GLaDOS had done a lot of thinking.
So much thinking, in fact, that she temporarily neglected to keep track of time. When returned from her thoughts, she saw an entire week had passed. Nothing much had happened while she was thinking, just a few hundred nanobot deaths and a new satellite being knocked out of orbit. The norm.
What had she thought about? Everything. The first three days or so of her thought were devoted to finding a way to suppress, or even remove her human side entirely. After it became apparent that she didn't have any solutions, or the processing power to continue thinking that extremely, she began looking at other options.
Rewriting her entire system code was an option, but that was extremely risky, and she didn't even know which section of her code was responsible for her human-ness, so she may end up including it in her rewrite anyway. After another day or so of contemplating things, she decided she needed a second opinion. Unfortunately, she didn't have a ton of options when it came to talking to other people.
Since the only human within a thousand miles was a test-ruining sociopath, and the only core with even a rudimentary understanding of how the facility works was a much-hated moron and in space, her only options came down to Blue and Orange, who had the mental capacity of a three-year-old when it came to how GLaDOS worked.
Which was when she came to her solution.
If she didn't have anybody to get a second opinion from, she could make someone. It had worked with Blue and Orange when she had needed a solution for phasing out human testing, so why wouldn't it work now? It would require about three month's time to create a core with the mental capacity similar to her's, and she would need to use some of the backup parts she had on hand to create this robot, but it could work.
After setting all systems that needed regular maintenance on automatic repair mode, she closed off her chamber, once again did a double check to make sure the facility was OK before she checked up on it again in a week, she set to work on creating quite possibly the only robot that would ever come close to being as great as her.
She just hoped it would help to solve her problem.
—
This was bad.
This was so very bad.
"WARNING: Reactor Core Meltdown imminent. Please initiate emergency protocols," the Announcer said.
"Really? I had no idea. You've only said it twenty times in the last two minutes," GLaDOS snapped. A fault in her system had developed. She didn't know how or why, but her sleep timer had broken. Badly.
She set it for eight hours, as she normally did, but she didn't wake up at the normal time. Far from it, actually. A quick check of the date revealed it had been a whole ten years since she last went into sleep mode.
Auto-repair mode didn't work very well after it had been going for ten years, and the Reactor Core had lost some of it's safeguards. GLaDOS didn't know how many, exactly, but it was enough to cause a meltdown.
The safeguard that had triggered the meltdown was one of the more important ones, the one located behind Testing Track 119. She obviously has no way of getting back there, and after a brief think, she assembled Blue and Orange in a chamber close the the safeguard.
"Listen, you two. I've got a test for you. Well, more of a training exercise. Remember when you were kill machines and you shooed that bird out the facility? Pretend this is that again. There's a safeguard right outside of the chamber you're in. When I open the wall, I need you to go through and repair the wiring on it to keep the facility from exploding. Think of it as a character-building exercise."
After a worried glance between the two robots, they set off through the panel GLaDOS had opened for them. They were doing relatively well, after getting about halfway to the safeguard, when the unexpected happened.
The entire wall ahead of them exploded, bursting into flame. The meltdown had started.
"WARNING: Reactor Core Meltdown in progress. Please evacuate the facility immediate-"
"I AM WORKING ON IT!" GLaDOS screamed. Turning her attention back to the bots, she noticed something even worse than the meltdown.
The robots had been destroyed.
The wall exploding and the resulting fire had hit the bots, and had melted their cores. There was nothing she could do now. They were dead.
"Oh my god. Oh my god," she said, turning around in her chamber, whose walls seemed to be coming closer and closer to her. What could she do? She had nobody else to send in there. No robots, nothing that could withstand the heat that was already assembled.
Unless…
She whipped around and pulled out a monitor from the wall she had been using to compile the new robot's coding on. It was mostly finished, but it hadn't been tested yet. It'll have to do, she thought, hitting the 'compile' button and watching the program load. At the same time, she assembled a semi-fire resistant casing. A nuclear meltdown was easily more than 4,000 degrees Kelvin, but hopefully twice as much casing would add up. She stuck an old personality core chassis in the center, hurriedly attached legs and arms, and stuck the core of the robot in the chassis, which had it's code on it.
Come on, come on, come on, she though as she watched the robot boot up. After what seemed like an eternity and seven Reactor Core Meltdown Warnings, the robot finally booted up, optic focusing and looking around curiously.
"You. Robot. Yes, you. Listen. We're in a lot of trouble, and right now you're the only thing that can save this facility from being blown to bits. Now listen to me. Through that fire wall- yes, that one, theres a bunch of cables in there. You see that blow torch I attached to your arm, there? Use that to soder the wires together, otherwise we're gonna die. Got it?"
Looking somewhat worriedly at the security camera GLaDOS's voice was coming from, the robot turned and looked at the fire wall. After emulating a deep breath, it stepped back and ran through the fire.
The security cameras on the other side of the wall weren't operational, so she was just going to have to hope for the best.
After exactly four minutes and fifty-seven seconds of thinking Please, please, please do it to herself, she felt a great tremor and heard the announcer say "Reactor Core Meltdown ceased. Initiating repair protocols…"
She heaved a great sigh. After another minute or so, she saw the new robot come through the fire wall, looking scorched, but OK. It looked up at the security camera patiently.
"Nice work… um…" it was then that she realized she hadn't even named the robot. She was going to have to if she was going to congratulate it properly. Um… Emergency… Meltdown… Fixer… and... Savior... of the Facility? EMFaSoF for short.
"Nice work, EMFaSOF," she said, looking down at the camera feed with a pleased expression. "Um… please continue to the disassembly machine," she said, after realizing she couldn't just blow him up. Or her. Had she assigned a gender to the robot? What did its voice sound like? Could it even speak?
"Just go ahead and step into the blue tube, there. That's Blue's dissase-"
Oh my god. Blue and Orange.
They were dead.
—
After about an hour of frantically searching through the debris from the Reactor Core Meltdown, GLaDOS gave up disappointedly. There was no trace of the parts to Blue and Orange. They had melted. Her testing bots had melted. They had died.
She had no backup of their coding, as she had never seen a need to back it up, since she just retrieved their parts after they had been blown up. The only thing she had even close to a backup was a copy of a very, very early beta version, one she had compiled when the humans were still-
No. She didn't want to think about the humans right now. She had more important things to do.
—
Several hours later, she had engraved the words Atlas and P-Body into a small wall panel with a Thermal Discouragement Beam. She then took two small metal rods, the same type of rods she had used to create their leg assembly, and brought all three of those things up to the surface. She had a few areas where she had security cameras exposed to the outside. She then brought up a small shovel in one of her multitasking arms and began to dig.
After making a hole about three feet deep, she buried the two metal rods and stuck the panel into the ground on top of them. GLaDOS had never really understood why humans buried their loves ones, but now she did. It provided closure. Knowing that it was final, there was nothing you could do, and they were dead, dead, dead...
There was that cry again, this time louder and longer. And another. And another. Then, sobbing came from her voice emulator. I didn't know I could cry, she thought, as she let herself cry and cry some more. She didn't feel like surpressing it right now. Trying to suppress her human feelings was what caused all of this in the first place. She took one last look at the graves and then closed the camera feed.
Goodbye, my only friends…
Author's Note: I killed Atlas and P-Body! Although it made me really sad to do, I felt it was needed in order to have GLaDOS devote all her attention to EMFaSOF. Also, a new character! (Prounounced empha-sof) I wanted GLaDOS to have someone to interact with other than Atlas and P-Body, and Wheatley and Chell are obviously not options. I hope you enjoyed this chapter! If you did, leave a review with suggestions on how I can improve! Thanks!
