Portal: Sad Machine
Indiana
Inspired by Sad Machine by Porter Robinson
Characters: GLaDOS, Doug Rattmann
Setting: Post Portal 2
Synopsis: When Doug learns of GLaDOS's final gesture to Chell, he decides he just might have been wrong after all.
She looked even bigger, somehow.
"You're still alive." Oddly, she didn't sound all that disappointed. She sounded more like she'd been expecting him to be alive. He shrugged.
"Sometimes you get lucky."
"I was hoping it would be someone else this time," she remarked, tilting her core in such a human way that he couldn't help but shudder. For all her insistence on being the indomitable AI, her mimicry of human behaviours was disturbing. It was if she were mocking him in his powerlessness, as if he was so much smaller than her for being human rather than acting like one. He knew it wasn't true but could not help thinking it anyway. "The saga of you and I has run its course, I think."
Doug folded his hands in front of him and did his best to look her in that great yellow optic, but he couldn't. It was so much easier to talk to her when he kept his focus on the gently swaying mass of her chassis, because when he fixed his eyes on her facsimile of a face he could have sworn he felt a raw, burning intelligence boring straight into him and discovering all of his deepest secrets and buried fears. He did not doubt that she knew everything about everything, and all that kept him from finding somewhere to hide was the fact that she did not quite realise that. She still had a ways to go before she truly captured the essence of humanity, but he wasn't sure that mattered anymore. There wasn't much left of humanity. She was, quite possibly, the last true store of it.
The thought was terrifying.
"I don't want to sit here glaring for very much longer. Is there something you wanted? If there isn't, feel free to take your leave. I'm not interested in capturing you anymore. I have much bigger things to worry about. More important things."
He licked his lips with an equally dry tongue and wiped his paradoxically wet hands on the hem of his ratty jacket. "What happened," was all he managed to say before his throat closed up altogether.
She went still and looked at him as sideways as she was able, lens narrowing. "What happened?" she asked, voice lilted with curiosity. "You're asking me what happened?"
He wasn't entirely sure she'd understood the question, which admittedly had been missing the 'to Chell' bit, but instead of attempting to clarify he just nodded.
She came down very low, in fact he thought that might've been as far as she could go, and regarded him silently for a long, long moment. That yellow light was washing over him, giving him the impression he was being scanned by a foreign party, which was possibly true. Finally she moved back a couple of inches.
"You're still here. So I suppose you were really asking. As opposed to just trying to make some sort of depraved conversation with yourself. All right. I'll tell you."
And to his complete and utter surprise, she started talking. But not about Chell.
She started talking about herself.
It was a long story. He only interrupted her once, by holding up a finger for her to pause so that he could sit down on the hard grey tiles, and as uncomfortable as those were they were better than standing. She stopped talking for the exact amount of time it took him to go from standing to touching the ground, and he got the impression she almost couldn't stop. As if she just had to get the words out, all of them, and nothing barring the end of the world was going to keep her from finishing.
It was a long story, but he did not regret a single second.
It was obviously skewed to make her look more favourable, but he considered that was true of most stories and decided to let it go. For once, he tried to believe her instead of automatically assuming everything she said was a lie, and as odd as the story was it appeared to be more or less true. Many parts of it were quite difficult for her to tell, if her sudden, abrupt movements during them were any indication, but to her credit she didn't gloss over them. As she told him exactly what happened, he realised that he had been wrong.
She was alive. She was not solely a robot nor an AI, not anymore. She was something else, something new and terrifying in its newness, and the only thing that kept him from leaving was the fact that she did not know this, either. She would find out one day, and the world would never be the same, but for now she did not, and so he listened.
She spoke with the desperation of someone who talked often but was never heard, at times almost spiralling into an all-too-human tangent that had nothing to do with the topic at hand, though unlike a human she did not stutter or trip over her own words, nor repeat anything she had already said. And the range of emotion he got from her was more than he'd ever thought possible. With every word she said he became more and more convinced that she was not a machine at all, she was something living that just looked like a machine, and if the events of the past had not been so clear in his mind he might actually have believed it.
Finally her narrative came to a close, and upon this she did not look at him. There was a long silence, which in its awkwardness was somehow comfortable. She had done something she should not have done while he had done the same. She should have tried to catch him and he should have tried to hide, and yet at the intersection of these actions they had both frozen in an odd moment of indecision.
When she finally did look at him, though in passing, he could have sworn that the light behind the lens had dimmed as if to mirror downcast organic eyes. "You've been here for hours," she murmured, looking behind him as if something were happening that she urgently needed to focus on. He shrugged.
"I had nothing better to do."
"Well, now you know." She said it shortly, as if she were embarrassed about what she had done, and continued to refuse to look at him. He looked down at the clasped fingers in his lap and tried to absorb even a little bit of what she had said. And then he realised why he kept trying to make sense of the end of it.
No matter what had really happened, no matter how much of the story was reworked or reconstructed, she had come to respect another living being. If there had been one thing in the world he'd not have expected of her, it was that.
Perhaps she had something after all.
When Doug stood up to leave, she did not move to stop him. Without a word an elevator materialised from below the cold tiles, and when he looked at her she pretended not to notice. And when he took that chance and stepped into the elevator, it brought him to the same place it had brought Chell. He could see the broken stalks of grain that marked the path she'd forged, and the first thing he noticed was that the path moved only forward and not back.
He decided that was going to change.
Every few months or so, he would carefully make his way back through the wheat field and into the facility, which was oddly always open for him. Never once did he ever have to ask for access. And never once did he have to tell her what he was there for.
He lost track of how many visits he made. But they remained much the same: he would sit down in front of her, she would insult him a few times, and then she would begin to talk. At the beginning, she only spoke of what was going on currently, such as the ineptness of her robots or her odd relationship with birds, but after a while she would tell him about things that had happened in the past. Things he'd heard about but was not fully aware of, that had been bothering her for many years and she'd been unable to do anything about. And so they went on like this, where she would talk and he would listen, and every time she finished he would quietly enter the elevator while she tried to understand why she was doing what she was doing. He did not say he would return and she did not ask him to, and nothing from previous days was ever mentioned again. And yet they continued, as if because they had to.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed. It was a long time, he knew, mostly by the ages of the people he saw during his sparse, day-to-day life, but also by the state of her. She too aged just as the people on the surface did, in many ways more than the physical. As he was about to leave during one of these later days, she spoke after her narrative for the first time.
"Doug."
He turned around, more in shock than anything, and was even more surprised to see that she had turned towards him as well. He blinked.
"They are asking me to… thank you for them."
His brow creased, and he asked in his hoarse, cracked voice, "Who…?"
"They are," she answered, sounding confused. "They won't tell me why, which is infuriating, but I'll never hear the end of it if I don't. So. Thank you. From them."
"Who?" he repeated.
"Them. The… oh. That's right. You don't know they're here. The AI. Aperture is full of them. And apparently you don't appreciate them any more than the people who built them did."
Doug froze, eyes tracing the wall of what really were glowing, staring eyes, and she laughed.
"They're less hostile than the wheat you trample on the way here. Remember. They wanted me to thank you. I doubt they're going to try anything."
The panels twitched and she shook her core, muttering, "Don't you start."
The back of his neck pricked with discomfort, and he decided he'd better continue his exit. As soon as his back was pressed to the cool glass, he heard her murmur, "Doug?"
He looked up from his fixation on the transparent surface beneath his feet.
"... I…"
He kept his gaze fixed somewhere over her left side, while she directed hers at the floor. And as if guided by some invisible hand neither of them could deny, their eyes disengaged from their stationary positions and met.
"Feel free to… to come back."
He shrugged.
"If I have nothing better to do."
As the elevator ascended, he could hear her laughing.