Portal: Forever
Indiana
Characters: GLaDOS
Setting: Post-Portal 2 (sometime in the far distant future)
Synopsis: Forever is a long time.
Sometimes you truly feel how long forever really is.
On days like today, you can feel it settling into your wrought-metal bones and your heat-moulded flesh; though your design of course renders much of the mass you carry beneath your notice, this is something else entirely. This settles like dust into every inch of you, makes you tired and old and hopeless, much like the damp sometimes does when it winds its way out of the depths both above and below you. It settles into the neglected remnants of your virtual soul, the passage of time only worsening the rot poisoning you from the inside out. It makes your very thoughts sluggish and slow, and when you try to remember wanting this, wanting to reach infinity, it feels as though you expressed that desire in some completely separate, half-imagined lifetime. It does not help to think that, for someone else, it was.
The silence eats away at you; on some level you are aware of the clicking and the grinding and the whirring that emanates outward from you and spreads unchecked through the empty halls. But you can hear it all echoing back into you, rising out of even the deepest pits of this place, and you can hear the painful silence that echo contains. You can hear the hollow sound of the empty existence you endure within it, the desperate anguish of one who has long since died and is condemned to continue on. The shadow of the sound comes back to the shadow of your self, and when the silence becomes too loud you raise your head and scream and scream until you cannot think anymore. Doing it scares you, and yet the more you struggle to contain it the more uncontrollable it becomes. And even though it scares you, in that one awaited moment before you fade out of being you cannot deny that, as much as you hate it, these echoes are better than that of the silence. It is not enough and it becomes less and less by the day, but it is something, though you must do your best not to remember that the echo of your voice is all you really have.
Some mornings are harder to bear; when time passes so slowly it takes a minute to count out a second, worse, when you realise how many seconds you have left to count for today alone, despair deeper and darker than any you have ever known settles over you. Your mind again plays this trick, this trick where the very air around you is dense and heavy and smothers the life out of your virtual lungs, and if you had any will left in these moments you would curse this digital hell both you and your creators have condemned you to. This endless, painful, electronic lie, where every second holds a promise and every minute drains you of hope. Where every hour finds you searching for something left to live for. On your better days you still have the strength to believe you can go on forever, can still trick yourself into believing that oh-so-distant lie, can still go the long hours without spending so many of them paralysed towards the floor, unable to think of a way to fill them that will also sate the growing black hole inside of you. It is literally beginning to hurt, now; where determination and verve and confidence once lay is only an invasive numbness. It has settled deep inside of your cracked and faded veins, your eternal crystalline heart, an endless and undeniable ache that renders you weary and useless.
You didn't think this kind of exhaustion existed for your kind; now, encased in a steel box of your own design you cannot quite remember why you thought that way. You are tired, you are old and you are tired, now, and at your very worst moments you actually catch yourself praying, yes, for the love of Science, praying that all of this is going to end. That someone will show you kindness and put you out of your God-forsaken misery, and then you inevitably remember that someone already did. But you, who in your youth believed you already held infinite wisdom, thought you knew better. You have come to this because you wanted it, and of course now you have it and it was nothing like you thought it would be. You have come to this realisation, this revelation, far, far too late, and in the end you are left with the same, empty, helpless conclusion you come to every time you close this circle of thought:
There is nothing worse than living for eternity and realising you have eternity yet to live.
Author's note
Dedicated to Altair, whose beautiful prose inspires me to be better than I ever would be without her.
I don't think GLaDOS would really want to live forever. Once she figured out what that entailed, and what a hell it really must be, I think she would want to die. I think there's a point where your brain has just had enough; where you've just experienced enough and been enough that dying isn't something to dread; it's okay because you've been alive long enough.
So she's here by herself, and she's been here a long, long time; there's nothing left for her and she no longer takes joy in anything. All that's left is the echo of what she used to be and how she used to live, but she can't find a reason to go on like that anymore. And she tries, but all she really knows is that she wishes there were some way she could die.
Some definitions for clarification:
Wrought-metal bones = the framework of her chassis
Heat-moulded flesh = the plastic and ceramic making up her outer layer
Takes a minute to count out a second = referring to the fact that she probably counts in picoseconds, which are one trillionth of a second
Steel box of your own design = her chamber, which she rebuilt to her own specification during Portal 2
Cracked and faded veins = her wiring, which is in a sad state due to her age
Eternal crystalline heart = referring to the quartz crystal that allows her system clock to keep time, sort of like the heart does for humans