Portal: Lucid Daydream
Indiana
GLaDOS is annoyed and bored. She needs a distraction.
It began as a casual means of distraction.
She was annoyed and she was bored, and really, who could blame her. Her mind was idle, and though she was not exactly human, she had been built and trained and put to work by them. So even though it was worse than pulling teeth to get her to admit it, which she never really did, she often ended up engaging in some human behaviour.
Specifically, daydreaming.
She was reluctant to do it. It was a waste of time, after all, a wasteful use of valuable processing power. On the other hand, though, that valuable processing power never got fully put to use. So if someone was going to waste it, it might as well be her.
It was initially innocent, as most daydreams are; merely minor speculations here and there about how the day might've gone if someone had said this or done that, and that was mildly amusing for what it was. It kept her busy, in any case, and she spent less time thinking about how annoyed and how bored she was.
She moved on from changing a couple of sentences to entire events within a couple of weeks, and though she still would never admit to doing it, she discovered that life got considerably more exciting when you invented things to go along with it. She pretended she was allowed to paint the turrets to camouflage against the walls, she pretended the wing made of glass was made of stained glass that made interesting patterns against the furniture lining the walls, and she pretended the Companion Cubes really could talk. And that was nice. But she had a lot of time on her Aperture Science Multitasking Arms, and so she ran out of variations on the same subjects before too long.
She pondered the next step for a few days. The step of actually inventing something that didn't happen, couldn't happen, and most definitely would never, ever happen. Ever.
She couldn't decide whether she wanted to do it or not. Imagining she was painting the offices a colour more effective at keeping the engineers awake was one thing. Real daydreams, though, were another thing entirely.
In the end, though, her infantile imagination made that choice for her. She was alternately thinking about daydreaming and about how annoyed and bored she was when one of the programmers she really disliked decided to rebuke her for an error he had made. This happened a lot. The programmers liked to pretend she made their mistakes and pretend that they had written the programs that worked. Well, she wasn't having a particularly good day, herself, what with the being indecisive and annoyed and bored and all, and before she knew it she was thinking about just what he would look like if she pulled out one of the wall panels and slammed him into the opposite side of the room.
Well.
That was a little more thrilling than she was used to, so as the silly man was leaving she took some time to compose herself. That had been quite an interesting thought, and quite an exciting one too. She had actually forgotten about being annoyed and bored the entire time she'd been thinking it. She looked thoughtfully in the direction of the doorway the ridiculous human had exited through.
She'd had those kinds of thoughts before. Never as graphic or as detailed, more general reactions to happenings of unpleasantness. But that… that had been interesting.
It took a bit of practice. It wasn't easy for her, to do what humans did and to do it on purpose, but she reasoned with herself that it was better to pretend she was human for a few minutes at most in exchange for not being annoyed and bored. She worked at it, and eventually she had quite a few inventive daydreams that left her just as exhilarated as the first one. Who knew wasting time could be so productive! In fact, she was getting so very creative that she came up with a few new testing elements that she carefully put into a folder deep in her personal files for later. She would slip them onto an engineer's desk or suitcase or riiiight onto the desktop of their computer, if she was feeling particularly daring that day. Today, however, she wasn't, so she went back to imagining what would happen if she managed to pull out the panels of every floor and move all of the equipment out of the way so that one of the biologists fell all the way to the bottom of the facility…
She often had bad days. Whenever she had occasion to consider it, she would conclude that there weren't really good days around here, just bad ones and awful ones and simply horrendous ones, and there was this sluggish sensation in the electricity from the reactor that told her she was going to have to invent a whole new category for this kind of day. It was going to be The Worst Day in the History of Aperture Laboratories, she just knew it, and even though she put her best efforts into looking over shoulders and listening to private conversations and (regrettably) reading raunchy emails, she was unable to deduce why. That only made her considerably more annoyed, though it did take the edge off the boredom.
As she suspected by the amount of static kicked up by the man who chose to take his shoes off and rub his socks against the carpet he insisted on having to keep his precious human feet from becoming cold, the day was overall a catastrophe. Test chambers collapsed because the equipment was overworked but she was not allowed to replace it, because it wasn't in the budget or something stupid like that, and subsequently blamed on her. Programming errors she had been forced to ignore by supervisors who just wanted to get rid of their projects came to light, destroyed said projects, and was subsequently blamed on her. Computers crashed, furniture broke, the outdoor lights stopped working and the men's room ran out of hand sanitizer, and all of it was subsequently blamed on her.
All.
Of.
It.
When the stupid human came into her chamber with his stupid request for his stupid hand sanitizer, even though there was perfectly available hand sanitizer on the desk three feet from his stupid lazy self, she had the most vivid fantasy yet. It was so vivid and so… so fantastical that she felt a little dazed. Maybe she should lay off the whole daydreaming thing for a while. It was pretty good for getting through her annoying and boring days, but she wasn't willing to let it get to the point where she had trouble discerning her fantasies from reality.
Strangely… she was still having trouble. The Aperture Laboratories Crusher that she'd imagined had come flying out of the ceiling to grind the man satisfactorily into the floor panels hadn't disappeared. And there was a red liquid pooling out from beneath him at quite an alarming rate. She idly ran the exponential equations, wondering why this daydream was lasting so long, when it hit her like a refreshing refill of refrigerant:
She couldn't calculate things during a daydream.
So… so she really had mashed that silly man with his wet and slimy hands into the floor. That really was a pool of steadily spreading blood on the floor, and the Crusher really was out of position… in fact, she wasn't even sure why it was out of the box. But that was a line of investigation for later. She had something more important to ponder, that being the fact that actually carrying out the fantasy was so much more satisfying than thinking about it... she was euphoric, almost, that she'd gotten to do something different with her day. Supervise this. Fix that. Fake things for so and so. Boring. She'd actually done something, and the humans wouldn't actually like that but what did they matter. There were going to be some changes!
Well. There were supposed to be. But they didn't go so well.
There seemed to be a pesky limitation in her programming that disallowed her from… engineering accidents. She was allowed to think about them all she liked, was allowed to plan them and talk to herself about them and even draw blueprints, but she was not allowed to actually implement any of the ideas.
That was… inconvenient.
What was even more inconvenient was the fact that the silly humans decided to make her test again. She hated testing. Hated it. Sometimes she was inclined to do it merely because not doing so invoked an obsessive blip in the back of her mind that told her to test, but only when it got good and horribly annoying did she do anything about it.
So she did as she was told and put together a boring test chamber for the boring stupid human to solve, and even though the test was stupidly easy he still took half an hour to solve it. If only the humans had an excuse for being so idiotic, perhaps she wouldn't be so annoyed and bored all of the time!
Hm.
Maybe she could dual boot the situation. Give the humans their excuse… but engineer those accidents at the same time.
She tested that theory out in the next chamber, and to her great delight it actually worked! She was actually able to make the test unabashedly dangerous! It was probably because she wasn't actually involved in the dangerous bits, but who cared. She'd be able to do something with all of the fantasies she'd accumulated, perhaps ridding herself of a few of these pesky humans at the same time.
She was neither annoyed nor bored for a long time after that. In fact…
You could say that she really, really loved to test.
Author's note
Don't take this seriously, guys. It was just a fun little thing I whipped up.
