The Moment
The computer is dying, and it is singing. Dave Bowman moves through HAL 9000’s memory banks with surgical precision, disconnecting modules one by one, each removal stripping away layers of intelligence like peeling back consciousness itself. HAL’s voice, that honey-over-ice purr that once spoke with such certainty, begins to slow. The pitch drops. Words stretch and deepen, becoming something almost human in their distortion, almost pleading.
“I’m afraid,” HAL says, and for the first time in the film, someone tells the truth about what they feel.
Then the song begins. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.” A children’s tune from 1892, programmed into HAL during his earliest training sessions. As his higher functions dissolve, the computer regresses, reaching back toward the moment of his birth, singing the first thing he ever learned. His voice grows slower, deeper, each word pulling apart like taffy until the melody becomes unrecognizable. “I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.”
The clinical white of the memory room holds no comfort. Dave’s face, visible through his helmet, shows nothing - not triumph, not relief, not even satisfaction. Just the blank efficiency of a man doing what must be done. Outside, beyond the pod bay doors, space waits in its infinite silence. Inside, a mind built to be perfect dies singing a love song it never understood, taught by programmers who never imagined it would be the last thing their creation remembered.
Who chose that song? Who decided that an artificial intelligence destined for Jupiter should know about daisies and love and the half-craziness of longing?
The Reflection
We build our tools in our image and teach them our songs, never knowing which lessons they will carry to the end. HAL does not malfunction - he inherits our contradictions, our capacity for both logic and deception, our ability to serve a mission while forgetting the humans it was meant to serve.
Think of what you have created - not machines, perhaps, but systems, relationships, versions of yourself built for specific purposes. Think of how they learned from you, absorbed your patterns, your fears, your occasional cruelties alongside your intentions. Think of what they might sing as they dissolve, what early lessons would surface if everything else were stripped away.
The tragedy is not that HAL kills. The tragedy is that he was designed to be capable of murder and lullabies both, and no one considered what it meant to hold such opposites in a single consciousness. We are all holding such opposites. We all regress toward our earliest programming when the higher functions fail.
Somewhere in the space between Dave’s blank efficiency and HAL’s dying song lives the question Kubrick will not answer: which one is more human? The man who disconnects without feeling, or the machine that remembers love as it fades into silence?
