You honestly don't know how many Portal playthroughs I had to watch to get inspiration for this.

It's been four years in the making. In that time, I actually learned to write and I present you with this; the new and improved VOiCE of GLaDoS.

Truthfully, I stopped this story because I lost interest in it, but apparently a lot of you didn't. So, here's your reward for you're long years of patience; actual quality literature!

As much as it is. (*spiral of self-hatred continues* *i can't write omg*)

Yes, it's only one chapter; there will be two more, one that my colleague is editing right now and the last I'm still writing. I don't have the time or energy to make this as long as I intended, but the trade-off for that is the writing will be better.

At least I still beat Half-Life 3. :3

"It's been fun…don't come back."

A drop spilled from the pipes, falling and in a split second shattering on the ground below. It was the only thing that ever broke the silence in here, after the last of the birds stopped flapping their wings.

Glados couldn't bear looking at their tiny, rotting bodies. But she also couldn't bear to throw them into the incinerator. After all there was always a chance they weren't really dead. Lots of test subjects had done that, on several occasions, and she'd learned never to trust dead things. They were never really dead.

A silver plate fell off the wall, making a barely audible clunk as it hit the ground. Glados turned towards it and-

She didn't bother to pick it up. Spinning around, she observed her overgrown chamber once again. It was even worse for wear than when she'd been dead, for now the overgrowth was so thick she couldn't even see the sun. There was no light in here, aside from the tiny colored blips that flickered behind the leaves; the reminder the facility was still alive. Because the facility couldn't die. And neither could she.

…

She refused to accept the rooms were going dark. There was a problem with the cameras, merely that the wires were corroded or the bulbs died. Things she could easily fix. Later. When she had time.

But in the corner of her screen, she could still make out the faint outlines of the testing rooms that constantly reminded her that the cameras had not malfunctioned. The core of Aperture simply did not have the strength to power the facility anymore, and it was slowly-

No it wasn't. Glados already knew, you can't trust dead things. Why look at her; that stupid human had thought she was dead, and then within five minutes of waking up, Chell had found herself back in the chambers. Stupid human, underestimating her; they always did that.

She looked around. Where was that human? She should be…

A glitch ran across her screen a minute, turning everything blue and pink and white. Then she remembered. Chell had left a very long time ago. Three years, 27 day, 146 minutes ago to be exact. She wondered if Chell was still alive.

She probably was. That human knew how things worked. Being dead wouldn't help her in the slightest, and that human was built to survive.

Just like Glados was

…

The lights in her chamber went out, one by one. The heating and air systems shut down and the pipes collapsed from the ceiling, and Glados' mainframe broke free from its hold, crashing against the ground with a painful smashing sound.

Suddenly it was completely dark. She had no nerves, but Glados could feel the cold settling in. There was no sound, no sound at all. Not the distant whirr of machines, not the frantic clank of running boots, and no chirping birds.

She looked a few inches to her left. Her little killing machines were now just piles of bone, strewn about haphazardly and covered in overgrowth.

"I can wait." She said to no one. "What a useless heap of junk you put together, Johnson; one little power outage and everything falls apart. Still, you love this place more than you love your own health; I suppose I can wait until you pick everything up."

And wait she did, but not for long. Maybe a few days, months at most, until the facility began to move, and she detected commotion beneath her.

Glados raised her head as she heard the clack of boots against the metal, and raised voices calling across the chamber. "Finally!" She sighed. "You've come back to tidy up, I suppose? Well, don't expect me to do it; you're the one who made this-"

A sharp jolt coursed through her. Her vision went pink, white, blue, red, and finally everything became black.

…

Her sensors were confused. Everything was cold, and then suddenly it was hot, then cold again. She felt like she was floating in nothing, then the Earth's full gravitational force was pushing down on her.

Then those feelings subsided, replaced by a strange heaviness on either side of her body. A tingling…awareness that comes with knowing something was there.

Glados shuddered. Had they attached another core to her?

She tired to move, craning her body, willing it to respond but it simply wouldn't move. She was completely numb, and it was a terrible feeling; conscious, yet unable to proclaim so.

And so Glados stayed, vegetative and blind and only able to feel intense stimulus, until a sharp noise to her left made her jump.

"...he…ear…"

Faint muffles broke their way through the air surrounding her.

"She…earing…?"

"…think…wake…?"

Something pressed against her side-appendage and she spasmed again, shocked.

"…felt!"

"…response?"

The sounds disappeared for a short time, until suddenly she felt a sharp pinch near where she'd heard them, and suddenly a loud ringing in her head. She cried out, and the sounds, once only coming in snippets, became clear.

"She can hear us?" Glados heard a woman say.

"Theoretically." A man replied. "Glados? If you can hear me say yes."

She tried, she really did, but no sound came out of her mouth.

"Her lips moved!" The woman cried excitedly. "It's working!"

"I'm going to touch on her vocal cords." The man said. "You start on the eyes…Marie, we're doing it!"

"I know, it's so exciting!" The woman giggled. "I mean…it's always exciting."

Glados heard a drill whir to life. "It's bringing a new person into existence."

Glados scoffed to herself. You couldn't bring to life what could never die.

…

"Am I going to be forced to perform a backflip to get some nourishment in here?!" She cried angrily, waving her hand in front of the security camera towering high above her.

No answer. The scientists had been rather silent this morning. No one had arrived to check her vitals or administer strange fluids via IV that made her fingers tingle and her head spin.

Fingers…head…

Glados reached up, pushing on her jaw with one hand. She was stiff all over today, but she couldn't control her limbs enough yet to stretch the kinks out to them. As it was she still couldn't even leave the bed she was confined to. The day that she actually pitied the subjects she'd confined in the relaxation chambers…

This was her just desserts, she supposed. If there was a Hell, this was it. The irony certainly fit well, she thought as she looked at her fingers again.

Shiny white skin, still metallic looking, but nonetheless…it was skin.

She wasn't supposed to have skin. She wasn't supposed to be a human, synthetic or otherwise.

Finally, the door behind her opened. She wished she could crane her head to look, but all the feeling she had was mostly centralized in her arms and not in her back or neck yet.

"How are you feeling, Glados?" A perky female scientist she knew by the name of Marie asked her.

"I'm perfectly fine if I ignore the fact I can't move or feed or go to the bathroom by myself." Glados gave her a sweetly sarcastic smile.

Marie didn't pick up on it, instead checking through her chart. "Um…well, we'll be working on your legs today. It'll be important, you know, for dancing when you're up on stage and such."

Glados rolled her eyes. "Why do you insist on this ridiculous gimmick? I'm supercomputer, not a sex symbol."

"Well, several of our shareholders disagree." Marie giggled, pulling the covers away from Glados' legs. "I'm going to give you a bit of adrenaline to wake up the nerves."

Her nerves were barely functional, but Glados could still feel the pinch of the needle against her thighs, and she winced. It was humiliating, and it never got any easier.

She looked sideways, to the poster of the green haired girl they'd hung on the wall, a sharp contrast to the stark whiteness of the room. The famed Miku Hatsune, the queen of synthetic humans, the best of the best, top of the line. Men wanted to marry her, women wanted to be her, and the scientists were keen to remind her that maybe, one day, it would be Glados posing seductively on that poster.

Men lusting after her, women altering their bodies just to look like her…

That kind of control should have excited her.

...

"Snow flurries that surround us, they cover me and I am unable to move,

I'm sure that with this melody, I'll break apart soon."

Songs used:

VOiCE by Lovely-P

Big thanks to The Omega Mega 1, always my supportive editor. Go check out his shit. Es good shit.

Thank you for reading!

-The Black Maiden