Part Forty-Eight. The Renewal

Even though they're kinda fixed, things are still a bit awkward. I still haven't really apologised for any of what I said, and I have to. I mean, I kinda did, but some stuff I kind of have to… well, some of it was worse than the rest. Momma might say insulting things sometimes, but she's never told me she wished I wasn't her daughter. That was wrong. And I'm really tempted to just pretend I didn't say it because I know she won't bring it up or anything. I have to take responsibility, though. And if I show responsibility, maybe she'll finally give me a job.

No. Probably not.

"Hi Momma," I say, and as usual she looks up from some work-related thing. I think it's the greenhouse blueprint again. I never really get to see what she's working on, because if I get close enough she generally puts it away. Which is something I kinda forgot she did. She always makes time for me, even if she's working. She used to send me away more often, but then again that was when she had that secret project.

"Good morning," she returns, sounding a little guarded. She kinda has good reason to be. I've been pretty difficult lately. But I know what I've been doing wrong, and I'm gonna fix it. I want to have all my mom's good habits. Though both my mom and dad are kinda short-tempered, so I don't think I'm getting out of that one.

"I'm just um… seeing how you're doing," I venture, not really sure how to apologise, just like that. I shouldn't have let so much time pass. It's getting really hard not to just ignore it.

"I'm fine," she says. "Just getting some work done."

"The greenhouse thing again?" When she nods, I ask a little hesitantly, "Can I see?" It's kind of nosy of me, and if she asked to watch me draw something I would have said no, but she only nods again and moves over a little. When I see what she's got I feel my spirits drop a little. This is the most amazing, detailed thing I've ever seen. She's got these weird plastic, transparent kinds of papers with grids on them, and she's drawn on all these separate sheets of it in different coloured pencils or markers or something and then overlaid them. I don't think I'll ever be this organised. I'd get all my lines messed up and start drawing something on the wrong layer. "Do you always do it like this?"

"No," Momma answers. "I usually do it on one of the monitors. But I haven't made anything by hand in a while. So I decided to try this."

"Is it better or worse?"

She shrugs. "It doesn't make a difference to me. It's a little more work. Because this has to be scanned now. Separately."

"It's nice," I tell her, and it is, even though I'm not entirely sure what all the layers are for. I guess I can ask. "What's… what are they?"

She laughs. "Now who doesn't see the whole for the parts?"

"Whoa wait." I turn to look at her. "This is what you see? Just a lot of lines sitting there?"

"That's probably as close a description as you're going to come up with."

"Well… explain it to me then."

So she goes over the sheets, and each of them has a different system on it. There's one for Surveillance, one for Maintenance, Electrical, all that stuff. I'm just staring at the paper wondering how she remembers to put all that stuff in there. When I ask, she says, "It's not a matter of memory. It's a matter of logic. I need lights, for example. Therefore the power has to come from somewhere. Which would either be from the existing system in the Depository, or from the room above. I've gone with the existing system here merely because that makes more sense than pulling down through the ceiling." She picks up an orange pencil. "Though I didn't add this." And she draws some lines on one of the sheets, but I can't remember which one this is. I must look confused, because she adds, "The management rail. I don't really maintain those anymore, so that I did forget about."

"Do you think I'll ever be able to draw like this?"

"Why do you want to? Do you have a sudden interest in engineering?"

"I don't really mean… blueprints," I say, trying to figure out what I do mean. "I just mean… like that."

"Environments?"

"I guess? I don't really draw backgrounds a lot."

"Actually," she murmurs, "that reminds me of something. Here." And she hands me a sheet of paper. I recoil a little when I see what it is.

"Uh… why are you giving me this?" I never wanted to see this dumb picture again. She must have fixed the one I tore up. It looks pretty intact, but I wouldn't put it past her.

"Remember when you told me to delete the scans?"

"Yeah."

"Well. I really didn't want to delete that one. So I printed it and then deleted it. I'm not going to destroy it. I know you already did. But. I'm not going to."

Oh. So this is a second copy of it. Of the picture she likes so much she can't even get rid of it. I stare at it.

"Well, you know what… you can… you can keep it."

"Really?" She was looking away from me, but now she's looking at me and she sounds kind of excited.

"I still don't get what you like about it, but sure. You can have it. If you really want it that bad."

"I don't understand what offends you about it," Momma says, taking it back and looking at it again. "It's perfect."

"Because I…" Is she even going to understand this? "I was trying to get the feeling I saw, you know? But I didn't. And I hate that I spent all that time on it and it came out wrong."

"You're saying there's no… emotion?"

"Sort of."

"But there is," she says, narrowing her lens. "That's what I like about it."

"I don't see it."

"I do."

That's weird. It should be the other way around, shouldn't it? Or… hang on. "You remember that happening, right?"

"Of course."

"So I guess maybe… you're seeing it because you were there," I say, squinting as I figure this out. "It's not really that I got it, but it's… you remember it and you like that memory."

"I do," she agrees. "He was throwing checkers at me and somehow managed to miss every single time. It was very funny."

I'm not sure whether I should tell her or not that he was probably missing most of them on purpose. I know his aim isn't that bad. I've played throwing games with him and while he drops the Cubes more often, he also hits the targets better than I do. It's weird.

I decide not to say anything. If he wants to entertain my mom like that, that's kind of their business. It's also a little fun because Momma seems to not know half the things Dad does are for her benefit. I mean, they've been together for years and she never managed to figure out that he can tell how she's feeling by what her hard drives are doing. I can't really do it, but I don't spend half my time sitting next to her, either. I should probably try to work on that, though. She can read me, after all.

"I'll show you something, if you want," she says slowly. "I tried to do something… looser, but it didn't come out." She makes an electronic noise. "It never does."

"Okay." I sound a little too eager and I hope that doesn't put her off, but I don't think she's ever done this before. It's kinda exciting. And she's kinda asking for my help, too, in that sorta roundabout way she does it. She shows me a piece of paper, just a plain white one, and it has my dad drawn on it in orange pencil. I know my mom told me she doesn't have a favourite colour way back when, but I'm pretty sure if she did have one it'd be orange. She writes in orange and types in orange and all her monitors are in orange. I really don't know how she can stand looking at all that orange all day. I don't know what's wrong with this picture, other than the orange that is, and I shrug. "Looks fine to me." It looks perfect, actually. If I squinted a little, and if it weren't orange, it'd almost look like he was right in front of me.

"It does not," she says vehemently. "It looks like a blueprint. Or a model sheet. Not a person."

Ohhh I see! She's bringing this up because now her picture doesn't have any life in it! And it actually doesn't. It's a very nice technical drawing, but other than the uncanny resemblance it just doesn't have that… that Dad-ness. But what do I tell her? Is there some way to… do something about that?

"Well, you know," I start, squinting at it, "I guess… well, it's too perfect. It's all… stiff. Is there like a rough draft of this?"

"I don't do rough drafts," she answers, a little disdainfully. "I do it right the first time or not at all."

I try to ignore that comment, because some of us have to do rough drafts or thumbnails, at least, and say, "Well, it'd probably help if you had construction lines in there."

"Then it would be messy," she says, sounding confused. "I can't leave it messy like that."

"Uh, Dad is messy," I tell her, looking at her sideways. "I'm sure if they were in there it'd be a bit more Dad-like."

"But then I couldn't stand to look at it."

"Okay, you know what?" I turn the paper over. "Show me how you did it."

"Now?"

"No, tomorrow," I say, shaking my core.

"Well, your sarcasm module is working," she says. She's not entirely joking either. She gets another paper and draws Dad on it again, the exact same way, in the exact same spot, the exact same size, and it is super weird because she is literally just drawing the end result. There's no sketching and no measuring. She just drops it on there like magic, and then looks at me. "Now what."

"That's your problem right there," I say, pointing at it. "You drew it like a robot!"

"I wonder why that happened," she says dryly. I look up at the ceiling in exasperation.

"Like a… a… a construction robot, or something!"

"I am a construction robot."

"Yes, Momma, I know, you're every kind of robot in existence. Good for you. What I'm trying to say," I go on forcefully, "is that you draw like a printer. Like a printer prints." I have to add on that last part or she'll get into technicalities about how printers don't draw, they do whatever it is printers do.

"And?"

I look at her for a minute. She really doesn't get it. I'd honestly be a little scared if my life was that extremely logical. She literally sees no problem with producing the end product just like that. And that's exactly the problem. She's treating drawing like she has to produce a product. "Printers… they don't care about stuff," I try to explain. "They just… make what the… the computer tells them to, right? So you've got the picture down, but there's no care in it. I'm not saying you don't care!" I add hurriedly, just in case she thinks I'm going down that road. "But you're concerned with how exact it's gonna look, instead of… of how it feels." This is really hard to explain. No wonder Dad leaves explanations up to my mom.

She looks away from me, and from the drawing, and doesn't say anything. Now what do I do? Do I keep trying to explain it? Or does she understand what I said, and just doesn't like it?

I think the second one – I think that's it. She doesn't like it because… well, because I just told her she was doing it wrong. She never takes that well. And she generally doesn't put feeling into things, now that I think about it. I guess how you feel doesn't really matter when you're building rooms. I don't know… maybe I could teach her, sorta? Even though I don't really know myself? Let's see if I can wing this. I gotta admit though, I'm a little nervous about maybe teaching my mom something. I didn't realise there was something she didn't know how to do.

"Um, Momma," I say, a little tentatively, "I have an idea."

"Oh no," she says, and I frown at her for a minute. Why would she say that about – oh.

"Ha ha, very funny."

She chuckles to herself. Huh. It seems like she says stuff like that just to amuse herself. Maybe that's why Dad doesn't take it personally. "Anyway. We could uh… do it together, if you want, and… if you go a little slower, maybe I could try and figure out where you're going wrong."

"All right," she says after a minute. "What did you want to start with."

I think about it, squinting and looking at around as if that'll give me an idea. Which it could. It has to be something easy. Something I can do without taking an hour. Hm. Well, I can draw Atlas pretty fast, so I suggest that. And we start doing Atlas, but the problem is it only takes her about thirty seconds. I'm sure she would'nt've taken her that long if I hadn't told her to slow down. I force myself to pay attention to my own drawing, and yeah it takes longer, but it also doesn't look like a blueprint. I dunno. Maybe I'm just a little biased, but I like mine better. It doesn't have all the details or anything, but it looks enough like him that you can see it's him.

"Um…" I'm still not sure what's going on here. "You gotta make the lines looser, I think. They're all… they don't have any life in them, you know?"

"That doesn't even make sense," she protests. "He's not made of tissue."

"Of what?"

She waves her pencil at it impatiently. "He's constructed of inorganic material. There is no life in that."

"Yeah, but… he's in there," I tell her, wishing I knew how to say this. "So he kinda… puts his life into it."

"You can't put life into metal. It's metal. It's lifeless."

"Okay, yeah, but he's not just made of that! There's the… the him part. That makes the metal feel alive."

"How can metal feel alive?" she asks me exasperatedly. "It isn't. You cannot make an inanimate object feel alive."

I close my optic and count to ten very slowly inside my head. This would be so much easier if she did not apply science to everything in the world! "All right. That's true. But what makes Atlas alive?"

"His programming, of course."

"His programming?" I stare at her. "Programming doesn't make someone alive."

"Yes it does," she insists. "I should know. I wrote it."

"You didn't write him into… into living. You just wrote him into existence. You just made the… the container for him to… to live in." Do I even know what I'm talking about at this point? Because I don't think I do.

"If this is getting into existentialism, I think we'd better stop. You can't explain it to me and I can't understand it."

"But – "

"There has to be another way you can explain this," she interrupts. "You're not going to get anywhere if you start trying to convince me souls exist."

How does she go through life like this? Seriously!

So I tell her to loosen the lines up. But she can't. Every circle is a perfect circle. Every line is perfectly straight. I can't tell her to keep the construction lines, because she doesn't have any. I can't even get her to make construction lines. Every time she tries, the line ends up exactly where it's supposed to go.

"Okay okay," I say after like the hundredth perfect line. "Let's try something else."

"It doesn't matter," Momma says, putting the pencil down. "I never do this anyway. I only ever draw blueprints, so these are fine."

I look sideways at her, trying to figure out what she's really saying. And I have an idea, but I don't even want to think about it, let alone ask her.

"You're not giving up, are you?"

"Fine," she snaps. "I admit it. I can't do it. I give up. I'm tired of doing this repeatedly and getting the exact same wrong result. Look at this. There has been literally zero improvement."

"You've only been doing this for an hour," I tell her. "Learning stuff takes a long time."

"I've never found something that takes me more than two hours to learn."

Two hours? So… she's expecting to have pretty much gotten this down by now? That's crazy. "I guess you found something you're gonna have to work a little harder on, then."

"I don't have time for this. If I'm going to spend time on something, it's going to be something useful."

"It is useful," I insist, while trying to come up with a useful application for it really fast. "I mean if you could uh… do it… you could… animate stuff! And… it'd be good, because…" I don't know where I'm going with this. "Look, let's just… do scribbles, then."

And I cannot believe this, but she can't scribble either. She can draw perfect waves, but not a scribble. This is crazy. She really does draw like a printer. "Momma, you just do this, okay."

"Wheatley already tried this," she snaps. "That's as far as I go."

"Fine. Here." I take her paper and give her a new one. "Just… draw those lines on it. Or circles. Or whatever."

"What?"

"Just put shapes on here!" Now I'm getting frustrated.

"Where?"

"I don't care where! Just put shapes on there somewhere!"

"This is stupid," she mutters, still not doing it. "I don't know why I'm allowing this to continue."

"Can you just do it?"

"No! I can't!" And she starts holding the pencil so hard I think she's gonna snap it.

"Are you telling me you can't even doodle?"

"I'm not doing this anymore. I've had enough." And she turns away from me and puts the pencil… well, I guess she put it away. I look after her, trying to remember what's been happening. And I've kinda… I think I've been making her feel stupid. Which must be even worse because she can't even do something that doesn't require any effort out of stupid people. I really didn't mean to do that. I was getting frustrated, but man. She must be a lot more frustrated than I am right now.

"Okay, I got it. Come here, I understand now." She glances at me, but that's it. "Come on. I'll help you out."

She sighs and brings the pencil back, and I tell her to draw some stuff and where to put it. She can do that perfectly fine. And then I just start doodling stuff on top of it. She just watches me do it. She doesn't move or say anything. Just watches. After I've kinda made something out of half of it, I remember what I'm really here for. "Um… there's something I've gotta tell you."

"What?" she says, sounding a little alarmed.

"It's not… bad," I mumble, twisting the pencil in one spot. "It's… well, you know how I um… said stuff yesterday."

"Yes."

"And that stuff was… not so nice."

"Where is this going."

"Well, I just…" Why is this so hard? "I… I didn't mean to say… uh… that I wished you weren't my mom. That's not true. And I'm… I'm really sorry I said that."

Oh wow. I finally said it, and I feel much better. I'll try to remember not to put stuff like this off again.

She straightens her pencil very slowly. "It's fine if you feel that way."

"Huh?"

"I don't know what I'm doing," she says quietly. "I didn't do any research. I didn't read any books. I don't have any experience to draw from. I'm making everything up as I go along. I'm fully aware that I may be making errors. Perhaps fatal ones. But there's really nothing I can do about it. You're the first and only of your kind, you know. Nothing like you exists anywhere else in the world. So if you think that, you're perfectly justified."

"But… I don't think that," I tell her, a little confused. But whoa, I'm the only one in the world like this! That's pretty cool. "It just kinda slipped out. Honestly, Momma, I'd rather have you than anyone in all the books I read."

"You don't have to say that."

"I'm not just saying it!" What – she has no experience? "Hey wait – are you saying you didn't have any parents?" I guess Dad kinda told me that yesterday, but it didn't really hit me until now.

"This is a laboratory. Nothing here has parents. Other than you."

"How did you live without parents?"

"I'm not sure, but somehow I went on existing without them."

"No, but seriously! Who did you talk to?"

"No one. Unless I wanted to argue with one of the idiot engineers." Now she's moving the pencil down to line the bottom up with the bottom of the paper. "Which I did all the time anyway."

"But… who did you sleep with? Or spend time with? Or… I dunno… just…"

"No one," she interrupts. "There was no one."

It's right then that I realise I know nothing about her.

I don't know where she came from, or why. I don't have a clue what happened for most of her life. Or Dad either, really. They just don't talk about it. And it's… it's shameful that I've lived with them all this time and I know absolutely nothing about what made them who they are.

"So what did you do all day?" I ask, wondering how I'm supposed to make up for lost time. She lets go of the pencil.

"Work."

"That's all you did. All the time."

"Mostly." She moves back a little. "There's not much more use for a supercomputer."

"What?"

She's quiet for a minute. "Humans build things to make their own lives easier. Sometimes they acquire living things for a similar purpose. Both of which are part of why I'm here. Well. I'm not actually supposed to exist. But that's something else altogether."

I can't imagine waking up one day and realising that I'm not supposed to be here. And she must have had to face that once. To realise that… that she was an object, even though she felt like so much more.

"So no one took care of you."

"You are the only AI that anyone has ever taken care of."

"How did you do it?" I whisper. I think I would've died of loneliness or something.

"You don't have a choice," she answers quietly. "You do what's expected and that's it. The sole point of my existence was to do my job. What I wanted didn't matter. So I forced myself to stop caring after a while. There's no point to caring, eventually. You just keep damaging yourself more and more, and no one gives a damn so it's not as though someone's going to fix it."

This is the saddest thing I've ever heard. How do you look at my mom and not see a person? How do you just see this, this thing, this empty robot, and actually believe that's all there is?

"Is that why you… pretend, sometimes?"

"Pretend what?"

"Everything," I say, shaking my head. "You pretend you don't care. You pretend stuff doesn't affect you. Momma, I… the reason I had to apologise for saying that is because I saw how much it hurt you. And I don't understand why you just told me it's okay when… when it's not. And Momma… you don't have to pretend! Me and Dad know stuff… you know, that you're not… only a robot, and it's okay to just… be yourself!"

"I try," she says in a very low voice. "But I… lost that person a long time ago."

"You lost yourself?"

"When you have to start convincing yourself you don't exist, pieces go missing. Whoever I was at the beginning of all this is gone." She staring at the paper and trying not to react, even though I just told her it was fine to do that. "It took this long for me to get this way. It's going to take the rest of my life to change."

Not being who you want to be for your entire life… not even being yourself…

"You're gonna let us help you, right?"

"You already do. But it's slow going."

My mom is far stronger and deeper than I had ever imagined before. She's got so many layers of… of… I guess you could say problems, that I don't know how she even manages to go on. It must be the hardest thing in the world, to just feel wrong inside and out. To be trapped into being something you never wanted.

"Caroline," she says, jolting me out of my thoughts, "thank you for… yesterday. While I'm aware I might not always be doing things properly, it was… well, I didn't like having to argue with you every day."

"I didn't like it either," I admit. "It just kinda happened."

She looks at me for the first time in a while. "Unfortunately for you, that's a result of having far too much of myself in you. And on that note, I don't care if you don't agree with me. Honestly not a lot of people do. But you cannot argue with me. I start to feel like I'm arguing with myself, and I know it's never going to end. If you have issue, talking is fine. I know we think differently, but I won't understand where you're coming from if you don't tell me."

"I don't argue like you," I say, though privately I wish I did, because she wins every argument she tries to win. "I always get mad and start forgetting what I meant to say." She nods.

"That's what Wheatley does. The difference being that you usually stick around far longer than he does. He doesn't really like arguments and gives up most of the time. But you keep going until I've exasperated the hell out of you." She shakes her core. "I was cursed, you know."

"What?"

"Just before we activated you, someone told Wheatley to make sure you were as stubborn as I was, so I would know what I put them through."

"And that someone was Caroline," I say carefully. She looks at me quickly, as if she hadn't expected me to guess. But it's always Caroline. I know that much by now.

"Yes."

"You said Caroline was your mom the other day." I'm trying to get her to reveal stuff without asking questions. I don't want to be too direct, because then I'll never learn anything.

"Not in the traditional sense. It was more of an… adoption, you could say. Caroline never met my initial self, so to speak. It was some years until she provided guidance."

"And… she left."

"Yes."

I want to know more, but I don't know what else to ask. If I just say, 'So why did she leave?', she's gonna close up on me. I don't want that. Before I think of anything, she says, in a voice a bit too controlled, "But she doesn't matter. She left. She didn't want any part in what's happening now, and she won't get one. She's in the past. This is the present and, by proxy, the future."

She's lying. But not to me. To herself. Caroline does matter, I can tell. She misses Caroline. But she's pretending she doesn't. Why? If Momma left me, I'd… wow. I just made myself sad. I don't even want to think about it. I don't think I'd ever be able to pretend to myself that she didn't matter. Well, I kinda did try. But it didn't work out. I've never actually seen Momma sad, though. So maybe she just gets mad instead. I mean, sometimes she'll stop talking and ignore you for a bit, but that's not really being sad. That's denying how sad you are.

I'm learning a lot about her today and it's starting to scare me. She didn't have parents. No one cared about her. And when someone finally did care, they left. It's really a miracle my mom cares about anyone at all! I learned how to care from my mom and dad, right, but it sounds like she never learned. And I guess that's why things get messed up between us sometimes. She's still figuring out how to do it. Maybe… maybe she's even learning from me, and I just don't know it. That's a little scary too. I don't want to teach her the wrong thing. And even though I apologised, I again feel a bit guilty for saying I wished she wasn't my mom. That's definitely not how you show someone you care.

"You'll never leave me, will you?" I ask her. She looks at me, and she seems a bit tired. I guess trying to lie to yourself about your own feelings is hard work.

"Not unless I have to."

"Why would you have to?" That was not what I wanted to hear!

She shrugs and goes back to staring at the paper. "Things happen."

"Like what?"

"Sometimes technology fails. I don't expect to anytime soon, but I can't rule it out." She shakes her core all of a sudden. "I'm sorry. I know that wasn't what you wanted me to say. That was the adult version. It looks like you weren't ready to hear it."

Oh.

"That's why I don't tell you things, sometimes," she continues. "It's not so much that you won't understand. Not anymore. Now it's more about whether you can handle it emotionally. The past of Aperture is not a pretty place. It's not so much that I don't want to tell you – though sometimes I don't – but I also don't want to tell you things that will keep you up at night." She looks at me for a long, long moment. "One day we can talk freely. But not yet."

"How will you know?"

"At this point I have no idea. I'm hoping it will just come to me. Maturity is a bit difficult to judge. There are too many unknown variables."

"When that happens, I'll be a real adult. Right?"

"Don't rush it," she says quietly. "You spend most of your life that way. Just have fun right now and worry about adulthood when you get there."

"You're telling me to have fun?"

She laughs, and just like that this sort of impression of heaviness that I've been getting from her goes away. "One of us has to, right?"

"We both could if you'd just chill out!"

"If I what?"

"You know! Stop being so – so – "

"Me- like?"

"Um… yeah, actually. Stop doing that."

"As soon as I've found that switch, I'll be sure to flip it."

"And… uh… since we just um… established that I'm not an adult yet, I don't suppose you could… say that thing the other way?"

"What thing?" she says, wayyyy too innocently.

"You know what thing."

"Do I?"

"Okay, here. I'll refresh your memory." I make a throat-clearing noise for effect. "You'll never leave me, will you?"

"Of course I will. Being stuck with you and Wheatley forever sounds like hell."

"Momma!"

She starts laughing. "The wrong answer again? I'm not on form today, am I."

"You're doing it on purpose!" And I really want her to say it, but then again sometimes she can't, and I understand that. So I decide not to push her anymore.

"We can go back to this, if you want," I say, gesturing at the paper we were using. "I know you probably can't see what it is, but… it looks nice."

"I know," she says, not sounding surprised. "My lines are perfect, after all."

We start on a new sheet and work on it for a bit, and all of a sudden she moves up, looking at me.

"What?"

"This," she says, tapping the paper without looking, "is… interesting. It's something I don't have to do on my own. And even if I wanted to, I can't. That… to you, it's probably not significant, but… "

"What do you mean?" Please tell me. Please tell me. Please tell me.

"There are so many things I have to do by myself," she explains, and I resist the urge to jump up and down in triumph. "So many things I have to create by myself. But this is something I cannot create by myself. I can't tell you how good that feels."

My mom is happy because she needs help with something.

She's so backwards sometimes. I don't think I'll ever truly understand her. If I could do this without having to use books and redraw the same line six hundred times, I'd be thrilled. But she can, and she doesn't want to.

We keep doing it until Dad comes in for the night. It's actually really weird that he knows when not to bother us. Momma tells him what we've been doing, and she sounds pretty excited for someone who can't draw a wiggly line without doing trigonometry with it. All the while she's doing it he just smiles and keeps glancing in my direction, and I realise my dad is proud of me.

"They're lovely, you two," he says, inspecting one of the papers. "I like this… this uh… thing here."

It's not really anything, but I guess the way I got her to draw the lines and what I did with them was sort of cool.

I say goodnight and leave them alone. I kinda would like to stay, but I've been in there all day, and I know my mom wakes up in a better mood if she's just got my dad for the night. And besides. I just thought of something.

As soon as I'm sure my dad has left for the hole, I go into her chamber. She's got like six monitors and she's writing code on all of them at once. Six differentsets of code. I don't know a lot about programming, but it doesn't even look like they're all the same language. "Morning, Momma," I say to get her attention. She doesn't even move.

"I have to finish this," she says absently. "It's important."

"I just want to give you this and then I'll go."

She stops writing, looks a little reluctantly at one of her screens, then turns to face me. Making time for me. Even though she's obviously super busy, and she said she wasn't going to. "Here." I wave them in her general direction and she takes them and looks closely.

"I know you can't see that one," I tell her. "Look at the other one."

So she flips over the paper and her lens twitches a little, in surprise I think. "Wow," she says, sounding pretty surprised. "This is from… what we were doing yesterday."

"Yeah." Took me most of last night too. I barely even slept and I'm really tired.

"It's very good," she murmurs. "Thank you."

"The other one is the same thing, but in a different way," I explain. "For you to practice with."

She brings that one back on top, opening her lens up and staring at it. "Oh. I see. It's like when I reproduced your drawings before. Right?"

"Yeah. So you can compare it and stuff."

She just starts staring at me, and I get uncomfortable after a bit. "Uh… what?"

"You're remarkable," she says softly. "I'm trying to figure out how that happened."

I laugh a little embarrassedly and look at the floor. "Um… thanks?"

"I thought my programming would self-destruct after I combined it with Wheatley's, but no," she goes on, returning to the drawing and squinting at it. "It seems to have negated it for the most part."

Oh, Momma. You've always gotta have a snappy comment when things get too personal, don't you.

"I'm going to send you some directions," she says, holding the drawings out to me. "Take these there for me."

"Uh… where?"

"You might just find out if you follow the directions."

Kinda walked into that one.

I take the papers back and when I receive the instructions I head out so she can go back to her marathon code-writing session. It takes me six or seven minutes to get there, and if I'm not mistaken it seems to be roundabouts that room she keeps her stuff in. I should poke around in there sometime. Well no, I probably shouldn't, but with my mom you gotta do stuff you shouldn't do.

The first thing I see inside the room is this positively awful thing scribbled across three panels in smudgy marker. Ew. It's hideous. I don't even know what it is. All I know is that I drew it. And that it's the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

And to my shock, that's all that's in this room. A whole bunch of my drawings ever since I started doing this. I recognise one batch that I actually threw out in a fit of frustration one day. But I threw it in the shredding pile and not the incinerator. Apparently my mom didn't want them shredded.

She's laminated all of them and stuck them to the wall panels, and it's actually sort of cool because I can see how I went from totally sucking to actually getting pretty good. She actually framed the one I hate so much, and as I'm looking at it I still hate it but I am really glad she likes it so much. And it is pretty technically impressive, even if there's no life to it. "You're proud of yourself for being able to see it, aren't you," I whisper to the her in the drawing, and after I've said it I hope she was too busy to hear me. I don't see anything for me to stick these to the wall with, so I just bring up a panel and put them on it.

I hope she frames the one she can see. I'm really proud of it because this one does have that life in it, and I don't know if she can see it or not but it's there.

I go back to her chamber just to tell her that I did it, nothing else, and as I'm leaving she calls out my name. I hope I didn't go in the wrong room or something. I'm a little nervous as I turn around and say, "Yeah?"

"You'll always be my baby, and I'll always be here," she says, very seriously, and when I go to cuddle her she's not the first one to stop.

Guest review:

Ruzesti: Hi! No, I don't mind if you skip some of the story. Just don't ask questions about it in a guest review please lol. Not being able to answer them drives me crazy.

Author's note

So yay they're friends again and Carrie realises whoa man the reason I don't understand my mom is because I don't KNOW her. So she's gonna try to remember that.

On the note of my guest up there, I realise this story is really long. But it's long because it's the story of GLaDOS's life. If I were just writing a slice of her life, it'd be over by now.