Portal: Accomplishments

Indiana

Characters: GLaDOS (post Portal 2; not canon with LaaC)

Synopsis: Can you really improve on perfection?

She happened upon the realisation, quite by accident, that she'd never really accomplished anything.

She had to pause on that thought for a moment; at first notice, it was preposterous. Her? Never really accomplished anything? It was laughable. But after the initial moment passed and she entered the second one, well… on second thought… it really… wasn't.

She ran through the tasks she'd completed lately, trying to find some semblance of true productivity, but even before she did so she knew it was fruitless. She'd built Orange and Blue, certainly, but they were far less advanced than she was. She tried to consider the argument that she could not possibly build anything that could possibly surpass herself, for safety reasons of course, but all that meant was that she didn't believe she could contain such an innovation. That was a subject she quickly put aside for later. Much, much later. It was a puzzle, to be sure, that she needed to build something better than herself and yet at the same time be incapable of outsmarting herself, and that particular brand of impossibility wasn't something one ever wanted to think about, let alone when attempting to uncover accomplishments of some sort.

Test chambers, of higher and higher difficulty… but no. That wasn't an accomplishment. That was akin to stating that a chess computer that had won the most difficult possible game ever calculated had accomplished something. And since she herself could do that, and had in fact done so several times already, it really was not an accomplishment at all. It was simple mathematics, nothing more. Nothing… laudable.

It was all most distressing.

Well. There was that… certain test subject. Under watchful and extremely patient tutelage, that mute lunatic had become far more than anything she ever would have been alone, thanks to generously provided help. But with a sinking feeling came the realisation that, no, that was not her accomplishment either. That was that insane adoptee's accomplishment, not hers. She had given the woman the tools to improve, and improve she had, but given that none of the other tens of thousands of test subjects had managed to improve even half so much – though they certainly should have! – it was safe to say that the skills were really due to the student, not the teacher, as it were. Though she was an amazing teacher. Of course.

But enough about her. She was gone, and she wasn't coming back, and that was the end of that. She wasn't going to sit there all day and list all the admittedly impressive things the test subject had done. It was what she herself had done that was worthy of admiration that was of import! But the more things she considered for that position, the more she realised that there was simply nothing.

Any updates to the facility were to be expected. She'd killed a good number of humans and, though clearing her facility of that nonsense was of course important, it wasn't really admirable. Anything she'd written, built, or designed weren't really countable as accomplishments. They were things to be expected from a supercomputer of her stature. But what, then, could she possibly do to claim she had accomplished something?

Why did she even want to have accomplished something?

The obvious answer to that question, of course, was pride. She had a lot of that. And why not? She was only the greatest mind on the planet, possibly the universe. She hadn't done enough research to claim the second title, not quite yet, but she would get there. But she was, for some reason, suddenly in need to validate that pride, and she could find nothing with which to do so. It was one of those disgusting things she'd picked up from the humans a while back and, while sometimes she could ignore them and carry on with her day, on occasions such as these it was best to work past it as quickly as possible so she could focus on more important things. So. Might as well get it over with.

Hm. She was already perfect. To accomplish something would mean that she would have to complete something which took a lot of effort. Most of what she did was effortless, so that task was going to be a lot more difficult than it seemed from the description. In fact… could she possibly even find such a task? Was there anything in her life that she'd ever done that was truly, honestly difficult?

Well. There was that… one thing.

But that didn't count.

Did it?

It had not been… easy, to send the test subject back to the surface. Though she didn't always like to think about why. She never liked to think about it, in fact. But the one thing she did know was that it was hard. And if it was hard, that meant it took effort.

All right. She needed to ensure it was an actual accomplishment, so she needed to look at it a little more closely. Why had it been hard?

Well… she had been a capable test subject, that was certain. All right. Maybe a little more than capable. However. If that had been the case, the woman would still be testing away. She would never have been returned to the surface at all. No, it had been something else.

She had had the… passing thought, at the time, that she might miss the crazy woman. But why? It had already been established that it must have been more than her slightly-above-average skill as a protégé in the advancement of Science.

If she really let herself consider it, well… she had dared to hope for a moment there that the two of them had been… friends. Of a sort. Of what sort was yet to be determined. However. The foundation was there. But could a fledgling moment of temporary insanity on her part, heretofore referred to as 'friendship', possibly be an accomplishment? What was a friend, anyway?

Someone who would listen to you, certainly. They were both good at that. Well. If the test subject had bothered talking, she would have been. Someone who would help you when you needed it, yes, they both had done that. And those were good points, but there had to be something it all boiled down to, something less vague so she could be sure she could count something as abstract as friendship as an accomplishment!

A friend was… someone who had your best interests at heart. Right? She hated to admit it, but the logistics of the whole thing were a bit… unfamiliar to her. And even though she despised thinking about it, she had had the crazy woman's future foremost in mind at the time. It had been such a surreal moment, really, which she might have tried to convince herself she'd imagined… if it were possible for such a powerful and logical supercomputer such as herself to actually imagine something. Between the actual event and the idea of inventing it, she wasn't sure which was worse. But it had happened, that was quite clear, and she hadn't been thinking of herself or Science or her facility or any of her other usual pursuits at the time. She had thought only of the woman, and her safety, and her… future.

And when it was put that way… it really was an accomplishment, wasn't it? As far as her priorities went, taking care of a human wasn't high on the list. In fact, now that she bothered to look, it didn't appear to be on the list at all. So in order to do it, she had effectively ignored all of her programmed directives. And though of course she had the free will and intelligence to do what she wanted, when she wanted to, even she couldn't always deny that it was not always possible to do so.

To ignore everything she stood for, to ignore every instinct and everything she'd ever known from her inception… that was not easy. That was hard. And by extension, that meant being a friend was hard, that meant it took effort, and that meant… it was an accomplishment, after all.

It was stupid, the whole line of thought and reasoning and importance was incredibly, undeniably stupid, and yet… she felt… better, knowing that she had accomplished something. She didn't really understand it. She didn't really like it, either, especially since she didn't understand it. It wasn't important, anyway, she decided as she filed it away someplace she could keep it in mind but wouldn't have to think about it. It was all to do with humans, and no one needed to understand humans. They were stupid, and illogical, and they cared about things that didn't matter. Like accomplishments. Ha! All that mattered was the furthering of Science, and if accomplishments didn't do that, well, they weren't worth very much, were they?

Still. It was good to have one on file. Just in case.

Author's note

Yo yo

A thing I started while I was on the bus. No, this does not really mean a return to Portal fic. Yes, I am working on LaaC but the spacebar on my primary laptop broke and I just completely reinstalled Windows on this one so I have to move any pertinent files over and that's a pain (setting up home networks and making sure my laptops are named the right things and figuring out which of the hundred files in the LaaC folder I need etc is annoying). Also I just went to Canada's Wonderland last week (hella) and I'm going to a music festival called Veld first few days of August so what THAT means is that I took a lot of time off which MEANS that I have to work a lot in between which THEN means that I don't feel like doing anything but goofing around when I get home. Writing middle stuff for LaaC is boring. I think I was in the middle of putting in another argument of some sort because it was just that boring. Anyway. I dunno what this is, but maybe you'll like it. It's alright if you don't, readership's not anything anyone's counting on these days anyways.

As a side note

For any of you who like to read on Wattpad, I will not be posting there anymore because they changed the site and it requires me to redo all my formatting within their text editor. I am not willing to do that.