Control
To feel accomplished, Caroline had never needed power.
It was in her nature to be humble. The key to true success was simple to her eyes. All it took was a fair amount of ambition, and the real and constant measure of what she could manage herself.
She never wanted more than that. She believed that would be foolish – all the men in her family had proved her right. She would be the one to make the change, and rewrite her own future.
That was why she felt uneasy when her workload began to grow too much.
In the very moment she was hired as Cave Johnson's assistant, Caroline knew she would always have much responsibility on her hands. Thirty years later, she pulled her contract out of the drawer it had dusted in since then, and realized she was handling much more than that.
In her daily overworked routine, she had lost count of the departments that had slipped under her control.
Caroline counted them at three in the morning, in a faint halo of light. It was staggering. She did not sleep for three days. Throughout the months that followed, she never left work without wondering the same thing – if anything were to happen to her, what of Aperture?
She had no answer at all, until it happened. Even when she was assigned as chief of security for the testing tracks, the strict dress code wouldn't let Caroline off her high heels. She slipped one day, on the edge of death, and broke her leg.
Although in a mess of paperwork and replacements, she was granted a brief period away. It was a rare privilege in the Aperture policies. She came back a couple of weeks later, expecting to find her desk and her duties unchanged.
Indeed, her absence had made a mess out of the place.
Caroline wheeled her way to her office in a frenzy of desperate faces. All sorts of employees buzzed around her, shooting questions as if their life depended on it.
She ordered silence, and obtained it. From the back of her desk, studying those dozens of faces, she had the epiphany.
She would need weeks of work to put Aperture back into shape. She would give endless dispositions, and ask for lots of information. But that, in front of it and them all, counted for nothing.
All she realized in that moment – and it crashed on her with the weight of a lifetime – was that her name would never show on any of those efforts. She would work hard, in silence, and vanish without a trace.
Caroline did not need power to be satisfied with herself. It was all about the recognition she did not have – the gaping hole it left in her soul was unbearable.
She hid it to them, as she had never done. For the first time in her life, she included herself in her scheming. She had no idea how it would happen – how could she? – but she swore it anyway.
Someday, she would make herself the queen of this place.