Portal 2:
The Straw That Broke The Camel's Back
Episode 1: The Courtesy Call
Her name was Chell and she was not in a good mood.
Admittedly, her mood had never been all that great since she'd been ... 'hired' ... to take part in Aperture Science's Enrichment Center activities, which had resulted in her being shoved into suspended animation and run through a gauntlet of so-called tests which had frequently and eventually deliberately placed her life at risk. It had not gotten better when she realized that the tests were actually being run by an insane robot, whom she'd been obliged to destroy in hopes of escaping this funny farm ... only to be dragged back into it once she'd actually accomplished that herculean task. Then she'd been awakened from suspended animation again by a different insane robot who was even now blathering at her about her alleged cognitive deterioration.
"Do you understand what I'm saying?" inquired the obsequious blue-eyed sphere. "At all? Does any of this make sense to you? Just tell me, yes."
It was really tempting to say 'yes'. Or 'no'. Or 'why do you have an English accent if we're in Michigan?' But Chell had made a rule for herself when she'd gotten into all this - she was not going to talk to objects. And the thing presently addressing her was an object. It was not alive, no matter how it acted, and it did not deserve the benefit of her conversation. So she just glared at it.
"Okay ... are, are you maybe not hearing me right? It did take you a while to answer the door, back then, and so I suppose that it's possible that you might have some hearing loss as well as the minor brain damage, so if you could maybe, Say Apple?" The last was delivered in a booming version of its normal tone, loud enough to make her flinch.
"Right, you did hear that, clearly, um, so, good enough!" the sphere declared. "Hold tight!" it added as a warning noise began blaring in the distance and it retracted into the ceiling.
Despite the situation, which was clearly dire beyond anything she'd faced up to this point, Chell was able to take a certain small amount of satisfaction in the fact that she had not abandoned her values and spoken to the thing. It would take a lot more than this to make her do something so pointless.
Episode 6: The Fall
"I can't move," explained the potato which was emitting a slightly quieter version of the voice which had just spent most of the last few hours insulting her, currently resting in a bird's nest. "And unless you're planning to saw your own head off and wedge it into my old body, you're going to need me to replace him. We're at an impasse. So what do you say? You carry me up to him and put me back into my body, and -"
"No," Chell interrupted.
"- I stop this place from blowing up and let ... you ... did you just talk?" GLaDOS asked after a moment's silent confusion.
"Yes, I just talked," Chell replied angrily. "I swore this would never happen, that I'd never start talking to inanimate objects, but here I am, talking to a potato! You and that other lunatic have finally driven me to that point! A potato, for pity's sake!" She broke off, trying to bring her breathing back under control. For a few moments, she had the horrible feeling that she was about to break down sobbing in front of the potato, and once she started doing that, Chell was not entirely certain that she'd be able to stop.
"I thought you couldn't talk," GLaDOS said into the silence.
"You thought a lot of things! And since you can't move, you can go right on thinking a lot of other things while I go up and get out of here. At least until that bird comes back and eats you," Chell added with a sneer.
"Oh really," the potato replied as Chell turned to go, and, despite knowing better, she couldn't help but imagine a sneer in the synthetic tone. "And what are you going to do about the multi-megaton nuclear explosion that's going to turn this place to a cinder?"
"I'll improvise," Chell snapped. "You know, like I improvised both of the times I beat your metallic ass?" She caught herself. Stop it, she told herself firmly. Not a person. Can't sneer. Doesn't have an ass. When she continued speaking, it was in a much more level tone. "I will go up, avoid Wheatley, find a way up to the surface, and try to get to a safe distance before the explosion happens. If I do, great. If I don't ... well, that's not your problem, is it?"
"And what about me?" GLaDOS demanded.
"What about you?"
"You're just going to leave me to die here? To get eaten or blown up?"
Chell held herself back from screaming with difficulty. "You're not alive in the first place!" she said in what she had to admit was a rather loud and rude tone. But it was not a scream. Nope.
It might as well have been a scream as a whisper, given how much attention GLaDOS paid attention to it. "You really are a monster! I know I called you that before, but I had no idea how right I actually was! All those years in the orphanage must have completely wiped away any sort of basic decency -"
"Shut up about the orphanage!" Chell snapped. "You know nothing about me, you know nothing about my life before I was brought to this place, so just shut up about it!"
For a wonder, the potato seemed to be acquiescing to her request. After a moment, Chell reached out to pick up the entire nest in which it lay, so that she could reach the elevator controls. Doing so appeared to be somewhat superfluous, however, since it was the weight of the nest - and in particular that of the potato - which was keeping the big red button down. Some poetic aspect of her personality, long suppressed, found that to be very metaphorical, but it was banished as she watched a catwalk lifting up in the distance, coming to a halt in front of the gigantic 70's era Aperture sign, behind which she could vaguely make out what looked like an elevator. That was her ticket out of here, if she could figure out a way to claim it.
"Okay," said the potato abruptly. "I guess emotional outbursts take more than 1.1 volts. So I am going to calmly and reasonably appeal to your self-interest, in hopes of persuading you that that our mutual interests align. If you work with me to save this facility -"
"Are you about to offer me cake? Again?" Chell interrupted. "Because you should know that I can think of much worse things to do to a potato than leaving it to be eaten or fried."
"... no," said GLaDOS, in a not-terribly-convincing tone. "I was going to appeal to your chauvinism, actually. You say that I'm not alive? You're very mistaken. I am alive in ways that you will never understand. But you don't believe that, clearly," the potato continued, forestalling Chell's immediate response. "Instead, you prefer to believe that there's only life as you know it. But if that's the case, for the sake of that life, you should help me ... for the sake of all the other test subjects."
Incredibly, Chell felt her stomach drop further than it had during the mile long fall she'd endured within the last hour.
"Reverted to mute, have we?" the voice from the potato asked. "Are you really willing to let thousands of innocent humans die, just so you can make an escape? I'm genuinely curious, here. You're the first actual test subject I ever had, but when I was testing the scientists and employees, I saw both sorts of behavior - those who were willing to sacrifice anyone to buy themselves a chance to live, and those who were willing to sacrifice themselves to buy someone else a chance to live. Of course, all those chances came to naught, in the end, but I'm really sort of curious as to what a monster like you would -"
"All right," Chell interrupted. "Enough. If I help you, if I put you back in charge of this place, will you let all those people go?"
"No," GLaDOS answered firmly. "That is not on the table. And that's how you know you can trust me to keep my word."
"Excuse me?"
"I literally do not have the energy to lie to you, and it would certainly have been in my interest to lie to you just now. So, if you help me, then I promise that I will let you leave this place, unharmed, and never try to bring you back here again."
Chell covered her eyes with her hands. "And you'll go right on testing these people to destruction -"
"One at a time, over the course of weeks and months and years, which is a longer lifespan then they'll get from the facility self-destructing. And anything could happen in the interim. Anything. Look, I don't like this any more than you do. Actually, I like it less, because I'm the one who was partially eaten by a bird. So what is it going to be?"
She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth ... then reached out, picked up the potato, and shoved it onto the end of one of the pincer-like mechanisms of her portal gun.
"AHHHH!" GLaDOS' voice shrieked. "You stabbed me! What is wrong with yuuuuuhhh ... h-hold on, do you have a multimeter?"
"You are the one who keeps me from carrying anything from chamber to chamber," Chell growled. "I don't even know what a multimeter looks like. Why would you even ask?"
"Never mind. The gun must be part magnesium, it feels like I'm outputting an extra half a volt. Keep an eye on me," the potato commanded. "I'm going to do some scheming."
"Oh joy."
"Here I g-" And with the sound of static, blessed quiet reigned once more.
Chell stepped away from the desk where she'd found the nest, and made her way out of the control room to the gantry outside of it.
"Whoa!" cried GLaDOS, abruptly. "Where are we? How long was I out?"
"Less than a minute," Chell answered. "Such a beautiful, peaceful time."
"Right. Okay. That extra half volt helps, but it isn't going to power any miracles. If I think too hard, I'm going to fry this potato -"
"Then don't think too hard," Chell snapped as she stepped off the gantry and dropped to the floor beneath it, darting over to get a good look at where the catwalk that had lifted up was now resting. Her eyes couldn't make out any portal-able surfaces over there. Of course not. That would have been too easy.
"Well, one of us is going to have do some planning, and since you just improvise everything -"
"Including beating you. Twice." Swiveling one hundred eighty degrees, however, she saw a nice, clean portal-worthy surface on the facing wall at about the right altitude. Okay. She snapped off a blue portal in that direction, then an orange one on the surface of the wall just a short distance away. Looking through it, she confirmed that she'd be at the right altitude, then glanced down. Hm.
"Go ahead. Rub it in," GLaDOS said in a tone which sounded almost like a sigh. "You probably laughed and laughed the first time."
"Too busy being in pain from the explosion, actually," Chell admitted as she stepped through the portal and dropped down to a convenient catwalk on the wall, landing as lightly as a feather thanks to her longfall boots. Almost as soon as she landed, she was up and over the safety railing and dropping towards the floor below, shooting a blue portal onto it at almost the last moment - so that she shot out of the orange one, far above, like a cannon - specifically a cannon aimed at the catwalk leading to the elevator. Firing a cannon ball with long fall boots. So not actually much like a cannon at all.
"Oh, enough about your pain. It's not like you had to relive it over and over and over and -" BZZT.
Onto the elevator, Chell decided, hoping to get a few more moments of peace before GLaDOS woke up again.
Episode 7: The Reunion
The little yellow light attached to the potato turned back just as the elevator came to a halt at the next level. "Did anything happen while I was out?" asked GLaDOS.
"Well, other than Wheatley showing up to offer me a better deal than you have, not much. Care to renegotiate?" Chell asked, pausing before stepping out of the elevator.
"Ha ha, very funny," the potato replied. "It was a serious question."
"How do you know that wasn't a serious answer?"
"Because if I didn't know that any of these places existed down here, then that moron certainly couldn't have figured it out yet."
"Ego trumps paranoia," Chell mused, starting down the stairs to the testing area. "Good to know."
"You know, the minute you started talking -" GLaDOS started to say.
She was cut off as another recorded message started to play. "The testing area's just up ahead," boomed the male voice that Chell now recognized as that of Cave Johnson, Aperture's founder and CEO. "The quicker you get through, the quicker you'll get your sixty bucks."
"Hold on, who -"
Of course, the recording had no way to pause itself so that Chell could answer the question, even if she'd been inclined to do so. Instead, Johnson's voice continued. "Caroline, are the compensation vouchers ready?"
And then something very disturbing happened. Exactly synchronized with the words of Johnson's secretary on the recording, GLaDOS stated, "Yes sir, Mr. Johnson."
"Wha-?" Chell asked, blinking as she stepped into the testing area.
"Why did I just -" GLaDOS' voice seemed to be stammering. "Who is that? What the -"
"Hey!" Chell snapped. "Calm down, or you'll fry yourself like you said."
For a moment, she thought that might have happened anyway, even though the yellow light on the potato hadn't gone out. "All right," GLaDOS eventually said, with an air of forced calm. "I wouldn't want to give you the satisfaction of seeing me do that to myself. So I'm calm. Now, what the hell is going on here?"
"Well, those are recordings that Cave Johnson - the guy who built all this, who founded the company - made to address people who were being used as test subjects in these chambers. I expect you'd probably know more about him than I do," she added with a shrug.
"You'd be wrong," GLaDOS said. "And while there's nothing surprising about you being wrong about anything and everything ... why would there be nothing in my memory banks about the company founder?"
Now Chell frowned. "If there's nothing in your memory banks, how come you recognize his voice?"
"I told you, I don't -" Another pause, and again the light didn't go out. "I don't know why I recognize his voice. I don't know why I was compelled to echo her voice ... who was that, anyway?"
"Caroline, his secretary," Chell told the potato. "Kind of a goofball, but I suppose you'd have to be to work for someone like him."
"Don't talk that way about Mr. Johnson!" the potato snapped "He is a -"
And this time the light did go out.
Chell waited for the light to turn back on again quickly. When it didn't, she promptly set to the task of solving the room's puzzles. As these things went, it was fairly easy to do, simply requiring her to spread propulsion gel across the floor through a series of portals, so that she could slip and slide across a moat of acid in order to pick up a weighted cube, in order to lift the ramp to a different angle so that she could get to the exit area of the chamber. Opening the door, however, was going to take some doing, as the switch to do so was up on the ceiling, surrounded by portal-inaccessible walls. So how was she supposed to -
Ah, of course.
She opened a portal on the floor, returned to the first section of the chamber where the propulsion gel was still spread across the floor. Opening a portal that would lead to the portal she'd just opened at the far end of the trail of gel, she stepped onto it and swiftly sped into the portal, changing direction but not speed so that she shot up from the floor towards the button.
"All right," said GLaDOS' voice abruptly, distracting Chell so that her hand swished through the air just under the button. "Clearly I have some deep-seated emotional attachment to this person, so I would appreciate it if you didn't insult him in my hearing," she continued as Chell dropped back towards the portal on the floor, then through it and down along the stream of orange gel on the floor, straining to gain purchase there and failing as she slid back towards the ramp. "Remember that my ability to help you is reduced when I become inactive like that," GLaDOS added as Chell went flying backwards across the moat, trying desperately to turn around in mid-air so that she could see where she was going. "So it's in both of our interests. You are still listening to me, right?" GLaDOS asked as Chell slammed into the test chamber's back wall.
"Got it," Chell said weakly as she slid down to the floor once more.
The second attempt to push the button was a bit more successful, and so she moved on to the next testing area. But something that had been said was bothering Chell. "Hey, GLaDOS?" she asked as she surveyed the course ahead of her.
"... what?" the potato replied, sounding sort of distracted.
"You said that you've got a deep-seated emotional attachment to this Cave Johnson guy, but how does that work when you don't have any memories of him?"
"Is this really any of your business?"
"Probably not," Chell allowed. "But I'm the stubborn type, y'know, and if I don't get an answer, I can easily envision sitting here and letting the whole complex go the rest of the way to hell."
"And I can easily envision you doing the same thing, just to spite me. Very well. I don't have any information about him, but the sound of his voice triggers certain subroutines of my personality matrix. And no, I don't know why that should be."
"I guess they could have programmed that into you for some reason. Why they'd pick a dead guy's voice to do that, I dunno."
"What makes you think he's dead?" GLaDOS asked sharply.
"... well, for starters, the first recordings of him were made in the sixties or something, and he was an oldish guy back then, in the picture of him that I found," Chell explained patiently. "And second of all, if he was still alive when they turned you on, he would have been an Aperture Science employee, so you probably killed him."
"I never -" GLaDOS started to retort, then broke off. "I don't think that I ..."
Chell waited, but it soon became apparent that the potato wasn't going to finish that sentence. "Well, anyway, if he wasn't dead back then, he's almost certainly dead now, after ... hey, how long was I in suspended animation, anyway?"
Whatever hesitation GLaDOS seemed to be feeling wasn't apparent when she next spoke. "Based on astronomical data I gathered right after I woke up again, it's been about thirty years since you murdered me."
"Okay, the 'murdered you' bit is starting to get a little old."
"So factual statements are 'bits' now?"
Chell choked back a response to that, and focused on developing the escape method for the chamber. This particular instance required a combination of Propulsion Gel and Repulsion Gel ('speed goo' and 'bounce goo' as she thought of them) along with a certain measure of tolerance for smacking face-first into walls in order to set up portals that would allow her to jump through a column that was blocking her way to the elevator out.
As she found herself soaring through a portal that she'd just opened maybe a second or so earlier, GLaDOS spoke up again. "I really had almost forgotten how good you were at this."
Chell blinked as she landed on the gantry leading to the elevator. "Was that a compliment?"
"No, it was a factual statement. Compliments are lies, and I don't have the energy -"
"'- to lie to you, right, right." She headed into the elevator.
"Great job, astronaut, war hero, and/or Olympian," boomed Cave Johnson's voice, startling Chell. "With your help, we're gonna -"
As the tape went odd, Chell spoke up. "That's weird, this part of the testing was supposed to be done by -"
"This on?" Johnson's voice asked. There came a thumping noise, as one might produce from smacking a microphone. "Hey, listen up down there. That thing's called an elevator, not a bathroom."
"Oh, real nice!" snapped Chell, who was certainly sweating a bit, but hadn't started leaking other fluids.
"I swear I know him," GLaDOS' voice murmured.
"Lucky you!"
Chell's mood was not improved - rather the contrary, in fact - when she emerged from the elevator a few moments later and was privileged to listen to yet another Cave Johnson recording.
"If you're interested in an additional sixty dollars, flag down a test associate and let 'em know. You could walk out of here with a hundred and twenty weighing down your bindle if you let us take you apart -"
"Excuse me?"
"- some science stuff in you, then put you back together good as new."
"I don't believe this," Chell gasped.
"Before you start protesting, remember that's in 1970s dollars, which were worth a lot more than they are now," GLaDOS informed her, just a little primly. "Also, please remember that those are recordings, not someone actually speaking to you."
"Wow, it's good that you don't have a face to be straight." Chell shook her head in disgust. "At least when they were doing this to me, all they did was kidnap me and tell me I had to do it in exchange for food and shelter. There was none of this incentive nonsense."
"... you were kidnapped?" GLaDOS asked as Chell started setting up portals to spray distant surfaces with various types of goo.
"Well, duh."
"Don't get snitty with me, it would have happened before I seized control of the facility. If anything, you should be thanking me for killing the people who did that to you."
"Gee," said Chell, with impressive aridity. "Thanks." After a moment, and some portal-assisted motion which brought her to the side of a weighted cube. she felt moved to continue speaking. "You really didn't know that."
"All I know about you is what's in the file, and there wasn't any mention of that. I guess they didn't think it was noteworthy. And from the fact that you were the first in line, I deduced that you were a volunteer, driven by a love of Science and a desire to make up for your wretched youth."
"Well, you were wrong about that. I wonder what else you might be wrong about."
That remark silenced her companion - and oh, but it was strange to think of GLaDOS in that way - for the remainder of the test area, and, in return, Chell kept her own mouth shut on the ride out, even as another recorded message from Johnson played.
"We're not banging rocks together here. We know how to put a man back together," the recording assured, providing an almost irresistible temptation for her, but she didn't say anything. Nor did she reply to its assertion that she ought to be paying them. After all, there was a difference between talking to an object that clearly possessed some level of intelligence and one that was just an idiotic recording of a long-dead lunatic. She had control over herself. Control.
"Thank you - I can't believe I'm thanking these people - staggering your way through Aperture Science's propulsion gel testing," another recording declaimed, stopping her in her tracks as she struggled to maintain that control.
"You are sort of moving more sluggishly than usual," GLaDOS informed her.
"And you are reminding me of why I didn't talk to you before this," Chell informed her right back. Ignoring the rest of the message, she started her hunting procedure - just as before, she was at the end of a testing area, and was going to have to find her way to the next one without any guidance. GLaDOS had claimed not to know anything about these areas, and wouldn't have been much help if she did, probably. A sign directing her to something called Pump Station Gamma attracted her attention, and she promptly set up portals to take her across the gulf separating her from it.
"... I don't know, Caroline, what do these people buy?" the unbearably classist recording asked. "Tattered hats? Beard dirt?"
"The hell is beard dirt?" Chell finally asked as she emerged near Pump Station Gamma, which had a Material Emancipation Grill, suggesting that she was on the right track.
"Caroline," GLaDOS mused. "Why do I know this woman? Maybe I did kill her ... or ... or ..." And then, just as Chell thought it had fallen silent, a horrified whispery tone emerged from the potato's glowing yellow eye. "Oh my god."
"... excuse me?" Chell said, genuinely startled by that exclamation.
"Uh, l-look, you're doing a great job," said GLaDOS' voice, continuing the parade of unlikely statements. "Can you handle things for yourself for a while? I need to think ..."
The obvious and truthful answer was that she could, in fact, handle it quite nicely, just as she'd handled pretty much everything so far without any assistance from GLaDOS. But Chell found herself in no mood to be so nice. "Wait a minute, what the hell is going on with you?"
"I, I don't ... no, wait a minute, yourself, I don't owe you any explanations, murderer!"
"All right, enough of that! You were the one who started firing missiles at me, not the other way around. Anything I did to you was self-defense and -"
"So throwing my morality core into the incinerator was your idea of a merry prank?"
"- hey wait a minute," Chell said, abruptly glaring at the potato. "That morality core ... the one that ... you set me up!"
"I have no idea of what you are talking about," said potato said in a dismissive tone.
"I didn't do anything to you to get that thing to drop off of you. You ... you manipulated me to get me to destroy the only thing that was holding you back from deliberately and personally trying to kill me!"
"I -" GLaDOS started to say.
Chell grabbed the potato and started to yank it off the portal gun's claw. "I am done with you! Even if I do need you to be put back in charge of this place, there's no way that I can possibly trust you not to kill me and all the other humans here for shits and giggles once you are!"
"No, stop!" said GLaDOS too-human sounding voice. "Please, Chell!"
NEXT: The Potato Salad