We are reaching the end of this story now. When I'm done, I'll go back and revise the entire story to take out some (grammar) errors I noticed.
Chapter 11
There could be no doubt about it, this place was obviously designed by no other than Cave Johnson himself. And if it wasn't, it was right up his alley anyway.
Tests, Tests and more Tests. With a capital T of course.
Luckily Chell was both smart and flexible, so making her way through this obstacle course didn't go as badly for her as a regular person would have fared. None the less, she was getting tired.
Both of the tests and Wheatley's inane babbling. He didn't get how the portal gun worked, he didn't get why these tests are being performed, he didn't get why he was stuck in a metal orb,...
Granted, Chell herself didn't have any satisfactory answer to these mysteries either, but she had more of a 'deal-with-it-as-I-go' attitude. Her once human friend however, was working himself into a fully-fledged panic.
They were reaching the final chamber now, only to encounter a small problem.
"Euuhm... A little help please?" Wheatley had effectively reached the end of his railing. Obviously the builders didn't attend the core, which was apparently supposed to function as some kind of guide.
Chell just looked at him for a moment, if she stood on her tiptoes she could just reach her robotic friend. She tried giving the ball a firm pull, but nothing gave.
She shrugged and started to look around, maybe she could find something to help her break the railing, when an electronic pop sounded behind her.
Wheatley was lying face first on the floor, well... As much as he still had a face, idly rolling to the side.
"How did I do that?" he questioned, sounding slightly muffled as his speaker was turned downwards. Chell quickly picked him up and shrugged.
"I didn't know I could do that? What else can I do?" The blue light flickered in excitement, Chell raised an eyebrow at him, and moved on to their final challenge.
Cave's finger pushed down on the button before Glados could even react. Not that it mattered anyway. If those files she discovered were true, and she didn't doubt for even a second that they were, Caroline's physical body had already been destroyed and she was practically nothing more than a computer program, waiting to be booted.
She was simply already dead.
Machinery whirred into live around them. Apparently uploading a whole human personality wasn't an easy task even for the more refined computers their sponsors could afford.
The screen flickered to life now as well, displaying a gray background with a round red orb in the middle.
To Glados it looked like something straight out of A Space Odyssey, typically her father to design his AI based on something so cliché. He had always been the more dramatic one.
A small light was born in the middle of the artificial face, and a cold voice rang out.
"GlaDOS activated. At your service."
Cave smiled at the completely confused look on his daughters face, idly laying a hand on her shoulder and smiling a thin smile that seemed nearly cruel.
"Seeing as I could never have accomplished this without you, it seemed almost natural to name her after you. I confess I did play with the idea of naming her Caroline, but that would be too humanizing."
Glados shrugged him of harshly.
"This is not what my research was for. This is not Caroline!" She nearly screamed, this was just too wrong to be really happening.
"Of course not." Cave looked at her as if she was the crazy on here. "Do you know what it would do to a person to actually be an all knowing, all controlling AI? She would lose control in a week. Of course, we didn't erase her completely. She will live on, just like I wanted. But only the parts of her that are actually useful here. We couldn't make her too human..."
He was losing his patience as well, picking up and waving a bunch of files in her face.
"We tried. We really did. But it didn't work out. There is a mighty fine line between how sophisticated and human you can make these things. Never both. We found our solution in the cores, attached to her.."
An arm gesture indicating the large screen. "They will allow her to remain human. Control her behavior. So to speak."
Now he walked over to and pointed out a smaller screen on the side, displaying security footage of 2 robot like entities completing puzzles, with strange devices and a lot of teamwork.
"Of course, this was before we managed to find the ideal balance in subjects Blue and Orange, but that's a whole different story..."
Glados averted her eyes, not wanting him to see how much pain her father was actually causing her. This felt like a betrayal of the highest grade. Not only to her, but to Caroline as well.
And she would be damned if she wouldn't find a way to fix this.
"Is this supposed to happen?" Wheatley asked, panicking for real now.
Not in the least because instead of the cake he and Chell had been promised through all previous chambers, they now found themselves on a moving platform, slowly being lowered into what seemed like a pit of hellfire.
And was that a smoldering body down there?
Chell was looking around, her mind working at top speed. No way had she come so far to be burned into a crisp now.
Spotting a walkway up ahead, which looked like it was supposed to be obstructed from view, but hadn't been finished building yet, she quickly shot a orange portal up there and a blue one right next to her.
This was clearly not how this test was supposed to end, as the monotone computer voice chided her for doing something so silly. The thing had definitely got an intelligence boost since they started this madness.
It had turned from something giving programmed responses and no thinking power of it's own, to what now resembled a real AI. It had also become slightly more snarky.
Wheatley was just glad they got out of this prickly situation, and also thanked the fact that, as a robot, he couldn't actually faint, as his human body most certainly would have.
"Can we now get out of here?" he asked hopeful. But Chell shook her head. She had a pretty good idea of what happened to the missing student, but she wouldn't leave without certainty.
She just hoped that, with all the cubes she had been destroying and turrets she had been tossing around, she hadn't killed a fellow student.
Or what was left of them inside the things they were turned into.
Please review, it motivates me to write faster and makes me happy ^_^
