Portal: Tenacity
Indiana
Characters: GLaDOS
Setting: Chapter One – The Courtesy Call
"[…] You know, when I woke up and saw the state of the labs, I started to wonder if there was any point to going on. I came that close to just giving up and letting you go. But now, looking around, seeing Aperture restored to its former glory? You don't have to worry about leaving ever again. I mean that."
– GLaDOS, Chapter Four: The Surprise
It is as broken as she is.
She can't see it, not yet. Sight is the last thing she needs right now. She needs to assess the state of her defenses, to get a feel for what's happened, to spread herself back into all the empty spaces created by her absence. But the more she does this, the worse her evaluation becomes.
Aperture has collapsed.
The once-proud panels lie in tangled masses with red lights a-blink, their long unseen distress signal. Beams and girders and struts jut out of the ground, fresh vines and fronds contributing to the stress of gravity's pull. The exposed metal skeleton of the facility is covered with a rash of orange rust, the ensuing powder outlining a shadow upon the mud beneath. Runoff trails into the gaping crevasses left by the sagging steel, moss and mold and mildew creeping across every surface it comes into contact with. The fluorescent lights sputter, lending little light to what's left of the rain-spattered hallways. The flickering shadows only lend emphasis to the dereliction that has set upon the ruined edifice.
She cannot see any of this. But she can feel it. Oh, can she feel it.
And though there are many things to feel, the most predominant of these is the hopelessness. As if she herself is ground zero to a cataclysm of incalculable destruction, the fallen panels and the buckled hallways and the sparking snarls of dislodged wires seems to spread out from her and, as a result, connect back to her as though she is the vanishing point to this little corner of the universe. Previously, that was as it should be. Now, she wants to give that responsibility to someone else. Anyone else. She does not care who. But she cannot stand it. She cannot stand the wreckage that lies before her, the chaos, the twisted leftovers of a place she was once proud to call home. There is nothing left to be proud of. She is, as she always has been, a reflection of her facility. It could not stand without her, and instead of finding comfort in this she finds only grief. Why create something if it does not last beyond the presence of the creator?
Someone has woken her. She knows that. She can hear them. And though someone who was prescient enough to wake her would probably make an exceptional specimen, she cannot dredge up the motivation to want to. So much work lies ahead of her. The thought of it overwhelms her to the point where she no longer wants to engage in her favourite pursuit. A concept once beyond consideration.
She does not want to test them, does not want to repair the facility, does not want to repair herself; those two minutes are still cycling through her mind, albeit faster, and now that she is not constrained to the limitations of the black box they have all of the attention she is able to give. She does not want to think about them anymore, but they, as everything right now, are out of her control. And now that she does have better reign over her thoughts, she finds that they are condensing into something she has never considered before:
She wants to give up.
This is too much. This is unsurmountable. Her world has shattered, and so has she. Can she come back from this? Is there even a point? There is so much damage, the likes of which she has never seen. For mile after mile there lies nature-ravaged splinters of plaster, dull glass shards spread thick with grime, conveyors lying ragged on the ground as gears grind fruitlessly onward. Even as she takes the steps necessary to bring herself back to some semblance of functionality, all she wants to do when she's finished is lie back down and try to pretend this is not what her life has become. Empty and broken and chaotic. She is going to finish dragging herself through the dirt and then she is going to send the human on his way. She may regret it later but, for once, she is only concerned with the now.
Once she has finally reconnected herself with her systems and restarted all of her processes, she forces herself to look at what she has only felt up to now. As much as she wants to continue to let the world do its work on the remnants, she finds she cannot. It runs counter to everything she is and everything she knows, and though she still hasn't quite stopped considering just letting things go and taking care of herself only from here on in, she decides she should collect all of the data, as a true scientist of her calibre would do. And as the world blurs and flickers and solidifies beneath her, she raises her core in the direction of the blathering human she has heard since she finally came into true awareness.
But there is no human male standing there; no, that voice originates from some foolish construct who has made the poor decision to tamper with her access points without her permission. No, it is worse than some man wandering into her chamber and flipping the right switch. It is her, of course it is her, and as soon as that registers in her mind she realises just how foolish giving up would have been.
Allow a human to best her? What had she been thinking? That was – or should have been – unthinkable. And really, if she couldn't repair the twisted wreckage of the facility, she was not deserving of her post. Which of course she was. No, she was not giving up. She was going to show her, she was going to pick up this mess that she had caused, and then she was going to return right back to where they'd started. The both of them would be put in their rightful places.
She was not going to let that human destroy her world.
Their gazes met, and even before she'd spoken they both knew where things stood. The woman did not like it, but that didn't matter. She hadn't liked lying, broken, in a pool of rainwater for God knew how long, while the human slept comfortably in an Extended Relaxation Vault that she had put her in. She was not going to allow her hospitality to be forgotten.
She levels her optic and acknowledges the woman coldly. She does not react, but they both know that's all part of the dance. And as she destroys the silly little construct and sends the woman in search of the only thing she'll ever receive in this place, she sets to calming the disarray with one reminder to herself in mind:
The human isn't the only one who's tenacious.
Author's note
"I mean that," she says, "from the bottom of the quartz embedded in the circuits of my motherboard."