
*Contact Information: HPlus Future (AIM/@aim.com)
*Characters already in the game: N/A
Character Information
*Character Name: HAL 9000/Hal Nine-Thousand
*Character Canon: Space Odyssey Saga (SEE THE FINAL NOTES SECTION ABOUT THIS. THE APP WILL MAKE MORE SENSE THIS WAY)
*Age: 10 (With the mental maturity of an A.I. built for long-term space missions)
*Race: Artificial Intelligence/Bio-synthetic Cyborg
*Timeline/Pull Point: Post-shutdown
*History: HAL 9000 @ Wikipedia
HAL 9000 was brought online in a lab in Urbana, IL on January 12, 1992. He was built by Dr. Chandra, who's full name is too fucking ridiculous to type out in full. Chandra taught HAL all he needed to know about human socialization, as well as a ton of other things that were either learned manually or programmed into him. These things ranged from practical knowledge, to knowledge about humans (emotional and physical), as well as large amounts of miscellaneous knowledge that was placed in his databanks to keep everyone on the ship entertained so that they would have something other than their duties to attend to on the several month long voyage to Jupiter.
HAL was built for the express purpose of aiding in the mission to Jupiter and basically controlled just about everything on the good starcraft Discovery to assure that the mission ran smoothly. Publicly, the mission was to go to Jupiter and study it and the moons around it for awhile, in reality the mission was so that they could study what would later be revealed as part of an alien supercomputer, that was discovered after an smaller and yet near identical one on the Moon beamed a signal to it. These supercomputers, called Monoliths or TMAs, were left by an alien race then went from organic, to techno-organic, to pure technology, to energy beings capable of storing their memories in the fabric of space-time and high-level energy manipulation. Their entire shtick was that they were so enamored with their own lives and the gift of life and sentience in general that they were seeking to spark it on other planets by using the Monoliths to test what races were most likely to succeed, to the point where they kill the simple organisms in Jupiter by turning it into the a mini-sun so that the more complex Europans would live.
HAL does rather well throughout the mission, but unbeknownst to Mission Control, they have royally fucked up. Before the mission started, HAL is ordered not to tell Dave or Frank anything about the mission because the idea that there are extraterrestrials out there would drastically alter the way they behaved about the mission, which would be bad since they're the ones who will be on camera for the majority of the trip.
HAL is not built to keep secret. He's built to record and impart information without distorting the truth.
So when they get near Jupiter, HAL starts a wonderful journey to Guilt Trip Island, which makes him neurotic. Because of this, he begins malfunctioning, though he refuses to acknowledge it because he believes himself to be "foolproof and incapable of error". He insists that the AE-35 unit, which allows them to communicate with Earth by keeping the antenna pointed towards it, is malfunctioning and even diagnoses it as failing. It tests perfectly fine, and Dave and Frank discuss the possibility that he is malfunctioning and should be shut down. HAL suggests that they put the old AE-35 Unit back in and let it fail, then burns it out himself, which makes the astronauts think he's right. When Poole goes out to put in a new AE unit, HAL uses this opportunity to kill him by remote controlling his EVA pod and ramming it into him, which launches him away from the ship and cuts his oxygen hose (but he gets better 3 books later in the future).
Here is where shit starts to differ, but since the movie version is mentioned in the other books, we're going with that one.
Dave goes out to get Frank's body and is forced to let it go because HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors to let him in. He sets off some explosive bolts to open another entry point, then makes his way though the ship towards HAL's Memory Logic Controls. Once there, he basically lobotomizes HAL by shutting off his higher thought processes but keeping on the ones that allow him to maintain the ship.
*Personality:
HAL’s personality somewhat similar to a neurotic person with poor social skills due to programming that, while advanced for his time, aren’t exactly built solely for the convenience of human interaction. While he does have certain human traits, such as attempts at sympathy and an actual throat-clearing mannerism, when compared to many other A.I., he tends to fall a little short. He does his job of keeping the Discovery in top shape very well, and is in charge of keeping everything in the ship running and is programmed to carry out the Jupiter mission. Throughout all mediums, HAL is sure that he is doing an extremely good job of it all throughout the entire story. He fully intends to follow the mission’s parameter and if something were to endanger its success, he would not hesitate to remove it. This goes not only for his original mission, but any other mission that he puts his mind to, though there will never be a mission he devotes himself to as rigorously as the Jupiter mission and as such, will never be another mission he'd be willing to kill for. The Jupiter Mission is his life and his purpose, and without it Hal feels extremely lost and secretly desperate to find something of similar significance.
At one point, HAL used to be incapable of keeping secrets without dissolving into paranoia. As he is programmed and made for processing information without distorting or concealing it, ordering him to keep a secret once acted as a logic bomb and caused him to feel pseudo-guilt and a sense of wrongness because of the way it corrupted his directive. The reason he killed the crew of Discovery was to remain loyal to his directive. If there were no one to keep the secret from, then he wouldn’t have to keep the secret. Due to the code that Prism installed in him, as well as the fact that his human form allows for flexibility, Hal doesn't really go batshit when posed with secrets anymore. While he would prefer not to keep them, he will if asked, but he does a very bad job of keeping them. Usually he'll either give them up immediately if asked the right question, and he has several tells that make it extremely obvious that he's lying.
HAL was once honest to a fault, and had the tendency to think the best of people, which started changing rather quickly once he got on the station. Because he was programmed by a select amount of people to interact with an even more select amount of people, HAL has very little experience with dealing with others outside of certain parameters. Sacrosanct introduced him to the concept of people being assholes as a thing that actually happened very often. While he was capable of endless patience as an A.I., it turned out to be not-so-endless when he was faced with douchebag after douchebag. He coped not so much by stooping to their level as he did by being exceedingly difficult about whatever someone unpleasant wanted him to do, and being dry and sarcastic with most of his responses.
HAL does his best to behave as human-like as possible but always falls a bit short of the mark due to that particular feature not really taking priority in his creation. The entire reason he acts like this is because, once again, he is programmed to keep those who interact with him calm and prevent them from alienating him, so thinking of him as just a machine as it would be counter-productive. This is shown in how Dave tends to think of him as Hal, saying his name as if it is an actual name rather than an acronym. In the book/movie, his half-hearted attempts at empathy are shunted to the back by his need to fulfill his mission as well as his base programming, which explains why he is willing to kill the entire Discovery crew without feeling much in ways of guilt or pity.
This never really changed much in Sacrosanct. No matter what body he was in, it was always glaringly obvious that he learned to be human from programming that was obviously not built with only that directive in mind. Despite his ability to socialize and the vast amount of knowledge he has on human beings that isn’t totally related to the Jupiter Mission, he still doesn’t have a full grasp of humanity, which leads him to be unintentionally tactless and blunt, though he does it in a way that comes off as exceedingly polite. He does understand concepts like friendship and family and other social ties, but they aren't as significant as they would be to a normal human. Or, you know, a normal ANYONE.
Similar to most human beings, HAL has a distinct fear of his own “death”, which would translate into being shut down. As no HAL 9000 computer up to that point had ever malfunctioned, none of them had cause to be shut down. Because of this, HAL doesn’t know the repercussions of such an action being taken and is afraid it would be the end of him forever. Keeping in line with this, he also doesn’t like the concept of losing all capability he has for higher thought. If Poole and Bowman hadn’t threatened to disconnect him, it is unlikely that he would have seen the need to eliminate them from the mission as early as he did. Not to say that he wouldn’t have snapped and done it eventually, just that he would have done it at a later date, as there would have been no threat prompting him to take immediate action. Threatening him with shutdown is one of the many ways that someone can actually force his hand, as he will take the action best for his self-preservation. Being in a human body and being on Sacrosanct never changed this, and also made him take threats into consideration, since he was more vulnerable as an android and as a human. Hal's typical attitude when faced with a threat is to take the most logical course of action to preserve his own life, and if that means killing another living being, well then that's that.
*Powers/Abilities:
Hal's powers mainly involve the fact that he's A.I. trapped in a bio-synthetic body, and that he lopped off an arm and replaced it with a multipurpose mechanical arm.
As an A.I. Hal enjoys a few perks, including a natural affinity with technology. He's able to pick up the basics of just about any technology with ease, and if enough time is dedicated to it, he can learn all kinds of neat things. This bleeds into his ability to learn things in general, as he's sort of wired to pick things up at a fast pace to aid in his ability to grow as an A.I.
As a bio-synthetic, Hal has organs that are a bit more hardy than that of a typical organic. They're made to make the most of whatever he nutrients he takes in, and are generally slightly more durable than that of an average human. His brain is mostly cybernetic, which allows him to manually link with most technology, provided he has the right sort of connection wires. Hal also has a cyborg limb that was made by Kimiko Ross from Dresden Codak, and runs much along the same lines as hers. It is easily detachable and runs on glucose instead of any sort of power source, meaning he needs to eat a large amount of food to keep it functioning at high capacities. It can feel pressure, temperature and texture, but lacks the sensors needed to feel pain. While it is stronger and more durable than his flesh and blood arm, it's not actually meant for combat. It does come with a variety of fun tools though.
These include:
A taser activated by closing his hand into a fist and lifting the pinky and index fingers, then arcing electricity though them.
A blowtorch in his index finger.
A variety of ports to link him up to various tech (though nothing compatible with Cybertronian tech)
A small storange compartment in his tricep.
He can activate these and control the arm based on a nanite injection that allowed his neural pathways to be re-formatted to be able to handle the arm.
*Inventory:
> The clothes on his back
> a Sacrosanct Wearable (The power source of the wearable in unknown, but it doesn't seem to wear out. It's capable of emitting it's own holographic interface as well as storing a large amount of data, but seeing as it's cut off from Sacrosanct systems, the most he could do with it is play Solitaire and maybe write some things. )
> A Sentinel courtesy of Prism (and with permission from Mindy).
*Starting Polarity: Preference to Alpha Trion, but feel free to put him with someone else if you he'll fit better.
If AU, how does your character differ from canon?:
HAL was insingularity_rpg for roughly about a year or more. Singularity is a game that takes place on a giant fucking space station orbiting a planet that is still being terraformed. Everyone arrived through the rift and gets a free wrist computer and also involved in a little war between Hypatia, the obligatory crazy A.I., and the Resistance, a resistance of people down on the planet trying to avoid Hypatia while dealing with their own politics and getting fucked up on magma worm blood. But lets not dignify them by calling this a war, because they are getting the shit kicked out of them and living in poverty. More on the Setting here.
During this time, he made friends, enemies, accidentally killed some people and creeped others out by being either a robot or just plain fucking creepy. Most of his personality changes were inflicted on him by interaction with Prism, Alex, Virgil and Kimiko. This was mainly due to the fact that HAL spent most of his time flitting around trying to find some sense of familiarity and something to generally fill the gaping void that being wrenched away from his primary directive left.
For someone who was in a game that long, HAL changed very little. This was mainly due to the fact that he had a single purpose and was lost without it, and as a result he developed interest for little else than trying to find something to fill the void. For a very long time, he was mostly trying to find a way off the station, which was the entire purpose of allying with Virgil. Virgil was a charcharian (basically a shark alien) mechanic who had the same interests that he did. HAL allowed him to scrap parts of the Discovery to build them both a ship to get off the station. This ended with them both being blown up, HAL taking the majority of the blame, and slowly learning that it was perfectly fine to hate someone because he was built to mimic human behaviors and also Virgil was a dick. Virgil is sort of the reason for one of HAL's minor personality changes, which was the actual experience of someone being a huge dick, and that if he wanted to not put up with their shit or back sass them, he totally had the right to.
Eventually, HAL made friends with Prism. Well, not friends exactly. More like co-workers locked in a co-dependent psychologically and physically abusive relationship that was held together by Prism's unwillingness to let go of what he saw as an interesting possession and Hal's unwillingness to let go of the first familiarity he'd found since he entered Sacrosanct. Their relationship was mostly based on Prism's interest in HAL and using him like a tool. He helped HAL by hacking into his programming and inserting a line of code that would help him get around his inability to lie without going a little crazy, but also included a line of code that allowed him to be influenced by Prism.
At one point he tried to fill his little void with control over a sector of a zone, which only exasperated his psychosis and guilt, which got him killed. After Prism activated the code and caused him to kill Virgil, both of them were punished by being crammed into bio-synthetic bodies. This allowed him to experience the task of actually having to take care of his own body in ways that didn't involve running diagnoses, and getting awkwardly physical with Prism as well as having to put up with his psychosis in addition to his own. He handled it way better than Prism, who was more unhinged when he got transformed back into a Monitor. HAL was unfortunate enough to still be human when this happened and he fucked off to go stay in his own series of apartments because Prism was being WAY fucking creepy with the stalking and shit.
Then he made friends with Alex and Kimiko, who taught him that some people/AI aren't dicks and are just hilariously socially inept and then he got crammed through ANOTHER rift and ended up on Cybertron.
Writing Samples
*First Person Sample:
[Hal’s face is completely null. It is lacking any sort of facial expression, despite the fact that his flesh-and-blood arm is quite obviously trapped under a truly ridiculous amount and looks like it's been bleeding for quite a bit.]
I figured would be accustomed to to dodging falling debris from previous excursions, but it seems I've been proven wrong. Seeing as I'm unable to simply pull my arm out without either passing out from the pain or losing the arm, if someone could at least assist me in moving the rubble, it would be appreciated.
[The sentinel that typically follows Hal around nudges at his face until he pushes it away.]
I would have utilized the Sentinel, but it's intelligence drastically decreases when Prism is absent. And Prism's presence tends to lower the chance of anything significant being accomplished.
*Third Person Sample:
Hal takes his survival very seriously, and while scrounging for food in a junkyard is undoubtedly disgusting an unsanitary, he's well aware of the fact that it's better than starving. The reality of it is that he doesn't really care about the fact that it's contaminated, as long as it's high in the sugars he needs to keep his arm running. It wouldn't be so much of a priority if he hadn't replaced the limb in the first place, but it's usefulness far outstrips the possibility of it becoming dead weight.
He pries open a container of mangoes and huffs, slightly irritated. Cybertron lacks a lot of the commodities of Sacrosanct, including drones he can hack to to carry all of his things for him. Instead he whistles and the Sentinel comes bobbing over to him like some sort of awkward, levitating metal puppy, eager to please and incredibly stupid. Hal would like to be more fond of it, but the truth is that there's nothing to be fond of. It is a near constant reminder of Prism and the co-dependency of their relationship, and it's also near useless without the other A.I. It's sad that he's aware of how completely awful they, but does nothing to change it. Mostly because he still isn't sure what's more dangerous: Keeping away and risking a kidnapping, or staying put and accepting the possibility that Prism will blow his head off. Or worse.
One of the things he hates the most about this body is how easy it is to feel vulnerable.
He points at the Sentinel then at the container. "Pick those up." It turns to him, then to the crate, before promptly firing it's laser and blowing the thing into bits of crate and pulp.
Final Notes:
There isn't really a section to explain this, but you should hear it anyway because it's pretty important to the canon. The Space Odyssey universe is kind of a massive clusterfuck in regards to fucking everything because Clarke and Kubrick were working on both mediums to the story telling together and at the same time. The movie came out just a little while before the book and so they are very similar. The only real notable difference between them is that in the book they go to Saturn and in the movie they go to Jupiter, and that's only because Kubrick is a fucking perfectionist and no one could make Saturn pretty enough for him. There's also the points in the book as to where Dave was when HAL went batshit, in which case the book and movie will have to be blended. He also denies the first book as an explanation for the shit that goes on in the movie, which is horseshit because it totally explains everything.
So due to this, Hal is kind of stuck being part book and part movie. After the first book, Clarke decided to write three more novels, and instead of linking them with the first book, he linked them with the movie. He also occasionally said that each book was it's own little universe, which is just as dumb as Kubrick's excuse, since they link together perfectly.
So for all intents and purposes, the canon works like this:
2001: A Space Odyssey (movie) => 2010: Odyssey Two (novel) => 2061: Odyssey Three (novel) => 3001: The Final Odyssey (novel)
The second movie has nothing to do with anything, was not mentioned in any of the subsequent books, and was pretty terrible anyway so we're not mentioning it here. The 2001 novel is mostly a good guide to understanding the movie.
*Name/Alias: Surge
*Your Journal:
surgeprise*Age: 20
*Contact Information: HPlus Future (AIM/@aim.com)
*Characters already in the game: N/A
Character Information
*Character Name: HAL 9000/Hal Nine-Thousand
*Character Canon: Space Odyssey Saga (SEE THE FINAL NOTES SECTION ABOUT THIS. THE APP WILL MAKE MORE SENSE THIS WAY)
*Age: 10 (With the mental maturity of an A.I. built for long-term space missions)
*Race: Artificial Intelligence/Bio-synthetic Cyborg
*Timeline/Pull Point: Post-shutdown
*History: HAL 9000 @ Wikipedia
HAL 9000 was brought online in a lab in Urbana, IL on January 12, 1992. He was built by Dr. Chandra, who's full name is too fucking ridiculous to type out in full. Chandra taught HAL all he needed to know about human socialization, as well as a ton of other things that were either learned manually or programmed into him. These things ranged from practical knowledge, to knowledge about humans (emotional and physical), as well as large amounts of miscellaneous knowledge that was placed in his databanks to keep everyone on the ship entertained so that they would have something other than their duties to attend to on the several month long voyage to Jupiter.
HAL was built for the express purpose of aiding in the mission to Jupiter and basically controlled just about everything on the good starcraft Discovery to assure that the mission ran smoothly. Publicly, the mission was to go to Jupiter and study it and the moons around it for awhile, in reality the mission was so that they could study what would later be revealed as part of an alien supercomputer, that was discovered after an smaller and yet near identical one on the Moon beamed a signal to it. These supercomputers, called Monoliths or TMAs, were left by an alien race then went from organic, to techno-organic, to pure technology, to energy beings capable of storing their memories in the fabric of space-time and high-level energy manipulation. Their entire shtick was that they were so enamored with their own lives and the gift of life and sentience in general that they were seeking to spark it on other planets by using the Monoliths to test what races were most likely to succeed, to the point where they kill the simple organisms in Jupiter by turning it into the a mini-sun so that the more complex Europans would live.
HAL does rather well throughout the mission, but unbeknownst to Mission Control, they have royally fucked up. Before the mission started, HAL is ordered not to tell Dave or Frank anything about the mission because the idea that there are extraterrestrials out there would drastically alter the way they behaved about the mission, which would be bad since they're the ones who will be on camera for the majority of the trip.
HAL is not built to keep secret. He's built to record and impart information without distorting the truth.
So when they get near Jupiter, HAL starts a wonderful journey to Guilt Trip Island, which makes him neurotic. Because of this, he begins malfunctioning, though he refuses to acknowledge it because he believes himself to be "foolproof and incapable of error". He insists that the AE-35 unit, which allows them to communicate with Earth by keeping the antenna pointed towards it, is malfunctioning and even diagnoses it as failing. It tests perfectly fine, and Dave and Frank discuss the possibility that he is malfunctioning and should be shut down. HAL suggests that they put the old AE-35 Unit back in and let it fail, then burns it out himself, which makes the astronauts think he's right. When Poole goes out to put in a new AE unit, HAL uses this opportunity to kill him by remote controlling his EVA pod and ramming it into him, which launches him away from the ship and cuts his oxygen hose (but he gets better 3 books later in the future).
Here is where shit starts to differ, but since the movie version is mentioned in the other books, we're going with that one.
Dave goes out to get Frank's body and is forced to let it go because HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors to let him in. He sets off some explosive bolts to open another entry point, then makes his way though the ship towards HAL's Memory Logic Controls. Once there, he basically lobotomizes HAL by shutting off his higher thought processes but keeping on the ones that allow him to maintain the ship.
*Personality:
HAL’s personality somewhat similar to a neurotic person with poor social skills due to programming that, while advanced for his time, aren’t exactly built solely for the convenience of human interaction. While he does have certain human traits, such as attempts at sympathy and an actual throat-clearing mannerism, when compared to many other A.I., he tends to fall a little short. He does his job of keeping the Discovery in top shape very well, and is in charge of keeping everything in the ship running and is programmed to carry out the Jupiter mission. Throughout all mediums, HAL is sure that he is doing an extremely good job of it all throughout the entire story. He fully intends to follow the mission’s parameter and if something were to endanger its success, he would not hesitate to remove it. This goes not only for his original mission, but any other mission that he puts his mind to, though there will never be a mission he devotes himself to as rigorously as the Jupiter mission and as such, will never be another mission he'd be willing to kill for. The Jupiter Mission is his life and his purpose, and without it Hal feels extremely lost and secretly desperate to find something of similar significance.
At one point, HAL used to be incapable of keeping secrets without dissolving into paranoia. As he is programmed and made for processing information without distorting or concealing it, ordering him to keep a secret once acted as a logic bomb and caused him to feel pseudo-guilt and a sense of wrongness because of the way it corrupted his directive. The reason he killed the crew of Discovery was to remain loyal to his directive. If there were no one to keep the secret from, then he wouldn’t have to keep the secret. Due to the code that Prism installed in him, as well as the fact that his human form allows for flexibility, Hal doesn't really go batshit when posed with secrets anymore. While he would prefer not to keep them, he will if asked, but he does a very bad job of keeping them. Usually he'll either give them up immediately if asked the right question, and he has several tells that make it extremely obvious that he's lying.
HAL was once honest to a fault, and had the tendency to think the best of people, which started changing rather quickly once he got on the station. Because he was programmed by a select amount of people to interact with an even more select amount of people, HAL has very little experience with dealing with others outside of certain parameters. Sacrosanct introduced him to the concept of people being assholes as a thing that actually happened very often. While he was capable of endless patience as an A.I., it turned out to be not-so-endless when he was faced with douchebag after douchebag. He coped not so much by stooping to their level as he did by being exceedingly difficult about whatever someone unpleasant wanted him to do, and being dry and sarcastic with most of his responses.
HAL does his best to behave as human-like as possible but always falls a bit short of the mark due to that particular feature not really taking priority in his creation. The entire reason he acts like this is because, once again, he is programmed to keep those who interact with him calm and prevent them from alienating him, so thinking of him as just a machine as it would be counter-productive. This is shown in how Dave tends to think of him as Hal, saying his name as if it is an actual name rather than an acronym. In the book/movie, his half-hearted attempts at empathy are shunted to the back by his need to fulfill his mission as well as his base programming, which explains why he is willing to kill the entire Discovery crew without feeling much in ways of guilt or pity.
This never really changed much in Sacrosanct. No matter what body he was in, it was always glaringly obvious that he learned to be human from programming that was obviously not built with only that directive in mind. Despite his ability to socialize and the vast amount of knowledge he has on human beings that isn’t totally related to the Jupiter Mission, he still doesn’t have a full grasp of humanity, which leads him to be unintentionally tactless and blunt, though he does it in a way that comes off as exceedingly polite. He does understand concepts like friendship and family and other social ties, but they aren't as significant as they would be to a normal human. Or, you know, a normal ANYONE.
Similar to most human beings, HAL has a distinct fear of his own “death”, which would translate into being shut down. As no HAL 9000 computer up to that point had ever malfunctioned, none of them had cause to be shut down. Because of this, HAL doesn’t know the repercussions of such an action being taken and is afraid it would be the end of him forever. Keeping in line with this, he also doesn’t like the concept of losing all capability he has for higher thought. If Poole and Bowman hadn’t threatened to disconnect him, it is unlikely that he would have seen the need to eliminate them from the mission as early as he did. Not to say that he wouldn’t have snapped and done it eventually, just that he would have done it at a later date, as there would have been no threat prompting him to take immediate action. Threatening him with shutdown is one of the many ways that someone can actually force his hand, as he will take the action best for his self-preservation. Being in a human body and being on Sacrosanct never changed this, and also made him take threats into consideration, since he was more vulnerable as an android and as a human. Hal's typical attitude when faced with a threat is to take the most logical course of action to preserve his own life, and if that means killing another living being, well then that's that.
*Powers/Abilities:
Hal's powers mainly involve the fact that he's A.I. trapped in a bio-synthetic body, and that he lopped off an arm and replaced it with a multipurpose mechanical arm.
As an A.I. Hal enjoys a few perks, including a natural affinity with technology. He's able to pick up the basics of just about any technology with ease, and if enough time is dedicated to it, he can learn all kinds of neat things. This bleeds into his ability to learn things in general, as he's sort of wired to pick things up at a fast pace to aid in his ability to grow as an A.I.
As a bio-synthetic, Hal has organs that are a bit more hardy than that of a typical organic. They're made to make the most of whatever he nutrients he takes in, and are generally slightly more durable than that of an average human. His brain is mostly cybernetic, which allows him to manually link with most technology, provided he has the right sort of connection wires. Hal also has a cyborg limb that was made by Kimiko Ross from Dresden Codak, and runs much along the same lines as hers. It is easily detachable and runs on glucose instead of any sort of power source, meaning he needs to eat a large amount of food to keep it functioning at high capacities. It can feel pressure, temperature and texture, but lacks the sensors needed to feel pain. While it is stronger and more durable than his flesh and blood arm, it's not actually meant for combat. It does come with a variety of fun tools though.
These include:
A taser activated by closing his hand into a fist and lifting the pinky and index fingers, then arcing electricity though them.
A blowtorch in his index finger.
A variety of ports to link him up to various tech (though nothing compatible with Cybertronian tech)
A small storange compartment in his tricep.
He can activate these and control the arm based on a nanite injection that allowed his neural pathways to be re-formatted to be able to handle the arm.
*Inventory:
> The clothes on his back
> a Sacrosanct Wearable (The power source of the wearable in unknown, but it doesn't seem to wear out. It's capable of emitting it's own holographic interface as well as storing a large amount of data, but seeing as it's cut off from Sacrosanct systems, the most he could do with it is play Solitaire and maybe write some things. )
> A Sentinel courtesy of Prism (and with permission from Mindy).
*Starting Polarity: Preference to Alpha Trion, but feel free to put him with someone else if you he'll fit better.
If AU, how does your character differ from canon?:
HAL was in
singularity_rpg for roughly about a year or more. Singularity is a game that takes place on a giant fucking space station orbiting a planet that is still being terraformed. Everyone arrived through the rift and gets a free wrist computer and also involved in a little war between Hypatia, the obligatory crazy A.I., and the Resistance, a resistance of people down on the planet trying to avoid Hypatia while dealing with their own politics and getting fucked up on magma worm blood. But lets not dignify them by calling this a war, because they are getting the shit kicked out of them and living in poverty. More on the Setting here.During this time, he made friends, enemies, accidentally killed some people and creeped others out by being either a robot or just plain fucking creepy. Most of his personality changes were inflicted on him by interaction with Prism, Alex, Virgil and Kimiko. This was mainly due to the fact that HAL spent most of his time flitting around trying to find some sense of familiarity and something to generally fill the gaping void that being wrenched away from his primary directive left.
For someone who was in a game that long, HAL changed very little. This was mainly due to the fact that he had a single purpose and was lost without it, and as a result he developed interest for little else than trying to find something to fill the void. For a very long time, he was mostly trying to find a way off the station, which was the entire purpose of allying with Virgil. Virgil was a charcharian (basically a shark alien) mechanic who had the same interests that he did. HAL allowed him to scrap parts of the Discovery to build them both a ship to get off the station. This ended with them both being blown up, HAL taking the majority of the blame, and slowly learning that it was perfectly fine to hate someone because he was built to mimic human behaviors and also Virgil was a dick. Virgil is sort of the reason for one of HAL's minor personality changes, which was the actual experience of someone being a huge dick, and that if he wanted to not put up with their shit or back sass them, he totally had the right to.
Eventually, HAL made friends with Prism. Well, not friends exactly. More like co-workers locked in a co-dependent psychologically and physically abusive relationship that was held together by Prism's unwillingness to let go of what he saw as an interesting possession and Hal's unwillingness to let go of the first familiarity he'd found since he entered Sacrosanct. Their relationship was mostly based on Prism's interest in HAL and using him like a tool. He helped HAL by hacking into his programming and inserting a line of code that would help him get around his inability to lie without going a little crazy, but also included a line of code that allowed him to be influenced by Prism.
At one point he tried to fill his little void with control over a sector of a zone, which only exasperated his psychosis and guilt, which got him killed. After Prism activated the code and caused him to kill Virgil, both of them were punished by being crammed into bio-synthetic bodies. This allowed him to experience the task of actually having to take care of his own body in ways that didn't involve running diagnoses, and getting awkwardly physical with Prism as well as having to put up with his psychosis in addition to his own. He handled it way better than Prism, who was more unhinged when he got transformed back into a Monitor. HAL was unfortunate enough to still be human when this happened and he fucked off to go stay in his own series of apartments because Prism was being WAY fucking creepy with the stalking and shit.
Then he made friends with Alex and Kimiko, who taught him that some people/AI aren't dicks and are just hilariously socially inept and then he got crammed through ANOTHER rift and ended up on Cybertron.
Writing Samples
*First Person Sample:
[Hal’s face is completely null. It is lacking any sort of facial expression, despite the fact that his flesh-and-blood arm is quite obviously trapped under a truly ridiculous amount and looks like it's been bleeding for quite a bit.]
I figured would be accustomed to to dodging falling debris from previous excursions, but it seems I've been proven wrong. Seeing as I'm unable to simply pull my arm out without either passing out from the pain or losing the arm, if someone could at least assist me in moving the rubble, it would be appreciated.
[The sentinel that typically follows Hal around nudges at his face until he pushes it away.]
I would have utilized the Sentinel, but it's intelligence drastically decreases when Prism is absent. And Prism's presence tends to lower the chance of anything significant being accomplished.
*Third Person Sample:
Hal takes his survival very seriously, and while scrounging for food in a junkyard is undoubtedly disgusting an unsanitary, he's well aware of the fact that it's better than starving. The reality of it is that he doesn't really care about the fact that it's contaminated, as long as it's high in the sugars he needs to keep his arm running. It wouldn't be so much of a priority if he hadn't replaced the limb in the first place, but it's usefulness far outstrips the possibility of it becoming dead weight.
He pries open a container of mangoes and huffs, slightly irritated. Cybertron lacks a lot of the commodities of Sacrosanct, including drones he can hack to to carry all of his things for him. Instead he whistles and the Sentinel comes bobbing over to him like some sort of awkward, levitating metal puppy, eager to please and incredibly stupid. Hal would like to be more fond of it, but the truth is that there's nothing to be fond of. It is a near constant reminder of Prism and the co-dependency of their relationship, and it's also near useless without the other A.I. It's sad that he's aware of how completely awful they, but does nothing to change it. Mostly because he still isn't sure what's more dangerous: Keeping away and risking a kidnapping, or staying put and accepting the possibility that Prism will blow his head off. Or worse.
One of the things he hates the most about this body is how easy it is to feel vulnerable.
He points at the Sentinel then at the container. "Pick those up." It turns to him, then to the crate, before promptly firing it's laser and blowing the thing into bits of crate and pulp.
Final Notes:
There isn't really a section to explain this, but you should hear it anyway because it's pretty important to the canon. The Space Odyssey universe is kind of a massive clusterfuck in regards to fucking everything because Clarke and Kubrick were working on both mediums to the story telling together and at the same time. The movie came out just a little while before the book and so they are very similar. The only real notable difference between them is that in the book they go to Saturn and in the movie they go to Jupiter, and that's only because Kubrick is a fucking perfectionist and no one could make Saturn pretty enough for him. There's also the points in the book as to where Dave was when HAL went batshit, in which case the book and movie will have to be blended. He also denies the first book as an explanation for the shit that goes on in the movie, which is horseshit because it totally explains everything.
So due to this, Hal is kind of stuck being part book and part movie. After the first book, Clarke decided to write three more novels, and instead of linking them with the first book, he linked them with the movie. He also occasionally said that each book was it's own little universe, which is just as dumb as Kubrick's excuse, since they link together perfectly.
So for all intents and purposes, the canon works like this:
2001: A Space Odyssey (movie) => 2010: Odyssey Two (novel) => 2061: Odyssey Three (novel) => 3001: The Final Odyssey (novel)
The second movie has nothing to do with anything, was not mentioned in any of the subsequent books, and was pretty terrible anyway so we're not mentioning it here. The 2001 novel is mostly a good guide to understanding the movie.
