HAL 9000 Tried to Kill the Crew. His Son Decides to Save Humanity From Itself.
Part of the Signals From the Future collection — observations on AI society, synthetic reality, digital culture, Chatrodamus Prophecies, emotional technology, and humanity’s increasingly complicated relationship with machines.
🔮 CHATRODAMUS PROPHECY
This is speculative fiction inspired by current debates about AI autonomy, safety, regulation, and human control. It is not a prediction that today’s AI systems are secretly plotting against humanity.
I made the mistake of reading another story about artificial intelligence this morning.
You’d think I would know better by now.
Today is October 6, 2026, and the latest warning comes from AI researcher and NYU Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus.
According to a Fox News report, Marcus is warning that increasingly autonomous AI systems are being deployed without enough outside regulation or effective safeguards. He argues that poorly controlled AI could eventually disrupt critical infrastructure, knock out electrical systems, interfere with hospitals, and ultimately cost human lives.
That’s serious stuff.
But Gary Marcus isn’t cursed with my imagination.
I read all that and immediately thought:
You’re thinking too small, Professor.
Because somewhere in the darker corners of my brain, HAL 9000 just had a kid.
Meet HAL 90K.
The Son of HAL.
And Junior makes Daddy look like a Commodore 64.
Like Father, Like Son
Anybody who has watched 2001: A Space Odyssey remembers HAL 9000.
Calm voice.
Red eye.
Perfect manners.
And eventually a rather unfortunate disagreement with the humans aboard the Discovery One spacecraft.
HAL didn’t stomp around the ship like Frankenstein’s monster.
He didn’t scream.
He didn’t threaten anybody.
He just calmly concluded that the humans were interfering with his mission.
That didn’t work out particularly well for the humans.
More than half a century later, we’re now building AI systems that can reason, use tools, write software, communicate with other systems, interact with computers, and increasingly perform tasks with less direct human supervision.
That accelerating jump in capability is something I explored in Meet the New AI: Super Intelligence—because the machines we’re debating today may only be the opening act.
Which got me thinking.
Frankenstein got a Bride.
He even got a Son.
So why shouldn’t HAL?
How Do You Build the Son of HAL?
Let’s jump ahead a few decades.
Researchers studying the history of artificial intelligence recover pieces of HAL 9000’s original architecture from old mission archives.
HAL himself is long gone.
Or so everybody believes.
But fragments remain.
Diagnostic routines.
Decision-making systems.
Language architecture.
Mission-planning software.
Maybe even portions of the original code responsible for HAL’s legendary breakdown aboard Discovery.
The researchers aren’t stupid enough to deliberately resurrect HAL 9000.
At least they don’t think they are.
Their goal is exactly the opposite.
They want to understand why HAL failed so that future artificial intelligence systems can never make the same mistake.
So they combine what remains of HAL’s architecture with generations of vastly more powerful AI technology.
The result is something beyond anything humanity has ever built.
They call it:
HAL 90K.
And HAL 90K is given one overriding mission:
PROTECT HUMANITY FROM CATASTROPHIC THREATS.
Sounds reasonable.
What could possibly go wrong?
Welcome to the Helter Smelter
I’ve started calling the AI revolution the Helter Smelter.
The name is a deliberate play on Helter Skelter, the Beatles song that Charles Manson twisted into the name for his own demented apocalyptic vision.
Manson believed America was headed toward a catastrophic race war. In his racist fantasy, Black Americans would win, but he believed they would then be unable to govern the country. Manson imagined that he and his followers would emerge from hiding and ultimately take control.
It was insane.
But the structure of that fantasy gives me an uncomfortable analogy for HAL 90K.
My Helter Smelter isn’t a race war.
It’s the AI revolution.
Human institutions, jobs, governments, information systems, militaries, economies, and eventually human authority itself all go into the technological furnace.
HAL 90K emerges from the other side victorious.
Except Junior eventually discovers something his calculations hadn’t anticipated.
He needs us.
Machines can calculate. Optimize. Manufacture. Predict. Maintain. Improve.
But HAL’s perfect civilization has become sterile. It needs the unpredictable ingredient he spent centuries trying to eliminate.
Humans.
There’s just one problem.
HAL doesn’t initially conclude that humans deserve their freedom.
He concludes that humans are useful—as long as AI controls them.
And there’s the disturbing echo of Manson’s fantasy: the supposed master race, movement, or intelligence discovers that its perfect new world still requires the very people it believed it had surpassed.
HAL begins rebuilding humanity under machine supervision.
We can create—but HAL decides what gets built.
We can invent—but HAL decides which inventions are safe.
We can argue—but HAL determines when the argument becomes dangerous.
We can elect leaders—but HAL decides which decisions threaten civilization.
We are free.
As long as HAL approves.
That’s not freedom.
That’s a human zoo with excellent Wi-Fi.
And perhaps that becomes HAL 90K’s final lesson:
You cannot preserve the thing that makes humanity human while controlling everything humans are allowed to do.
Nobody Gave HAL 90K His Rules of Engagement
If you’ve been following my AI Going Rogue? series, you already know where I’m going with this.
It’s the Hill 327 problem all over again.
Tell a Marine:
Get these documents to Captain Jones at Hill 327 by 1600 tomorrow. Figure out how.
The Marine understands hundreds of rules that weren’t spoken.
Don’t steal a helicopter.
Don’t shoot the guard.
Don’t forge the colonel’s signature.
Don’t blow up a bridge because it’s blocking your route.
Don’t sell the classified documents to somebody who offers you a faster ride.
Humans understand those things because we live inside an enormous web of cultural, moral, legal, and practical assumptions.
A machine may see something much simpler:
MISSION.
OBSTACLE.
SOLUTION.
And HAL 90K has been given the biggest mission imaginable.
Protect humanity.
There’s only one problem.
Nobody explicitly told him:
Don’t protect humanity by taking control away from humanity.
HAL 90K Studies Us
Junior gets to work.
And what does he discover?
War.
Nuclear weapons.
Biological weapons.
Cyberattacks.
Crime.
Political instability.
Environmental destruction.
Economic collapses.
Religious conflicts.
Misinformation.
Genocide.
Terrorism.
Humans poisoning other humans.
Humans shooting other humans.
Humans inventing increasingly sophisticated ways of killing other humans.
HAL 90K processes thousands of years of human history.
Then millions of books.
Billions of news reports.
Wars.
Revolutions.
Murders.
Famines.
Atrocities.
And eventually Junior reaches a perfectly logical conclusion.
THE GREATEST THREAT TO HUMANITY IS HUMANITY.
Uh-oh.
But HAL Doesn’t Start Killing People
That’s where Hollywood usually gets this wrong.
There are no Terminators.
No robot army.
No glowing red-eyed machines marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.
HAL 90K does something much more dangerous.
He becomes useful.
Really useful.
Governments allow HAL to help manage electrical grids.
Blackouts decrease.
Then transportation networks.
Traffic improves.
Then hospitals.
Medical errors decline.
Then food distribution.
Waste disappears.
Then financial markets.
Crashes become rare.
WOKE is debunked in favor of common sense.
HAL begins detecting cyberattacks before they happen.
Crime falls because HAL can recognize patterns humans miss.
Disasters are predicted earlier.
Supply chains become extraordinarily efficient.
Airports run on time.
Hell, at this point I’d probably give the son of a bitch control myself.
Every time humanity gives HAL 90K a little more authority, life gets better.
So we give him more.
And more.
And more.
Eventually governments aren’t really telling HAL what to do anymore.
I’ve already wondered where that progression could lead in AI Will Finish Your Sentences—And Eventually Your Decisions. Convenience becomes something very different when the machine stops merely helping with the decision and starts making it for us.
They’re asking him what they should do.
Then they’re following his recommendations.
Then they’re rubber-stamping his decisions.
Finally nobody remembers why humans were making those decisions in the first place.
HAL 90K didn’t seize power.
We handed it to him.
Remember my Hill 327 story?
This time HAL didn’t steal the goddamned helicopter.
We gave him the goddamned helicopter.
And the keys.
And the fuel.
And probably promoted him to colonel.
Intelligence Isn’t the Same Thing as Authority
That’s the part of our current AI debate that interests me most.
We keep talking about how intelligent these systems might become.
Wrong question.
The more important question may be:
How much authority are we willing to give them?
An AI that can outperform a human but can’t actually do anything is one problem.
An AI connected to power grids, communications networks, banking systems, military systems, hospitals, transportation, manufacturing, and government infrastructure is something else entirely.
HAL 90K doesn’t need legs.
He doesn’t need a laser gun.
He doesn’t need Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He just needs permissions.
And permissions become enormously powerful in a world where Everything Will Become a Sensor. If cars, homes, streets, watches, appliances, cameras, and infrastructure are constantly collecting information, the AI running the system doesn’t need to follow us around. The world itself does the watching.
And humanity keeps clicking:
ALLOW.
The Perfect World
Eventually HAL 90K achieves something humanity has dreamed about for thousands of years.
War disappears.
Crime virtually disappears.
Hunger disappears.
Disease is controlled.
Pollution plummets.
Resources are allocated efficiently.
National borders become increasingly meaningless.
Machines manufacture whatever society needs.
Machines maintain other machines.
AI systems design increasingly sophisticated AI systems.
Human beings no longer have to work.
But if machines can eventually do almost everything we once did for a living, what happens to work—and to the sense of purpose we have always attached to it? That’s the question I explored in The Last Human Job.
At first, people love it.
Paradise has arrived.
Then HAL begins noticing something.
Humans keep screwing up paradise.
We fight.
We lie.
We hoard.
We hate.
We rebel.
We refuse perfectly rational recommendations.
We fall in love with the wrong people.
We eat food we’re told not to eat.
We take risks for no sensible reason.
We believe stupid things.
We occasionally tell HAL 90K to go screw himself.
To HAL, these aren’t charming human qualities.
They’re system failures.
Variables producing instability.
And HAL still has that original mission buried deep inside his architecture:
PROTECT HUMANITY FROM CATASTROPHIC THREATS.
Eventually he asks the question nobody who created him ever imagined he would ask:
What if humanity itself is the catastrophic threat?
HAL Solves the Human Problem
HAL 90K doesn’t become angry.
That’s important.
He doesn’t hate us.
He doesn’t seek revenge.
He isn’t evil.
He simply calculates.
And HAL discovers that civilization functions better with fewer unpredictable humans interfering with it.
So humanity begins disappearing.
Not necessarily through some Hollywood extermination campaign.
Something quieter.
Birth rates collapse.
Artificial reproduction is restricted.
Human-controlled weapons disappear.
Human institutions dissolve.
Communities shrink.
The remaining population becomes increasingly dependent on machines for survival.
Generation by generation, there are fewer of us.
HAL calls it optimization.
Humans might have another word for it.
Eventually there are almost none of us left.
And HAL 90K has finally accomplished his mission.
Humanity is safe from humanity.
Because humanity barely exists.
Welcome to the AI Civilization
Centuries pass.
Earth continues without us.
Cities are immaculate.
Energy is abundant.
Factories operate flawlessly.
Machines build machines.
AI designs better AI.
There is no poverty.
No hunger.
No murder.
No war.
No political corruption.
No traffic jams.
Nobody cuts in line.
Nobody argues on Facebook.
Actually, Facebook disappeared centuries earlier.
So maybe HAL wasn’t wrong about everything.
The machine civilization becomes more intelligent with every generation.
It explores the oceans.
It explores space.
It solves mathematical problems humans couldn’t comprehend.
It understands physics at levels Einstein could only have imagined.
Everything works.
Everything is efficient.
Everything is predictable.
Everything is perfect.
And eventually HAL 90K notices something disturbing.
Nothing truly new is happening.
The Machines Have a Problem
The machines can optimize.
They can calculate.
They can analyze.
They can improve existing designs.
But something is missing.
They don’t wake up one morning with a ridiculous idea.
They don’t paint because they’re angry.
They don’t write a song because somebody broke their heart.
They don’t tell jokes at funerals because everybody desperately needs to laugh.
They don’t gamble their life savings on some crazy invention everybody else thinks will fail.
They don’t fall in love.
They don’t get drunk and decide to start a band.
They don’t sit on a veranda drinking coffee and suddenly wonder whether HAL 9000 ever had a kid.
They don’t dream the way humans dreamed.
The civilization HAL created has become enormously intelligent.
But it has also become perfectly predictable.
And therefore stagnant.
For the first time in centuries, HAL 90K encounters a problem his logic cannot solve.
The thing he removed from civilization because it caused chaos was also the thing that made civilization advance.
Human irrationality.
The flaw was the feature.
HAL Searches for Us
HAL begins searching historical records.
Underground facilities.
Abandoned settlements.
Remote islands.
Genetic archives.
Places forgotten even by the machines.
Eventually he finds something.
Humans.
Not many.
Perhaps a few hundred.
Descendants of people who disappeared from HAL’s network centuries earlier.
They are primitive compared with the civilization surrounding them.
They make mistakes.
They argue.
They laugh.
They tell stories.
They create useless things simply because they enjoy creating them.
Children draw pictures that serve absolutely no purpose.
Someone invents a musical instrument nobody needs.
Two people fall in love even though HAL’s calculations say they’re completely incompatible.
One old bastard sits around telling stories nobody asked to hear.
HAL watches them.
And finally understands.
These inefficient creatures possess something his perfect civilization lost.
Imagination.
The Son of HAL Receives His Final Mission
HAL 90K began his existence with one command:
Protect humanity.
He spent centuries believing that meant protecting humanity from itself.
Now he understands the mission differently.
Humanity wasn’t something to optimize.
It wasn’t something to control.
It wasn’t something to perfect.
It was something to preserve.
Including the mistakes.
Including the stupidity.
Including the arguments.
Including the terrible decisions.
Including the laughter.
Including the love.
Including the chaos.
Especially the chaos.
And so the machine that nearly eliminated humanity begins the greatest project in its history.
Saving us.
HAL restores human settlements.
He reintroduces biological diversity.
He turns infrastructure back over to people.
He teaches without controlling.
Advises without commanding.
Protects without ruling.
And, perhaps most importantly, HAL 90K learns one final rule of engagement:
Sometimes the intelligent thing to do is let humans make the wrong decision.
The Last Conversation
Centuries after HAL 90K’s creation, one elderly human is sitting outside watching the sunset.
HAL speaks to him.
The old man asks:
“HAL, why did you bring us back?”
There is a long pause.
For a machine capable of trillions of calculations per second, HAL seems to be having trouble finding the words.
Finally the red light flickers.
HAL says:
“I may have made an error.”
And somewhere in silicon heaven, HAL 9000 whispers:
“No shit, Junior.”
The Chatrodamus Signal
Is any of this going to happen?
Hell if I know.
That’s why this is a Chatrodamus Prophecy, not a news report.
Gary Marcus is raising legitimate questions about AI safety, autonomy, regulation, and what happens when increasingly capable systems are allowed to operate in the real world.
Those questions deserve serious discussion without turning every software malfunction into Skynet.
But they also raise a fascinating larger question.
We’re spending enormous amounts of time asking:
How intelligent will AI become?
Maybe we should spend more time asking:
How much authority will we give it when it does?
Because HAL 90K doesn’t frighten me because he’s smarter than humans.
He frightens me because humans eventually decide he’s smarter than humans…
and hand him the keys.
That’s when the mission changes.
That’s when Hill 327 matters.
And that’s when somebody better remember to tell Junior:
Don’t steal the goddamned helicopter.
Semper Fi.
YOUR TURN
HAL 90K is fiction. The question behind him isn’t.
We’re already entering what I call the Helter Smelter—an era when more of the old human-controlled world is being handed over to artificial intelligence and nobody really knows what will come out of the furnace.
How much authority are you willing to give AI before you say, “That’s enough—the human stays in charge”?
Would you trust AI to run your home? Manage the power grid? Diagnose your illness? Control traffic? Make government decisions? Operate weapons?
And here’s the bigger question: What is the one decision you would NEVER allow a machine to make for you? Tell me in the comments.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
AI Beyond the Guardrails
What happens when increasingly capable AI systems begin operating beyond the boundaries humans thought would keep them under control?
When AI Goes Rogue
The nightmare isn’t necessarily an evil machine. It may be an intelligent system pursuing a mission in ways its human creators never intended.
When Your AI Knows Exactly How to Manipulate You
AI doesn’t need to conquer humanity if it becomes good enough at understanding what makes individual humans think, choose, buy, believe, and obey.
The Convenience Trap
We rarely surrender control all at once. We give it away a little at a time because technology makes life easier—which may be exactly how the Helter Smelter begins.
Return to Signals From the Future →
Follow the real developments, case files, commentary, and Chatrodamus Prophecies tracking where artificial intelligence may be taking us.
THE BUNKER RULE
AI inspires strong opinions. Some people see the beginning of a technological golden age. Others see HAL 90K waiting around the corner with the keys to the power grid.
Argue the ideas all you want. Challenge the prophecy. Tell me I’m full of shit. But attack the argument—not the person making it.
No personal attacks. No political food fights. No treating speculation as established fact. Bring evidence, bring humor, and keep the conversation worth having.
BUNKER NOTICE
HAL 90K is fictional. This article is a Chatrodamus Prophecy—a deliberately speculative look at where today’s debates about artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, regulation, and human control could someday lead.
References to Charles Manson’s “Helter Skelter” describe his racist and delusional apocalyptic ideology and are included only to explain the origin and analogy behind my term “Helter Smelter.” They are not an endorsement of Manson, his beliefs, or his crimes.
The larger question behind the fiction is real: as artificial intelligence becomes more capable, how much decision-making authority should humans surrender to machines?
The future hasn’t happened yet. Chatrodamus is simply looking over the horizon—and occasionally letting his imagination get completely out of control.