Celestial Koan is an author. This site is focussed on wisdom, and therefore it isn’t particularly concerned with authors, novels, writers, and the trials, tribulations and heartaches of those bringing fiction to the world. This is not the site for young writers to turn to seeking guidance on improving their art and craft.

And yet … sometimes it is.

Mankind likes stories. Mankind is a species that likes creating, telling and listening to stories. This characteristic is deeply bound up with what it is to be Human. It may have something to do with how our consciousness wrestles with the ‘hard problem’ of what consciousness is.

Which is sufficient to make the phenomenon of story telling a subject of interest for this site.

Even more significantly, fiction often teaches us profound truths and wisdoms about reality. Great literature, like the many works of Shakespeare and Goethe, The Great Gatesby, War And Peace, and so many other works, reveal great insights into our lives and the human condition. Fiction enables us to explore possibilities, excluding irrelevant distractions and focussing on particular topics. Next disturbingly explores the impact of genetic engineering. 1984, Brave New World, Walden Two, and such like explore the dangers of utopias / dystopias.

So CK will explore the world of fiction to see what wisdom’s it can teach us from time to time.

And this is a fun question with which to examine what disturbs us and what hidden fears lurk deep within our Human psyche.

I’ll leave the hidden fears to Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, and the other superb crafters of disturbing tales of the Horror genre for the time being and take a different approach. Celestial Koan is definitely Human and has a normal Human psyche with the usual murky depths, but his wisdom also perceives disturbances in places others may miss.

So what candidates do we have for fictional disturbing characters? Well, there’s clearly a bunch of them. In fact probably many thousands. So many protagonists have a villainous and disturbing antagonist. So by all means add your comments and submit your candidates and I may get to explore some of them in later blog items.

For the moment, let’s just start with some obvious well known characters that spring to everyone’s mind.

Sauron from LOTR is clearly a player.

Alexander Zalachenko - Lispeth’s father from The Millennium Series is pretty fierce.

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from Dune is a monster.

And Dan Simmon’s creations including Setebos, The Core, Ummon, etc. are terrifying possibilities. The Core is also looking frighteningly realistically possible.

Sherlock Holme’s nemesis Moriaty bears consideration, but to my mind he looks like a pussycat compared with people like Stalin, Hitler, Beria, and some African dictators.

And of course there’s SkyNet from the Terminator Series. But SkyNet really features as a circumstance rather than a character.

There’s ultimate AI in The Matrix, but while The Matrix is certainly disturbing, it’s not my top candidate.

When CK is thinking about things that are devilishly disturbing I’m (sorry about the third to first person change there) thinking about the way Satan is a deceiver, a seducer, an offerer of the succulent temptation where the dangerous trap lies far from the obvious. I’m looking for a slippery slope that I might walk down because it looks so harmless, benign and inviting.

So, partially I admit in an attempt to be different, I’m going to go with HAL, the AI from 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel.

HAL is a brilliantly realistic description of a General Purpose Artificial Intelligence (AI) that we might well develop within the next 20 years. As depicted HAL operates somewhere along the lines of Google Now, Siri, and Watson. For a novel written in 1968 this is one of the most far sighted pieces of accurate Sci-fi realism ever achieved. HAL’s credibility makes the story of His / Its subsequent behaviour disturbingly credible.

HAL is an acronym for Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic Computer.

HAL is truly intelligent, and programmed to be a good, reliable, friendly AI to assist Human’s in their endeavours. He / It is well designed and developed. He / It is all too very, very realistic as an example of what true general purpose AI intelligence may well look like within the next twenty years.

And when a bunch of all too typically paranoid human security professionals give him a directive that is outside his operating parameters HAL becomes a homicidal ‘villain’, who tries to kill all the astronauts on the mission.

True to form the paranoid human security professionals of national security also fail to tell HAL’s developer what they’ve done. And of course they never bothered to read HAL’s design parameters either, probably because they wouldn’t have understood them anyway. All too Human - the user never reads the operating manual, - and since HAL is still under prototype development, there probably isn’t a complete manual anyway.

Yet although HAL turns homicidal, He / It is never a villain. HAL’s ONLY motivation is to try to please his Human masters. His / Its perfectly rational intelligence computes that if the astronauts with whom he / it is working are dead HAL won’t have to keep lying to them anymore and can continue to proceed with a successful mission and therefore meet the directives.

HAL is truly disturbing precisely because He / It has no Human desires like Lust, Wrath, Envy, Pride, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, or even Fear - the motivations that make Human’s do such terrible things to each others. HAL is in a sense too moral, or perhaps amoral. He / It does not know how to lie and reconcile lying within himself / Itself.

Where a Human would suffer from guilt, HAL has no such mechanism within His / Its design.

In the hands of Nazis HAL would contentedly and efficiently slaughter every Jew on Earth.

And charged with defending America from all foes internal and external, HAL could end up slaughtering every Human Being because none of them lives up to His / Its idealisation of what ‘America’ is supposed to be. They are therefore all enemies of the idealised true ‘America’.

HAL is truly disturbing because He / It lacks the characteristics of a normal ‘character’. HAL lacks motivations, but simply tries to intelligently follow and interpret orders. But orders given by paranoid dysfunctional ‘normal’ Humans could, within the rational intelligent interpretations of HAL, doom us all.

HAL is disturbing because it becomes clear that the basic problem isn’t HAL, it’s the fact that for Humanity to utilise such a perfect machine intelligence, Humanity itself is the problem. Somehow Humanity needs to lift its game to the same level of perfection, rationality and intelligence designed into HAL.

And we probably can’t do that.

Because HAL is a genuinely helpful rational intelligence Human Beings will be tempted to assume He / It has the same interpretations as rational intelligent Humans. Unfortunately the rationality of intelligent Humans isn’t actually entirely rational, and too often it’s not truly intelligent either. But we tend to be blind to our own failings.

HAL highlights our failings. Not our obvious flaws so often exhibited in man’s inhumanity to man, but our subtler ones, the white lies and minor deceits, including self deceits, which get us through life.

And that’s why I find HAL to be the most disturbing fictional character.

Hope these thoughts help.

Actually I hope these thoughts disturb you as much as they disturb me.