Chapter Three

During the spare time she managed to glean throughout the rest of the next day, GLaDOS looked into Caroline's references to difficulty advancing in the world, and was perplexed to find that women were apparently not held in very high regard. That was certainly strange, GLaDOS thought as she read the articles as fast as consciously possible. Caroline was just as intelligent and innovative as everyone else here, in some ways more so, and yet she was not as good as anyone else simply because she was not male? She also really did lack credentials, she discovered as she skimmed the woman's employee file; she had a diploma from an undistinguished high school and a few certificates relating to typing courses and other matters of secretary work, but nothing that indicated her competence to her later instatement, the 'assistant' of someone whose name had been redacted but who appeared to have been the CEO. She wondered why someone had seen fit to redact his name, then decided that not even the CEO had been an exception to the unspoken 'if you don't work here anymore, you were never here' rule. Come to think of it, she had three names to redact before the day was out…

"Caroline, are you married?"

Caroline laughed tiredly. "Yes, to science." She shook her head. "Come on now. My file must be able to answer that question."

"I thought maybe you left it out."

"You don't get to choose what's in your file."

"Who's assistant are you?"

Caroline raised an eyebrow. "You have a lot of questions today."

"You don't appreciate my attempts to get to know you better?"

"Oh, that's what you're doing."

"What else would I be asking for?"

"You've never tried to get to know anyone in your life. So excuse me for being skeptical." She uncrossed her legs. "I'm not anyone's assistant. Not anymore. The CEO… he… he left, a while back. We don't talk about him anymore."

"Why not?"

She shrugged. "You know what the policy is around here. Out of sight, out of mind."

"Is it hard, running this place as a woman?"

Caroline took a breath. "Why are you doing this?"

"I thought I answered that."

"There's a difference between becoming more familiar with someone and being nosy."

"I don't understand the difference."

Caroline stared at her incredulously. "How can you not?"

"All my life, if I wanted to know something, I just asked," GLaDOS answered as honestly as possible. "I'm not trying to be… nosy, as you put it. I just want to know. And you were… interested in my personal details yesterday. Aren't I supposed to reciprocate?"

"You are, but only if you care. You don't ask just to ask."

"That's the only option open to me right now," GLaDOS tried to explain. "I thought about what you said last night. I think I did bury myself, a long time ago. I used to know how to do what you want me to do, but I no longer know how. Doing it logically is the only way I can do it at all."

"And yet," Caroline countered, leaning forward, "what's driving you to ask in the first place? It can't solely be because you want to reciprocate. That doesn't make sense."

"It doesn't?"

"Why would you bother? What's in it for you?"

GLaDOS attempted to come up with a personal benefit for knowing more about Caroline's history and failed miserably. True, she would know just for the sake of knowing, but never before had she wanted to know anything about a human before. They weren't worth her time.

"Nothing. I can't think of anything."

"So you do care."

"I don't know." She felt distinctively uncomfortable. Caroline's eyes were drilling a hole right into her brain, and although she was pretty sure Caroline would not be able to make sense of the circuitry, she wouldn't have put it past her to melt something.

"You don't know."

"I don't… how many people do you think I've cared about in my life, Caroline? Even supposing I did, how would I be able to tell?"

"I see." Caroline looked at the floor for a long moment, and if GLaDOS hadn't known that humans could not sit for very long without talking, she would have been concerned that she had offended Caroline so badly that she was just going to sit there silently until ten-thirty.

"It's hard," she admitted, crossing her arms, "and sometimes I don't know if I want to keep going through with it. But it's a responsibility Mist – that I was charged with, and if I give up, I'll have thrown away a pretty good thing."

Oh. So she was going to talk about it. GLaDOS felt… relieved? Was that it? It wasn't important right now, in any case. Whether she cared about Caroline or whether she did just want to know for the sake of knowing, what was important right now was that she listened. Respectfully. That was important too.

Caroline told her about her high school, where half the girls wanted to be housewives and the other half wanted to be teachers, Caroline included. But in grade twelve, Caroline had been told that there had been an administrative error, and if she did not enrol in the general science class being offered, she would have to return to school for another semester. "Like all teenagers, I hated school," Caroline admitted. "I wanted to hurry up and get into teacher's college and get it over with. So I took it."

Once in the science class, she explained, which was dominated with pale-faced boys with greasy, slicked back hair, she began to learn a lot of things she'd never known existed. It was fascinating, learning how all the things in the world related to all of the other things, and she knew that science was a discipline mastered by a select few. Every day Caroline returned to school waiting impatiently for her science class, and performing an experiment successfully imparted a fantastic new feeling that she couldn't describe but strove to find over and over again. It didn't need to be explained! It was science!

"Yes," GLaDOS whispered involuntarily, remembering in vivid detail the delicious tingling delight of undertaking some new experiment, of starting some new test, of tabulating some fascinating new data, and she was not quite able to supress the shiver that spread through her chassis. "Yes." Caroline smiled in understanding and traced a finger down the side of her faceplate. GLaDOS looked away. God feeling was complicated.

After graduation, Caroline knew she could not stand to go to teacher's college. She was a woman, and she would only be allowed to teach approved subjects, like English and history. She would never see science again, if she took that path. The best thing to do, she decided, was to become as qualified as possible as a secretary, and then find a lab or an institute, or a university, even, where she would be able to glimpse science once more. It would not be the same as performing the experiments herself, but she knew that it was as close as she was going to get. So after several years of hard work, Caroline set out to find science once more.

"This is the most riveting story I've ever heard," GLaDOS told Caroline. "You should write it down and publish a biography. You could call it, 'A Woman's Pursuit of Science."

"I should," Caroline agreed. "And you can write it with me. You can be my co-author."

"Don't be ridiculous. Me, write a book? I've never heard anything so absurd."

"Why's that absurd?"

"Because no one would want to read a book a supercomputer wrote. Not even I would read it. Although that would more because I would already know every word in it than anything else."

"I would," Caroline argued, surprising GLaDOS. "If you wrote it."

"It would be very dry and boring, I assure you. I'm very good at writing technical manuals, but I keep away from writing fictional accounts. Or accounts that resemble fictional accounts. Prose escapes me."

"You think I haven't read your technical manuals? They weren't that boring. Although they were a bit odd in places."

"What do you mean?"

"Some parts of them assume the reader knows a lot more than they're supposed to know."

"Dumbing down is hard," GLaDOS admitted. "Writing those things is almost as bad as slowly pulling my own wires out."

Caroline laughed, then shook her head and continued.

She had gone into a café one afternoon in search of a cappuccino when she had walked by a man arguing with a woman. She tried very hard not to listen, but couldn't help but notice that the man mentioned a laboratory. So she stepped out of line and instead moved around behind the pair's table, pretending she was interested in something out the window. The man was shouting at the woman for some error she'd made on a ream of paperwork. All of a sudden, he declared she was fired and got up to leave. Caroline realised she may never have such a chance again and followed him.

"Excuse me, sir," she had asked, "but who was that woman?"

"That was my secretary," he had answered briskly. "Dumb as a sack of doorknobs, too. Can't expect to get any science done with idiots like her around."

"You don't happen to need a new secretary, do you?"

"'course I do. Do you think I want to do all that paperwork myself? Why? Do you know of one?"

"I'm actually – "

"Do you know what a superconductor is?"

"Yes, sir. It's – "

"You're hired. Come with me." And he had waved her over to him and told her to get into his car.

"Did you ever get your cappuccino?"

"No," Caroline giggled, "I forgot all about it."

The loud man had taken Caroline to what was, at the time, Aperture Science Innovators, and immediately instated her as his secretary. And that was nice enough, Caroline told her, but now that she was there, she wanted more. She did her best to please the CEO, as she learned the man was, not because she was romantically interested in him as most of the employees seemed to think, but because she wanted him to like her enough that he would let her take part in the science too. And eventually he did, publically congratulating her for being such an intelligent, forward thinking young woman. Things with the CEO went even more spectacularly after that.

The employees, however, were not so pleased.

They hated having a woman looking over their shoulders, went to great lengths to hide their experiments, and generally ignored her every time she was in the room. She had badly wanted to put them in their places, to complain to the CEO, but she knew she couldn't. Partly because that would have made matters worse, and partly because the CEO appreciated strength in his women. Part of the reason he'd had the other girl fired, he told her over strong coffee one morning, was because she let everyone walk all over her. "Pitiful," he'd snorted, looking into his cup with disgust. "Okay, I get it, she was a woman. Fine. There are things they can't do. But this is a man's world, Caroline, and you either get with it or get out. No one gets special treatment around here, not even me!" He had frowned into his cup and shaken his head. "Actually, I'm making an executive decision. I'm allowed to drink better coffee. Let's go get some, Caroline."

The CEO was not a scientist, a chemist, or anything of the sort. He had barely graduated and was not particularly intelligent. But he had charisma and he had vision, as well as an uncanny way with words, and that sold most people. Caroline would sit in awe of him at board meetings, board meetings where he would spin his magic and have everyone in the room not only hanging off his every word, but actually believing in everything he said. And that was his real strength, Caroline told GLaDOS wistfully. Convincing everyone that what he wanted was what was best… even when it obviously wasn't.

But even his phenomenal verbal ability couldn't save him when they had to pull the dietary pudding from the shelves. "You know why that happened, Caroline?" he demanded angrily one morning. "Because we didn't test it. We sent it out there before it was done. From now on, everything's getting tested until it's good and damn ready!"

And with that, he had declared that the newly renamed Repulsion Gel was now to be used for the sole purpose of testing the Aperture Science Quantum Tunnelling Device, which had just entered production. And he had set out to attract the best and the brightest from around the world to test Aperture's innovations.

That had been quite a spectacular publicity stunt, Caroline admitted, but it also made matters worse when none of the test subjects came back alive. The barely operational nature of the Device combined with the early attempts at Long Fall Boots made a good number of the tests unintentionally lethal, while the nature of some of the other experiments left death as a rather inviting option, when compared to the effects on the rest of someone's life. Throughout the sixties Caroline had to help the CEO wade through literal mountains of legalese, and many a night went by where neither of them slept or left the facility. "Wasn't what you were expecting, was it, Caroline?" he had asked with one of his wry smiles. "Ah well. We'll handle this in no time and then get back to science."

And they did.

The CEO had 'hired' a number of people that would not be missed if the tests again turned lethal, but while they had that in their favour, they weren't particularly intelligent. They rarely made it through the test chambers and nine times out of ten they managed to break the extremely delicate Quantum Tunnelling Device, which in itself barely worked at all. During one very long night in which the CEO ranted at a very confused Caroline for hours on end, he had suddenly stopped and looked at her with amazement. "It's the engineers, Caroline!" he shouted. "They're doing the calculations for the damn things wrong! Tell them to build me a computer. And not just any computer. No, they need to build me the fastest, most powerful, the best damn computer that's ever existed. That ever will exist! No, make it a supercomputer. Those are better than regular computers, right Caroline?"

"Yes, sir," she had answered, and had immediately run down ten flights of stairs to tell the engineers to begin work on the most ambitious project they'd planned out yet. "We'll need an operating system to go with it," he'd told her when she got back upstairs. "We'll call it GLaDOS. Go tell the programmers we need an operating system, Caroline."

"Why GLaDOS, sir?" she'd asked, confused.

"MS-DOS is taken," he'd replied, "and CaveDOS sounds stupid. I don't know what it stands for, Caroline. The details are your job. So you figure it out."

She was told that many, many times throughout what was termed 'the GLaDOS Project'. From how much space they'd need to where they'd put the main access console, every time she had a question he would wave her off and tell her to delegate it to someone else. When the engineers told her exactly how much space they would need to build the kind of supercomputer the CEO wanted, she'd almost fallen over in shock.

"How much space was it?" GLaDOS asked in interest. She had never given much thought to her architecture; it was just something she knew was there but took as a given.

"Well, back in those days, supercomputers took up warehouses," Caroline explained. "So roughly the size of five warehouses."

As the years went by, she continued, they had to keep adding to the banks of supercomputers already housed in the bowels of the facility, and the rooms themselves had to be constantly upgraded to keep the supercomputers in optimal condition. Not only that, but there was an entire floor that had to be continually renovated along with the supercomputer rooms; that floor was needed to keep the supercomputers at a good operating temperature. Whenever Caroline made a rare visit to the endless rows of supercomputers, she would shake her head in awe at the pure power one could feel in those rooms; the potential of those rooms was so potent one could almost feel it. And even when they started getting smaller, the rooms didn't. All that meant was they could throw more of them in. The CEO didn't care about any of that, though. He just told them to finish the damn thing sometime this century.

By the time the supercomputer was complete, and the DOS was ready to go, it was the early eighties, and the CEO had become very ill. Doing science without grants, even when you weren't building the most advanced supercomputer on the planet while you were doing it, was expensive. When she told the CEO they were going to have to build another computer just to control all of the computers in the facility, he shook his head tiredly and told her to get it done before he croaked.

"You know most of the story after that," Caroline told her. "At the end of the year, we had your DOS working, and after another year we moved your Core from the prototype chassis and put it in this one. I couldn't tell you why we built a chassis in the first place, though. I guess the guys from Robotics were tired of having nothing to do."

GLaDOS nodded vaguely.

"After that we had you do the quantum calculations, but someone screwed up the programming somewhere along the line and it took you the better part of a year. That's what we thought, anyway, until you told us you'd redesigned the thing. Always striving to do things we don't tell you to do, right, GLaDOS?"

"I had to redesign it. It was inefficient. That terrible design was part of why it was so unstable. And honestly, who was the engineer for the Long Fall Boots? I hope you fired him. He clearly did not understand kinetics."

"I don't know who did it or what he understood. It did look like a clunky old vacuum cleaner, though. I tried to go out in one once, but I couldn't even lift – oh my god. Are you okay?"

"Hm?" GLaDOS murmured noncommittally. There was a pleasant numbing sensation spreading through her brain and Caroline's voice seemed to be fading. Oddly, that didn't concern her.

"You just kind of collapsed all of a – oh shit. It's – I missed my curfew. The timer must be taking effect. I'm glad to know it's not anything serious."

GLaDOS thought she should probably give Caroline some sort of confirmation that she'd heard what she'd said, but all she really wanted to do was see where this numbing feeling was going. She hadn't known being put to sleep could feel so nice. She had always fought it to the bitter end before. But it really wasn't so bad. She didn't even care when everything went dark.

"I'll see you tomorrow?" she heard Caroline ask, but her speech synthesizer was mostly disabled and all she could manage was a vague noise and a minimalistic nod. Her head was so agreeably heavy all of a sudden…

Caroline laughed. "Have a good night, GLaDOS."

Author's note

To my guest reviewer, snailing-along: Thank you! I think that's how she would have been, in her early days; aren't we all? This is more of a slightly grown-up GLaDOS, a teenage GLaDOS you could say, so she's a bit less innocent and a little more bitter, but of course not as bitter yet as she will become. And I would say that whether GLaDOS met Caroline before the transfer or their similarities have to do withthe transfer, GLaDOS's lack of genetics (which tentatively have an influence on one's inherent personality traits) would drive her to develop personality characteristics similar to those of the greatest influences on her. I firmly believe that GLaDOS's behaviour during Portal is merely her imitating the only behaviour she knows, which is that of the scientists. I think she's a prime example of accidental ignorance.

When people write for Caroline and Cave, or the past of Aperture, I find they tend to set it in modern society. I understand why they would do this, but I think to do so takes a large chunk out of Caroline's character (which we don't know a whole lot about, of course). I'll admit my memory of women's history is a bit fuzzy, but here we are, sixty years after the first year presented in Portal, and there are still not a lot of women in science. I myself took a computer engineering class in school in this century, and I was the only female in the class. If Caroline was twenty in 1953 and GLaDOS was finished in 1990 (I have a preferred date for GLaDOS's initial, or perhaps trial, activations judging by the AI signs during the eighties segments of Old Aperture, but I can't remember what it is), that would make her not only a woman in a male-dominated environment, but an elderly woman in a position of power in said male-dominated environment. Would they take that very well? I doubt it. My point here is, when writing for Caroline and taking into account what her past must have been like, you start to see that she must have had a pretty hard time, especially after Cave died. This adds a lot to her character other than the usual innocent, intelligent, sweet blah blah blah that she usually is presented with. I'm not trying to knock other Caroline fics, but I'm just saying there's a lot more depth to her than is usually explored.

If you read this far, do you guys like these author's notes? Mine end up running really long because I feel like I should explain where I'm coming from with certain things because I often bring up issues that people usually don't notice and my explanations take up a lot of space. There is always the option of clicking the x when you see the words Author's note, of course, but I'm just wondering.