'Be Quiet'
Indiana
Characters: Chell, GLaDOS
Synopsis: Mere silence cannot end a nightmare.
Setting: During Portal
"Be quiet, or GLaDOS will get you!"
She'd heard it so many times.
Her parents had said it a lot. When they were tucking her in at night, when she got restless in the car. When she went to school it was said between giggles on the playground, passed as a note between desks, told in a raised voice by an exasperated teacher. It was a joke. A lark. GLaDOS was the boogeyman, the troll underneath the bridge, and the thing that went bump in the night all rolled into one. GLaDOS was a shadow that hid in the closet. GLaDOS was the scraping sound against the window at midnight. GLaDOS was the dark figure that you saw out of the corner of your eye when you stayed out too late.
There was no GLaDOS. GLaDOS was made up to scare children into behaving. That was why nobody listened the day she and a gaggle of other little girls had been rushed into a dark room and told to gather underneath a table. Their parents had brought them to the laboratory where they worked and a nervous man was giving them a tour when the hallway went dark and he ushered them through the closest available door.
"Be quiet! Or GLaDOS will get you!" he whispered urgently.
The girls went along with the game, giggling and whispering among themselves and hitting their heads on the table legs, and one of them said in childish sympathy, "GLaDOS isn't real, silly."
"I wish you were right," the man muttered. And then he got up from under the table and went into the hallway, and the girls were left there in the dark for a long, long time. The chatter died off eventually and they were left staring at the faint red stripe glowing from beneath the door. When it opened and the contents of the room were edged in that unnerving shade they hunched a little closer together, the unknown silhouette seeming more a portent than a sign of hope. After a moment they heard a woman's voice, spoken low:
"Come with me. But be quiet."
Or GLaDOS will get you, each of them finished silently. This time… this time, it didn't seem quite as funny as it had before. They climbed out and followed without a sound, walking closer together than they meant to.
The hallway was still blanketed in red, the shadows sliding sinister between their feet. They were led silently through the building they had just joyfully traipsed through, and once they were squinting against the overcast sky hanging low over the parking lot the dark-haired woman who had brought them there sighed and started asking for phone numbers.
Maybe there is a GLaDOS, after all, was whispered amongst them at school for a little while, but it was soon replaced with the usual giggles that accompanied the contemplation of a convenient and spooky ghost that existed just to make sure they were good and behaved.
When she was thirteen her mother went to work and never came back. Her father refused to talk about it. He told her to be quiet. The same happened to him, five years later. And in those five years other adults she knew went missing. Adults who all worked at the same place her parents had.
It was beyond coincidence.
The warnings were real. They had to be. Whoever – whatever – this GLaDOS was needed to be confronted. And she, in her adolescent foolishness, found herself on the doorstep of the facility where so many had gone missing determined to do just that.
She didn't know how long she'd been sleeping. She didn't remember going to sleep at all. But one timeless day she woke up in a glass box, greeted by an electronic drone. She did not need to be told who was behind it. She already knew.
Her feet, bared by force, made no sound as they touched the floor. The device she was provided just barely hummed between her hands. The noise it made during use was loud but deceptive. Other than the bookend phrases from the ubiquitous computer and, later, the ingenuous pleas from the smooth, glossy turrets, every room was silent. Oppressively so, broken only by the whirring and the combustion and the buzzing of components locked into an eternal fifteen-second cycle that had gone on long before she had arrived and would continue long after she left. The elevator sighed and trembled and laboriously carried her to chamber after chamber after chamber, where she dutifully jumped through the hoops laid before her in the hopes she would eventually find what she was looking for.
The penultimate test held a room blocked behind the press of a button. As endless bullets crushed themselves into the glass she stood behind, she stared at a machine that had been turning for eternity, the pellets it fired off grinding craters into the walls. Either nobody had been here in a long time, or nobody had ever made it this far.
For a moment she thought there would never be an end to this. That she had volunteered herself to an empty, endless maze with only an electronic voice seemingly bent on passive destruction to stave off a solitary existence. But that was the sort of thing that someone who had given up would believe.
She escaped the fire in silence.
The machine beyond called for her but she did not answer. She allowed herself to be lost within the thudding and the whining and the whimpering of a world she was not allowed to know. When she finally came upon the myth she had been chasing, she was… underwhelmed. The boogeyman was nothing more than a bundle of plastic and wire, swaying from the ceiling and surrounded by nonsense. For this she had been stuffed beneath a dark table for hours upon hours? For this her ears had been filled over and over again with warnings? For this countless men and women had been lost?
For this she had kept her mouth shut?
It was time to put all of this to rest.
There was no kill switch, no convenient cord to pull. The machine had to be destroyed one piece at a time, and all the while the breath in her lungs thickened with the tang of corruption. Throughout it all she made no sound as the computer filled the empty air all on its own. Her actions were mechanical, without real drive or emotion. It was the best way to deal with things like this.
The next part was a blur.
She ended up sprawled, dizzy, outside. The sun was on her face. She felt bruised. She dimly remembered a bright light and being sucked out of the ceiling, somehow. She had bitten her tongue during impact. Or perhaps she had done it to keep from screaming. It didn't matter. The need for silence was gone. She allowed herself an audible sigh of relief.
Her opened eyes were rewarded with the sight of a sightless amber optic trailed by the remnants of a deceptively contained machine, and as she stared at it she attempted to gather her wits enough to rise from the warm and pocked asphalt, to pick her way through the shattered robotics and sparking wires and shards of grey plaster. But then she heard it. Heard something harsh and grating cut through a silence that should only have been marked by the rustle of leaves and the self-extinguishing of futile fires and her own heart inside of her chest. Sense kept her silent. Fear kept her paralysed.
Be quiet. Be quiet be quiet be quiet –
"Thank you for assuming the Party Escort Submission Position."
As her inert body was scraped unevenly against the ground it felt as though the great dead yellow eye across the way had somehow, someway, centred upon her, and she could have sworn she heard that electronic drone whispered directly into her ear:
"Got you."
Author's note
I thought it'd be wild if there was this thing among Aperture employees to tell your kids the big bad supercomputer would get them if they were naughty. Chell took it all a liiiiiiiiittle too far lol.
Yes, the one who led the girls out was Caroline. No, I would not like to argue about how GLaDOS and Caroline are the same person, or about the 'Caroline is Chell's mom' theory.