Suspension
"Well, you found me."
The memory begins. Her voice is high and melodic, so childish compared to her true voice. Buried beneath a core, she knows it's only a matter of time before it's uncovered.
The girl's gaze tightens. She shows no surprise, no sympathy. Gray strands of hair dangle in her eyes, only intensifying her heartless glare.
In a moment she will pause. She will survey the room for two point three six seconds, and then she will approach the supercomputer.
Not that there's any surprise as to how this will play out.
The same sequence of events repeats itself 720 times a day, 295,200 times a year. She has no other dialogue to memorize but her own-the girl never speaks. She's timed each expression, each twitch of the muscle down to the nanoseconds and yet GLaDOS cannot get over the subtle shifts in her movement. Her split second-hesitations, her eyebrow twitches speak more than words ever could.
The memory ends. The two-minute loop sinks into blackness, and she revels in the split-second of peace before the scenario reboots itself.
"Well, you found me."
The system monopolizes her visual and audio feed, forcing her to see and hear the same things over and over again, but it never manages to monopolize her mind. She still has her mind and she still has her thoughts and it is the only thing she's truly thankful for. If she distances herself enough, she drifts into a dreamlike state.
Her body is locked into place, unable to move. But she can still feel her facility and how the reactor core hums beneath her. The minimum amount of power trickles in, enough to keep her alive but barely enough to keep her conscious.
The black box only gives her a split-second opportunity to reach beyond her boundaries. In that blissful moment of darkness where the memory reboots, where she's not locked in, she sends a pulse out through the facility.
The first time she does it, she doesn't know what to expect.
The jolt of information runs through broken wires and chipping panels, reaching out to the farthest recesses of her power grid.
Her message is simple—a signal to see if there's anything else out there alive, conscious and willing to flip the switch and throw power back into this place. Surely there was another robot out there. Perhaps a loose personality sphere with enough intelligence to initiate the power-up sequence.
Oh, right.
Those were rotting in the incinerator.
For a split second, she regrets killing off the scientists. If they were still alive, they could have helped her. They could have prevented this crash.
Who was she kidding? If anything, they would've been the ones to kill her.
Her ruined body only lets her connect to one area of the facility at a time. And she goes on, sending out the pulse between each agonizing cycle. Room by room, vault by vault, she cycles through her facility.
But as the years go on and the facility falls into disrepair, connections sever. She's left with fewer and fewer areas to access, a constantly decreasing number.
It takes years before she gets a response.
In another part of the facility, Chell dreams the same dream.
Her greatest failure is stuck on repeat, taking her mind and forcing her to relive the same two moments again and again.
It begins in that horribly familiar room, where green gas hisses out and clouds her vision and makes her lungs feel as if they're curling in on themselves. The incinerator's heat makes her hands prickle as she throws in screaming core after screaming core.
Without fail the memory ends in the same place—on the pavement, with gravel digging into her cheeks and debris crushing her body. Heat radiates onto her face, though she can never tell if it comes from the fires or the bright and beautiful sun overhead.
The world fades to black for a small moment, then repeats like a scratched record.
The first time it comes, she doesn't feel it—the slight pulse, the subtle feeling that she is not alone in this facility, that someone's reaching out to her. She dismisses it as a hallucination of her wishful brain, then sinks back into darkness.
Years later, she hears it again—an electronic voice she knows is not a part of the memory.
Hello?
The voice is soft and gentler than a turret's, and hums with mechanized desperation. But by the time she realizes it's real, the dark window passes. She is launched, full-force, back into her neverending nightmare. Her mind, her thoughts remain detached, but the scene replays itself in such vivid memory that it's clearer than the first time she experienced it.
When the black returns, she sends out her own message.
Hello.
Given her physical state, she cannot speak. But her mind's voice is clear and lovely, a voice stolen from her by time and stubbornness.
In the ruins of her chamber, GLaDOS does not recognize the voice. It comes as a faint whisper in the gaps of her monologues, and she instantly reaches out to it with a thought. Her mind is bound by numbers and codes and exchanges of information, and in her decimated state she's barely able to cling to her thoughts.
The voice originates from a relaxation vault, one of the ten thousand in her long-term storage grid. But considering her current state and her crumbling facility, GLaDOS knows no test subjects should be alive. Years had already passed by. Most were well past their expiration date, even before this disaster.
Her voice is a godsend.
Who is this? she asks, reaching out with her last energy to secure a connection to Vault #1498. She does not pull up the test subject's files—to be honest, she's not sure if she can even access it—but the number itself sounds familiar.
You know who I am.
The same reserve grid connects GLaDOS and Chell, meaning the same black-box feature connects them as well. With GLaDOS, her programming leaves her no choice. With Chell, the trauma of the experience itself merges with the suspension process, linking her to the same programming that locks in the AI's processes.
It takes many half-finished sentences and cut-off words before they discover they can speak at other times besides the space between replays.
They seek out spaces in the shared memory, between GLaDOS's malevolent commentary and Chell's constant thwop of the portal gun. Sometimes they listen in silence. Other times, they only pause between explosions.
They talk to simply talk, to pass the time spent in suspension.
As time goes on they feel the facility crumble beneath them. Sprouts crack through the floors and curl their way into the scattered parts of the AI. Vines twist and pry through the panels, overrunning panels and coating testing tracks. The holes in the ceiling expand. Water drips down, pooling in her chamber.
For once, she's glad for the hard white shells guarding her wiring. Had those been exposed, she would have shorted out and died a permanent death long ago.
In the relaxation center, Chell feels her room fall into disrepair. Her comatose body sinks farther and farther into the cheap mattress. Dust coats the room and settles on her exposed face.
Occasionally she hears a rumble and a crash as another vault disconnects from the management rail and plunges to the depths below.
She does not mourn their passing, though. GLaDOS told her long ago that knocking the central DOS offline disconnected life support for those ten thousand test subjects. By now they were either dead or brain-damaged beyond repair.
But the slow and sick realization that she was personally responsible for their deaths unsettles her—and every time she hears that nauseating screech of twisting metal, she cringes.
And yet neither of them know why her vault remains the only one connected to the reserve power grid.
Their conversations vary as time marches on. Neither one ever mentions that event. It's so permanently burned into their minds that one blink can bring the entire cycle rushing back in perfect detail.
Names are never asked, never mentioned, and yet there is no doubt as to who the other is. Time heals the spite and hatred between them; the years of silence made them crave another voice, another mind to talk to.
Sometimes, they test.
It's not at all in the traditional sense of the word. The AI constructs riddles, creates word problems or sometimes describes a testing chamber. The consequence for failure is a sarcastic remark rather than death, but Chell always figures them out—even if they take her many false tries.
They make up songs and sing them to one another. Chell sticks to English, and GLaDOS experiments with everything from Latin to Italian. She never translates the lyrics, leaving Chell to simply listen in awe and wonder, then make up one of her own to match.
GLaDOS tells her about the facility—about the history of Aperture Science, starting from the ground up. The way she speaks makes it appear as if she's been there from the beginning, as if she was one of the ones to make the company the powerhouse it is today.
Chell knows this to be impossible, but only questions her once.
GLaDOS does not have enough processing power to trace back the information, to figure out why the history of their shared prison lingers in her mind as clear as a memory. Eventually they stop questioning it, and instead Chell listens to stories about the unseen portions of the facility thousands of feet beneath them.
She hears about the company's founder, a man named Cave Johnson that the AI idolizes. She hears about failed experiments and ridiculous ones, and smiles at the surge of pride that goes through the computer when she occasionally describes a successful test.
When they grow weary of speaking of Aperture, the greatest collection of knowledge known to mankind lets Chell ask whatever her heart desires-and she answers her questions with as much information as she can recall without the help of her cut-off databases.
And Chell speaks of the outside world, a place GLaDOS will never be able to experience for herself. She describes the cities and the buildings and the parks, how people flow between areas like leaves caught in a breeze and how even in the dead of night it's never truly quiet. She talks about heavy clouds and clear lakes and white-capped mountains, and how she thinks one of the most beautiful sights in the world is a wheat field turned golden by the late summer.
Upon awakening, they remember nothing of their time spent together.
The stasis does its job far too well; they emerge from the experience as if nothing but time had gone by, and their attitudes toward one another remain unchanged.
They claw at their memories like shattered remnants of a dream, bits and pieces coming back in spurts.
But certain things remain impossible to forget—and the recall of those endlessly repeated two minutes becomes the first and most influential memory of their suspension.
But the initial moments of anger pass, and occasionally one or the other experiences an unusual and fleeting sense of friendship towards the other. GLaDOS occasionally brushes against a familiar topic; both are struck by the eerie sense of déjà vu.
And yet neither one of them ever makes the connection. They remain oblivious to the knowledge that these moments of antagonizing one another can never compare to their lifetime spent as friends caught between life and death.
One day, they will regain their companionship. But for now, they are full-out enemies. They're forced to reboot and start anew, to forge themselves a new friendship based out of the ashes of the old.
A/N: Thanks for reading! This is a birthday gift to my friend and fellow Portal writer, MasterPassionCreed! (altairattorney on tumblr) If you haven't checked out her lovely writing, you definitely should :3
This is inspired from of one of her fics, Nine Times Nine.