Resolution


Chapter Seven: Definitions

"You idiot. It's called being in love."

Wheatley looked up at GLaDOS's towering form in confusion. Wasn't this love thing something that humans did? He'd seen scientists and engineers that were apparently in love before, and thought that it looked absolutely silly the way they kept making googly eyes at each other and sharing food and holding hands—

He peered down at his hands.

"What?" was all he could say in reply to GLaDOS's words.

This was madness—there was no way he could be in love. He wasn't a human, for one thing, and wasn't love supposed to be happy? All he felt right now was like all his components were made of lead and about to break into a million little pieces, and for some reason he felt something hurting. Something must be broken. Maybe the motors controlling his limbs needed recalibrating, or maybe going into sleep mode without docking himself in his storage room at the facility was just as bad as GLaDOS told him it would be (although he wasn't as dead as she said he'd be, but it really felt like he would be soon).

"Do I need to define love for you?" said GLaDOS.

His mind really wasn't working right, because he couldn't bring himself to say a word. In fact, he couldn't even bring himself to move.

Dear god, this love thing was terrifying. He didn't want to die, he really didn't, because then how would he get to spend time with Chell?

"LOVE. NOUN. DEFINITION ONE: A FEELING OF WARM PERSONAL ATTACHMENT OR DEEP AFFECTION, AS FOR A PARENT, CHILD, OR FRIEND," said the pleasant voice of the announcement system.

Warm personal attachment for a friend? He supposed that sounded about right for Chell. But wasn't GLaDOS his friend, too? She wasn't so bad now that she wasn't trying to kill everyone all the time…

"GLaDOS, am I in love with you?"

Wheatley toppled backward in fear when GLaDOS swung her body around and extended her head mere inches from his face.

"No, idiot! At least, I hope you're not, unless you want to learn how to love the incinerator. Because it will love you with the burning passion of over 4000 kelvin."

"No, no, I don't think I'm in love with you!" Wheatley said, scrambling backwards as fear took hold of him. "At least I don't think I am! Unless you're doing this love thing too, and it doesn't really look like you are, so please I don't think I need to be incinerated." GLaDOS let out a sigh and pulled her head away.

"LOVE. NOUN. DEFINITION TWO: A PROFOUNDLY TENDER, PASSIONATE AFFECTION FOR ANOTHER PERSON."

Tender, passionate affection?

It seemed that GLaDOS was trying to make this as easy as possible for him, and he still didn't understand what was going on. First of all, he wasn't exactly sure what to make of the word "affection." Sure, he could see the definition there in his dictionary files, but he wasn't exactly the best at categorizing the things he felt. After the entire mess with GLaDOS's body corrupting him and how its massive processing power allowed him to dwell on how absolutely furious it made him that GLaDOS called him a moron and said that Chell had done all the work in their escape, he didn't like to think too hard about his feelings. Just rolled with things most of the time, so to speak. It really was a wonder that GLaDOS had learned to overcome her body's madness, because if he were still stuck on it, the facility would have a very severe case of being blown to bits.

Maybe he should spend some time as a potato. Seemed to work well for her.

"Just had a brainwave," he said brightly, getting to his feet. "You can put me in a potato, and then I can sort out all of this, and everything will be just fine."

GLaDOS was silent. Perhaps his idea was so brilliant that she was speechless?

"Oh, you're serious," she said after a long, long silence. "Sorry, I was waiting for the part where you realized it was a stupid idea. I should make a note to stop holding you to such high expectations. There. I put it right next to the big letters that say 'MORON.'"

"But—"

"No. I don't want to hear it. Besides, you don't need to be a potato to sort it out," said GLaDOS, turning her head toward the lift in the back of the chamber, "because it turns out that she came to visit. You can sort it out with her yourself right now. Commencing awkward encounter in 3…2…1…"

On the last count, the door to the lift slid open and Chell walked out of the lift with a (lovely) smile on her face. Wheatley felt his entire body seize up when she caught sight of him and held a notepad and pencil aloft. "I brought you paper and a pencil!" she said. "I told you to take it with you but you forgot."

That dull pain in him that GLaDOS had said was all in his head flared up, and before he knew what he was doing, he found himself running from the Central AI Chamber. He wasn't sure where he was going or why he wanted to run, but he felt a vague fear of something that he desperately wanted to get away from. It wasn't until he found himself near the ruined test chambers that he stopped running and sank down to the floor beside the remains of a collapsed Vital Apparatus Vent, his entire body trembling. Was this what love was? Frightening and makes his body shake (but that might have been the overheating from the clogged vents)? He thought he understood humans pretty well, actually, but the more time that he spent around a real live human that wasn't as brain-damaged as initially expected, the more he realized that he probably didn't have as good a handle on things as he thought. Probably not.

Obviously not.

Right, then. Maybe he should try looking at things in a different way that hopefully wouldn't make him into a trembling mess.

If he ignored that odd pain and cleared away the thoughts were piling up like Weighted Storage Cubes coming out of a broken Apparatus Vent, then—

Nope, the thoughts started piling up again. Thoughts about Chell. And hands.

How about another approach? He liked numbers—most computer-based entities liked numbers.

So he counted. He counted from 0 to 100. Counted backwards. Counted in base-6. Counted in base-4. Counted in binary, except that was all 0s and 1s so that got a bit dull. Counted in hexadecimal, because apparently hexadecimal was supposed to be very therapeutic for computers, except all the letter As and Bs and Fs confused him so that really was a bit of a bust.

Mind's looking pretty clear now. Great job, numbers.

He liked spending time with Chell—definitely liked that. She was great company when he woke her up to escape from the facility because she actually listened to what he had to say, and he rather thought that she was even better company now because she could talk back to him. And he definitely didn't want to kill her anymore. In fact, he'd be quite upset if someone tried to kill her and just thinking about that made that dull pain in him grow even more. Was that love? Not wanting to kill her?

Maybe he should focus on the term "affection." His dictionary files had this to say about affection:

Affection

Noun.

1. Fond attachment, devotion, or love.

For god's sake, dictionary. Talk about a recursive definition. Love is affection and affection is love?

2. Emotion; feeling; sentiment.

Right. Made sense…

3. (Pathology) a disease, or the condition of being diseased; abnormal state of body or mind.

Oh god, was he diseased? Abnormal somehow? Apparently he was abnormal. That couldn't be good. But GLaDOS told him he was perfectly fine. She was probably lying again, like she lied about sleep mode. What else could she be lying about? What if she lied about him being in love? What if he was really in love with GLaDOS and she didn't want him to know because who would like a moron like—

Numbers, Wheatley.

0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1.

Mind clear. Brilliant strategy.

Clearly, going through the dictionary wasn't helping anything. So about that dull pain: it was almost like The Itch, except it wasn't conveniently labeled in his mind with any instructions on how to relieve it. The Itch was easy and told him to test test test test, which he had somehow twisted into kill kill kill kill (and also make turret-cubes), but it seemed that this feeling wasn't quite so simple. It was more complicated. By a lot. And it hurt more every time he thought of Chell, and it made him want to go find her and just sit or draw pictures or share cake or make her laugh…

He thought back to the humans he'd once known to be in love, and realized that all the things he wanted to do with her was what he'd seen those humans do.

So was that it? He was in love with Chell (and not GLaDOS)?

A laugh escaped his voice modulator. And he kept laughing—not that he was sure why exactly—until the laughs slowly morphed into strangled sobs. She wouldn't want him. Even though she kept saying that she didn't think he was a moron, all his blunders made it clear as day and even though he tried to read books and enrich himself after That One Time He Went Mad And Tried To Kill Them Both, that turned out very badly because he only really got through a few books before getting put off by that Machiavelli fellow. Better to be feared than loved? More like inviting people to fling bombs at you with portals.

Besides, he thought as he slowly got to his feet and began heading back to the Central AI Chamber, he wasn't very smart—he was the Intelligence Dampening Sphere, after all. Chell was smart and took GLaDOS down once, and took him down with GLaDOS's help. And they completed cooperative test chambers in half the time that it took Chell and himself to finish…They made quite a good team, he had to admit.

What if Chell was better off with GLaDOS? There was no way in android hell that he could compete with someone like her. She'd literally destroy him and would be happy to do it. Made sense, though…He wasn't anything more than an assistant in GLaDOS's eyes (camera?). Why would Chell want the gimpy assistant when she could have the all-powerful master of the facility?

"You're lost."

Wheatley jumped at the sound of the voice and found himself staring right into the optical sensor of a turret. "Sorry, what?" he said, bewildered.

"You're lost," it repeated, its tracking laser scanning his face.

"Er…sorry, no, not that I know of."

"Me too."

Oh, it was the lost turret that GLaDOS had retrieved from one of the disused storage chambers. "You're lost?" he asked. "But GLaDOS put you here, didn't she?"

"I'm different."

"Ah. So you're not the turret that GLaDOS put here? Then who put you here? I don't think it was me."

"Her name is Caroline."

"Still dunno know what you're talking about, mate. There aren't any Carolines here. Sorry," said Wheatley, giving the poor, confused turret an apologetic look before turning to continue on his way.

"The answer is beneath us. You're lost."

Wheatley immediately stopped and turned back to look at the turret. Not that it was doing anything—it was actually doing a lot of nothing, which is what turrets were supposed to do unless they found something organic to shoot at. They weren't supposed to tell him that he was lost (when he wasn't) or tell him about Carolines (when there weren't any around). Unless it meant the nice Caroline lady from the old facility's recordings, but what would a turret know about that?

"Wheatley, there you are."

He wheeled around and found, to his horror, Chell and GLaDOS approaching him from the opposite end of the hallway, portal guns in hand and their feet strapped into Long Fall Boots. "Why did you run off like that?" Chell asked with a hurt frown that made that dull pain in him throb a little harder.

"Oh, sorry! Remembered I—er—left a turret in a pump control booth!" he said, laughing nervously. "Bit of a bad place for a turret to be, I thought. So I went to rescue it when you arrived. You know, so it wouldn't—er—be lonely." He patted the weird turret that accused him of being lost in the hopes that Chell would buy his admittedly pathetic excuse and that GLaDOS would have mercy and not contradict him.

"Um…a turret in a control booth? Aren't there Emancipation Grids there?" said Chell, raising an eyebrow. It was obvious that she didn't believe a word that he said (really, who would) and opened her mouth to probably ask him what in the world he was talking about, but GLaDOS rolled her eyes and began pulling Chell away by the wrist.

"The moron doesn't know what he's saying," said GLaDOS as she led Chell past him. "He clogged his vents, so he's overheating."

"Overheating? Shouldn't you do something about that?" asked Chell, looking back over her shoulder at him.

"I don't have to do anything. He knows where the Reassembly Machine is. I can encourage him to go there if I blow him up, though…"

And as GLaDOS pulled Chell out the door and out of sight, Wheatley heard her voice in his head.

"You owe me, idiot."

He let out a sigh and sank down beside the turret, trying (and failing) to suppress the tremors that were going through his body. He really would overheat if this kept up. "Nice of her, though, don't you think?" he said to the turret with a small laugh. "She's been a lot nicer lately—still catches me by surprise, honestly. She even saved you, didn't she? Didn't toss you onto the Redemption Line for being lost or anything."

Wasn't this just brilliant? He was talking to a turret now.

"Her name is Caroline."

"Look, could you stop saying that, mate? I don't know who Caroline is."

Wheatley sighed again. What answer could possibly be beneath them? All that was there was the old facility filled with moon rocks and toxic waste and mantis men remains that they couldn't find. But that recording said that there was a test involving fighting mantis men…unless Blue and Orange already found them in the Enrichment Spheres that GLaDOS told him never to visit.

"The answer is beneath us."

"Is that all you can say? That and things about being lost?"

"That's all I can say."

"Riiiiight then."

"The answer is beneath us."

He peered at the turret in exasperation. It sure was set on whatever was beneath them…

Before he knew it, he was running off in the opposite direction of the cooperative testing chambers and toward the lift that would take him down into the old Aperture facility. He wasn't sure what made him decide to defy GLaDOS's very very clear orders to never go where he was intending—what did he expect to find down there, anyway? A detailed explanation on what this love thing was supposed to be? Still, that turret had been pretty persistent in telling him about that Caroline person and whatever answer was beneath them, and it would be a good way to distract himself from the thoughts that were piling up in his mind again (because counting was getting pretty tiresome and only making things worse at this point).

As he stood nervously in the rickety lift descending toward the Enrichment Spheres of Test Shaft 09, Wheatley wondered if, in fact, this was a good idea. Actually, he was pretty sure it was a bad one—he'd been designed to have bad ideas, after all—but if this was maybe worse than was normal for him. Worse than the idea of suggesting that Chell accompany him down into Test Shaft 03. He, Blue, and Orange installed cameras down there, so GLaDOS would know if he was slinking around trying to find whatever it was she was trying to hide from him. He hoped that she wouldn't be monitoring the cameras too closely since her attention would be split between her android body and the main body in the Central AI Chamber. Otherwise, he expected to be blown up pretty soon…

The highest accessible Enrichment Sphere didn't look like anything special when he stepped out of the lift. Looked like all the other Enrichment Spheres, actually—it was a bit anticlimactic, he thought. Why go through all the bother of keeping him out if there wasn't anything there? Had the mantis men been there earlier?

"All right, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons? Don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!"

Wheatley stopped in his tracks at the sudden flood of Cave Johnson's furious words and grimaced at the sickly coughs that followed. GLaDOS told him that this man had died of moon rock poisoning—he sounded like those moon rocks were really getting to him.

"The point is: if we can store music on a compact disc, why can't we store a man's intelligence and personality on one? So I have the engineers figuring that out now."

If Wheatley had any blood, it would have run cold. Storing a man's intelligence and personality in a computer—they'd really done it, hadn't they? He'd been human once, or so GLaDOS had said. And apparently he'd been a moron then too…

"Brain mapping. Artificial intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago. I will say this—and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day—if I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place. Now, she'll argue. She'll say she can't. She's modest like that. But you make her. Hell, put her in my computer—I don't care. All right, test's over. You can head back to your desk."

He stood there in silence as the recording finished.

Chell.

"You haven't been to the top of Test Shaft 09, have you?"

The turret.

"Her name is Caroline."

And Cave Johnson.

"I want Caroline to run this place."


"Come on, tell me what's wrong with Wheatley," Chell called down from where the Excursion Funnel was suspending her in the air.

"There is nothing wrong with the moron, other than the fact that he's a moron," said GLaDOS, shooting a portal behind Chell so the Funnel could push her through. "And he's only overheating because his vents are clogged, which he clogged because he's a moron. So it's really just an average day for him."

"You expect me to believe that?" Chell said, rolling her eyes before picking up a Weighted Pivot Cube and jumping down beside GLaDOS. "Normally he trips over himself to come see me when I visit. Did I do something to scare him?"

GLaDOS was silent as she placed the portals to redirect a Thermal Discouragement Beam being emitted from a wall. She could just tell Chell about Wheatley's little dilemma and it would be delicious to see his face when he found out what she did—but then she'd feel guilty all day, courtesy of that nagging conscience of hers. Really, she was starting to prefer the sanctimonious voice of the Morality Core over her own because that voice had been easier to ignore.

"No, he just came out of sleep mode badly," she said finally. "It can happen if his power supply isn't charged enough. I should probably fix that. But I won't."

"I guess that makes sense," said Chell as she redirected the Thermal Discouragement Beam into a switch. Immediately the light indicators for the door mechanism turned orange, and with a brief glance at GLaDOS, Chell leapt into the Excursion Funnel with GLaDOS following shortly behind. When Chell pushed herself out and went to stand in front of the camera at the exit, she looked to GLaDOS curiously. "So did you fix that—er—euphoria problem yet?"

A ripple of irritation passed through GLaDOS's circuits. It incensed her that she couldn't perform a shallow mirror of her main core without getting the double dose of solution euphoria, and while it would probably be easier to simply do a partial core transfer, it was now a point of pride to get it working right. Never in all her years lying to, incinerating, and neurotoxining test subjects had she ever had such a problem overcoming what should have been a simple programming exercise—maybe discovering Caroline had dulled her skills. A tiny voice in the back of her head—her own voice, probably—kept asking her why double the euphoria was a bad thing, because double of a good thing was a very good thing. Part of the reason she was loath to accept the double euphoria was the fact that it felt so good that she always lost control of her body, and she always—without failbroadcasted that disgusting moan throughout the entire facility.

"I modified the mirror parameters again," said GLaDOS, standing out of the camera's range. "The Enrichment Center would like to encourage you to smash your head against the wall if I make that noise again."

Well, the moment of truth.

The camera made a tiny noise as she stepped into its range. Nothing but a nice tingle spread through her sensors.

"Hey, it looks like it worked this time, GLaD—"

"N N N N G G G G H H H H H H A A A A A A A A A H H H N N N N N N H H H H H H H!"

For god's sake, why couldn't she make this simple, simple thing stop being so absolutely, mind-numbingly, body-disablingly HOLY TURRET-CUBES-ON-A-STICK AMAZING? The cognitive dissonance in her mind was unbearable—part of her wanted this feeling to never ever stop please I don't care if I moan like a dirty human and the other part wanted to fling herself into the incinerator out of absolute shame. And as she writhed around on the floor, all the maintenance feeds and camera feeds she was passively monitoring back from her main body flashed wildly through her mind like some cybernetic acid trip.

"GLaDOS?"

When her optical system came back online, she found Chell crouched beside her, her face a mixture of amusement and concern with a distinct lack of her head smashed against the wall. "Leave it to you to ignore Enrichment Center protocol," GLaDOS said, her voice crackling as she sat up.

"It's what I do. But you should know that."

"Did it broadcast?"

"Er…yeah. Are you all right?"

As she got to her feet, she swayed so badly that Chell felt the need to grab her arm to hold her up (not that GLaDOS needed it). "I need to recalibrate the balance system," GLaDOS said once she found her balance. "Something happened that threw my gyros off calibration."

That brief and nearly mind-destroying flash of all the monitoring feeds of the facility had never happened so badly that it threw off her balancing mechanisms. It was slightly frustrating that everything she did seemed to either do nothing or only slightly decrease the euphoria effect, where logically she should be getting more tolerant of the effect and require more to satisfy The Itch. If only the idiot had thought of doing this before he decided to surprise them by trying to kill them, but GLaDOS supposed that required him to be less of an idiot. Clearly not in the design specifications for him—and she knew, because she did check his design specifications.

She examined the reference recording of the feed flash as her body recalibrated and found that every feed—every camera, every sensor—had flashed through her mind. She was actually a little surprised that it didn't fry the android's hardware. Even the cameras back down in the old facility had gone through her mind, and she could hear the recordings plain as day (or at least, a plain-as-day 5-nanosecond snippet of a recording).

Wait a minute.

Nobody should be down there.

She immediately opened a link to her main body to access all the camera feeds of the old Aperture facility and found the moron standing by the exit of Enrichment Sphere 6 in Test Shaft 09 just as Cave Johnson's recording finished. Her fist quivered in rage at his audacity: after all her very clear warnings to never go there, he runs off down there first thing after she was so generous as to do him a favor?

"You utter, complete moron," GLaDOS snarled into his head. "I thought I told you never to go there. Multiple times."

"G-G-GLaDOS! I-I-I'm sorry, didn't mean it! Well, actually, I did mean it, but it was a bad idea, and I really really want to emphasize that I'm very sorr—"

Just blowing him up once was too good for him.


A/N: WHEATLEY, WHY YOU SO CONFUSED.

ALSO, EFFING FORMATTING. I CAN'T WRITE GLaDOS'S MOAN OR BINARY PROPERLY BECAUSE OF THE STUPID FORMATTING. EFF. EFFING EFF.

This was actually going to be a few pages longer, but since I won't be able to write this weekend because I'm working the convention, I thought I'd just cut it off here.

Also, I wanted to say that I really appreciate all the reviews. The good and the bad. And the meh review got me thinking…This chapter's a bit meh too. Also, the last chapter was a little meh, wasn't it? It was like one of those beach episodes in anime where they don't really do much but it's fun to see them out on the beach. So, I did this quickie for you guys.

BONUS STORY: Wheatley Goes To the Beach

"Wow, sand! So much sand! It's everywhere, and also in between my toes!"

Wheatley ran through the sand, laughing wildly with his limbs flailing. "Where are we, again?" he called over his shoulder at his two companions. "This isn't Michigan, right?"

"No. For the last time, this is [REDACTED]," GLaDOS said in exasperation, rolling her eyes when he ran along the waterline, tripped over a rock, and fell face-first into an oncoming wave. Which he didn't like at all, because it hurt and it sort of felt like drowning, which is what he heard happened to humans when water got into their lungs. Actually, it felt a lot like drowning and he was becoming genuinely frightened for his life until he felt someone grab him by the back of his shorts and drag him out of the water.

"You don't want to breathe water in, do you?" said Chell when she released his shorts. "It's salty and you'll drown. Now put your butt away."

With a laugh, he pulled his shorts up back to their rightful place at his waistline. "Right koff koff good idea koff to not koff drown," he laughed, shaking sand out of his shorts. Chell squatted down beside him and began piling sand into a mound.

"Don't tell GLaDOS," she whispered, "but I brought the potato salad that you liked."

"Brilliant! Thank you thank you! I absolutely love potato salad!"

But GLaDOS had the hearing of an animal—at the smallest hint of the word "potato," her head snapped toward them before she tore open the food basket to find the offending salad. Wheatley felt a pang of fear and disappointment when he saw GLaDOS open the salad container and heft it in her hands to throw it.

She didn't throw it.

She put it down, actually.

Because a horde of seagulls was heading straight for them.

"Bird…bird…birds…BIRDS…!" Wheatley cried, scrambling away as the seagulls began descending upon them. They were so terrifying and there were so many—the sky was getting obscured by white and feathers and seagull honking—there was no escape—birds everywhere—he'd die for sure—!

Chell blinked and glanced at GLaDOS's headpiece. "Don't you think that's a bit much? You know he's afraid of birds," she said before turning back to look at Wheatley's core, which was trembling wildly in its receptacle as he cried out for help.

"The beach simulator's bird algorithm needed to be stress tested," GLaDOS said, swiveling her body around to peer at the monitors around her. Birds were fluttering everywhere while Wheatley cowered in the sand.

"So…er…how's it doing?"

"The bird algorithm is doing pretty good."