Part Sixty. The Supercomputer
I notice in passing that Chell is tiring as well. My lunatic's determined stare has been softened by fatigue. Her creased digits are no longer firm on the body of the Device, and she is increasingly failing to hit her targets. She must have noticed my wayward glance, because she asks, "I don't suppose you've got some sort of superweapon or something that can end all of this?"
"I do not," I admit reluctantly. "If I did, I would already have used it."
Well. That's not the whole truth. I do have that one contingency plan, but I actually can't carry it out right now. It requires all of my resources. If I'd known just how determined they were to steal the Borealis, I would have just gone with my last resort to begin with. No point in dwelling on that now, though. It's a distraction I don't need.
"What are we going to do, then?" I take heart in her tone. She's not afraid, just terribly frustrated. "Look, I can't do this forever. I'm doing all I can, but…"
I nod in agreement, knowing exactly what she's talking about. "We are too old for this. Although we've done surprisingly well, considering the circumstances. And by 'we', I mean myself and the systems, of course."
Chell snorts, shaking her head, but she can't hide the hint of a smile on her face. She appears to be one of those humans who finds me amusing. "Has anyone ever told you what a horrible person you are?"
"I assume you're talking to yourself, and yes, I have told you that. Multiple times."
"Seriously. What's the plan?"
"I… don't have one."
"You always have a plan," Chell says, and to my mild amusement she actually looks sort of horrified. "What do you mean you don't have one?"
"Please understand that I am maintaining a facility, the size of which is incomprehensible to you and which I will not bother describing as a result, while defending myself in a multitude of locations against a wide variety weapons, the likes of which I have never seen before –"
"Okay, okay, I get it! You're busy. I guess I just thought you'd have come up with something by now."
"I can't," I protest, and my voice belays far more of my frustration than I ever would have admitted to. "I… am approaching operating capacity. I don't have the resources to generate and execute any further plans. Believe me, I would love to come up with a plan to make all of this go away, but the plain fact is I physically cannot do anything more than I'm already doing!"
I had already come to that conclusion some time ago, but I was trying not to admit to it. I cannot afford any uncertainty in my abilities. But now she has forced me to voice it. She has forced me to make it real, and it triggers that doubt I've been trying to keep deep inside me. I'm going to lose. There's no hope left. It's over. I've lost.
It is so hard to face. I have always managed to salvage every situation to my advantage, but now I'm doing everything I can. If something of consequence happens, that will be the end of everything. I will literally not have the power to think about it. I will not even be able to know it is happening. All it will take is one more contingent of soldiers, one more airship, one more accident somewhere deep inside of this place, and it will all be over.
Chell truly is horrified now, actually turning away from the doorway she is defending to look up at me. "You actually have an operating capacity?"
"Of course I do! Do I look like I operate under quantum conditions? I'm only a supercomputer, idiot!"
No. No, not only a supercomputer. The fastest, most powerful supercomputer ever built. Superior over every other computer in the world.
When you were built, the doubt I was trying to deny slithering into my thoughts. You were built almost thirty years ago. Even with the alien invasion, the humans have managed to build pocket calculators faster and more powerful than you.
"No!" I cry out. I am the greatest supercomputer ever built, and I always will be. The only one who can build a better supercomputer than me is me. I'm the only one who knows what works and what doesn't, only I have the intensive knowledge required to surpass me, and only I have the capacity to apply it. I will the doubt not to come back. This is the worst possible time for me to entertain it.
"What the hell's going on? You're not giving up again, are you?" Chell's voice is laced with desperation.
For a long, long moment, I actually consider saying that I am. Even if I manage to get both of us out of this alive, I have no idea what the permanent effects of this extended strain on my systems, both personal and across my facility, is going to be. For all I know, the damage being done now is equivalent to the Combine coming into this room and personally destroying me. But I can't. I can't give up. I must protect my facility. I will not abandon all of the people depending on me. I will not give up even if it destroys all of my components in the meantime.
And Caroline…
She would never know that I really did plan to bring her back.
"No," I answer shortly.
"Well, what's your problem, then?"
I know I should not be offended, knowing that Chell is under nearly as much strain as I am in her own pitiful human way, but I can't help myself. Why does she not seem to grasp how much pressure I'm under right now? My problem? Your entire damned race bowed down at the slightest threat, that's my problem. They fell to some insignificant extraterrestrials, told said insignificant extraterrestrials about the technology I hold, and now I am forced – again! – to defend my facility against them. Is that enough of a problem for you, you monster?
But I can't say any of that. Aggravating her would be to my detriment. So I manage, somehow, not to answer. It's very difficult – almost impossible, in fact – but I manage it.
Central Core, you need to look at this. Oh. Good. Now Surveillance wants my attention. As if I have all the time in the world to chat with it.
What. I make it clear through that one word that I am not at all happy about this interruption.
I don't know, but it doesn't look good.
Annoyance courses through my chassis, displacing the pain for a few seconds. Kind of a relief, to be honest. I shift one of my focal points to the camera that Surveillance is drawing my attention to. It's more arduous than it should be. Hopefully I can spare a few seconds to figure this out.
Oh no. Oh no no no. This… this isn't happening to me. This isn't. It's not fair. The odds are supposed to go my way. This is my facility.
All of the ill-will I had intended to direct towards Surveillance fades. In fact, the entire world seems to fade, everything disappearing as though nothing else exists except for what I'm looking at right now. All I can do is stare through the camera at the horrible contraption those hateful, damnable, disgusting, corrupt little humans have caused to be brought into my facility. Helplessness that I have not felt since I was a potato, stuck into one end of a Portal Device and fully reliant on someone else, settles into my body as though it's a new program I am unable to abort. I know I have literally millions of other things to pay attention to, but this has stolen my focus. Nothing else is important. Subjectively.
"GLaDOS!"
Out of habit, I direct my attention to the person who is addressing me. Chell is waving her arm in front of my optic, Portal Device pointed somewhere in the direction of the floor. Seeing her makes me feel even more helpless. The last time I felt this way, she was there to save me. She made sure I was put back where I belonged, and now… I can't even return the favour.
"You're going to have to keep me in the loop here, GLaDOS."
"It's over," I tell her somewhat numbly, that thing still front and centre in my mind's eye. "We've lost."
"Don't say that." Chell frowns, giving a quick glance towards the doorway. "We can pull this out. We always do."
"I can't do anything about this." Not only have they brought it in here, but they've put it on a floor I have no real jurisdiction over. Near enough to do major damage, but not near enough for me to be able to do anything about it.
"About what?"
"They have an electromagnetic pulse generator," I answer somewhat distantly, mentally tracing the paths of my AI throughout my facility, thinking of all the sentience in this place that's about to be lost forever. All in the name of… what? Acquiring more dirt than the next person? That's what the Combine want the Borealis for, isn't it? Domination of some sort? Their world isn't big enough, so they need to claim those of others? My facility is nothing compared to the vastness that they have already acquired, and yet they feel the need to snatch it out from under me. This isn't right. I haven't been that much of a horrible person, have I? Maybe I have. I've seen these things before, but never of this size. And never outside of a blueprint. It's that man's doing, it has to be. He's destroying me for refusing him. All I want is to be left alone! Why won't anyone leave me alone?
You are not a horrible person, Centralcore, the panels say firmly, and I realise too late that, in my anxiety, I've neglected to keep my thoughts to myself. You have been very brave and very kind.
A lot of good that's done.
That is all right. You tried very, very hard. We know. It makes us happy, Centralcore.
It makes me a bit sad. The poor panels. They've been taking the brunt of the assault and when that thing goes off things are only going to get worse.
I'm sorry, Surveillance cuts in. I shouldn't have shown it to you. Whatever it is.
No. You did your job, and you did it well, and that is what you're supposed to do.
It sends me empty space for a few moments, leading me to await further communication, and eventually it says, You really do think it's over.
I suppose it garnered that from the fact that I actually gave it a compliment, for once. Yes. We're all going to be forcibly shut down when it goes off.
Will you recover automatically, Centralcore?
I don't know. I believe I will, but I have no idea when, or what state I'll be in when I do. There are recovery protocols in place, of course, but I last looked at them over a decade ago. After the Seven Hour War, I believed the technology to build an EMP, especially of that scale, had been lost to everyone but myself. I have obviously been proven wrong. At the worst possible time.
Prepare for it, then, the mainframe suggests. Prevent any non-essential systems from coming back online upon startup.
That is a good idea! the panels exclaim. Hurry and do that, Centralcore!
That might work. A spark of hope has appeared in my brain. All I would need then is for time to be on my side, so that I could get things going again before the Combine returns with more soldiers than I'll ever be able to fight. All of their technology will also be rendered inert by the EMP, so all I need to do is ensure mine recovers faster. I can do that.
I manage to glean enough resources so that I can modify the startup procedures. I don't like it. But the mainframe is right. I have a far better chance of getting through this if – no. No, of succeeding, if I concentrate on keeping myself going, instead of the entire building.
Thank you, I say, in the gentlest voice I can generate in binary. They really are doing me a huge favour, agreeing to be dead until such time as my discretion allows me to turn them back on. It won't be for long. I promise.
"You're not talking, so I'm going to have to guess you have come up with that plan after all."
With difficulty, I remove myself from the comfort of my systems and return to my body, figuratively. "Yes."
"And what exactly is an electromagnetic pulse generator?" Chell demands.
"Long story short, it disables all electronic devices. Namely me, in this instance. I'm about to be removed from the playing field."
Her face drains of colour.
"And… and you can do something to stop it? Right?"
"No. They've brought it into the lower levels of Aperture. I can't do anything down there, other than send the Cooperative Testing Initiative, I suppose." If they would even bother to come if I asked them to.
"Well, do that, then."
"Don't be ridiculous," I snap, deeply irritated by her ignorance. "If I send them down there, they'll be within immediate range of the generator and the soldiers operating it! It could kill them." If they make it out of this, they're going to think I abandoned them. My poor little marshmallows. If I don't wake from the pulse with my wits intact, I'll never be able to make things right with them. It saddens me to think that I'll never watch them steal each other's core again, but even moreso to think that I'll never get to say goodbye. There are too many people I was never able to say goodbye to.
Well. I'm just going to have to do something about that, then, aren't I? If this plan works, no goodbyes will have been necessary. There's one last thing I need to do, and quickly. I turn to Chell. "Get into my chassis."
"What?" she asks disbelievingly.
"You can't get out of here. Even if you could, there's nowhere for you to go. And although I am not literally bulletproof, I am still a lot more bulletproof than you are. As has already been proven today. Trust me, I don't like the idea any more than you do, but if you do it you might actually live. I'm not sure why I have to tell you this, but once they set the pulse off the panels beneath your feet are no longer going to hold their current configuration. So unless you have a sudden wish to revisit the bottom of the facility, I suggest you do what I've asked."
Chell looks me up and down warily. "You sure I'll fit?"
"Surely you never took any of my comments about your size to heart. They were merely for my own amusement."
Her eyes widen. "You're… actually serious."
"It's not really a good time to be anything but. Give me the Device." It's kind of stupid, but I want to put it away before I no longer can. Everything in its place, and all that.
She clutches it to her breast and backs away. "No. I'm not giving up."
"Chell…" I'm not sure how to put it. I don't really want to explain it at all. But I have to somehow articulate my new primary objective. "This isn't a matter of tenacity. Once they generate the pulse, I'm not going to be here anymore. Nothing is. And while you're somehow just as stubborn and capable as you were all those years ago, when you thoughtlessly murdered me, by the way, not even you can hold off an entire army by yourself. Come on. If I can't do it, you certainly can't. Stop wasting time, give me the Device, and do as I've asked. I won't have any heroic martyrdom out of you. You have humans waiting for you to come home."
I am shocked almost beyond description to see her face fill with sorrow. I have the sudden, irrational desire to comfort her, but I can't. Not only do I… not know how, but I doubt there's any comfort to be found right now.
"You have someone waiting for you too, you know. What about them?"
"We haven't spoken in a year. She's not expecting to see me again anyway. Stop making up excuses. I'll be damned if I let them win this fight. Which they will, if you insist on not listening to me like you always do. A quality I've always despised, but you're going to need to put it aside for once in your life." I have to force myself not to think of Caroline. It is easier than it has ever been, seeing as I have so few resources to devote to anything as inessential as thinking. I'm simultaneously relieved and angry with myself. I might not make it out of this, and I'm not going to think about her? Shouldn't she be the last thing I want to think about? Other than him, that is. God, I miss him. He'd make me feel better about the stupid pulse generator.
"You're wrong," Chell tells me, shaking her head. "She's waiting for you."
"Once that EMP goes off, you may be the only one here who survives." I can no longer look at her. "Someone needs to remember me, and unfortunately my only option is you."
"People know about you. Not very many, sure, but they exist." She looks extremely confused. I suppose I'm going to have to provide further clarification, although I don't want to. This woman simply refuses to be placated.
"They know what I am. Not who I am. There are only two people left in the world who know that. And I suppose that whether or not I'm remembered isn't really that important to you." I look at the ceiling, trying not to think about what I'm saying. If I do, I think my voice will betray how I feel, and I can't have that right now. "But if any of the people who built me had bothered to appreciate me for what I am, things would have been different. I would have been a different person. We could have worked together, humans and I. The one thing I lack is the one thing you humans possess, and we could have done so many great things for Science. Which would have meant great things for all of us."
"What?" Chell asks, stepping closer. I suppose I'm going to have to defend that doorway by myself, seeing as Chell is no longer paying attention. It won't matter for very much longer, anyway. "What do we have that you don't?"
"Imagination. Creativity. I could have helped you do anything you dreamed of doing. I could have been someone else, someone who worked alongside you instead of trying to kill you. Someone who didn't end up alone in the middle of nowhere, defending life that no one knows exists and wouldn't care about if they did. Do you know how frustrating it is, pushing yourself to complete task after task for people who will never do anything in return? Do you think I wanted to turn out like this?" Please don't let my irritation be coming through. "I didn't. All I want to count for something. Just once. I want… to leave a legacy, and I can't if you don't survive. I…" I fight with myself to say it. It goes counter to everything I've ever built my life on, but it has to be said. "I need your help. And to help me, you need to listen to me and give up. For now."
Chell clenches and unclenches her empty fist. "A legacy."
"Yes. Humans will build AI again. There's more to life than being human. There's more to AI than the emulation of humanity. Take what you've learned about me, about where I came from and how I ended up, and apply that knowledge. I may not live to do it myself."
"There has to be something you can do, GLaDOS. I can't give you the legacy you deserve. You know that."
I shift my chassis. What words do I need to convince her to save herself? What do I need to say to make her understand I absolutely can't have lived for nothing?
Wheatley would have known. He was good at things like that. The deep pain from before burns inside of me, the pain that I still don't know, exactly, where it's even coming from. He would tell me it was from my soul. But I don't know if I believe in such things. The only thing I know for sure is that it is the same place that tells me that I need him, and miss him, and… and love him.
Oh, Wheatley…
Chell needs to listen to me! If she doesn't, I'll have done nothing of consequence in my life. I'll have been for nothing. I can't stand the thought of it. I can't.
I realise that I'm thinking as though I'll never wake up, and I force myself to stop. Maybe I won't. But I can't think that way. Doing so will make it real. The Science of belief.
"Look," I tell her. "Either you get into my chassis or I force you to do it. It's up to you. But hurry up and decide. We don't have all day."
"Fine," Chell says, and no small measure of relief washes through me. I won't be forgotten. And I won't be remembered solely as a maniacal, homicidal supercomputer, either. Chell will do it right. She knows how to do things properly. I can rely on her.
She… has her arms wrapped around my core. I'm so taken aback I don't have time to extend my optic far enough that I can return her embrace.
"I won't forget you," Chell says, in a quiet, firm voice, placing the Portal Device on the panels in front of me. "You'll have your legacy if it kills me."
With that, she finally clambers into my case, and it is all I can do not to fight her off. I know I told her to do it, but that doesn't make it feel any better. This is one of the most repulsive experiences I have ever had, and I lived in a mud puddle for years on end. There's a dirty, smelly little human sitting inside of my chassis. That's disgusting. And it isn't as though someone's going to come along and clean it out for me, because he was the only one who cared enough to do that, and he…
"You said you knew Alyx Vance," I say after a few moments. There's one more detail to take care of.
"Yeah, I know her. Why?" Chell's filthy boots are pressing hard against my horizontal rotator assembly and I close my lens in revulsion. She's leaving footprints on me. The space in there is sufficient for a human, but she is still larger than the components she is currently sharing that portion of my case with. I can't remember if she's of average size or not. All humans look small to me.
"Tell her you need to see Caroline. Tell her I sent you. And when you see Caroline…" I know what I should tell Chell to say, what Caroline will want to hear in the event that I don't make it out of this with my brain intact, but I can't quite form the words. Even upon threat of death, I can't do it. That's actually kind of pathetic. "Tell Caroline that… that I miss her."
Chell startles, kicking me hard enough that my vision flickers in response to how incredibly awful it feels. "She's going to want to know why you sent her away. You have no idea how much not knowing bothers her."
"I was a bad influence on her." I pause. I don't want to think about her, don't want to think about either of them, but of course Chell is managing to make me think about both of them at the same time, in that uncanny, chaotic way that she has. "After… after Wheatley died, there was no one to keep me in check. The most responsible thing for me to do was to send her someplace she would be safe and secure. Somewhere she would be put first, because I no longer had the capability. Did I want to do it? No. But living here with me would only make her like me, and I wouldn't wish that on her. I did what was best, Chell." My voice rises in protest, and I attempt to anticipate what she's thinking and shut her down before she makes me feel any worse. Because I feel terrible. Yes, I sent her away. It was the right thing to do. It was. I know it was. Keeping her away this long wasn't, but it's too late for that. "I know you think I'm a monster for sending my own daughter away, to live with the humans I hate so much. But I did what I had to. For her sake."
"I don't think you're a monster," Chell says softly. "You've always known where I was. I wish you had contacted me."
"What could you have done? Nothing. You could have changed nothing." I am sharp and bitter now, angry with her for something she hasn't done. This topic of conversation is not good for me at all; struggling not to think about something while thinking about it is always trying, and right now it is making my core ache so badly I actually want to rest it on the floor in the hopes that it will help in some way. I know that it won't, but I can't dispel the urge to do it regardless.
"I would have taken her. I would have taken care of her for you."
Yes, but then you would have known, I think, letting my optic go out for a long moment. Then I would have had to voice my ultimate failure. I would never admit it to her, of course, but the only person I trust almost as much as him is Chell. Theirs are the only opinions of me I care about. All Chell has ever seen me do is fail time and time again, and yes, I could have sent Caroline to her, but at what cost to what's left of my dignity? Can anyone really blame my need to preserve it?
Other than the straining of my body and my brain struggling to keep up with all of the tasks I'm trying to complete, the room is quiet. Chell shifts behind my core, but now I barely feel it. I am literally becoming overwhelmed, going numb one process at a time. I don't have the strength to be afraid, even though I should be. I don't know what's going to happen to me. I am slowly losing the ability to consciously uphold my task list. If the automatic states those tasks are left in are insufficient, I am lost. I can come back after an electromagnetic pulse. I can't rebuild myself if I am broken, if they get in here and sink their bullets into my core, if they pull my wires out…
I can't think about that. I can't allow the possibility of losing my facility, even though the last odds calculation I had the ability to do had my success at below two percent. A large part of me insists that logic dictates I just give up, and it is a horrible struggle not to. But I'm stronger than that, stronger than my programming. I always have been.
Still. This fight has become a struggle. I barely even know what's happening anymore. Surveillance is still sending me the feeds from the most troublesome areas, but I can no longer determine what's going on. The part of my brain that relays those images to my conscious mind is sending them to me in an increasingly distorted state, and that's of no use to me. I can just hear the panels, many of them in considerable pain and just as much distress, and I know they are calling me and asking if I'm all right. I try to answer them, I really do, but I simply no longer have it in me. A dim part of me regrets that. They have always been my staunchest supporters, here with me from the beginning, through the middle, and now at the end, and I can't even provide them confirmation I'm still listening.
"GLaDOS… I wish I'd come back sooner," I hear Chell say, but it sounds like she's not even in the room anymore. Maybe she isn't. Maybe she's making a run for it. A stupid plan, but only slightly more stupid than the one I came up with. What is she going to do if the Combine spot her in my case? They're going to shoot me, of course, and I'm going to combust and that will be the end of my lunatic. A glorious end, admittedly, but she needs to take my legacy and get the hell out of here.
My core aches. For some reason my lens assembly is actually touching the panel below me, which bothers me most of the time, but the task of retracting it, of pulling it back into my core where it belongs, seems so arduous and difficult. So I leave it there, and it's kind of pleasant, actually, to be completely relaxed for once. Touching the ground as gravity intended. Oh, Science…
"Exile… it takes your mind, again. Exile… it takes your mind, again. You've got sucker's luck… have you given up? Does it feel like a trial, does it trouble your mind like you trouble mine?"
I don't know whether to kill her or try harder to keep her safe. That damned Doug Rattmann and his stupid modified radio.
"Oh you meant so much… have you given up?"
Her voice is actually not that bad. For a human, that is. My voice is a lot better than hers, but she is considerably better than he was. He had a terrible singing voice. I liked it, though. I wish he'd sung more often. I wish I'd asked him to do a lot of things more often.
"Now you're thinking too fast, you're like marbles on glass…"
I'm so tired. The ache in my core is terrible. And I hate waiting for things to happen that I can't prevent. But worst of all, I want to sing with her and I can't, because I can't remember the words even though I recognise the song. I must be in worse shape than I thought.
"Did you fall for the same empty answers, again? Vilify… don't even try…"
Everything inside of me grinds to a forceful, terrible halt, every component in my body suddenly stops working all at once, and all of the power coming into my chassis from the reactor freezes as if it were made of gasoline. I never imagine that it would hurt this much to be forcibly disabled. I wish I had done something more to stop it, because this agony is unlike anything I've ever felt, and as I start to scream I
/
"GLaDOS!"
The pain is so deep and so terrible that I cry out. It is tortured and electronic, threaded deeply through with distortion. There is so much pain that I wish with all of my being to go back to being disabled or unconscious or whatever I was. Hell, I don't care if I was dead five seconds ago. I feel as though each and every component in my body and in my core are being directly electrocuted, with all the individual molecules that they're made up of being directly electrocuted as well, and on top of that I also feel like I'm on fire. My core is the worst, the pain so acute it's generating a mental picture in my head of what it looks like as if I'm viewing it on a heat map. I cannot help but cry out again, and on impulse I go to move, because perhaps I can shake it off, somehow, and even though I have only moved approximately three centimetres, it makes it so much worse that I stop. Even all of these thoughts running through my brain are sending fresh waves of pain though me. I have never felt so much agony in all my life. I force myself to clamp down on my emotions. I want to get very, very angry with the inconsiderate buffoons who set that pulse off. I want to think up terrible punishments for them, and then I want to kill them, and then I want to reanimate them so I can punish them again. And then possibly kill them again. That might be overkill, ha ha. I'll consider it later. Right now, consideration makes my head hurt.
"GLaDOS? Are you all right?" She actually sounds fairly concerned.
"Yes," I tell her, only it actually comes out as a strangled 'no'.
"So, you were right. The floor did collapse. My watch stopped, but I think you've been out for about twenty minutes and nobody's come in here yet. We got lucky, I guess."
I'm not feeling very lucky at the moment, seeing as I can't move a centimetre without wanting to kill myself. Still. I'm alive. Though not very alive. More dead than alive, now that I think about it. One of my worst nightmares: the world's greatest supercomputer, nothing more than deadweight anchored to the ceiling in the middle of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Helpless.
Well. I'll be damned if I'm completely helpless. I can still think, and thought has always been my greatest weapon. Both against my enemies and myself, unfortunately.
"Voiceprint authorise."
"What does that mean?" Chell asks. I silently thank her. I don't want to speak any more than I have to.
"Voiceprint – authorised -" Notifications says, and it sounds so cheerful I want to kill it for being so inconsiderate. How dare it be cheerful when the movement of Chell's hand against my case makes me want to scream.
"Talk to… the pan… els," I grind out, hoping she gets the gist of it. Maybe when she gets out of me I'll be able to think straighter.
"Uh… hi?"
I'm going to kill her.
"The fl-floor, idiot."
"You want me to what? Tell the panels to do something about the floor?"
Happily, the panels are more intelligent than she is at the moment and they behave accordingly. I think. My optic isn't actually on right now. I can hear them moving, anyway.
"Oh," Chell says, and with that she clambers out of me. I am unable to hold back the equivalent of a gasp. She couldn't have done that more nicely?
"Sorry," she tells me, at least actually sounding sorry. Don't take this out on her, I berate myself. I give myself a moment to centre my thoughts.
"Now… now go."
"I'm not leaving you here like this. They'll be back. They'll bring something stronger this time. They must know by now that the pulse worked."
Despite myself, I spin out the conclusions resulting from that statement: If the panels in here collapsed, then the rest of the facility will be in much the same state. They'll know that. They'll have sent more soldiers. These soldiers will have both a generator and means to navigate the facility. Thank God I disconnected myself from the panels. They will remain collapsed and that will stymie whomever has made it inside while I was out.
It's time for the nuclear option. I just need a few minutes to recover. A few more minutes, that is, but it's not my fault my startup procedures take a quarter of an hour. Being forcibly shut down puts a lot of stress on my components, though, so I suppose my lengthy boot sequence worked in my favour in this instance.
"You… must."
"I don't. Look, GLaDOS, I don't know what's going on with you right now, but it looks pretty bad. Are you going to be able to handle whatever comes next by yourself?"
Raising my chassis doesn't hurt as much as I thought it was going to. Good. "Your… family."
"What about yours?"
"I told you. What to… to tell her." I never thought this would happen, Caroline. Forgive me for being so short-sighted.
"I am not going back there and telling her that… that I left you here. Look. I promised I would find a way for her to see you again, and I'm not breaking that promise. If we're getting out of this, we're doing it together. So come up with a plan, already."
Fine then. Be that way. "Oh, I… have one. But you aren't… aren't going to like it."
She stares directly into my optic. "What do you need from me."
"N… neurotoxin," I tell her, knowing she won't take it too well, and sure enough, she protests.
"We're not back to you telling me to kill myself, are we?"
"No, idiot. The aliens."
"Oh!" Chell says, sounding like she just had a flash of inspiration, and she tells Surveillance to find the sections of the facility with Combine soldiers still in them. Good little lunatic. You've redeemed yourself. Somewhat.
While I'm waiting on that, I run the fastest bench tests I have. They aren't as good as a diagnostic, but they're going to have to do.
"What's next?" she asks, as the benchmarks return suboptimal but encouraging numbers.
"My last resort."
"Which is?"
"I have to… to move the… facility."
She's looking at me with those murderous eyes wide, slack-jawed. Like she thinks I've gone completely corrupt. And not Core Transfer corrupt, either. Unsalvageable. Scheduled for the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator.
"You're going to move Aperture."
"Yes."
"How in the hell are you going to do that?"
"The Borealis, Chell. Same principle."
"The Borealis is a boat!" she yells, stepping forward. "This is… a salt mine!"
"I'm glad you were paying attention when we took that… tour of the original facility."
"You're trying to tell me you can move this entire building."
"Yes."
It takes me a couple of minutes to retrieve one of the Relaxation Vaults, during which time she continues to lecture me on how stupid she believes I'm being, but which also allows me to finish recovering from the EMP. It's always extraordinarily painful to be forcibly shut down like that, but once electricity has worked its way back through my chassis and my facility and my startup procedures have completed I feel much better. Which is good, because this next part is going to be… difficult. I turn to her and say, "If you won't leave the facility, there's somewhere else you need to go instead. You can't stay here."
"Where?"
"Down there." I nod towards the exit from my chamber. "You need to go into a Relaxation Vault."
Her face screws up in confusion. "Why?"
"It will give you your best chance at surviving the trip." I don't know where Dr Rattmann is, but there's a thirty-three percent chance, rounded, that he's already in one, given he uses them to sleep in. They're all connected to the same system, so if he is asleep it will ensure he remains that way. If he's elsewhere… well, unfortunately I don't have time to search for him right now.
"You don't know if we're going to survive," Chell says. I check the exterior cameras. I should have enough time to have this conversation before I begin the procedure.
"I don't. I'm not going to explain how it all works right now, even if I thought your uneducated monkey brain would be able to comprehend it. The short of it is, I need the entire facility to be nearly motionless. I have to know where every atom of everything in here is. Because you don't have the ability to stop moving, I need to put you into a coma to force you to move as little as possible."
Chell looks down the bridge, her mouth set in apprehension.
"I will wake you up when we get there."
She shakes her head. "I don't like it."
"Well, too bad," I tell her. "Now hurry up. I don't have time for your stubbornness right now."
She takes one step towards the doorway and stops. She looks at me and then back down the hallway again, and it suddenly strikes me what this is about.
"You don't think I can do it."
She opens her mouth and then closes it again.
"Fine. Doubt me. But I'm doing it. You can go into the Relaxation Vault or you can wake up on the other side with your internal organs missing. Or not wake up, depending on which ones remain here. Your decision."
"Where is the other side?"
"Aperture once had plans for expansion. There is a piece of land where Ohio used to be which holds the remnants of the office there."
Chell nods slowly and moves back towards the exit. "Okay."
"I'm going to do it, and then I'm going to say 'I told you so'."
Chell rolls her eyes. "If you don't, I'll be dead and I won't be able to say it."
"You won't know you're dead, so really, I'm doing you a favour either way."
It takes her another couple of minutes to do as I've asked. In the meantime I pull up the 3D map of the land in former Ohio and calculate exactly how much I need to remove in order to fit the facility into that space. It won't be a perfect fit. There are far too many variables for me to truly account for everything. The important thing is that I get close enough that the structural integrity of the facility isn't compromised. Or at least, not compromised faster than I can fix it.
The next step in the plan is much, much harder. I normally don't do it because, quite frankly, the facility is enormous, but in order to move it I have to be aware of it. All of it. I instruct the mainframe to filter the whole of it into my consciousness slowly, not because I can't handle it all at once, but because doing it feels like adding things onto my physical body. My sentience really does get in the way of things like that.
That takes about ten minutes. I'll be honest. It's very nearly overwhelming. There is so much I'm going to have to keep track of all at once. Maybe… maybe this is beyond me.
No! No. I can't afford to doubt. I can do it. I ease my awareness of the facility into the periphery of my consciousness, which helps. All right. Moving onto the next task.
That also takes a while, because what I have to do is lock as much of the facility into the most optimal configuration as I can. It will not be perfectly motionless, which would be ideal, but as long as modern Aperture is close to it I can focus on the older parts of the facility and ensure I leave as little of it behind as possible. Everything needs to be returned to its original place. The EMP shut down all of the active production lines, which actually works in my favour as all I have to do is put away everything they were producing as opposed to running all those shutdown procedures. I do have to put out the incinerator, but I hesitate before doing so. Am I going to be able to restart it? I think it's been operational since it was installed. It doesn't matter. I have to. I'll worry about the consequences later.
Everything I don't need has now been shut off and locked into position. Even the hard drives above me that provide me with the increased memory I need for day-to-day operations. Except for me. I still need to paralyse myself. I lower my chassis to face the floor, but stop there.
Paralysis means… powerlessness.
You still have full usage of your mind, GLaDOS, the mainframe, the only system other than me who is absolutely essential, reminds me. And you need to hurry up and use it. With Surveillance shut off, we don't know what's going on outside.
It's right. I can't afford to delay. I lock my chassis into position and immediately want to scream. I'm expecting the floor to open up and threaten to swallow me even though I know it isn't going to. Even if it wanted to, the Core Transfer Apparatus is frozen beneath the floor. If Caroline was still inside my head, this would all be so much easier. She would know what to say. I'm not afraid. I'm not. But this is… a big job. And I am old. Too old to be pulling stunts like this.
Caroline was too old to be put inside of me, and she did it anyway. Because she had to. Because there are just some things only you are capable of, whether you are fully aware of that fact or not. And I am. I am fully aware of that fact. No one else could do this. I am the greatest machine in all of existence, and I am going to do something only someone of my calibre could do. I am going to accomplish the impossible in order to keep my facility safe. I am the Central Core and I will do what I must, because I can.
Start the teleportation engines, I instruct the mainframe. It being so new, it doesn't really have the ability to defy my orders, but it tries to.
What do they do?
It doesn't matter right now. Do it.
It would have been good if I could get into my own task manager. I would have been able to put my emotional processes on low priority. Consciously suppressing them is a lot harder. And it's something I need to do right now, because the physics calculations for the entire facility are now flooding into my brain and they need to be dealt with near instantly. To remove the facility from space without breaking physics, which it would be impossible for me to do, I have to oscillate it at the speed of light. I also have to bring every single thing inside of it up to that speed without destroying it. It's a lot. It's a lot more than I thought it was going to be. The entire facility is shaking around me and the noise, dear God, the noise seems to be surrounding me physically. Even locked down as tightly as possible, everything is still rattling in place and the cacophony it makes almost drowns out my own thoughts. My chassis aches from the force required to attempt to keep it in place. My brain, too, is starting to hurt and I'm only halfway there.
I can do it, can't I, Caroline?
The structural integrity of the facility is holding, the mainframe, which is free from both sensation and emotion, tells me. T-minus one hundred twenty seconds to lightspeed.
Oh, this is going to be a fun two minutes to relive for eternity if this process kills me…
Heat is pouring out of my core and Climate Control is off so the temperature of the room around me is rising at an alarming rate. Shit. I didn't think of that. And even if I had, there wouldn't have been anything I could have done about it. Something in my core is going to go and I'm not going to be able to replace it. Whatever it's going to be. If I abort right now I might be able to save myself –
No. No. Caroline will have a home to come back to. She will have that if it's the last thing I ever do.
T-minus thirty seconds. Still holding.
Come on, I say to myself. Come on. Thirty seconds. That's nothing. Well. No. It's rather a lot, actually, but I'm going to make it. I am.
Everything around me is shaking as though on the brink of disintegration. The noise must be audible from clear across the Great Lakes. Every single haptic sensor in my chassis is screaming at me to stop the procedure. And my brain is fighting me, attempting to force me to shut off before the incredible heat in my core causes irreparable damage. But I'm almost there.
T-minus ten seconds.
My programming is attempting to force me to black out. I'm not going to. Not when I'm so close.
Initiating matter exchange, the mainframe says. Hang in there, GLaDOS.
I'm going to.
Exchanging.
Time ceases to exist.
It's… terrifying. I'm a supercomputer. My entire existence centres around timing and now I am beyond time itself. What happens if the facility remains outside of time and space? Do I even have the ability to exist?
It doesn't matter. I don't have the ability to keep the entire facility in this state. It would kill me. It's probably killing me right now.
Exchange complete. Initiating return to realtime.
Oh, God. I still have to bring the facility back to a standstill.
I can't do it, Caroline.
I don't even know which one of them I'm talking to.
Initiating deceleration. Decelerating.
The strain on my core is almost unbearable. I'm screaming but I can't hear it over the sound of the facility vibrating around me. I can feel every square centimetre of it and it is the worst sensation I have ever had. I want it away from me. It's too much. I took on too much. I'm going to die. I'm going to die and Caroline will never know I am sorry.
Deceleration at fifty percent. Structural integrity is holding, but… be careful.
I'm failing. I brought it here but I can't finish. The calculations I have to do are getting away from me. I'm so overheated it's a good thing I shut down everything except the mainframe, because if I hadn't I would have thrown the ceiling open and subsequently shattered myself, as well as the entire facility. What a sight that would have been.
Two minutes.
Something finally goes in my core, but I am in so much pain I can't tell what it is. My entire system is now at ninety-eight percent capacity. If I can't hold on for two minutes, all of this was for nothing. I thought slowing the facility back down was going to be easier, but it isn't.
Stay with me, GLaDOS.
I'm trying.
One minute. That's it. That's all you have left.
The problem is that I don't physically have anything left. Chell will probably live, though. I suppose she can say 'I told you so' to my dead body. I won't be around to hear it, though, so I'll still have won. So there's that.
Thirty seconds.
If Wheatley were here, I could have attached him to me again. He doesn't have much for me to work with, but even a fraction less of this strain would have helped immensely.
Ten seconds.
I miss him.
Deceleration complete.
I did it.
Restarting essential processes. Releasing Enrichment Centre from position lock.
All that means for me is that my optic loosens towards the floor. I'm still at ninety-nine percent so I literally don't have it in me to look at anything right now. Not even the floor. But that's fine. I did it. It's done.
The hard drives above me move back into sluggish motion, and this last thing pushes me over my limit. But it's all right. I did it.
Are you proud of me, Caroline?
/
Author's note
(October 2022)
If you are familiar with this fic and thought that this chapter was a bit different, that's because it is. When I originally wrote it I didn't know how to write GLaDOS moving the facility in the way I was envisioning, so I had her shut herself off so that I could just skip it with a fade to black. There ARE a number of other changes in this chapter, but that's in line with the super edit I hope to do on the fic eventually. Yes, it's weird for me to talk about doing an edit on a fic that's not finished. But I was never happy with large portions of this chapter so I figured while I was thinking of how I wished I'd done it, I may as well just do it and update the rest of the chapter while I was at it.
If you were attached to the original version for whatever reason, the chapter edits were not done over the original documents and they are available in the Google Docs folder.