Chapter Text
Chapter 29: The Devil You Don’t - Part 1
“…but you didn’t think about me when you turned me down, did you?” Caroline said, as she recounted her story, never letting up on her grip. “You weren’t thinking about how you utterly humiliated me when you turned down my offer.”
Some of Chell’s memory had begun to come back, little flashes of moments rather than the whole picture. Yet those faint and slippery memories felt different than the ones that Caroline was sharing.
More than anything, Chell remembered the feelings of those moments, that creeping dread from the past seeping into the panic of now as she stood stock-still, pushed to the wall by the android.
“I fought so hard for you, you know. The others thought I stupid for even suggesting it. That you were too unqualified, that you should stay where you were,” Caroline emphasized. “I really put myself on a line out there for you. I wanted to help you the way that no one ever helped me. I know you would have been the perfect person for the job, and if you had spent more than one second thinking of someone other than yourself, you would have seen that I was right.”
Caroline pressed an arm across her collarbone, and Chell’s eyes darted around the room, trying to figure out just how she would get out of this.
“But no. You proved them right—that no, you didn’t have what it took. Not only that, but you made me look like an idiot in the process,” Caroline said. “As if I didn’t have enough problems with them questioning my calls—as if I could afford that kind of setback.” She leaned further against the arm, shifting Chell’s discomfort from passive to active. “And then you thought you could just walk out.” She laughed. “Oh, no, it doesn’t work like that. None of us can just leave. Especially not after that display.”
At the added pressure, Chell’s fingers scratched for purchase against the seams in bot’s arm, the bot’s hand—the same way she tried before, when GLaDOS grabbed her wrist—
Chell’s hands froze in place.
That hadn’t been GLaDOS.
Just like this—this supposed betrayal—wasn’t GLaDOS, either.
That one who nearly broke her wrist? That one who threw her into testing? That unexpected attitude shift? Dangerous and calm, but calm like a deep river—still on the surface, but a deadly current beneath.
That had been Caroline.
The realization brought resolve back into her body, like a heat creeping into her limbs after winter.
Meanwhile, GLaDOS scrambled to find something to talk about. The AI had never been able to shut out Caroline, so now Caroline wouldn’t be able to shut out GLaDOS—and she was going to make the most of that.
She latched onto an idea, and started. “You are so lucky that no one looked at those paper records. Junior-level architects getting credit for test chambers created before they were hired. Senior-level management getting accolades for leading a department that they never worked with. The inconsistencies are embarrassing, frankly. You did such a lousy job”
“I didn’t need to be careful,” Caroline said. Her head twisted slightly, as if listening to something behind her. “I knew no one would ever go looking, and no one ever did. Because no one else cared about her. I don’t think anyone even noticed when she disappeared.”
“They did,” GLaDOS said. “At least, one person did. I saw the internal inquiry that was opened. You’re lucky you were able to get it closed so quickly. You could have just fired her, but no, that would have been too easy.
“I don’t think the thought honestly crossed your mind that she would say no, did it? But if you had taken the effort to actually speak to her—maybe even get to know her—you could have avoided the embarrassment. But no.”
Chell watched a flash of anger ripple across the android’s face, but Caroline wasn’t looking at her. It was as if she was looking through her, through the wall, through the facility.
“I thought you were supposed to be the careful one,” GLaDOS said. “God, since when did you become the unrealistic optimist? You fought for years—decades!—to establish yourself as the logical one, the calculating one. Yet you refused to calculate half of all possible outcomes.”
“Shut up,” Caroline said.
But Chell hadn’t spoken.
Chell felt a bit of her confusion dissipate—GLaDOS must have managed to speak to Caroline now from within the systems.
“I just don’t understand it,” GLaDOS said. “You didn’t know her, yet you put her up for a promotion? And a significant one, at that? You said it yourself: you put yourself at so much professional risk. And then you put yourself at even more risk by trying to patch the crack in the dam left by her abrupt absence. It’s not like you. Not at all. So why w—”
The voice in Caroline’s head broke off with a note of confusion, parsed something, and then spoke again.
“Oh. Oh,” GLaDOS laughed. “Oh, this is good.”
Something unreadable flashed on Caroline’s face, and Chell couldn’t place it. It wasn’t just anger; it was something else entirely. What was GLaDOS saying to her?
GLaDOS gave another small laugh. “You know,” she started, “you’re lucky no one else was in that room after she rejected you. Otherwise they would have seen you throwing a massive tantrum.”
“I did not—”
“Oh, you did. Like a spoiled child,” GLaDOS lied.
Caroline made a noise and shoved Chell harder into the wall. Chell wheezed, the pressure bearing down on her clavicle. But Caroline wasn’t even looking at her. Her face was fully turned back over her shoulder.
“—threw your clipboard onto the ground—”
A speaker crackled to life. The words were muffled like a bad walkie-talkie, but it was GLaDOS’s voice.
“—papers going everywhere. And then you had to get down on your old knees and pick them all up, because god forbid someone else see any of the things that you wrote about her.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Caroline hissed.
Chell’s brow creased. She also didn’t know what GLaDOS was talking about.
“You might as well have drawn little hearts around her name too while you were at it. Mrs. [REDACTED].” GLaDOS gave a mock dreamy sigh.
Chell’s heart jumped. Her eyes darted to Caroline’s face, searching for confirmation—but Caroline couldn’t meet her gaze and twisted away.
“ “God, you have done nothing but give me a hard time for having feelings for her, but really? This is why?”
“You shut up.” Caroline shoved again, harder, and Chell’s head hit the wall.
“And then you pulled every single bit of information on her that you could legally get away with removing,” GLaDOS continued, voice growing clearer with each word. “Threw it all into a fire. Like a bad breakup.”
Whatever GLaDOS was trying to do, this was only making Caroline more angry. And Chell wasn’t sure how much more of Caroline’s anger she could take. The pressure creaked against Chell’s chest, and Chell’s hands curled harder against Caroline’s arm. She needed to do something, now—while Caroline was so distracted.
Chell widened her stance, bending her knees as much as they would allow. She sank her weight down low and closed her eyes for a moment. Exhaled.
“That’s a lie,” Caroline said. Her bracing arm had followed as Chell lowered in position, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Okay, sure,” GLaDOS admitted. “I lied about the tantrum. But I’m not lying about the feelings.”
Then, Chell tucked in her chin. She shoved herself upward, the crown of her head catching the android under the chin.
Caroline stumbled back and cried out, first in surprise and then in fury as Chell bolted. Her hand jumped up to the underside of her jaw as she steadied herself, making no move to stop Chell as she disappeared through the door. She kept waiting for the pain to jolt through her skull, to flash in front of her eyes, to surge through her jaw.
But nothing happened.
Caroline probed at her jaw again, this time more tenderly. Nothing. No pain, not even any soreness. No error messages, no damage to the bot. As if nothing had happened at.
No pain.
She started to laugh, delight in her voice.
“You’re really going to run? To where?” she called after Chell, while she ran further and further away. She made sure to broadcast her voice through every speaker in the facility. “There’s nowhere you can go where I won’t find you.”
Things fell quiet as Chell disappeared from view.
Caroline took a moment to secure the elevators, the fire doors, the entrances and exits to the facility.
Now there was nowhere for Chell to go.
Once she secured the borders of the space, the rest would be easy. Even that mediocre AI had known this, back when she had murdered Caroline’s workforce. It may have been the only reason for her success—the takeover attempt had hinged on disaster, and yet she’d succeeded.
Chell had physical needs and limits; Caroline did not. The only limit she had was the android’s battery, and that was on a fresh charge. Chell didn’t even have a portal gun this time.
Hardly a threat.
Caroline opened and closed her fists once, twice, as she secured the box that held the AI. She did not want her to access those speakers again.
Chell wanted to run around and exhaust herself? Fine. She could be patient. She was intimately familiar with being patient. But she wasn’t going to remain idle, twiddling her thumbs while she waited for Chell to show up on a camera.
The unexpectedness of Chell's behavior really was a gift. Her reaction to the “betrayal” had not failed to delight, and Caroline hadn’t anticipated that she’d give herself a concussion trying to get away. If she had succeeded in exterminating the woman moments ago, she wouldn't have been handed this opportunity.
She could have fun with this.
Caroline pulled up the live tracking information, and then cursed internally. The AI had not been lying when she’d zapped Chell and disabled the tracker.
“She lied about disabling the tracker, by the way,” Caroline said through her broadcast. “You really think she would give up the only reliable way to track your movements? After all of your history together? Come on.”
Caroline ran her fingers along the tool left behind in the jacket’s pocket, reviewing all of the nearby cameras. There weren’t many in this residential area, but no matter. She’d show up soon; this place was blanketed in cameras.
Caroline began to walk.
Chell sprinted back the way that she came, her heart beating so hard it almost blocked her vision. She didn’t dare look back until she got to her vault door, and though she hadn’t heard anything behind her, part of her feared she would twist and see GLaDOS—no, Caroline—behind her.
But she wasn’t.
Chell’s eyes darted down the hall in both directions before she tore into her bathroom.
“You don’t actually care about her, do you?” Caroline said, through the static of a hallway speaker.
Chell yanked open the cabinets under her sink. A wall of towels greeted her, stacked like a floor-to-ceiling pile of books.
“She’s just a computer,” Caroline continued. “She’s failed at experiencing basic empathy and expressing basic sympathy. Every nice thing she’s ever said? That was me. I suggested those words. Because they never even occurred to her.”
Chell began to pull and pull and pull, a nest of towels rising around her. She felt like an ill-equipped magician, pulling out an endless chain of linked scarfs. Why had she stuffed this cabinet so full?
“She’s just a stupid robot. She doesn’t even have the capacity to feel love. And even if she did, you really think she would ever love you?”
Finally she reached the towel she was looking for. She pulled out the bundle, gingerly setting it on the floor. Then, she unfolded it.
Chell sat there on her knees, staring at the handgun and holster. Then, she took a breath and hiked up her dress, not sure whether to thank herself or hate herself for putting on this stupid thing today.
“And then you chose her instead of me?” Caroline gave an incredulous, static-y laugh that was a little too loud. “Give me a break. They should have turned her into a door mainframe years ago, the way she lets you walk all over her.”
After a bit of fumbling, Chell secured the holster. She double-checked it.
“Even if she did love you, you know it would never work out, right?”
Then, she smoothed down her dress and darted out of the bathroom, swiping a pair of socks off the top of her dresser and then some shoes, then took off down the hall.
“She could build you everything your heart desires and it would still fall apart,” Caroline said. “Love doesn’t work here. It’s a means to an end. And, well. This is the end.”
When Chell’s breaths grew more and more labored, she shouldered open the next office door. Ancient papers fluttered as she sped toward the opposite end of the room, singling out a desk with filing cabinets pushed in front of it. She ducked underneath, shielded from view.
“I wanted to thank you, by the way.” Caroline’s voice was tinny on the tiny wall speaker. “If you hadn’t kissed her, then I wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the moment, and we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”
She tried to regulate her breathing as she pushed herself as far under it as she could, contorting her body in the cramped space. She felt like a child playing hide-and-seek, who had chosen a spot just a little too small.
“I knew that there would be a moment of weakness, just like there was before. But I expected to have to wait a lot longer, after all the damage I did.”
As her breath began to settle, Chell’s brain sprang into planning mode. She began charting out the areas of the facility closest to her and marking off the dangerous ones, plotting out and crossing out potential routes.
Then, she stopped.
So many of those routes relied on her having access to a portal gun. And she didn’t. She wasn’t even sure how she could acquire one without being seen.
These offices were safe—from camera views, at least. But the farther Chell got into the office blocks, the more likely she would be spotted on camera.
Though her eyes tended to seek out cameras everywhere she went, she couldn’t guarantee she could avoid each one. Especially when she was in a rush. Especially when she was on a main path.
Part of her was convinced Caroline would burst through the door and drag her away. But as minutes passed and the door didn’t open, Chell realized GLaDOS must have been telling the truth—the tracker had to be offline.
Caroline wouldn’t let Chell sit here otherwise. Would she?
With shaking hands, Chell slipped socks and shoes onto her raw feet, pulling the laces tight.
“I did set you up for the perfect reconciliation opportunity though,” Caroline said, as if losing her temper with Chell and throwing her into testing had all been according to plan. “But I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Goodness. And for you to be so stupidly forgiving. So thank you for that.” The speaker crackled off, and the room was blissfully quiet.
Chell exhaled, then felt something wet on her face. She wiped under her nose, and the back of her hand came back streaked with red. She stared at it before registering what it was. Then, the pulsing pain caught up with her.
Chell cursed internally, scrunching her eyes shut at the throbbing pain in her face. Just what she needed right now. A broken nose.
With the sleeve of the dress, Chell wiped off as much as she could, but made no attempt to scrub at the crusted-on blood. She stared down, eyes fixated on the cracks in the flooring before she blinked and came back into herself.
Right. She needed a plan.
Chell exhaled and reached for the gun under the dress, gingerly bringing it out. She carefully checked the safety again, making sure it was still on before letting her fingers rest on it, to get a feel for its location without even looking at it.
Though it was far from a portal gun, this could still make holes. It could still rip through fabric—just not the fabric of space-time.
Chell wasn’t sure if it would have any effect against the metal of the android. At best, it could buy her moments of confusion—but, if her broken nose proved anything, confusion had allowed her to break away from Caroline.
Chell’s breath finally came in slower and steadier waves, the clouding adrenaline beginning to drain from her brain.
Okay. Her next move.
If she went through the door closest to her, and wove her way through a few more offices, maybe—
The air circulation kicked on, not a sound that would have registered if the room hadn’t been so quiet. Her eyes flicked up, then she went back to thinking.
Chell was just about to drag herself out from under the desk when she noticed the room was beginning to smell different. A lot different. But familiar, too.
Her memory reached for a match, and dragged back a choking fear.
Chell scrambled, covering her mouth with her hands and her dress. Though she had only encountered this a few times, the smell—combined with the green haze tinting her vision—was unmistakable.
Chell tried to keep her breaths small, holding them as long as she could. But this office space was a lot more cramped than GLaDOS’s chamber, and was filling fast. Chell closed her eyes, even though the gas didn’t irritate them.
It didn’t seem like Caroline’s style to kill her without being able to even watch her die. Maybe this wasn’t as lethal of a concentration? Maybe Caroline was just trying to flush her out.
So if Chell didn’t come barreling out the door, she might shut off the neurotoxin and switch to another room. Right?
Maybe she could wait it—
Chell coughed.
The action brought air sucking back into her lungs, and she coughed again, pulling in even more toxic air. Chell shoved herself upright from under the desk, balance wavering. She coughed, harder, and it took her a moment to orient herself, before she bolted for the nearest exit.
Chell twisted the handle and shoved through the door, clean air rushing to fill her lungs. She halted, coughing hard as her system tried to purge itself from neurotoxin. She braced a hand on her knee, throat stinging.
She blinked hazily, trying to map out a path from here.
“There you are,” a voice echoed from farther down the hallway. Chell twisted to look for the activated speaker, but it was Caroline. And she was just standing there.
Chell twisted and ran, tearing down the hall and not even stopping when a camera caught her eye. This was all moving too fast for her to plot the path most free of cameras—and Caroline already knew her location, anyways.
When she reached a junction, Chell arbitrarily sprinted to the left.
Caroline walked towards Chell. With the hallway such a straight shot, she had a good view. Chell really was quite skilled at this. A good runner, enjoyable to watch. Very healthy, very fit.
When Chell reached a crossroads, she banked left.
No matter. Even though she was out of direct line of sight, it didn't mean she was out of sight altogether. Chell was headed towards areas with even higher concentrations of cameras, areas where she'd be able to track—
An alert flashed. Then another, and another, and another, until they sprinkled her peripheral vision. Caroline reached, pooling the messages into a neat pile before opening them.
A scrolling list of serial numbers flashed, broadcasting that their status had been switched to OFFLINE.
Wait. What had gone offline?
Had the power gone out in a section of the facility? No. She wasn't getting any power alerts.
The inventory system was only spitting out serial numbers, nothing about the individual objects. Caroline pulled the rest of the data and began to plot the objects onto a map.
As she ran down the hallway, Chell heard an angry sound in the distance. Not one broadcast over the speakers—it was a private frustration. Chell didn’t know what else she could be mad about—she had seen Chell turn the corner, and had only seemed annoyed about it.
So what else was she angry about? What had GLaDOS just told her? Chell wasn't about to stop and find out.
“I bet you think you're so clever right now,” Caroline said, just to GLaDOS. “That you're protecting her. But you have to know you’re only wasting my time, just like you always do.”
Another block of cameras went offline, and Caroline suppressed a hiss. She decided to loop Chell back in on the conversation. “This was always meant to be my robot,” Caroline said. “This is my facility. She was just an unfortunate accident, a case study on how not to build artificial intelligence.
“There were other human test subjects when you were gone, you know. Thousands of them. Do you want to know how quickly she went through them? A matter of days. She could have had enough test subjects to last her years. But all she could think about was how none of them were as good as you, that maybe the next test subject would be smarter or faster! She wasn't thinking about the future; she never thinks about the future. She doesn’t know how to think ahead. To plan. To wait.
“Not me, though. I’ve set up pieces that haven’t come into play for years. It’s a miracle that Aperture has survived as long as it has despite her being in charge.
“I’m sure you know she killed every single one of my employees. People who had worked here for decades, people who had devoted their lives to this place. Do you have any idea how long it took to attract and retain the type of talent that Aperture needed? To build that kind of loyalty? She didn't care about any of that. My life's work—gone. In a matter of minutes.” Caroline snapped a finger. “Just like that. Just because she was upset.”
Caroline didn't get a chance to finish that thought, instead interrupted by another block of cameras going out. Caroline floated a digital hand next to the breach that AI had managed to jam her metaphorical arm through, but stopped herself from fixing it.
“Here's a perfect example of how she doesn't look ahead,” Caroline said, hoping that Chell could still hear her. “While we've been having this talk, she's been taking out blocks of cameras. She thinks that she's obscuring your movements. But really, she's leading me right along your trail.
“I've been bringing the cameras back online, of course. But with each block that she tries to hide, I've gotten more and more information on where you're headed. While, yes, I can't see where you are right now, I can see where you've been.
“The list of possible destinations is shrinking, and she’s showing me where she thinks you're going next. This might be even more information than if you’d been on camera the entire time.”
This time, two blocks of cameras on her map went out, in opposite directions. Caroline wasn't sure what she had been expecting the AI to do, but this didn’t surprise her. “Oh, sure, now you're trying to get clever. You had no idea how transparent you were being until I told you, didn't you?” Caroline said, speaking just to GLaDOS. “You may think that you're starting to help her, but it's too late for that. Plus, it's not like you can sustain this. Blocking out one block of cameras is taking all of the strength you have, isn't it? There's no way you could take out enough cameras in branching paths to block all of her possible paths.” Caroline kept walking. “But now that you've been doing this long enough, I know how you're doing it.”
She took a moment to patch up that hole in her defenses, severing any potential access to the power systems that the AI could possibly use. “But that's enough of that.”
With a surge of inputs, every camera came back online.
But Chell wasn't on any of them.
Caroline checked. Then double-checked for signs of movement. Maybe Chell had just stopped to catch her breath somewhere and was standing still. But as she looked, she didn't see her anywhere.
Very well, then. She would just wait for a moment.
Since Chell didn’t know GLaDOS was no longer obscuring her movements, she had no reason to change her behavior. She had been running. She would keep running.
“Did you think you were different? That you were special, somehow?” Caroline said. “That because you had a stronger relationship with her, she would treat you differently in the end?”
Caroline waited.
“I made that mistake too, once. I thought I was special. I thought being close to Cave Johnson would make me important. Safe. I poured my life into this place for over fifty goddamn years, and it still wasn't enough,” she said. “This place killed him, and he took me down with him.”
She waited a bit longer.
“In a way, I almost feel sorry for you. You could have been free from this place forever.” The woman had been given such a beautiful, priceless opportunity, but she had wasted it. She really should have stayed outside. “But you're just like me,” Caroline continued. “You came back anyway, and now this place is going to destroy you, too.”
And Caroline waited even longer than that, until a reasonable-enough time had passed for a human to catch her breath and start moving again.
Chell still didn't show up on camera. On any cameras. In the entire facility.
That didn't make sense.
Caroline had seen the direction Chell ran, and she knew there weren't any back areas for her to squeeze into here like there was with test chambers. This was arguably an even more secure area. So where was the little shit?
A flicker in one camera feed caught her attention, and she backburnered the others. She wound back the footage, this time stepping through it frame by frame. There.
It almost looked like a hitch in the video feed—like a disruption from a power surge. But she knew there had been no power changes; she’d checked again. And now she was seeing other small hitches in several other feeds, too.
As she stepped through more frames, her suspicion mounted. Then, she made an angry sound, seized by the urge to crush something. In the distance, a test chamber crushed itself into a metal singularity.
She had looped the footage.
While Caroline had been busy with the camera blackouts, GLaDOS had been looping the footage of other cameras. For all she knew, Chell hadn't even ever stayed in those blackout zones. She could be anywhere by now. She could even have exited this area altogether!
“Change of plans,” Caroline said, pushing the anger out of her voice. She turned on her heel and began walking at a clipped pace. “You keep running around and having fun. Don’t stop on my account. While you do that, I'm going to go get myself transferred up to the mainframe—where I belong—and delete her once and for all,” she said. “I’d hate for you to think I wasn't going to be fully present for our next one-on-one.”
When Chell got to the next junction, she halted. One path would take her toward the fringes of the facility. From there, she knew—guessed—she could get herself to an area that she knew the modern enrichment center had no control over. Like any of the reclaimed layers between here and the aviary. From there—well, she’d figure it out.
But still she hesitated. She could do that, yes. But what about GLaDOS? If GLaDOS could be siphoned out into a core that could be detached from the mainframe, then it stood to reason she could be removed that way—permanently. If the AI could barely grab ahold of some cameras, how was she supposed to fight off Caroline? She was going to need help.
Chell steeled herself, and headed towards the Main AI Chamber.
The thing that unsettled Chell most about her long walk was just how silent it was. She knew Caroline could see her; she knew she’d headed back into areas with active cameras. In the areas under GLaDOS’s control, Chell knew the AI didn’t like having blind spots. Memories of watching her install new cameras came to mind—sometimes by clumsy maintenance arms, and sometimes by GLaDOS herself, standing up on a raised panel with an array of tools. Chell always continued walking, never stopping to offer help.
And now Chell was standing outside the Main AI Chamber.
She knew she didn’t have a plan. She didn’t have time for a plan. All she had was a handgun—and that was a tool, not a plan.
She took half of a breath and then approached the door, which began to open without the required keycard. Her stomach twisted in time with the chamberlock.
Chell stepped inside, then the lights went out.