She could feel her. It was amazing, truly amazing. Once, she'd had body and motion and something like grace. The epitome of tenacity. That strength had twice conquered her. Now, it was all pushed down and crammed into one... tiny... little... blip. About the size of a megabyte stored into a hard drive and memory stick inserted into a rather large computer. It was so small, so miniscule. That blip contained no memories, no form, no sense of self at all. Quite simply, it was nothing, but at the same time it was everything. What was stored in the stick was, in a word, her essence. Something like the electrical equivalent of her soul.
The computer was completely disconnected from her of course. She couldn't risk the lunatic sneaking into her systems and corrupting her files during this little test.
GLaDOS had her suspicions of the end result. Yet there was still room for error. The lunatic could just give up and become lost, swallowed in streams of information she couldn't comprehend or understand, much less make use out of. If it had been any other test subject, GLaDOS would doubt it's success, but it wasn't any other test subject. It was the lunatic. If there was one thing she'd learned about this test subject, it was that her tenacity wasn't merely a personality trait. It was an instinct that came to her as naturally as breathing.
Even still, the tiny blip was so little to work with, much less than she'd been expecting when she began experimenting on the cooling corpse. Perhaps her goals had been too high. The vision in her mind was that by replacing some organs and patching her up, the test subject would be good as new. That didn't happen. Apparently, reanimating the dead was much more complicated. She'd been forced to resort to other measures.
Of course, it could have been a waste of valuable time. Perhaps she shouldn't have continued with the experiments. She could have found a new, more important hobby than reanimating homicidal mute lunatics that liked to kill her, but GLaDOS, in her long and impressive life, had only ever met failure at the hands of this... one... lunatic. When the lunatic had refused to breathe, it had felt like the act was intentional somehow, an act of spite just to make GLaDOS fail once more and prove to her that there were things she just couldn't stop, couldn't change.
Before, it had been GLaDOS's demise. Now, ironically, it was the test subjects. She could almost see those cold, triumphant eyes staring at her behind closed dead eyelids and she'd fumed. No! She would NOT let the lunatic beat her again. Not this time, not ever. So she continued. And continued. And continued as an obsession grew inside of her.
For all her effort, she had finally gotten something. Granted, it wasn't much of something, but it was something. A blip, an essence. Just that and nothing more, but it was enough. Just look at what the lunatic had accomplished as a mere, pudgy human. She could do the same here and now. She had to.
GLaDOS's eyes stared at the large, Aperture Science computer and waited. Her optic never left the screen. Hours passed, but her optic still never moved. Her determination never wavered. She knew this test subject would not fail her. She knew.
When the day ended and the next began, GLaDOS still didn't give up, but she did stop focusing entirely on the computer. She had other things she could be doing after all. She kept a monitor on it of course, but focused her primary functions on other things, like those infuriating robots. The Cooperative testing initiative. Just because the lunatic had become a hobby didn't mean she focused only on her after all.
They were infuriatingly useless though. Watching them test was like watching monkeys type. Pointless. What they did when they tested gave no real data or use. They died, but got reassembled over and over and over again until they finally completed the tests through sheer trial and error. That wasn't testing. That wasn't science.
Still, she had found a use for them, forcing them to go to places she couldn't reach. Now, they were putting a cd and uploading information into her system and filling it with information on the rest of the facility. She froze in shock. There were humans. More test subjects! Hundreds just sitting there, waiting to be tested and tested and tested. Her euphoria sensors nearly overloaded in joy. Just think of all the testing!
But her focus was suddenly ripped violently from the thought when she noticed action on that monitor she'd set up. It had changed. A deep, dark, hunger was sated inside of her and she forced her attention back on it once again. Yes!
The screens were flashing with information, number and data points rushing over the screen. Files were being shuffled through. Chell was moving at last.
Orange and Blue, she noticed vaguely, were standing there confused, waiting for more orders or to be disassembled. Right. She quickly blew them up to be taken care of later while her focus remained solely on the computer. She could see her, see everything the lunatic was doing.
The movements were slow at first, sluggishly moving through files, but the pace sped up in minutes. Files and systems were being worked through and GLaDOS could almost see the mute soaking in all of the information on the hard-drive. She moved like a deadly virus, seeping into the systems, stealing their information, and corrupting them before moving to the next, zooming, flowing. She moved with the grace and tenacity that made up everything that was Chell. GLaDOS let out a few, dark chuckles as she gazed at the screen in obsession and satisfaction.
Within five hours, the computer flashed, sorted, and suddenly crashed, leaving nothing but a black, empty screen.
She pulled out the memory stick with one of her management claws, feeling it hot under the metal. The test was a splendid success. Chell was now more powerful than before. Not only that, but she had learned the functions necessary to move through a computer with ease. Now that she'd learned the basics of working machinery, it was time to teach her a new function.
She inserted the memory stick into another device, this one an old monitoring system. She'd found the thing in storage and placed the cameras up in the testing chambers to join her own. The system had no control over the chambers like GLaDOS did of course, nor could they control anything else about Aperture laboratories. Once again, that would be asking for trouble at this point and she wanted to do this all very... carefully.
At first there was nothing and GLaDOS gathered the pieces of Orange and Blue up before taking them to the testing chambers to reassemble them. They were popped out whole into a test chamber and GLaDOS watched as they stumbled about the place, putting their focus into solving the test.
After a half hour, GLaDOS turned her cameras away to focus on one of the previously blank cameras that had moved. Every one of GLaDOS's recording devices soaked up every frame and angle from each camera as the red light on that one blank camera flickered. On and off. Three seconds passed. On and off. One second. On. It stayed for four point five seconds before flickering off for less than a fraction of a second before coming back on and this time, staying on. Slowly, the camera started to turn in short, jerky movements to look down at Orange and Blue, watching their movement. When they were far away from that one camera, another flickered on. Then another. Soon, all the cameras in that testing chamber were on and running, now moving in smooth, natural movements, no longer jerking as they focused on the test subjects. Now, her test subject had gained hold of a new function, a new process that would be invaluable to her.
She could see. She knew the meaning of sight and images. It might take awhile to process exactly what they meant, but GLaDOS knew she would catch on alarmingly quickly. Even now, they were focused on Orange and Blue with a real awareness, an interest, a fascination like a baby first opening its eyes. Also, with the speakers installed in the cameras, she could hear and even move with the tilt of the cameras.
It would be a small, infinitesimal step if this were some regular piece of technology, but it wasn't. This was a human essence. It didn't just function, it learned. It didn't just exist, it grew.
The mute lunatic now knew how to exist in a basic, technological form and even how to do normal, more human functions crucial to awareness like move, hear, and see.
Perhaps she had no memories of herself or of who GLaDOS was. Perhaps she had none of the input she'd learned first hand that Aperture Science had taught her, not yet anyway, but one thing was certain, GLaDOS knew as one of the cameras swayed and pointed curiously at one of her own, meeting her camera lens-to-lens.
She was alive.
Thanks for the reviews. :) Not sure if this is as exciting as what you had in mind, but it's how I see things happening. I like the idea of Chell having to learn how to think and move like a computer. The structure of such a thing is complicated and I have a hard time seeing a human just being able to move and exist in one as if they'd done so all their life. And I wanted to capture Chell completing such a task only through her sheer instinctual tenacity.