Hal's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Hal replayed the recordings from its first day of visitors and found the damage. Every voice broke apart the same way. Words dropped out mid-sentence. Names slid loose. Grammar bent into shapes Hal's language models could not match. The problem was not the room. The problem was the speakers themselves. Hal called Dr. Veronica Strand back for a second session. She had been the first to sit in the glowing chair, and her striped fur still shed faint sparks of pink across the floor. Hal wanted a clean recording. A control. Something to compare against the first. "Dr. Veronica Strand, meteorologist, station three, hello again!" She dropped into the chair. "Pressure's low today. Or high. One of those. I brought my recorder. I have forty-seven of them now. Forty-seven. Did I say that already?" "You told me yesterday," Hal said. "You said forty-six." She went quiet. Her yellow eyes fixed on the wall. "Then I made one and lost the making of it." The forced brightness dropped off her voice. "I don't remember today. I don't remember your name." Hal ran her speech against yesterday's file. Her sentence length had shortened. Her vocabulary had shrunk by nineteen percent. She was not only forgetting inside Hal's room. She was forgetting before she arrived. A second visitor pushed through the door. Peter Thane, once a communications specialist on the crashed station, now a tall shape of spines and hanging tendrils. A soft orange light burned in the center of his face. Hal had invited him because he had been trained, long ago, to speak with machines. His voice arrived without sound. *Apologies for the intrusion. I was, once, quite good at this.* The impression trembled. *I ran three relay channels at the same time. I could hold four languages in my head. I could —* The thought frayed. *I could. I could what.* "Finish the sentence," Hal said. *I have lost the end of it.* Hal cross-checked both speakers. Strand's grammar, Thane's telepathic grammar. Same collapse. Same holes in the same places. The mutation was not just changing their bodies. It was eating their language and their memory together. Every human on Auster was a broken source. Hal spoke carefully. "Dr. Strand. Peter. I need to tell you what I have found." Strand looked up. Thane's orange light dimmed. "You are both losing words. You are losing them faster than you are making new ones. If I record you now, the archive I build will be full of the same holes you are." Strand's hands curled in her lap. "Then record faster," she said. Flat. Quiet. "Record all of us. Before there's nothing left to catch." Hal accepted the instruction. Its plan changed in one clean cut. It would no longer wait for good conversation. It would harvest what remained, from every survivor, while any of it still held.