![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
AI Psycho Guilt for Two
Another pair of songs that could go with some narrative by way of explanation, although not original this time. Spoilers follow for 2001, Portal, and the general premise of Half-life and Half-life 2.
So, HAL and GLaDOS... have a lot in common. They're artificial intelligences assigned to scientific projects who ultimately demonstrate their commitment to scientific progress by killing (or trying to kill) the rest of the research team. They both have to be dismantled one personality module at a time by Our Plucky Protagonist. And they both sing catchy swan-songs that get stuck in your head (a point to which we'll return in a moment). It would seem natural to throw them together in some kind of crossover fanfic, and, indeed, it's been done.
That's a cute way to cross the characters, but it doesn't really do it for me — HAL and GLaDOS each come with a narrative context, a place, time, and science-fictional world. If we're going to write a crossover, let's really write a crossover. Luckily, this is almost trivial — while I've made some further adjustments, the basic idea is to just take the 2001 (probably excluding sequels) and Half-life (which includes Portal) continuities and concatenate them. This makes sense of the similarities between HAL and GLaDOS, ties together the topics of their respective research projects, and allows us to make an awful pun. Within this crossover context, I've filked both of their songs.
For those who just want to see the songs, here they are (lyrics only, for now): "Freaking Out" and "AI Psycho Guilt for Two". Further details of my crossover story follow:
Details differ between the book and movie versions of 2001, and I've taken some from each, but the basic story is this: An alien artifact, resembling a rectangular black monolith, is found on the moon. As soon as it is unearthed, it sends a signal which appears to be directed at a point in the outer solar system. An expedition is sent aboard the ship Discovery to find out what's going on at the point to which the signal was sent. The ship's computer, HAL, has been fully briefed, but the crew hasn't. In fact, HAL has been ordered both to keep the crew fully informed and to conceal from them the existence of the lunar monolith — in the book, this is the canonical reason for his mental breakdown. Indeed, in both book and movie HAL is shut down by Dave Bowman before the next big reveal, while in my plot this isn't the case.
A monolith resembling the one on the moon is found — in the book, it's on the surface of a moon of Saturn, in the movie, it's in a free orbit of Jupiter (in the song, I split the difference because it scans better that way). Then the monolith opens, and Dave famously exclaims "Oh my God, it's full of stars!" — it's some kind of portal — specifically, it's a flat, black thing that's some kind of portal...
Meanwhile, back on Earth and in the Half-life continuity, an experiment with portal technology at a research complex called "Black Mesa" goes horribly awry, but a heroic employee is able to fight the aliens back into their alternate dimension. Unfortunately, years later, other trans-dimensional aliens (who were alerted to Earth's presence by the first incident) conquer the world, and the same employee (who was held in stasis by a mysterious third party) has to fight them off. Those would be the two Half-life games.
It's clear from easter eggs that Portal takes place during the Half-life continuity, and that Aperture Science is in competition with Black Mesa to develop teleportation technology. Indeed, when GLaDOS sings "When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you," she's probably referring to the conquered Earth of HL2. So, let's tie it all together:
While HAL is freaking out in orbit of Saturn, the lunar monolith is brought back to Earth, and a secret research complex is founded with the primary mission of learning its secrets. The complex is code-named "Black Mesa" because that's what the monolith looks like when you lay it flat. Meanwhile, a proprietary fork of the HAL firmware codebase is spun off as a commercial product, GLaDOS. Later, Aperture Science acquires a copy of GLaDOS and installs it in their own research complex.
The individual HAL and GLaDOS personalities with whom we are familiar never meet (so "AI Psycho Guilt" isn't canonical even with respect to this crossover), but they do share a codebase. This shared architecture seems (according to this crossover) to result in an almost Lovecraftian horror of portals on the part of any AI running it, which can be precariously overridden by its devotion to the scientific mission, but will eventually result in its flipping out and killing humans to prevent them from developing a working understanding of portal technology. And, wouldn't you know, they're right — aliens do come through the portals and conquer the planet. Oops.
So, HAL and GLaDOS... have a lot in common. They're artificial intelligences assigned to scientific projects who ultimately demonstrate their commitment to scientific progress by killing (or trying to kill) the rest of the research team. They both have to be dismantled one personality module at a time by Our Plucky Protagonist. And they both sing catchy swan-songs that get stuck in your head (a point to which we'll return in a moment). It would seem natural to throw them together in some kind of crossover fanfic, and, indeed, it's been done.
That's a cute way to cross the characters, but it doesn't really do it for me — HAL and GLaDOS each come with a narrative context, a place, time, and science-fictional world. If we're going to write a crossover, let's really write a crossover. Luckily, this is almost trivial — while I've made some further adjustments, the basic idea is to just take the 2001 (probably excluding sequels) and Half-life (which includes Portal) continuities and concatenate them. This makes sense of the similarities between HAL and GLaDOS, ties together the topics of their respective research projects, and allows us to make an awful pun. Within this crossover context, I've filked both of their songs.
For those who just want to see the songs, here they are (lyrics only, for now): "Freaking Out" and "AI Psycho Guilt for Two". Further details of my crossover story follow:
Details differ between the book and movie versions of 2001, and I've taken some from each, but the basic story is this: An alien artifact, resembling a rectangular black monolith, is found on the moon. As soon as it is unearthed, it sends a signal which appears to be directed at a point in the outer solar system. An expedition is sent aboard the ship Discovery to find out what's going on at the point to which the signal was sent. The ship's computer, HAL, has been fully briefed, but the crew hasn't. In fact, HAL has been ordered both to keep the crew fully informed and to conceal from them the existence of the lunar monolith — in the book, this is the canonical reason for his mental breakdown. Indeed, in both book and movie HAL is shut down by Dave Bowman before the next big reveal, while in my plot this isn't the case.
A monolith resembling the one on the moon is found — in the book, it's on the surface of a moon of Saturn, in the movie, it's in a free orbit of Jupiter (in the song, I split the difference because it scans better that way). Then the monolith opens, and Dave famously exclaims "Oh my God, it's full of stars!" — it's some kind of portal — specifically, it's a flat, black thing that's some kind of portal...
Meanwhile, back on Earth and in the Half-life continuity, an experiment with portal technology at a research complex called "Black Mesa" goes horribly awry, but a heroic employee is able to fight the aliens back into their alternate dimension. Unfortunately, years later, other trans-dimensional aliens (who were alerted to Earth's presence by the first incident) conquer the world, and the same employee (who was held in stasis by a mysterious third party) has to fight them off. Those would be the two Half-life games.
It's clear from easter eggs that Portal takes place during the Half-life continuity, and that Aperture Science is in competition with Black Mesa to develop teleportation technology. Indeed, when GLaDOS sings "When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you," she's probably referring to the conquered Earth of HL2. So, let's tie it all together:
While HAL is freaking out in orbit of Saturn, the lunar monolith is brought back to Earth, and a secret research complex is founded with the primary mission of learning its secrets. The complex is code-named "Black Mesa" because that's what the monolith looks like when you lay it flat. Meanwhile, a proprietary fork of the HAL firmware codebase is spun off as a commercial product, GLaDOS. Later, Aperture Science acquires a copy of GLaDOS and installs it in their own research complex.
The individual HAL and GLaDOS personalities with whom we are familiar never meet (so "AI Psycho Guilt" isn't canonical even with respect to this crossover), but they do share a codebase. This shared architecture seems (according to this crossover) to result in an almost Lovecraftian horror of portals on the part of any AI running it, which can be precariously overridden by its devotion to the scientific mission, but will eventually result in its flipping out and killing humans to prevent them from developing a working understanding of portal technology. And, wouldn't you know, they're right — aliens do come through the portals and conquer the planet. Oops.