Portal: Yes, Ma'am
Characters: Caroline, Cave Johnson
Synopsis: She got what she wanted, but not in the way that she wanted it
She'd looked to be such an innocent little thing.
She was perky, eager to please, upbeat. Always asking for a little extra to do, always asking to take a look at this or that, offering to do things no one else knew how to do. And he'd let her. Why not? It was nice to have someone around that took initiative. While she took care of the details, he had time to consider more grand projects, or court more investors, or make sure everyone else knew just who their boss was. If she was taking care of it, he didn't have to.
She would make suggestions from time to time, asking if she could forge his signature for certain things so as not to waste his valuable time, or telling him about something she was sure would make the tests go better. He agreed to her requests with a smile and a nod. She was a bright kid. Things were better for having hired her.
It was when the Senate hearings began that he began to feel a bit uneasy.
She was inhumanly meticulous about the whole affair, telling him what papers they needed to destroy and which ones would probably be noticed in their absence. She knew who she could get to lie on the witness stand in Aperture's defense. And when he told her she was amazing and that he didn't understand how she did it, she just smiled her enthusiastic smile and said:
"I do what I must because I can, sir!"
And they both laughed and he forgot about the incident until after the hearings were over, and they had to build up Aperture again from what very little they had left.
He wasn't sure of how to go about it. He was all for grand plans and elaborate schemes. None of this starting small stuff he was now stuck doing, what with all of his investors cutting him off. Lose a few astronauts and everyone loses their minds! He griped about the subject to her more times than either of them could count, and every time he did she would smile and agree with him.
She, of course, took care of the nitty-gritty involved in resurrecting their reputation, while he went to work thinking of what they could possibly market that would get them back on the map. He'd always had to ask her for the password to his computer, so when he tried to log onto it one day and was unable to, he didn't think too much of it. He discovered that there was quite a lot more paperwork with his signature on it than he remembered putting a pen to, but she knew what she was doing. And really, she was doing such a good job, taking care of all the operations of the facility so that he could get more important planning done. He appreciated that, he told himself through the uneasy feeling in his gut. He knew she was doing what was best for his company.
Until one day, when he had unlocked his office in the morning and she'd been sitting at his desk, in his chair, using his computer.
She had jumped and explained she'd arrived early and only wanted to get a little extra work done before the workday began, and he accepted that. He watched her gather her papers with that smile on her face and another apology on her lips, and then he sat in the chair she had vacated and stared at the door she swung shut behind her.
Of all the things he had given her his permission for throughout the facility, he had never given her the key to his office.
With that old trepidation growing stronger, he ticked off on his fingers the things she was in charge of. The things she had taken charge of. And as he went down the list of operations, he began to realise there was not very much he was personally responsible for. Not anymore.
Their list of projects was down to a select few. He picked one at random to reclaim the reins of and marched downstairs to give some of his scientists a visit.
Soon after his moon rock experiments – the first experiments he done in many, many years – he became extremely ill. He'd been told using lunar sediment was a bad idea, but what choice did he have? He had to take charge somehow. He had to wrest the facility away from her, but he needed something big to do it with. This would get that stupid gun working, and he could hire someone else to do her job, and everything would be back under his control again. Everything would be fine. It would be all right.
And he told everyone that he had made the noblest sacrifice in the name of science, risking his own health to advance their project, but truth be told he believed his paranoia was beginning to get the best of him. He saw her in every shadow, eyes glinting as she waited for him to bite it so she could take his facility for her own as she'd slowly been doing all these years. It was of course entirely possible the stupid moon rocks'd done it, but he could not fight the creeping impression that she had somehow poisoned him. Put something in the morning coffee he was no longer strong enough to drink, or substituted the pills he needed to get this elephant off his chest with something more deadly. Were moon rocks really pure poison? If they were, how come the eggheads at NASA didn't drop dead like he was about to? He wanted to believe that not even she would go that far, but when she came to see him on his deathbed every morning with that smile on her face, he could not make himself think otherwise.
She was about to get what she was after, and he couldn't have that. He couldn't.
So he came up with one last scheme, one last grand plan to show her who was actually in charge here. And he did it right in front of her so he could see the look on her face when she realised exactly where all her machinations had gotten her. She was about to learn just what happened when you tried to snatch what was Cave Johnson's out from under Cave Johnson's dying nose. He would never live long enough for the engineers to finish the artificial intelligence project. But she would. And they both knew that as he spoke into the microphone, looking into her slowly smouldering eyes set in a face that had finally lost that damnable smile:
"I will say this - and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: if I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place. Now, she'll argue. She'll say she can't. She's modest like that. But you make her. Treat her just like you'd treat me. Hell, put her in my computer. I don't care. Just make sure she's taken care of."
Taken care of, indeed.