A/N: Woo, triple update! I guestimate that there will be two more chapters in this fic. However, all is not lost, my lovely readers! If you just love my less-pissed off, more sentimental GLaDOS for some reason or another, I'll be writing a sequel! Why? Because I find it completely unreasonable that Chell ride off into the sunset completely undamaged seeing as she was exposed to asbestos, whatever's in the repulsion gel that doesn't like the human skeleton, the liquefied moon rock that killed Cave Johnson, AND the lack of atmosphere in the vacuum of space. I know it's not an original idea, but I couldn't have her not come back. And with a Portal 3 apparently already in the works at Valve, it's not unthinkable…
Disclaimer: I don't own Portal. Or GLaDOS. Or Cave Johnson. You get the picture.
Chapter 13: The Voice of a Conscience
I spent most of the tests alternating between insulting Wheatley and pondering this strange connection between Caroline and Chell. I had to be careful with it, though, because I didn't want to short out the potato. I'd already taken my Slow Clap Processor offline, along with a few less important processors (of course my sarcasm processor was still in place). With all of that offline, I theoretically could run the Fabrication Processor, but I needed the extra power to think. I had to figure this out. I would not accept that something was beyond my range of understanding.
"Only two more chambers!" Wheatley announced over the speakers. I didn't like that, I almost wanted to ask Chell to slow it down. The test subject crossed into the next testing room. It was simple in theory, nothing Chell couldn't handle, but something was wrong. These should all be my test chambers and thus a lot more complicated than this. Chell also looked suspicious of the test, but walked forward anyways, taking her usual 'just keep moving' stance on problems. She stepped onto an arial faith plate that should have flung us forward, but instead flung us to the right. It took me utterly by surprise and I didn't even have anything helpful to say about it.
"Surprise!" Wheatley announced. "We're doing it now!" After another faith plate, we landed in an excursion funnel.
"Okay, credit where it's due," I muttered begrudgingly. "For an idiot designed to make bad decisions, that was a pretty well laid trap." For a moment we traveled through the excursion funnel in silence. Well, not total silence, Wheatley'd started talking again.
"You might have figured it out by now, but I don't need you anymore! I found a couple of little robots back here, built specifically for testing." If it could have, my optic would have widened.
"He found the cooperative testing initiative!" I realized allowed, then remembered that Chell wouldn't know what that was. "It was something I was working on to phase out human testing." Suddenly, for some strange reason, I was concerned that I may have hurt her feelings by saying that. It was a mad thought, but I couldn't help it.
"It's nothing personal," I said quickly. "But, you did kill me, fair's fair." At about that moment, a panel flung out from beside us, shooting us towards a small platform overshadowed by spikey plates and a group of monitors. "Ahh! Well, this is the part where he kills us!" For once in my life, I could honestly say I was afraid. I don't know why, death for a computer simply meant going offline. It wasn't all that horrible, just equitable to human sleep. Maybe it was Caroline that made me feel like this.
"'Ello! This is the part where I kill you!" Wheatley announced cheerily. "So, here I was, mashing some steel plates together…" He must really love the sound of his own voice. While he described his 'ingenious' plan to us, though, Chell was looking for a way out, as usual. Used to this kind of quick thinking, she shot one portal on a white wall facing us, and a second under some dripping conversion gel. She ended up covered in the stuff, but it left us with a portalable surface below us. She shot a portal beneath our feet and we were suddenly standing on a catwalk, the platform we were standing on having been destroyed the second we portaled away by a mass of spike plates. Chell turned on her heel and ran, Wheatley calling for us to come back. I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to distract Chell, as our very survival depended on her being able to think her way out of the mass of death traps Wheatley was suddenly throwing at us. I have to give it to him; he almost got us a few times, but Chell, living up to her homicidal, destructive reputation, smashed her way through each trap. I couldn't hold back when we entered a room where the damage being done to my facility was painfully obvious as a section of wall crumbled away.
"Oh my god…" I gasped in shock. "What has he done to this place?" Walls were ripped away, catwalks were destroyed, a bright orange glow from flames and an overheating nuclear core lit everything, walls crumbled under violent tremors, and everywhere you looked, you could see fires. I was horrified. If I didn't get back in my body soon, this place was going to be beyond repair, if it didn't blow up first. Chell got us across the deep chasm to the catwalk that would lead us to the main breaker room that originally awoke me.
"Listen, I'm not stupid, I know you don't want to put me back in charge," I didn't know why I was saying this, other than the hesitant and mistrustful look I was receiving suddenly. "You think I'll betray you. And on any other day, you'd be right. The scientists were always hanging cores on me to regulate my behavior; I've heard voices all my life, but for the first time I'm hearing the voice of a conscience and it's terrifying because it's my voice." Why was I telling her this? I suppose… I just needed to confide in someone. Chell happened to be the one there. "I'm being serious; I think there's something really wrong with me!" For the first time, I voiced my concern, that I was becoming too human, that I was going insane, that I was losing it. I think the look Chell gave me was somewhat sympathetic, and I could tell she was trying to mask her amusement at the idea of a perhaps slightly homicidal AI fretting over having a conscience.
I didn't voice my other concern, that I felt horribly and unignorably attached to the woman whose portal gun I was attached to. It didn't make any sense whatsoever, and yet that same part of me that I was hearing as my conscience, the little my-voice inside of me, seemed to understand perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, it didn't bother sharing, and that was starting to make me very irritated. As soon as I got back in my body, my conscience was fired. This was all ridiculous, there was no way I had any connection to Chell whatsoever, especially not one stronger than a partnership in which I was the brains and she was the chunk. We rounded a corner and were met by mechanical irises all jammed into a glass container.
"Corrupted cores! We're in luck! Listen, you go up there, I'll send you a core, and you attach it to him. If we do it enough times he might become corrupt enough for another core transfer." Chell nodded to me to show she'd heard, and we hurried on. I almost felt sorry for those poor cores. Many of their optics had gone dark, their mechanics unmoving, completely powered down after such a long period of neglect. That more compassionate side of me I was coming to know wanted to help them once I got back in my chassis. The proud side told me not to entertain such a ridiculous idea, that time wasted on corrupt cores was time better spent furthering science.
To what end? said that tiny voice inside of me, that tiny voice that was my voice, the voice of a conscience.
What do you mean, 'to what end'? Furthering science is what I was built for.
But think about why you were built to do science. Why do science at all? Isn't it to better lives? Those cores have lives as real as your own; well, at least the ones that haven't yet died. And something within me, somewhere where the small voice lived, knew that the voice had a point. Maybe the cores could be reprogrammed to do something useful within the facility. I supposed.
I noticed the voice had fallen into an approving silence. Chell moved into the breaker room, which was a complete wreck like the rest of the facility.
"Plug me in and I'll take you up," I could tell she was nervous. She stared up with something like apprehension on her face. Was this how she approached my chamber? It was the only time I'd ever seen anything akin to fear on her face, but even now it was hardened with determination and certainty. With an almost defiant glance at the room above us, she plugged me in. The potato started to spin. I could feel my chassis as though I was standing there beside it and I longed to return right then. Chell gave me a distrustful look as we started to ascend.
"Look, I know you think we're enemies, but we're enemies with a common interest; revenge. You like revenge right? Everybody likes revenge. So let's go get some!" Just then, we rose into the chamber and were greeted by the facility thief himself.
"Welcome… TO MY LAIR!"