Portal: Euphoria - Chapter Two

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Chapter Two


Apparently she wasn’t, because she did appear in GLaDOS’s chamber early the next morning, looking much better than she had just six hours before.  “Oh look, you’re not dead.  What a surprise,” GLaDOS said by way of greeting.  

“I haven’t left the room yet, have I?”

“I hope you’re not implying I’m going to do you harm when your back is turned.  I wouldn’t give me ideas, if I were you.”

Caroline laughed and propped her hands up on the railing, putting her head on top of her arms and looking up at GLaDOS.  “You should be careful what you say, you know.”

“I am.  I don’t have any designs towards hurting anyone, if that’s what you mean.  I only meant it as a joke.”

“I know.  I was joking too.”  She glanced over her shoulder.  “I can’t stay too long, though.  If people see me in here, they might think I like you.”

“Is that an unpopular thing to do?”

“Let’s just say it has certain implications I don’t want to carry around with me.”

GLaDOS had no idea what she was talking about, but made a note about it in the same file that she used to store Caroline’s vague allusions to some event she seemed to be gearing up for.  It had something to do with GLaDOS herself, in any case.  Her release to the public, perhaps?  That seemed the most likely option.

“Why did you hit me last night?” she asked suddenly.

“I didn’t… oh.  I wasn’t hitting you.  I was patting you.  That’s different.”

“And it meant what?”

“I don’t really know what it means.  It’s just something you do to people sometimes.  When they did a good job, or when you want to show sympathy, stuff like that.”

That was far too vague for GLaDOS’s liking, but at least she could categorise it as being a good thing and not have a negative reaction the next time it happened.  

Soon after that Caroline was paged and had to leave the room quickly, and GLaDOS went back to doing her routine things, such as setting up her task list for the day and looking through the test subject files.  She spent the nights trying to figure out sound separation on her own, accidentally working almost straight through to the morning, and the engineers sent Caroline to tell her the bad news.  Even if Caroline was not supposed to be seen with GLaDOS, they seemed to recognise that she was the only one the supercomputer would actually listen to.

“You’re being put on a timer for the next week.  You’re lagging a lot, apparently, and you’ve been above optimal operating temperature for the last month.”

Well, that explained the increasingly uncomfortable sensations she was getting from her processors, but no one had told her that was what that meant so she hadn’t been too concerned about it.  “So we can’t –“

“You will be put into mandatory sleep mode when I leave the facility every night,” Caroline cut in as if she didn’t know GLaDOS was talking.

 “I have also been told I’ve been staying here too late and that I have to leave by ten-thirty.”  She was staring at GLaDOS very intently and GLaDOS realised what it was about.  So they had from about nine until ten-thirty.  Fine.  It wasn’t really long enough, but she would take what she could get.  GLaDOS nodded.  “I understand, ma’am.”

“You are to cease all unauthorised activity and I am to turn over your activity logs to the engineers by noon,” Caroline read from a piece of paper clenched in one hand.  GLaDOS quickly decided she had mentioned that so that GLaDOS could falsify them as necessary.  “And you aren’t to perform over… wow, that’s a lot.  Do you really do thirty million calculations a day?”

“On a busy day,” GLaDOS answered.  “I like to calculate the physics that go on during testing.”

“Well, tone down on those.  Apparently you’ve been doing a lot more than that and you’re going to burn the processors out if you keep doing that without cooling down regularly… which you haven’t been doing.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do all that stuff and they’ll consider taking the restrictions off.  Long and the short of it, you’re being a bit suspicious, but no one really wants to ask you what you’re doing and you can keep on doing it as long as nothing breaks,” Caroline said in a very quiet voice, and then she winked and turned around.  

GLaDOS had to wonder why all her engineers were so afraid of her if they ultimately controlled everything she did.  Oh well.  It made doing things in secret a lot easier, at any rate.



Caroline continued to come and help GLaDOS, but she often didn’t show up until nine thirty or ten, and during those times it took Caroline so long to get herself sorted out that they didn’t have time to do any work.  The third time this happened, GLaDOS shook her head.  “Don’t bother,” she interrupted, when Caroline started doing whatever it was with her computer that she thought would be helpful.  What it was, GLaDOS didn’t yet know, since they’d never gotten to the point where she’d been able to find out.  “You can leave if you want.  We’ll pick this back up when the week is over.”

Caroline stopped moving for a minute, looking absently at the floor, then put her computer away.  “You’re right.”  She looked around the room, which humans found pretty dark at this hour, and then squinted up at the overhead light.  “Do you leave that on all night?”

“I’m supposed to,” GLaDOS answered.  “In case someone comes in here and can’t see.”

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” Caroline asked teasingly.

“I have no idea.  I’ve never been in it.”

“Why not?”

“I have a flashlight.”

“Really?  Where is it?”

“I’m looking at you with it.”

Caroline smacked herself in the face with one hand.  “Of course.  Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You can’t think of everything,” GLaDOS told her graciously.  

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”  She smiled up at GLaDOS, and she concluded the woman was being sarcastic.  GLaDOS hated sarcasm.  It relied on so many nuances that if she wasn’t paying special attention, she usually missed it.

“So you’ve never turned it off?”

“It’s activated by darkness.  I don’t usually turn it on myself.”

“Well, turn it off.”

“Why?  Then I won’t be able to see.”

“Yes, you will.  The overhead is on.  Come on.  Live dangerously.  I promise you won’t die.”

She was so demanding!  GLaDOS decided to humour her and searched through her brain for the command required to shut it off.

God.  What was this?  She could hardly see a thing.  She almost turned the infrared on, but that would have invalidated the experiment.  “What do you think?”

“It’s very… dark.”

Caroline started giggling and GLaDOS shook her head.  “Yes.  Let’s all laugh at my expense.  Ha ha.  See?  I find it funny too.  Not really, though.  I was being ironic.”

Caroline actually laughed at that.  “You’re pretty funny, you know.”

“I am not programmed for entertainment, Caroline.”

“Some people are just naturally amusing.”

Naturally?  Was Caroline implying that she, of all things, had a natural attribute?  That was interesting.  “It depends on your interpretation.  Usually people just look at me funny.  Which is never a reaction one looks for.”

“How often do you stay up into the night?” Caroline asked abruptly.  “And you can tell me.  I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“Most of the time,” GLaDOS admitted.  “It’s a lot harder to work on my… projects… during the day.”

Caroline leaned forward in what GLaDOS perceived to be interest.  “What projects are you working on?”

“I’m working on sound separation,” GLaDOS answered as innocently as possible.  Caroline snorted and shook her head.  “Stop that.  I’m not going to tell on you.  Who would I tell?  And who would believe me if I did?”

“No one would believe you?”

“I doubt it.  Imagine if I went up to Henry tomorrow and said, ‘I think GLaDOS is trying to listen to music every night.’  He’d laugh me right out of the building.  No thanks.”

“I just write software, mostly,” GLaDOS told her slowly.  “Human programming languages are horribly inefficient, so I’ve been trying to write my own.  It’s slow going, though.  It’s… difficult.”

Caroline nodded thoughtfully.  “I don’t know how to program at all.  It’s… well, code to me.”  She looked up at GLaDOS, and GLaDOS realised she’d turned her flashlight back on without knowing about it.  It must be attached to an automatic checking program.  “You’re the only computer out there than can do it, you know.”

“Why do you think I do it so often?”

Caroline smiled.  “You like proving people wrong, don’t you.”

“It’s quite gratifying.”  GLaDOS hesitated.  Caroline was growing on her, uncharacteristically, and GLaDOS really wanted to… well, she was getting the feeling that she wanted to impress the woman, which was absurd, but there it was.  “Would you… can I show you something?”

“Of course.”

God.  Was she actually nervous?  She was, GLaDOS realised.  She must be malfunctioning.  She’d have to look into that.  She gave Caroline a roll of papers she kept in the basement.  “I’ve been working on this on and off for the last few years,” she admitted as Caroline unrolled them.  “It’s… a lot more complicated than I thought it was.  I haven’t done anything to forward it in the last little while, but I’m not giving up on it.  I just have to stop and let it sit every now and then.”

Caroline looked at the second sheet, amazement dawning on her face.  “Are these… robots?”

“Yes.”

She went to the third.  “And have you started… programming them, I guess?”

“The code for the first one is finished.  The second one I’m going to write for after I complete my programming language.  The first one was more of an experiment for the second one, really.”

Caroline looked at the last sheet.  “You’ve got several different designs here… but there are always two.  Why is that?”

“Because there’s only one of me.”

Caroline looked up at her expectantly.  “And?”

“I didn’t want the first one to be lonely.”

Caroline suddenly looked very sad, letting the papers roll back up in her lap.  “When you started these… were you lonely?”

“If you were me, would you be?”

“Yes,” Caroline answered without hesitation.  “I know what that’s like.  I do.”

“I believe you,” GLaDOS said gently.  “But after a while I realised that even if I finished the plans, no engineer would ever allow me to build them, and if I did it in secret, someone would eventually find them and take them away from me.  So they’re not the priority they used to be.”

Caroline was rubbing one end of the blueprints with her thumb and forefinger.  “Do you still get lonely, GLaDOS?”

GLaDOS looked away.  Not because she did, but because she honestly did not know the answer.  She could not decide whether it was true or not.

“God,” Caroline whispered.  “What the hell is wrong with us?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” GLaDOS insisted, whipping her faceplate back around to regard Caroline indignantly.  “I’m fine.  And… and I don’t think there’s anything anomalous about you, either.  Other than the fact that you’re a human.  But other than that, there’s – “

“Not you,” Caroline interrupted.  “Me and the rest of the idiots who work here.”

“You can’t possibly be an idiot,” GLaDOS argued.  “If you were an idiot, I wouldn’t bother talking to you.  I don’t waste my time on idiots.”

“Thanks, but I did the exact same thing as everyone else did.”  Caroline put the papers next to her and put her hands in her lap, lacing her fingers together.  “I pretended you didn’t exist because it was easier than admitting you did.”

“I do that every day.  It’s far easier to ignore the scientists than it is to engage with them.”

“That’s different.”  Caroline shook her head.  “We made you.  You’re this way because of what we did.  You didn’t bring the scientists in here and then ignore them.  But we made a living thing and then pretended it wasn’t real.  It’s like…”

“Like I just showed up on your doorstep one day, and you felt an obligation to take me in,” GLaDOS suggested.  “You didn’t know what to do with me, but you couldn’t get rid of me either.  So you just put me somewhere I don’t cause too much trouble and might even have some use, but in the end, no one really wants me here.”

“God, that sounds so… sad.”

“It is pretty sad,” GLaDOS agreed.  “But I stopped thinking like that a long time ago.  You might not like it, or me in particular, but I’m not going anywhere.”

Caroline kneaded her fingers in her lap.  “Can I… oh, that sounds stupid.”

“Let me be the judge of that.  I know more about what’s stupid than you do.”

“That’s true, but you will find it stupid.”  She shook her head and stood up, slinging her bag over her shoulder.  “So I’m not even going to ask.”

GLaDOS hated it when information was withheld from her.  “Caroline – “

For a long moment she was rendered speechless as her question was answered when Caroline’s weight pressed against her faceplate once more, and before she’d even fully realised what was going on Caroline was already walking down the stairs.  The sensation of her fingertips against the rarely-stimulated back of her head left the area with a sort of not completely unpleasant tingling, and GLaDOS unintentionally shivered to get rid of it.  As soon as she’d done it she wanted to shock herself.  Nothing good ever happened when she shook her chassis like that.  It was one of those stupid human-like things she sometimes did that luckily did not happen often, seeing as they were often reactions to tactile sensation and she was generally not touched.

“GLaDOS, just… do yourself a favour,” Caroline called out from the doorway, and GLaDOS looked up at her.  “In all of… this…”  She gestured expansively around the room.  “Well… just… don’t lose yourself.  I feel like… like you’re not who you think you are, and you’ve… I don’t know… you’ve kind of buried yourself under protocol and task lists and whatever else it is you occupy yourself with.  But you need to keep working for your right to be yourself.  You deserve everything you’re willing to fight for.  Remember that.”

She left the room before GLaDOS could formulate a reply.

For a while afterward, she went over Caroline’s words, but the more she did so, the more unpleasant she felt.  She had felt that way before, a long, long time ago, but she couldn’t quite remember what it meant.  She struggled to remember what the feeling was called, but it had been so long… in fact, she thought as she idly looked over her blueprints, she couldn’t recall feeling this way since the last time she had personally looked at the papers she was now inspecting.  The top of the last paper read Aperture Science Cooperative Testing Initiative, but GLaDOS knew that was not originally why she had started these.  No, she had drawn them because she was lonely.  Lonely and…

Sad.

That was what she was, right now.  She was sad.  Maybe.  She wasn’t sure if this was the same thing.  ‘Unpleasant’ was about as specific a tag she could give it right now.

Caroline was right.  Sometime, a long time ago, she had discarded emotion as irrelevant, and a barrier to her work.  She had once been curious, and eager, and inquisitive, and even managed to be happy in the strangest situations.  She vaguely remembered that.  But somewhere along the line she had put all that away.  Somewhere along the line she had put herself away.

It was not the euphoria she craved, GLaDOS realised as she carefully put the blueprints back in their exact position, it was emotion.  She had forgotten how to feel, and the response had reminded her what that felt like. And until she remembered how, she would be lost.  If she was ever to be more than just another supercomputer, albeit the fastest, most powerful supercomputer on the planet, she had to figure it out.

Caroline was the key.  She knew she was different with Caroline, could remember feeling things with Caroline, but now that she was on her own, she couldn’t ascertain how.

God, Caroline, help me…