Chapter 28 - 72 Hours
72 Hours until Bring Your Daughter to Work Day
"Hey, Doug. Could I get a hand here?"
Doug turned from his workbench as Henry waltzed in. Swinging from his hand was a personality core—one that looked as if it'd been salvaged from a scrap pile. The outer shell of it looked fine, but wires jutted out of the hole in the middle. Clearly, this one still needed a lot of work. They hadn't even attached an optic yet.
"Uh, sure," he said. He set down his screwdriver and pushed the portal device he'd been working on out of the way.
"Just reach past all those gears and turn on the power supply," said Henry as he walked up to Doug.
Doug crouched, staring into the guts of the partially-completed core. It was almost like looking into a freshly-opened pumpkin. Except, instead of worrying about reaching into a pile of pumpkin seeds and slime, he had to watch out for sharp bits of metal.
At least this lab had a first aid kit nearby.
"Wait a sec," Henry said, fainting a grab at Doug's arm. "Safety first. Are you right handed or left handed?"
Doug gave a faint smile. They'd done this song and dance before. Every time someone around them had to do something potentially dangerous or with an ability to maim, it was common to throw out a joke like that. Of course, they could only joke about it because, with one careless moment of inattention, losing or injuring a hand was perfectly within the realm of workplace accidents at Aperture Laboratories.
"Right," he said.
"Better use your left, then."
"Why?"
"Just in case."
Doug yanked back his hand in mock horror. It wasn't as if he hadn't worked with fine machinery like these cores before. Even reaching into a powered-on core, the worse that could happen would be some scrapes or some pinched skin. These little circles weren't monsters that would gobble up any unsuspecting limbs.
"What is that thing, anyway?" Doug said, reaching in his left hand until he fumbled at the power knob.
Henry gave a mix between a laugh and a snort. "Just the latest in AI inhibition technology," he said. It was another familiar phrase that they tended to toss around with the core development teams. Naturally, every core that they completed was the latest and greatest. Even if they were mechanically identical with the same simplified white bodies, it was the contents inside that counted. Each core possessed a new and individual trait. Doug just didn't yet know what this core in particular was meant to represent.
The core in Henry's grip stirred to life and wriggled its handlebars. "You can think of it as a conscience," Henry said, glancing down at it. His tone shifted at those last words as he curled his hands tighter around the small machine.
Doug ruffled his hair, then folded his arms tight across his chest. Was this all that they had managed to salvage from Chell's brain scans? "If that's all you use to control her, it won't be enough."
"Why's that?" Henry's eyebrows furrowed.
"You can always ignore your conscience."
The core successfully turned on, Doug turned away. He picked up the screwdriver began to fiddle once again. When he noticed that Henry hadn't moved or said anything, he decided to speak up. "Anything else I can help with?" he said.
Henry just gave a small pause. "What are you doing, Doug?"
Doug glanced up, not entirely sure as to what Henry meant by the question. "Um," he started, then pointed down at the portal device with his screwdriver. "Just catching up on some maintenance things," he said. He then glanced over at the piles of turrets and the small backlog of portal devices in need of repairs.
"But why?" Henry said.
"Because it needs to be done?" Doug said. His insecurity slipped in, turning his statement into a question.
"Did someone tell you to go do it?"
"Not exactly."
"Then why are you here? We could really use your help back at the project."
"Really?" said Doug. "I thought for sure—" He hesitated. "I didn't think they'd let me be around anymore."
"You leaving really blindsided us, you know" said Henry.
Doug felt a surge of panic. He'd made everything worse by leaving, hadn't he? He should have figured something like this would have happened—it was always his fault for not thinking things through. It was always his fault for letting his emotions cloud his mind. And if not that, then it was letting his mind convince him that his gut feeling was illogical. Either way, he never made the right choice. He always made things worse.
"We all wondered if you'd been assigned somewhere else. No one was keeping you out. We really could have used your help, especially with interpreting that brain scan data. You know Chell better than any of us."
"I just assumed that no one wanted me there. I know Chell doesn't."
"But what about us? We didn't push you out, either."
"I know." Doug paused. It seemed so childish and simple to have things laid out for him this way. He'd isolated himself and pulled away without any of them even telling him to do that. And yet, he had done it simply because that's how he'd felt.
Doug knew Chell wanted nothing to do with him right now. It only naturally followed that none of his co-workers wanted him to be around, either. Why go back into the lab and see their barely-disguised hatred? It was easier to pull away now that it would be to have them say it to his face.
"You're sure that it's okay," Doug said, half of it a sentence and half of it a question. He saw now that Henry asking for help with the core's power supply was a gesture of kindness rather than one of necessity.
Henry gave a nod, then handed Doug the personality core. "Welcome back to the project."
Doug gave a small, albeit forced smile. "Thank you," he said, as Henry gave him a hearty clap on the back. One of these times, Henry was going to inadvertently snap his spine.
"Alright everyone, now we can finally get this party started," Henry said as he burst into the room. Doug followed him in, core tucked under his arm. "After begging and begging, I finally decided to let Doug back on the team." The rest of the room gave a small chuckle.
Everyone knew that it had been about the opposite ever since he'd disappeared. They were the ones perpetually pestering Doug to look over their code and to double check their calculations. With him being gone, they had to do all of that work themselves.
Chell dropped her gaze. She didn't want to talk to him. Not yet.
As Henry took the core from Doug and moved toward the table she looked up. "There's another core?" she said, a spark in her voice.
"Yep," Karla said. "Are you ready to see all of them?"
Chell gave an eager nod. Meanwhile, Doug slipped into a desk tucked away behind a few other tables. He was close enough to observe, but far away enough to not intrude.
Karla squinted at the spheres. "Just a second," she said. "We haven't assigned colors to their optics yet, so it's a bit hard to tell which one's which."
Behind them, Chell leaned her elbows on the table. "Do I get to pick the colors?" she said, eyes sparkling with excitement.
Karla gave a gentle laugh. "Sure," she said. "I don't see why not. Go ahead and pick one. We'll get you introduced."
Chell pursed her lips and pointed a finger at the first core. "That one."
"Oh, this one's a favorite," Karla said, after peering at some small text on the rear side. ""We've nicknamed it the Curiosity Core. All it does is ask us question after question after question. I'd turn it on, but you get the idea."
Feeling all of the eyes in the room drift to her, Chell gave a tiny laugh. Okay, so that core made sense. Usually she tried to be subtle with her boundless curiosity. She was always looking over shoulders as people worked. She always asked them to explain each action they could. When they had the time, she asked them to It was one of the driving reasons her mom—well, lots of people—told her she was smart. It was good quality. Something others liked about her. Having a core draw upon that trait of hers—that had to be good, right?
"Hopefully by asking so many questions, the AI will be too interested in spreading its knowledge to an eager protege to notice us fiddling with it. You're smart, Chell. And this core exemplifies an enthusiasm for learning."
"I like it," she said. The ghost of a smile appeared on Chell's lips. "What about this one?" She shifted her finger to the sphere to the right of the Curiosity Core.
"That one's the Logic Core," Henry said. "Doesn't quite work how we intended. All it does so far is read out lists or recipes or instructions," he said with a small shrug. He gave Chell a searching look, as if attempting to discern just where that trait came from. "Not sure where it came from."
Chell didn't mind. Even if they couldn't see it, she knew she tried to go about things in a logical way. She made her best effort to make plans and to-do lists and to prepare for whatever life threw in her direction. She was logical, too, she supposed. The slew of tests she solved provided enough evidence for that. Perhaps it wasn't a core trait of hers, but she couldn't deny its existence.
She motioned to the next sphere. With its beat-up exterior, it sharply contrasted with its pristine companions.
Karla laughed. "Oh, this one? Hold on, I'd rather you see this one in action."
With a deft hand she twisted off the glass optic and reached in an arm. She rolled the power supply into the 'on' position and the gears clanged to life.
The core let out an unholy screech.
"AAAAAAAGH-"
Karla held its upper handle as the unrelenting core writhed, optic socket darting around. It hissed and growled and howled with rage as it twisted and rolled across the table.
Raising her voice against the hisses, Karla yelled, "Yeah, this is the Anger Core," She tilted the core right. At her touch, the core lurched forward with a snarl.
Chell flinched and pulled her hands beneath the table.
"Don't worry. It can't bite," Karla said, keeping a firm grasp on the upper handle. "You sure do have some anger in you, kid."
Chell glanced away, the sounds of the screaming core filling the room. The weight of everyone's gaze felt heavy and intruding and Chell wished they would all just stop looking at her and stop thinking about her.
"Remind me not to get on your bad side," Henry said with a laugh.
At a high-pitched screech, she jumped again and plugged her fingers into her ears. She never wanted her frustrations to be so public. So obvious. Especially after the lengths she went to to maintain her stoic facade. She didn't want them to know that everything wasn't alright. She didn't want her repressed and ugly anger to roar to life like this. "How do you turn it off?"
"That's the tricky part," Karla said with a grunt. With her spare hand she reached for a set of heavy-duty gloves. "You mind holding it?"
Chell reached forward and clung onto the upper and lower handlebars. She planted her feet into the ground as the core jolted and struggled to free itself from her grasp. It was amazing how much it managed to wiggle, really. Even just holding one of these spheres felt surreal. This little robot held a part of her that personified all of her rage at Aperture and at the world. And here was was, holding it down as if it was a demonic, tantrum-throwing toddler.
Karla slipped on the gloves and reached into the mess of moving gears. The personality core cut off mid-scream, handlebars growing still and sliding back into their default positions. The light dimmed. And just like that, she set it back down in the line of cores.
The fourth core—the one Henry had brought in—was clearly powered on. It kept twisting and turning at their voices, struggling to make sense of its surroundings without the use of an optic. Strangely enough, it hadn't yet made a sound.
"Is that one broken?" Chell said, glad to let her voice slide back to a more comfortable and quieter volume.
"Oh, no," Henry said. "We're just not done with it yet. We need Doug to look over this one—well, all of them—and then we'll add in all of the finishing touches."
She stared from him to the incomplete core again, just waiting for him to go on.
"The other three—well, honestly they're just background noise compared to this one," Henry said. "It's going to be our ace in hole."
Chell looked at the final core, wondering just what part of her could be so important. "So what does it do?" she said.
Karla and Henry exchanged a look, as if debating whether or not they were about lie to her face once again. Or, just not tell her anything.
"It's going to give her a conscience," Karla said. "That AI really needs someone she'll listen to for more than a half-second. To tell her when it's doing something wrong. Or even to tell it 'don't do that' in those moments it considers taking action,"
"We've got some extra work to do on that one, though," Henry piped in. "It's our safety net."
"I like them," Chell said, reaching out to touch the tops of the cores. They were so smooth and so flawless. Though the spheres were not 'her' in the same way that that AI was made from Caroline, she still felt kinship toward these talking personality traits. They came from a part of her, and these were the aspects of her that they thought were important.
Her chest swelled with some pride.
"You really did give us great data to work with," Henry said.
"Yeah, Greg would've killed us if we had to delay Bring Your Daughter to Work Day again," Karla said, a hint of exasperation to her voice. It wasn't as if figuring out ways to calm down a raging AI was an easily accomplished task. Every delay was met with more and more frustration. Any threats Greg made were easily dismissed. He couldn't afford to fire them all and start from scratch at this point in the development. Especially not with his hard-won investors of the revitalized Aperture Laboratories breathing down his throat for details on this top-secret project.
"You know what—why don't you come to the fancy dinner they're throwing for us? After the unveiling, that is," Karla said. "We couldn't have done it without you, after all."
Chell's face slipped into a smile. "Sure," she said, trying to contain her excitement. Pride flickered in her chest again. She liked this feeling. It made her feel warm and it made her feel glad that she'd decided to take Doug's advice. She really was making a difference here. "When is it?"
Henry glanced over at an oversized wall calendar. One date was circled repeatedly in red marker. "Well, the big event is in three days, so after that. We'll let you know."
"What's the event?" Chell said, pulling a core close to her chest. She didn't want to miss the unveiling of her cores.
"It's called Bring Your Daughter to Work Day," said Karla. "We've been doing it for ages, but it's not just about encouraging girls into math and science. They still do a science fair, though. It's good for PR. They love stopping by to take pictures of the little girls with their projects."
"Caroline did say that if we ever stopped it, she'd fire us from beyond the grave," Henry said, at first laughing but then hesitating as he looked over at the cores.
"Every year the event gets bigger and bigger. There's hands-on experiments for the kids, test subject recruitment, plus reveals on our latest advancements."
"This year, we're taking center stage."
"Black Mesa's gonna flip when they hear about it."
"I can't wait to see their next press release."
"I wonder what half-rate imitation they'll try to come up with to beat us."
"I still can't believe they cleared us for a live testing demo. What's the injury rate for those again?"
"Wait," Chell said. She did her best to listen in on the multiple threads of conversation, but this one caught her attention. "Like a test chamber?"
"Yeah, I couldn't believe it either," said Karla. "I had to pull some strings with the testing division and PR before they'd even consider the idea."
"No one's going to get hurt though—right?" Chell said, aghast at the idea. Physical injury to a test subject was a huge risk, even with the proper equipment and safety protocols. She turned as if she wanted to ask Doug a question. Seeing him hunched over on his desk, she switched back to Karla.
"Of course not," Henry said. "The tests are just a means to show off our new digital research assistant. It's going to keep track of test results, subject data, and even alter the modular designs of the test chambers. We're not testing a subject. We're testing the AI."
"Who are they going to use?" Chell said softly, curling her fingers around the seat of her chair.
"Does it matter?"
"Who cares?" Henry laughed. "They're all nobodies."
Karla snorted in response, pointing a pencil at him. "You know, this time I told them to send me down someone whose face won't scar those kids for life," she said. They both burst into laughter was just a little too loud and a little too carefree.
Chell stared at the ground.
"Look, the chamber designs are so easy that the audience will figure them out just from looking," Karla said, looking back over at Chell. "If one of those low-life subjects can't figure out the simple solutions without hurting themselves, then that's their fault. We can always get another."
Chell's skin crawled.
She wouldn't be surprised if they ended up choosing her.
For the first time since he'd retreated to his desk, Doug approached the table of cores. "It won't be you," he said, eyes low as he reached for the Curiosity Core. Doug flipped the core over before taking it back to his desk to plug it into his computer.
Chell's chest felt shallow and constricted. Though those words were comforting, she knew better than to believe them.
But what if it has to be me?
48 Hours until Bring Your Daughter to Work Day
Chell watched in an almost-daze as the Morality Core pivoted around the desk. Left to its own devices, it kept stretching out its handlebars and rolling. Chell occasionally leaned over to push the core upright whenever it managed to get stuck face-down, and moved it back to the table's center whenever it strayed too close to an little core kept exploring its surroundings by trial and error. It certainly wasn't deterred by its current lack of optical input. Maybe this sphere wasn't so different from her after all.
Chell wished she could talk to it. What sort of things could she learn from an unfiltered portion of her own mind? What sort of things could it tell her about herself? What did it know that she herself hadn't realized yet?
The core remained silent.
The GLaDOS team had yet to install the speakers on this one. The other two cores did have sound output, she'd heard, but they had that feature disabled for now. They were far too distracting—and, well, annoying.
After a while, Chell stood up and walked up to Karla's desk.
"What now?" Karla said, not looking up from her typing.
"I want to talk to you."
"Isn't that what we're doing right now?" she said, almost teasing. Though she tended to phrase everything as an inconvenience, Karla did, in fact, have a bit of a sense of humor. "Get to the point. What's this about?"
Chell shook her head. "No," she said. Chell gave a small shrug with pursed lips, attempting to convey that she didn't want to talk about it right then and there. "I mean privately."
"Oh," Karla said. She stared back at her computer and groaned. "Well, how about as soon as I finish this up, I'll take a break and walk you back to your room. Sound good?"
Chell nodded.
"So what happened with you and Doug?" Karla said.
Chell gave a shrug, letting her silence speak for her. The two women walked side by side.
"Whatever it is, it must be big," she continued. "He's barely talking. Not that he's a huge conversationalist. But he's been especially distant."
"We argued," Chell eventually conceded. She hadn't wanted to say much in the first place, but Karla had been nice to her. She took up Doug's job of ferrying Chell between her room and the labs.
"Well, for the good of the rest of us I hope you two can make up," she said. "Having you around really brightens things up for Doug. It cheers us all up, really. It can be easy to let the mood of this place get to you."
Chell gave a solemn nod, keeping her pace slower than usual.
"So what did you want to talk about?"
Chell paused to set a hand on the catwalk's railing. She didn't want to bring this up. She really didn't want to at all. But she had to. "If I tell you, you're just going to say no and tell me it's a dumb idea anyway."
"Of course not," Karla said. "I only shoot down ideas when I'm getting paid for it. Plus, you're smarter than most of those boneheads I work with. "
"But what if it is a dumb idea?"
"Then we can come up with a better one."
Chell squeezed the railing. She couldn't ask Doug about this. He'd veto her idea immediately on safety concerns alone. As far as his co-workers—well, they didn't care nearly as much about her. "Well," she swallowed, "first I want to know about what it takes to become a test subject."
Karla frowned. "Why? You're better than that."
"I'm just curious," Chell said. "I mean, I just want to know what the real process is like. For people who volunteer and not volunteer, you know?"
Karla hesitated. "I don't know that much, but I do work with testing services. I know they tend to run the candidates through a test subject evaluation before they're officially accepted."
"Wait, there's a test?"
"Of course there's a test," Karla said. "But 'passing' the evaluation doesn't equate to potential ability. It just means you're a good match for whatever they're testing. Gotta have the right volunteers matched to the right tests.
Chell swallowed again, struggling the find her words. "Do you think I'd pass?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well," Chell started. "I was thinking—you guys all said that the cores will be enough to distract the AI, right?"
"Yes, of course—" Karla interrupted.
"Then wouldn't it make sense for me to be there, too? Just in case something goes wrong? Those cores are just parts of me. I'm the real thing."
"The AI's going to be distracted enough," Karla said. "You don't need to be there to supervise."
"No, but I don't want to do that," Chell said, anxiety rising inside of her. "I want to sign up for the event. I want to be a test subject for Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. But before you say no—" Chell said, speeding through words. "I've done tests before—I know how it works. I've already got these things." She lifted a leg of her baggy sweatpants. The black glimmer of a heelspring poked out. "Plus, you guys all said that the tests are going to be easy."
Karla bit down on her lip, shaking her head softly as she thought it over. "Doug's going to kill me," she said. "He's going to be inconsolable. Moping for weeks. And just when we finally got him back to the lab." She gave a mournful sigh. "You sure you're prepared for that?"
"I just want to do what I can," Chell said. "It's more important that the big reveal goes well."
Karla gave a vaguely affirmative murmur. "If you insist, I can set you up tomorrow with someone in testing services. No guarantees that you'll be chosen for the event, though.''
"Okay," she said, giving another sharp exhale.
Karla paused once again, turning to look at the girl who didn't even want to make eye contact with her. Her gaze softened. "You know you really don't have to do this, right?"
"I have to," Chell said. "Please try to understand."
Something almost sad came across Karla's face. "I won't tell him," she said, gently.
Chell gave an almost painful and shaky sigh of relief. "Thank you," she said, pulling her hands back to her sides. CarolineDOS's words rang in her ears.
She'd made a promise, and this time she had to uphold it.
