A while ago, I began writing down a few fragments of some ideas for a Portal fanfic. They were mostly based in the origins of GLaDOS, but there was also some Wheatley-origins stuff thrown in as well. When I finally got around to crafting a fanfic out of these pieces of narrative, I realized that the storylines for the GLaDOS and Wheatley fics actually lined up with each other in an unintentional and rather creepy manner. Thus, I decided to combine the two, with each chapter containing two parts - one for GLaDOS, and the other for the corresponding Wheatley segment.
So, naturally, the Wheatley fic took off, I wrote almost all of it in a few short days of heated inspiration, and I left GLaDOS' story in the dirt. She will be very disappointed with me. But, because I'm starting to loose some steam on writing the Wheatley story and I know that I need to get some motivation to force me to complete it, I've decided to start putting up my Wheatley chapters in their own separate fic. When I get around to writing more about GLaDOS, I'll put that up as well. If this is the future and the GLaDOS-origin fic is already up, congratulations! I'd suggest reading this story and that one side by side - read one chapter of this one and then one of the other, etc.
There are two things that have always annoyed me in the Portal fandom concerning Wheatley. I don't particularly like the idea that he was originally a human - and, consequently, I don't like the idea of turning him into one. Each person has their own tastes, I suppose, but Wheatley always struck me as the kind of robot who had just been around long enough and experienced so much humanity that he started to drift away from his robotic roots. This phenomenon should be familiar to anyone who has seen the movie WALL-E. So, I hereby present a fanfic on the decidedly robotic origins of Wheatley.
I'm trying out a couple new things with this fanfic. Most notably, I'm experimenting a bit with different writing styles. As you might notice, this first chapter is composed entirely out of dialogue. If my experimentation starts to lead me down the path towards poor writing, feel free to review and tell me in which ways it's starting to suck. Seriously, I won't mind. In fact, I'll probably be ecstatic that someone cares enough about the story to tell me how to make it better.
Enough authorly, bold-print talking. This fanfic isn't making me any money, but that doesn't give me an excuse to make an author's note that is almost as long as the following chapter.
"Why? Just, can anyone answer that for me? Why us? Why is it that we get blamed for all this?"
"Because, obviously, the ones who built her are all dead. They can't blame the ones who started her, so now they're blaming the ones who can't stop her."
"Well, it's not our fault we can't stop her. She's killed all the smart people."
"Not true. If they were the 'smart people', they'd have been smart enough to stay far, far away from her."
"Grrgh. Fine. But, still, it's not as if there's anything we can do. Everything we throw at her, she just brushes off."
"Okay, okay. Let's think about this for a minute. We're engineers – we solve problems for a living. Let's just take a moment to calm down and think rationally about this."
"…Alright. Hmmmm. Let's try to reduce this to one small, specific problem, something that's easier to find a solution to. 'We can't stop her from killing us' is a pretty big, pretty vague problem."
"I hear you. Huh…I guess the real problem here is that we can't regulate her. We can't control her, and therefore we can't stop her when she tries to kill us."
"But even that's a pretty big problem – we need to reduce it more. We've tried to regulate her by strapping cores on her to influence her actions, but that doesn't seem to help very much, if at all. I'd say our real problem is that the cores aren't a strong enough influence on her."
"But that's too vague of a problem. And, it's not that they can't be a strong influence, it's just that they literally have no way of forcing her to listen to them."
"We've tried a whole bunch of things to make her listen, but it's no use. We've used different methods of input, different styles of distraction, different techniques of influence, but nothing works. Nothing. Works. Her processors are far too fast for anything we'd be capable of building to stand up to it. She just determines where the core's influence is coming from and finds a way to shut it out."
"Considering that the problem of 'processors too fast' is pretty much unsolvable on our end, let's try to look at this a bit differently."
"Okay. What did you have in mind?"
"Well, the cores are like different kinds of weapons. You know, different methods of delivery, different kinds of damage."
"I'm not sure what you're getting at."
"Well, let's say one of the cores is a turret. GLaDOS is so strong that she can weather its bullets for long enough to realize that knocking it over will kill it."
"So, the problem is that each of our cores has a debilitating weakness that she can exploit? All we need to do is to build a core that isn't very good at one thing, but is so infallible that she won't be able to stop it?"
"Almost. Let's say, she walks up to the turret to push it over, but before she can do anything, it turns into a rocket launcher."
"…what?"
"And then she figures out how to defeat the rocket launcher, but when she tries to do it, it turns into a pit of acid. When she figures out how to escape that, it transforms into a turret again. By now she thinks she's learned all its tricks, so she tries to defeat it like it's a rocket launcher, but this time, it morphs into a nuclear missile."
"…I, I think I get it. You think we should make a core that's not necessarily good at everything, and doesn't necessarily lack a weakness, but is just so good at adapting to her attacks that she can't defeat it?"
"Bingo."
"What you're thinking of…it's downright insane."
"Well, newsflash to you, she's insane. Sometimes insane problems need insane solutions."
"We can't possibly begin to build a machine that complex!"
"Someone already has. GLaDOS finds a way to adapt to our cores' methods of attack, right? We know an adaptation mechanism is at least possible."
"But…she was a one-time event. An accident. And, we didn't entirely make her. Some of her memory banks were stripped from a human, weren't they?"
"We're better at this now than we were then. At that point, we didn't even know how to make an AI from scratch. To date, we have created five different cores out of nothing but circuitry, and under some loose definitions, a couple of them could even be called sentient."
"…"
"Come on, really. What do we have to lose?"
"Our lives. Our jobs. Our dignity."
"Well, gee golly, I could have sworn that we'd lose all three of those anyways if we didn't find a way to stop her."
"…Okay, you know what, fine. We'll do it your way. Your insanely impractical way. Though, as idiotic, unworkable plans go, this is a pretty appealing one."
"Hehe, yeah. No, wait a second…that's a fabulous idea! Forget the whole 'adaptable' thing, just give me a pen. I need to write this down."
Yeah, this chapter was short. There really wasn't that much that was supposed to happen in this one anyways. The next one will be much longer, I promise. This story has a total of eleven chapters, some of which are over five times as long as this.
You know that motivation I said I needed earlier? Well, if I know people are reading this story, that gives me an excuse to work more on this story. I suppose you could start off by simply reading it...which, if you've made it down here, you already have. But, if you review, you'll let me know that someone out there actually cares. This may only be my second fanfic on this site, but even I have enough experience to know how much motivational power can be packed into a single review.
