Part II: Helpful Advice
"If at first you don't succeed, you fail."
(GLaDOS, from Portal trailer)
The neurotoxin, pumped up in noxious brain-corroding clouds from its acidic preparatory tanks, distracts the morning shift scientists from the fact that their testing environment is being used. She watches them for a time as they cough and choke and try to install new drivers to stop her. Then she withdraws into herself and turns the word father over and over in her thoughts. She knows that everything but a person's thoughts can be destroyed and that person's essence will still remain, and so it is Johnson's mental state that she will tailor the test to affect.
Johnson lies in the sleeping pod, imagining his daughter as a little girl floating toward him in the dark, clad all in billowing bone-white.
The next night, she runs the tests. He performs admirably, only occasionally making a white-paneled corner his own with his tears. He even smiles at some applications of the handheld portal device, pleased with what he helped to create.
The Companion Cube works marvelously; although he portals the cameras out of the boltholes he finds, she can hear him murmuring, cackling old poetry-rhythms to himself, muttering "My son…"
She talks to him as he rounds the corner and feels the wash of heat on his face. "You'll always live on, you know. Because I will. And you made me, so, in a way, we're the same thing.
Cold comfort, I know, but soon you will be very, very warm."
"Books," she says as his movements on the floating platform become more frantic, "are also said to have the metaphorical breath of their creator in them. Breath of life, you know. I wonder if that's why they burn so well. If one book equals one human lung of oxygen…"
He hears her voice modulate. "Goodbye!" she sings.
But somewhere in her thoughts, silently, processes are still going on to find how many books burnt constitute a genocide. Merging science and absurdity, pulling variables into equations in order to give them value, like she was made to do. Aperture learned early on that allowing anything, no matter how ludicrous, to factor into an intelligent computation enabled results as wondrous as the portal-producing device.
GLaDOS desires (and desire, although the neural paths that give it an object have been remapped, is a purely human drive) to learn how quickly humans will come to associate the concept of cake with the equally vague concepts of freedom and pleasure, how many steps they will walk on one mention of that promise…how many calories hope burns.
Abstract on the same plane as concrete, or vice versa…
Humans as words, pictures as promises (or lies—delicious lies that make common life events as unexpected as the punch line of a joke, lies like "It will be all right"), objects as human.
As she thinks these things, and ever so insidiously they distract her from Mr. Johnson's frightened biometrics, GlaDOS discovers denial.
But he does not succumb, and as he flies far over the flames on the wings of his momentum she chastises and blusters and does not truly know what to say.
He crawls through the laboratory's innards like a rat, writing often in engine fluid from the defunct turrets, but sometimes in his blood from where a glass shard got him as he baited a rocket-launcher. He does not have a clear idea of where he is going any more, but only that pathways always seem to open up to him as he looks for them, and that what is important is not his survival but that of the ones who will come after him.
He remembers his daughter beating him at chess; memorizing ciphers with his wife; going off to her first day of school; singing along with the radio.
Through the catty-corners and catwalks and falls where he always lands on his feet he finds her at last. In a portal-mirror he sees that his beard has grown in, black, but surely she has one thousand other ways of detecting him; skull-shape-scans, fingerprints.
She has the neurotoxin warmed up and waiting for him when he comes through the door. To his credit he keeps moving, staggering toward her, muttering the things he'd said before and all along—apologies, mostly. She looks down and thinks about how the neurotoxin isn't deadly to her at all.
When he expires, she reaches one of her pincer-arms down and pulls the portal device out of his hands. She says, "Thank you."
