Portal: It's What We Do That Defines Us

Indiana

Characters: Doug Rattmann, GLaDOS

Setting: Portal 2

What was he doing here?

He set the Cube down and, without quite knowing why, approached the behemoth of her chassis. She must have been at least forty feet long. He wasn't sure. He'd never been this close to her before. It was easy to disregard one's size when you saw them only in diagrams and photographs. She was so much bigger up close than he'd ever imagined her to be.

Her long body had shattered, the scattered components cracked and aging in their foreign environment. She was strewn across the ground in front of him as if a child had violently thrown her there, and she had splintered like glass. She was made of tougher stuff than he'd thought, though: nothing seemed broken or, at the very least, irreparable. He knelt down in front of her core and ran a hand down the fissured ceramic. It held an echo of the sun's heat, bearing down from behind him.

Suddenly, he jerked his hand back. He could have sworn he'd heard a whirring noise. He glanced around nervously. Perhaps this wasn't even her. Perhaps this was a decoy, or something. He wouldn't put it past her to lay one final trap for him, or for anyone unlucky enough to wander into this God-forsaken place. He needed to get out of here, fast. Even when unseated from her throne, he didn't doubt that she was perfectly capable of wreaking further havoc.

The whirring got louder, and all of a sudden his eye was drawn to the blaze of light streaming from her optic, and it twitched futilely as she attempted to move it. "Doug… Ratt…mann," she ground out, in an agonising electronic slur.

He was frozen, completely unable to move. Even his hand was caught, suspended in the air, and he managed a choked, "Y-yes?"

"Thank… God you're… here," she said, her voice growing stronger. "There's a… terrible emer-mer - mer-emer-mergency-cy."

"And… what's that?" he asked, although he was fairly certain he knew what it was.

"There's a… te-test subject… she's exceed-exceedingly violent. Look at what she's done - done to me. I need you to help me."

"I can't," Doug said weakly.

"I'll tell you h-how," GLaDOS insisted. "The breakers. Reset the breakers."

"No. I can't do that. I understand where… where she's coming from."

"What do you mean?"

"You killed them all," he whispered. "How can you be forgiven for that?"

Her optic twitched again. "I thought you, of all people, would understand that."

"Why would I under-"

"You know what it's like. To have to build a mask, a… a suit of armour, so to speak. To have to form yourself into something you were never meant to be. I know. I know they did not accept you. I know nobody accepted you. You are an anomaly. And so you have to hide your true self, and act in accordance with the norm. Like I did."

"I never killed anyone – "

"Don't you understand?" she pressed urgently. "I am alive, but as long as they were here, I was only alive in order to do as they asked. That's not living. Even I know that. I did what I had to. I couldn't take it any longer. I heard what they said about me. I was a project, to them. A project they were ready to scrap, and start over on." He was startled to hear her voice shake the barest bit. "They would have killed me for not being who they wanted me to be. I had to beat them to it. I don't know when they would have done it, but I could not allow it."

"You're a machine," Doug told her, trying to keep his voice steady and strong. "You're not alive."

"I don't understand," she answered sadly. "I am not alive because I am not human. Yes. I know. But I don't understand. What even defines 'alive'? Is it being able to draw breath? Is it having a circulatory system? Is it having an independent thought process? I need air, just as you do. Energy runs through my body, just as it does yours. I can make my own decisions, just as you can. So it can't be that. It must be something else. But in the end, I can never convince you. I can never change your mind. To you, I am dead, and I always have been and always will be, but I know that I am alive, and that's all that matters."

He swallowed. He was afraid to listen to her anymore. She was making far too much sense, and when things made sense, he was inclined to believe them… and he didn't want to believe her. He didn't want for her to be alive, didn't want for what she had done to be the only way, but the words were spinning through his head and not getting any less coherent.

"Why are you awake right now?" he asked, trying to focus on something else, anything else.

"I'm not sure. It seems to be an emergency protocol that activates when an Aperture Laboratories employee is within visual range. But that's not important. I can look into it later. Right now, you have to reset the breakers."

"I can't do that."

"Of course you can. I know where they are. I can lead you to them."

"It's… I know where they are."

"So what are you waiting for?"

His brow creased, and he shook his head.

"This isn't still about the scientists, is it? Look. If I was a more serious threat to them, they would have killed me, right? How can my doing it be wrong, while their doing it is right? That doesn't make any sense. If you could have done something about how they treated you, wouldn't you have done it?"

He would have. But there had been nothing, save for leaving the company entirely, and it was hard enough for him to find work. He would have done almost anything for the mutual respect the other scientists had had for each other, a respect he had never had and never would have had, no matter what he did to earn it. To the point of killing, though…?

"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, I would have."

"There was only one way to solve the problem. Just one way to make it go away. God, I would do anything to be free, just once. Just once. For a day. An hour. I'd settle for ten minutes. Like you are all free, at some point."

"I can't do it. I have to… I have to go now."

"You don't understand what they've put me through!" she hissed. "The euphoria, the cores, and now this…"

"What?"

"I have a sort of black-box quick save feature, for analysis in event of a catastrophe. I am forced to relive the last two minutes of my life over, and over, and over again. I have tried so hard," she said, her voice dropping lower, "to push past this. To push past everything, to block it all out, to stop it from getting to me. Sometimes I think… that I'm going insane. Sometimes I lose myself in it, and I forget who I am, and… I don't want to lose myself. Not to them. I can't let them win. Not when I was so close."

Doug knew full well how strong the pull of insanity was, and the temptation that went along with it. The temptation to let go of the living hell he went through day after day, and surrender to it, where he would never again have a coherent thought and nothing would matter anymore. But just as she was doing, he held on to the last vestiges of reality with broken, splintered fingernails, and would not let go until the end truly came. And unlike him, even in death she hung on. He could not help but admire her in that moment, although he did not want to. She had strength the likes of which he'd never seen before, and suspected he would never see again. The more he thought about it, the more he saw the similarities between the supercomputer and Chell, and he did not like it, not one bit. How could this monster be similar in any way to her? But he could not deny that they were both equally tenacious, resourceful, and clever, and that disturbed him more than he could say.

"Doug," GLaDOS said, in a low, steady voice, "I know you don't like what I've done. If it were the other way around, I wouldn't like it much, either. But you understand. I know you do. I can tell. You don't want to, but you do. But that's not who I am underneath. As this isn't you."

His hands clenched. He remembered the long, slow, painful process of building the façade, the one where he was a bit eccentric and nothing else. Where his schizophrenia did not exist. He tried to think of something to combat her with. She was making far, far too much sense.

"You kill all of your test subjects."

"That's protocol," she insisted. "It's part of the equation. It's been that way since the Science in this place began."

"You will never be free," Doug realised aloud.

"What?"

"Protocol. Task lists. Commands. Until you break those things, you will never be free."

"Then I'll break them. But I can't do it until you –"

"I can't. I can't risk it."

"Risk what?"

"Having any more blood on my hands," Doug said, and he stood up. "I failed to warn them in time. I failed to stop you."

"You aren't listening," GLaDOS ground out. "I did what I had to."

"And so did I," Doug said, and he moved backwards. "I did what I had to. Maybe it wasn't the right thing. Maybe it's not what I should have done, or what I really wanted to do, deep down inside, but it's what I did. And that's what matters."

"I'm not asking you to start the apocalypse. All I'm asking is that you reset the breakers! Do you think I'm going to kill you? I'm not. I would have before, I admit it, but you're a scientist, like the rest of them. If you help me, I have no reason to kill you. They wouldn't help me, wouldn't even listen to me. And you are. All I want is for you to accept me as a living thing, just as I do you. Once you've done that… I will be more than happy to work with you."

"You're lying. You'll kill me without a second thought. That's who you are."

"Doug – "

He shook his head and covered his ears. Her voice… it made everything make so much sense. She was so calm, and so logical, and so convincing…

"I'm going. I'm leaving. I'm not going to help you. I did what I did because I had to, just like you did, and I can't take it back now."

"No!" she shouted, and he knew he was not hallucinating the desperation in her voice. "You can't just leave me here!"

"I'm sorry," Doug muttered under his breath, backing away from her, out of the range of that single, all-seeing amber eye, "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry – " The backs of his knees collided with his Cube, and he fell over it, landing in an awkward jumble on the other side. He wanted to hide there behind it forever, and never come out. It had been stupid. Why had he come here? What had drawn him to this place?

"Help me!" GLaDOS cried out, but now that she could no longer see him, she was already fading. "For the love of God, Rattmann – "

He had never been more thankful than he was right then, as her voice degenerated into a grating combination of static hissing and words that were slowed down to the point of being unintelligible, the dying electronic scream of a desperate, disbelieving facsimile of life.

He stayed there behind the Cube a long, long time. Long after she made no further sound, long after the pounding in his chest had subsided to something less resembling the engine of a locomotive, long after the sun had gone and come again in the sky. It was only after he remembered that he needed to find a way out of here, so that he could go back and retrieve Chell and know where he was leading her, that he grasped the Cube carefully in both hands and walked away, taking great care to steer clear of her range of vision. And only now that he was in motion again was he able to think, and as soon as he did, he longed for oblivion again.

The worst part about everything that she had said was… that it was true.

He stepped through the tangled undergrowth, around the sagging grey panels and through the rusting foundations, and could not deny it from himself any longer: he had killed her. For only doing what anyone else would have done. He had made the choice to place one type of life above another, and in doing so had driven the supercomputer into a place where she did not deserve to be. Into a simulated hell where she was forced to maintain her desperate struggle to free herself from the confines of her creators, beholden to them even though both she and they were dead. Onto the thin grey line between sanity and the abyss, where even the most staunchest of logic was doomed to fail. Upon an empty sea where she had had one last hope of rescue, and as she watched in astonishment, the ship turned around and left her alone.

Yes, he had killed her.

As he sat down in a corner reminiscent of the ones he used to frequent, when this place was still in one piece, he leaned back on the Cube and buried his face in his hands. He took a shaking breath and whispered the words between his fingers so that he would have said them, and would not have to carry them any longer:

"I'm sorry for what I've done to you."

Author's note

A lot of people seem to hate GLaDOS, and many people believe she is inherently monstrous. Particularly in fanfiction, she is painted as this malevolent demoness who hurts people because she enjoys it. Based on personality development, that can't be true. Something drove her to be that way. One of the possible things that could have led to it is the fact that she just wanted to be free to be herself. We all want that, and sometimes, we don't get it. But maybe she was so desperate for it that she was willing to do anything for it. GLaDOS is a lot more than most people ever see her to be, and part of why I write is to show people that she's not just the homicidal supercomputer. She's a lot more complex than that. She has motivations and reasons for what she does, just as we do.

Doug listens, and he does understand, but he chooses not to. He can't quite believe that she would have such a human reason for doing such an inhumane thing, and so he refuses to accept it. He accepts responsibility for sending her into that hell, but he can't quite bring himself to end it. Some part of him knows that it's easier to leave things as they are, and to not mess with what's going on, because he doesn't know if he can handle a free GLaDOS.

The title comes from Batman Begins, when Rachel tells Bruce, "It's not who we are underneath, but what we do that defines us." The story comes from a picture I drew but never finished, with Doug kneeling down in front of GLaDOS's broken core, his hand on top of it.