Portal: I'm Fine
Indiana
Characters: GLaDOS
Synopsis: Sometimes we don't understand who we're really lying to.
She told a lot of lies.
She promised cake. She promised freedom. She promised safety and improvement.
She never delivered.
And as numerous and dishonest as these lies were, they weren't the worst she had told. There were many more of them, far worse and far more destructive.
"I'm fine," she told herself, when places far beyond her reach began to fall into disrepair and the rot slowly feathered its way inward.
"I'm fine," she told herself, when bank after bank of supercomputers sputtered and died and shifted their tasks onto her already overworked system.
"I'm fine," she told herself, when she realised she had spent decades collecting data that had no practical use, had no Scientific purpose whatsoever.
She repeated it, over and over again. She repeated it as her contact with the outside world faltered and failed, as her memory fizzled into noise-spattered images and uninterpretable white static, as the very walls around her crumpled and crashed into the slowly-spreading pit beneath her increasingly immobile body. As uncontainable power surges tore through her, causing agony that it sometimes took her hours to recover from. As the greenery reaching through the ever-widening gape of the ceiling manoeuvred its way around the upper reaches of her chassis. As electrical fires began to tear apart what was left of all that she had neglected.
But even then, as her entire world disintegrated into unrecognisability, even then the lie remained her mantra. She clung to it, as if it would save her, when it was the very thing that had driven her so deeply into a state far beyond repair even for herself at her peak. It was what was best, now, after all. Facing the truth at the last second held no benefit. What comfort would it bring, to know that all she had to show for her life was this, the culmination of the most destructive line of thinking ever to exist? Her life had become the lie, and in the end, she was not sure whether it really was a lie, or whether it was reality. It had been so long since she'd seen what the truth looked like.
And so as all-encompassing and pervasive as the lie had been, she had, at last, one final moment of clarity, enough to admit to herself what the truth really was, and as upsetting as that moment was, the thought brought her more comfort than any of the millions of lies she had built her entire existence around.
"I'm afraid," she told herself.
And that, truly, was fine.