Agreed, HAL should go dead center because he is acting purely in self defense. Maybe even a nudge to the right because aside from that he seems to be helpful and benevolent.

It's clearly foreshadowing the deep lore that their timeline branches from ours not with the mutation of the cortyceps in 2003, but with an earlier cumby's rebranding campaign that happened to be identical to the one that happened in 2009 in the real world.