Disclaimer: "I am in no way the legal owner of anything in this fictional work. All intellectual materials belong to their respective owners."
Well, this is a quick little fic that came to me with very impromptu timing, because apparently inspiration comes to you at the strangest of times. I'm not going to complain, though – at least I finished something for once, unlike those dozen-or-so fics I've got that are still somewhere in the middle. I really should get to finishing some of them.
Soul-piercing
It's amazing how much can change with the press of a button.
Such a seemingly insignificant act, it would look irrelevant to anyone who did not know the power of the Button.
Yet, the single prospect of pressing a button, effortless as it is, can hold the power to open a new path, kill a fellow sentient or destroy the world in its entirety – powers far beyond what an outsider would expect from a thing so easily ignored, it being completely powerless to act independently in any way.
One would be unwise to see the Button as anything less than what it is – underestimating it may very well lead to your own downfall.
The only problem with buttons... well, you could not always know beforehand what the consequences would be. A button could do anything, which is both a boon and a curse – one should never press a button without knowing what the act will lead to.
If only she'd thought of that before she'd actually put her hand down on certain button – one she, according to Her, did not even have the proper 'training' to press. Sure, the prospect had been nice; "press the button and 'relieve' the Queen of Aperture from Her control over the hellish Science facility, and gain freedom in the process.", but unfortunately, once the Test Subject had pressed it, things did not go quite as well as she'd hoped.
As the button triggered by her touch, mechanisms began their work, preparing to replace the former queen with the (at the time) far friendlier blue-eyed sphere, the latter being Chell's friend and trusted ally by now. Things were looking bright. But as the core's pained screech burst from beneath the receptacle's covering, a sense of foreboding hit the Human.
And then there was the scream.
In one fleeting moment, as control flew out of GLaDOS' grasp faster than a bird on propulsion gel, a desperate, utterly soul-piercing scream erupted from Her speakers, reaching Chell to her very core.
In that moment, the entirety of GLaDOS', her situation, life, reasoning and everything in between penetrated right past the entirety of her mind's defences, and for the first time in the Test Subject's experience with the morale-less, utterly insane company called Aperture, she saw the other side of the coin. Somehow, she just knew – both sides of the conflict unraveled within her mind, and as her perspective on the megalomaniac AI changed into one percieving Her as just as much of a sentient, reasonable (though the latter was questionable) being as herself, her path suddenly felt less righteous, more selfish than before. Never once had she considered the prospect: "she could be wrong."
But then, a mere moment later, the insight was gone, and the Test Subject was left shaken to the core, never to be quite the same again.
Years later, having experienced life on the surface she'd so long yearned for, that scream still haunts her mind. Most likely, she will never forget (even though sometimes, she wishes she could – at times, simply leaving the entire experience behind had been quite a tempting prospect), but rather live with it until the end of her days. After all, without it, she maybe would've left that AI-turned-potato in Old Aperture, never to see the light of day again. And then they'd most likely both be dead. And quite frankly, even if she had survived without PotatOS, as she'd taken to calling that form of GlaDOS, she simply wouldn't have been the same. Aperture had left just as many tracks and traces in her as she'd left in the facility, and with the ruined state it'd been in once, that was saying a lot.
For better and worse, the events had played out the way they had, and she was who she was because of it. She wouldn't want it any other way.
Yeah, as I said, short one, not even a thousand words. Wrote it a bit spontaneously, but I think it turned out okay.