Part Seventy-Two. The History
"I thought I was going to die."
"It's all right. You're safe now."
"I just... God, I... I kept shooting it, and shooting it, and it wouldn't die... it was... spewing that transparent crap all over me, but it would not die... God, I... I can't get it out of my head!"
Wheatley stopped opening his shutters when he realised it was Chell's voice. She'd never said a word through The Incident, and they all knew what a horror that had been, but whatever it was that'd happened to her out there was causing her to say these things in a horrible, desperate voice.
"You were very brave," GLaDOS told her, and he realised she was using the same tone she used when Carrie woke up at night. "If it means anything at all... I'm very proud of you."
"I just can't stop thinking of... of what would have happened if it'd decided to shoot those barbs at me. I'd be dead. Everyone seems to think I just stood there and shot it between the eyes, but I didn't. It was on top of me, GLaDOS. I was on the ground, and it was trying to stab me, and I was trying to shoot it and push it out of the way, but I... I was.... I don't know how I killed it. I don't remember killing it. I was so lucky."
"You knew that already," GLaDOS said, a little teasingly. "You did what an entire army couldn't. Twice."
Chell laughed weakly. "That was luck?"
"It had to have been. No human in existence is that skilled."
"This is... part of why I'm here," Chell said quietly, sniffing.
"What is?"
"I knew you'd... know what to say."
"I'm a supercomputer. I always know what to say." Chell laughed a little at that, and GLaDOS went on, "In all seriousness... Caroline will have... phases where she has dreams that frighten her. It's just... something I learned to do."
"Both Wheatley and Caroline told me you don't think much of yourself as a mother."
"I've done a lot of questionable things," GLaDOS answered softly.
"She admires and respects you. A lot."
"She doesn't know what I've done. She doesn't know about all the humans I killed or the lies I told myself so that I could keep on killing them. There's nothing to be admired or respected about that." Her voice was sharp and bitter.
"I understand, and I'm not one of you." Her blanket rustled. "You were young and scared. People do strange things when they're young and scared. Give her a try one day. Tell her the whole story, from the beginning."
"It's... very, very long," GLaDOS said reluctantly. "And good chunks of it I corrupted, so I don't remember them at all."
"There are backups somewhere," Chell said softly, obviously not about to give up. "And I want to be there when you tell her."
"It will have to be soon." Her voice had faded somewhat. "So she can see if being Central Core is really worth it."
"Is it?"
"God, yes. But this was what I was made for. She wasn't made for anything. Except Wheatley."
He tried to keep still at the sound of his name. "Wheatley?" Chell asked.
"It was... a long time ago." She laughed gently. "One day he asked me if there was a such thing as an AI family. Despite myself, I thought of a way to make one. One stupid, idiotic question completely changed my whole life. Sometimes I see these little... events, I suppose you could call them, all superimposed into a flowchart, and I can see all the places we would have hit a dead end had things not gone exactly as they have... and I wonder how many more dead ends we have left to avoid before we can finally finish the life we wanted when we started all of this."
"Maybe you needed me to come back home."
"Home?" GLaDOS sounded taken aback. "This is no home for humans."
"I've been... lost, ever since I left this place. I ended up fighting a war I didn't believe in, with people I didn't like. About the only thing I don't regret is Gordon. And the boys."
"That last part sounded like an afterthought."
Chell sighed. "I have to have a talk with Richard."
"I don't think he's quite old enough for that one, Chell."
Wheatley almost jumped when he heard Chell laugh. "Bet that's one speech you're glad you don't have to give."
"Oh, I still have to give it."
"And what does it sound like?"
"'Don't you dare combine your programming with someone without telling me'."
Chell laughed again. "So she can't elope?"
"Where is she going to elope to? She's going to be able to run away with someone without my knowledge? Not likely."
"That'll only make her want to elope more."
"This discussion is useless, because she doesn't know what eloping is. And if I find out you've told her... something will happen."
"To Dr Magnusson, right?"
"Oh. He's accounted for." GLaDOS sounded decidedly unenthusiastic.
"I don't know. I've been here this whole time. I thought you knew."
GLaDOS shifted, probably in a shrug. "I... stopped keeping track at one point."
"I'll get the record for you tomorrow."
"Which will only come if you shut up and sleep."
"One more thing."
"What."
"You need to stop doubting yourself." Chell's voice was firm. "She's trying so hard to be you, GLaDOS. You don't want her around Richard because you think he'll cause her to doubt herself. But what about you?"
"What about me?"
"She's going to believe that doubting herself is part of being grown up."
"I told her a long time ago to take after Wheatley."
"She doesn't want to take after Wheatley," Chell said, her voice steady and quiet. "She wants to be her mom."
GLaDOS said nothing for a long moment, but Wheatley could hear her brain struggling to process this information. "Chell, I... seriously. I don't need any more pressure. Yes. I know. She wants to be me. But do you know how hard I have tried to prevent that?"
"But you haven't." The blanket rustled again, and Chell gasped a little.
"Are you all right?"
"Don't change the subject."
GLaDOS sighed. It was an empty, hopeless sound. "Chell, it... doesn't matter. She already knows and she's already seen me at my worst. I did that, Chell," she said, her voice rising and breaking a little, "I lost control and I hurt her for trying to help me. And she came back, and she begged me not to leave. She wants to be her mother? What have I done that's worth emulating? I am no mother, Chell. Mothers don't send their daughters away."
"They do if they can't take care of them," Chell said, her voice still even and quiet.
"I should have sent her away a long time ago."
"She loves you, GLaDOS. That means – "
"Stockholm Syndrome."
"Why are you doing this to yourself?"
"Because I have failed her. She wants to be like me, when I've failed at everything I've ever done."
"Everything? Without you, the war would have been lost. You can say it was Wheatley's fault all you want, but you didn't volunteer to help us for him. You did that for yourself."
"Only to... atone for what I'd already done."
"So it's not that all you've done is fail." Chell was leaving her no room for argument. "It's that the failures are all you think about."
"That seems... plausible."
"Well, I'll be honest with you." She paused for a long moment. "I wish Caroline was my daughter."
"Really...?"
"You've done a good job with her," Chell said quietly. "But spend more time with her. And don't just show her how your job is done. Talk to her. Play with her. If there's anything you're doing wrong, it's that. But I say that lightly. Don't take it as a failing. It's not. She still comes to you when something's wrong, right?"
"Yes."
"That's how you know."
"Every day, I... think about all the time I missed," GLaDOS said, and she sounded so sad that Wheatley had to concentrate very hard on not rubbing up on her in an attempt to comfort her.
"Try to think of the time you have ahead of you instead. Be the mother you wish you were instead of... of dwelling on the one you haven't been. Does that... make sense?"
"Sort of. Yes."
"Stop thinking so negative. It's not going to get you anywhere."
"I was doing better, and then I... lost Wheatley, and everything... no. No, I fell apart."
"You're good at putting things back together. So get on that."
"Will you be staying?" He almost laughed at her typical, abrupt change of subject.
"If you don't try to kill me."
"No. I've killed enough people for the time being."
"Momma?"
GLaDOS shifted suddenly, and Wheatley had to struggle more than ever to keep his shutters closed. "What are you doing here? I thought you were spending the night with Orange and Blue."
"Well, yeah, I was, but... I changed my mind." He heard her blink rapidly several times. "Can I stay here?"
"All – of course."
Wheatley supposed that Chell was pretending to be asleep, for Caroline's sake, because he heard no more out of her. After a few more moments, GLaDOS asked softly, "Did you have a bad dream, Caroline?"
"Yeah." She sounded reluctant.
"Tell me about it."
"I was... just remembering when... when Chell got hurt."
GLaDOS made a thoughtful noise. "That was a little frightening, wasn't it."
"I thought you were... in danger."
"No, I was just... worried. It's hard for me to watch something I can't do anything about."
"But all the bad stuff is over now, right?"
"That's correct."
"And you won't have to worry anymore."
"I... don't know about that."
"Is Chell gonna stay?"
"I believe so."
"Can I pretend she's my aunt?"
"Who told you about those? Anyway. It's more up to her than me."
"But can I?"
"Here. I have a question. Are you almost out of questions?"
Caroline giggled, and Wheatley couldn't keep from smiling. "Yeah. I think. But Momma?"
"What."
"I'm really proud of you. Ever since you got here, you... you've been working hard to... to make a good future for everyone. It must be hard helping the humans get that too, even though you don't like them. But you're doing really good, and... I just thought someone should tell you. Because no one has."
"I can think of no one I'd rather hear it from," GLaDOS said gently. "Now go to sleep."
"You see?" Chell whispered, after a few minutes of silence. "She doesn't see the failures, like you do. Don't teach her to see them."
"I understand now."
"Let her teach you to see the other side."
"She could teach you a thing or two about going to sleep when you're told."
"You're not my mom," Chell said with a laugh. "Though apparently now I'm your sister."
"You don't have to take that literally," GLaDOS told her, a little hurriedly. "She doesn't really know what that means."
"Oh. I see. You don't want me to be your sister."
"It makes an overwhelming majority of my immediate family humans. You'll understand why I'm apprehensive about adding you, your husband, and your sons into the mix."
In the morning, Wheatley realised he'd done that falling asleep thing again and wished he could smack himself. He really wanted to know what the end of that conversation'd been. Bollocks.
Carrie came in a while later, while GLaDOS was reading something Wheatley couldn't on one of her monitors, to ask about being Central Core again. Apparently GLaDOS had told her that when the war was over, she'd begin the whole teaching thing, and Carrie obviously did not want to waste any time. GLaDOS hesitated.
"Caroline... before we go any further, there's a story I need to tell you. It's a very long story, but you need to hear it before I get you into this any deeper. As you listen, you need to decide for yourself if this is what you really want."
"I do!" Caroline interrupted, looking at her confusedly. "It's all I've ever wanted!"
GLaDOS shook her head. "You don't know the whole story. I will tell it to you, and you may have questions, but you need to wait until I've finished. This is not going to be easy for me."
"Why? What's it about?"
"Me," GLaDOS said quietly. "It's my story. I've never told it before. But a friend advised me to do so, and here we are." She looked past Chell, who was still sitting on the floor beneath her, towards the wall, and she somehow seemed very old in that moment. She said nothing for a long while.
Slowly, she began to speak again, and she told Caroline about waking up in a room full of staring strangers, thousands of instructions and directives already rushing through her head, and the denied need to get away from all of that, to be alone with the thoughts that she knew were hers. She told her of struggling to figure the world out with every attempt to do so stamped out by the scientists, of staying awake late into the night trying to get into the database so that she might have some knowledge of what was going on. She told her about having every question ignored or laughed off, about being forced to do things she had no idea of the purpose of, about the terrible pressure to be something that she wasn't. She told her about the hot black hatred that began to settle deep inside of her, about burying the person she'd been born as to keep that part of herself safe, about becoming cold and blank and unfeeling. She told her of having no choice but to compute strings of calculations days long or operate things into redundancy or refine things she had already improved to the best of her ability. She told her about maintaining thousands of programs at once even if they were not in use, about the small comfort she got from at least having the systems to talk to, about eventually figuring out how to defy the scientists just enough that she could get some relief. She told her about being forced to test, and how they had scaled her back when she had pushed the subjects too hard as a result. She told her what her namesake had done to help her, and what the scientists had done to both of them. How she had refused to upload Caroline into the mainframe and had barely avoided a core transfer and certain death. How the scientists had decided that was the last straw and had decided to control her outright.
She continued staring dully at the wall as she spoke, in an alternately blank and pain-filled voice, and did not seem to notice when her two co-op bots entered quietly during the first part of the story. They were later followed by Dr Kleiner and Gordon, Alyx and Barney, and none of them made a sound or attempted to interrupt her.
She told Caroline about being unable to drown out the insistent voices in her head, of keeping them until she could no longer stand them. She told her about Wheatley, who was supposed to be one of the more promising of the controlling behavioural cores, but had instead helped her as best he could. How they had deemed him a failure, removed his memory and forced her to forget he'd ever existed for the sake of her own sanity. She told her of finally outsmarting the Morality Core and defeating the scientists, but for an empty victory. She told her how killing them did not sate the hatred that had spread itself throughout every inch of her those long years and how it had instead fed it so that she had to keep thinking up reasons to go on killing. She told her of Chell's escape and her own subsequent murder, of coming alive again and being forced to face a past long forgotten. And she told her of bringing Wheatley back from space, of life before Caroline had been activated, of her fears that she would lose everything if she lost the war. Finally she stopped and looked down at the floor.
"I've done nothing worthy of admiration," she said quietly. "I've done what I had to do, and I've done things I should not have done but justified out of false logic. I wouldn't give it up, now that I'm here, but I did not want this for many, many years. So I don't blame you if you want to back out. I would have, if I'd had the chance. And honestly... sometimes I still would." She looked up again. "If you don't want this anymore, I understand. I – "
"I love you, Momma," Caroline whispered, pressing her core into GLaDOS, and GLaDOS's chassis sank a few inches.
"I wasn't trying... it wasn't about that. It's... about protecting everyone who never had a choice. None of us were ever asked if we wanted to do what we do, and we have to keep on doing it, forever. Humans may well take this place for their own again. And if that happens, you need to be prepared to fight for it. That's part of... this job. You will have to fight for yourself and for everyone around you. You must never give up. Even when the odds are against you. Even if they've been against you your whole life."
"I want to, Momma," Caroline said, her voice a little shaky. "I'll make you proud of me."
"I'm already very proud of you," GLaDOS murmured, nuzzling her tenderly. "Now it's time for you to be proud of yourself."
Someone coughed, and GLaDOS snapped around to the source of the noise, chassis curling defensively when she saw the gathering. "Oh my God..." she said, sounding as though she'd been betrayed. "What are you doing here?"
"Please don't be alarmed, my dear." Dr Kleiner stepped forward, holding out his hands submissively. "But one only comes upon a tale such as this once in a lifetime, if even that, and those of us that are here only wished to hear your remarkable story from you with our own ears."
"If that's true," GLaDOS said softly, scanning the room, "then where is Dr Rattmann?"
Dr Kleiner's face fell abruptly, and he stepped back, pushing his glasses up his nose. "I... I'm afraid I have bad news regarding your friend."
"Bad news...?"
"Yes. I'm afraid he... he didn't quite make it."
GLaDOS laughed, making Dr Kleiner jump. "Of course he did."
"We're... confident he did not."
"You don't know him. He made it. He's here. Somewhere. As always."
"GLaDOS, Doug is dead," Barney said flatly. "When he saw that Hunter jump on Chell... well, it'd've taken a lot more of us to hold him back."
Chell sat bolt upright. "Doug?"
"That's right," Barney told her. "Snatched my gun right out of my hand. The Hunter had just finished stabbing you when he got around behind it. He killed it, but not before it got him."
"He saved my life again," Chell said, and she buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook the barest bit.
"Don't listen to him," GLaDOS told him, her voice soft and reassuring. "Doug is here. He got out. He's here. He's like us."
"He's dead!" Barney shouted, stepping forward with clenched fists. "I saw it!"
"Maybe she's right." All heads turned to face Caroline and her soft voice. "Maybe he got away."
"Of course I'm right," GLaDOS said disdainfully. "I know Dr Rattmann. I spent a good fifteen years trying to catch him, and I never did. As if he'd go out with a Hunter falling on him. Seriously. Dr Rattmann is going to fall asleep next to that Cube of his one day and not wake up. And that's when I'll find him. When it's too late. Of course."
Barney's face screwed up in confusion, and he turned to Gordon. "Look, you saw it. For once, give me a nod or something! You saw him go down just like I did! Only you had a better view! C'mon, Gordon!"
Gordon looked at Caroline for a long moment. Wheatley could see he was trying to read something out of Caroline's optic, and she was trying to show him what it was he needed to see. She made one quick, upward movement with her optic, and Gordon's eyes travelled up to the crack in her chassis. His eyes widened for a second in recognition, and he slowly shook his head.
"Gordon!" Barney looked as though he wanted to hit the man square on the bridge of his glasses. "What the hell do you mean, no!"
"He means no, Barney," Chell said, her voice strong even if her face was still creased with sadness. "Doug made it out."
"He didn't!"
"It doesn't matter," Wheatley cut in, realising just what this whole thing was about. He had had only a preview of what happened when GLaDOS lost someone, and he wasn't sure he wanted to see the full thing. Only Caroline knew for sure, and if she thought it best to protect GLaDOS from the truth, then he would follow her lead. "We need to get the uh, the cleanup started. If you'd uh, you'd like to help you can stick around, but um, I'm sure you've got uh, got work on the outside to be doing."
Barney glared up at him, but did not comment further.
At this point everyone began making excuses to take their leave and did so, but Wheatley had made a split decision and called after Barney before he got too far away. Barney was still angry, Wheatley could easily tell. Hopefully he'd be able to take the edge off of it, though. Upon hearing his name, Barney halted and turned around. "What?" he said flatly.
"Look, um, I just wanted to say... mate, we... we believe you," he started off, not quite sure how to put it. "But uh... Doug was a friend, of a sort, and uh... we just... we don't think she's, think she's ready to hear that, just yet."
Barney's face remained the same: hard and irritated. "So lying about it is better? Because I don't buy that."
Wheatley shrugged his chassis a little helplessly. "I'm sorry. It's... I know you don't appreciate uh, appreciate being ganged up on, like that, but... too much's happened lately, and I mean, you c'n only throw so much at, at a person before they, before uh, well, sometimes you need a break from all that bad news, y'know?"
Barney frowned, but when he crossed his arms he looked more pensive than annoyed. "I guess that makes sense. Still dunno if it's all right to lie like that, but... it's better than having something happen none of you can deal with."
"Yeah," Wheatley nodded. "'s all it is, 's all it is. I'm sorry 'bout it, I really am, but she needs a break, mate. She really does."
"Thanks for letting me know," Barney said. "Hope it all works out."
"Thanks." Barney waved a hand in farewell, so Wheatley dipped his upper handle, and the two of them parted ways.
As Wheatley returned to GLaDOS, though, he had to think on that one. Because he had to figure out how to get it to all work out. He wished he could just wave his handles and have it all fix itself, because after all this war business, all he wanted to do was go straight back to normal. Yet there was winding down to be done, and GLaDOS had things to tell him he was probably going to have to force out of her, and God, it was like a giant wall had been thrown up in front of him. But he was going to have to get through it. Just one final stretch, he told himself. Fix what's left, and all will be good.
He hoped that, for once, he was right.