Part Seventy-Seven. The Step Forward

Wheatley did not stay with her the entire morning. He was stiff and sore from having a giant robot pressing on him for who knew how long, and he needed to have a bit of a stretch. So off he went, yawning a little because he felt like it, and it was a good thing he did leave, because he caught Caroline on his way out.

"Hang on there, princess," he said, shoving her away from the doorway. "Not now."

"But – "

"Nope. Get going."

She complained all the way to the one kitchen GLaDOS'd opened up for use, where Chell was eating some nasty looking cereal out of a black Aperture Laboratories bowl. He didn't know one type of the stuff over the next, of course, but he could not imagine why anyone would find that gloppy beige stuff at all appetising. "G'morning, Chell," he said cheerfully.

"Hey," she said, grinning up at him. "Patched things up, I see."

"Better."

"Must've been a long night." Her eyebrows quirked, and it seemed to have something to do with all those references to whatever it was humans had influenced Caroline about that he still didn't know, but he decided to take it literally.

"Extremely. But ev'rything's okay now. She'll feel better when she gets up."

"Did she cry again?" Caroline asked suddenly. Both Wheatley and Chell frowned at her.

"Again?" they asked in unison.

"You know," Caroline said, fixing her gaze on Chell. "When I sent you to see her."

"She didn't cry," Chell said, looking confused.

"Then what happened?"

"We just talked. That's all. You thought she was crying?"

"She was going to!"

Chell shrugged and went back to her cereal. "She didn't."

Wheatley made a note to talk to her about that.

Caroline left, muttering to herself, and Wheatley turned to Chell. "She's such a joy, really," he said, half apologetically. Chell laughed.

"Did she, though?" she asked seriously.

He nodded grimly. "She did."

Chell shook her head slowly. "She must have had a lot to cry about."

"Yeah. But it's done now. I got it out of her, and… hopefully she's, uh, she's going to stop burying it, now."

"And she agreed to marry you."

He smiled broadly and nodded.

"Congrats," Chell said, grinning, and she extended her hand. Wheatley shook it.

"Thanks," he said. "I know sounds like life with her is a nightmare, but it… it's not, really. She's wonderful. Just… not too… happy lately."

"I'm glad someone's there for her," Chell said softly. "You've done a great job, Wheatley. I mean that."

He shrugged and looked down at the floor.

"I gotta go," Chell said, standing and picking up her bowl. "Gordon's got something important to do and I have to keep an eye on Richard. To his regret. Caroline ever give you a hard time about that?"

"We don't watch her," Wheatley answered absently. "She can do as she likes. She thinks we watch her, sometimes, but we don't. The panels keep an eye on her in case she gets lost, but they're uh, they're laying rail for her anyway, so, so it's not like we can really stop them."

"Hm, I see," Chell mused. "But you don't keep an eye on her personally."

Wheatley shook his core. "She's allowed to do as she pleases."

"And she doesn't take advantage of that?"

"'course she does. We have a chat and she never does it again. Why? Richard gives you a hard time?"

"Every day. About everything."

"Well," Wheatley said, a little shyly because he didn't know how different raising a human child was from raising an AI one, "when she acts out it's usually 'cause she's upset about something. Or she wants attention. That too. So we just have a chat with her and that's the end of it."

"And she listens? Just like that?"

"Wouldn't you, if Gladys was your mum?"

Chell laughed and nodded. "I guess I would. She doesn't… threaten her, does she?"

"No. I wouldn't allow that. She gets told off when she does that, believe me." He wiggled his handles mischievously. "She's just… her. Y'know. She gets… like herself. I… dunno how else to describe it."

"It doesn't need explanation." The corner of Chell's mouth quirked upwards. "Anyway. See you later."

"Bye now," he said, waving at her, and Chell put up one hand in farewell and left.

Wheatley gave a visit to Atlas and P-body, but did not bother them. He had no idea what they were doing, but it looked an awful lot like they were building a house or something with a large quantity of Weighted Storage Cubes. He wondered how they'd gotten them out of the Diversity Vent. And what GLaDOS would say if she found out. She usually got a little tetchy when testing elements were used for things other than testing.

That was when Wheatley realised he had no idea where Caroline was.

Well. That wasn't entirely true. He was pretty sure he knew where she'd gone, but he couldn't figure out why he hadn't thought of that earlier. Optic set in annoyance, he set off to find her. Honestly, that girl was magnetically attracted to GLaDOS, or something. Every time Wheatley left her alone she would head off and bother GLaDOS to no end…

As soon as he'd looked into GLaDOS's chamber, yep, there she was, sitting in front of GLaDOS and looking at… Wheatley frowned. It looked an awful lot like a laptop, but why in the name of Science would GLaDOS be using a laptop?

"Carrie, I thought I –"

GLaDOS interrupted him with a shake of her head. "It's all right," she said, though she sounded quite tired.

"What're you doing with that?"

She looked down at the computer for a long moment, as Caroline looked up at her expectantly. Finally, she said, "I thought it was high time Caroline learned who her grandmother was."

Wheatley just went blank and empty inside. He wondered if Caroline had noticed the thread of distortion in GLaDOS's voice when she had said that, but she hadn't appeared to. She only looked back at the laptop again and said, "And who's that, Momma?"

GLaDOS ignored her and said to Wheatley, "Would you like to see?"

It took Wheatley a second to get his head back in gear. "Yeah, I… I'd love to." And he went over and sat down on the raised panel with Caroline. The screen displayed a bunch of little humans, and Wheatley wondered how GLaDOS knew who any of them were.

"Caroline, why don't you go back to the first one and tell Wheatley what I told you," GLaDOS said, and Caroline closed the open file and scrolled up a list, choosing the one on top.

"This is Caroline, Dad," Caroline said, gesturing at a photograph of what appeared to be a middle-aged human female with dark hair. "She ran this whole place when there were humans around. Can you imagine that? Running everything without being a computer? That sounds so hard."

"Well, I… I'm sure she had computers helping her, Carrie." Though that was a little hard for him to imagine, honestly.

"Yeah, but they didn't think," Caroline scoffed. She giggled. "Isn't that weird? Computers that don't think?" She didn't wait for him to answer and went on to the next picture in line, and she related to Wheatley the things that GLaDOS had told her. Through all of this GLaDOS said nothing, and when he glanced up at her every now and then he could see that she wasn't looking at the computer at all. He knew that this must be hard for her, since Caroline had been the only friend she'd had through those rougher parts of her life and she probably did not want to be doing this at all. But she was doing it, she was letting herself remember Caroline, and for that he was very proud of her.

When she got back to the picture they'd been looking at when Wheatley had come in, Caroline closed the file and said she wanted to go find Atlas and P-body and left. That was fine with Wheatley. He was pretty sure GLaDOS needed a snuggle.

"You okay, luv?" he asked softly.

"No," she said, still sounding tired. "I'm not. But… that's okay. I think. I'm still working out the logistics on that one."

"No, you've got it right," he said, as reassuringly as he could. "It's okay not to be okay."

"I just wish I understood how that worked."

He laughed a little. "It's easier when you just let it happen, alright?" He looked pensively at the floor for a moment, then asked carefully, "What made you do that?"

She didn't say anything for a long moment.

"She once told me that I had to slow down and take your and her advice more seriously. She… said she wanted her daughter to have a grandmother."

It was one of the saddest things Wheatley had ever heard.

"So you decided to show her hers," he said.

"Yes."

"Sounds like it hit you pretty hard, her saying that."

"My daughter was afraid I was not going to be here in the amount of time it would take her to build a daughter of her own. And how long will that be? Ten years? Fifteen? That's not even that long, in the grand scheme of things. And she was afraid I was going to be gone before then." She was shaking a little bit, and there was a hint of self-loathing in her words. "What does that tell you about what I've been doing her whole life?"

"Learning," Wheatley said calmly. "And maybe, uh, maybe you think it took you a bit of a long time. But it's sunk in now."

"Yes," GLaDOS said with conviction. "Work be damned. I'm not living like that anymore."

"Good."

"Remind me when I forget."

"Yes ma'am."

Her laugh was so unexpected that he jumped. "Oh. Yes. Let's go back to that game of Stratego. I'll finish it up so we can play something else."

Wheatley moved off of her and she stretched a little bit, making a noise somewhere between that of pain and satisfaction. "You okay?" he asked. All her components had been replaced. She shouldn't be in any pain.

"I've been like that for hours, that's all. Just a bit sore. Hm. Where were we…"

Within twenty minutes, GLaDOS had soundly beaten him, but he didn't really care. He was content to see her so happy. The game cheered her up considerably, though he wasn't sure if that was the playing or the fact that she won again. That wasn't too much of a surprise, because she always did. But he was happy for her, and had truthfully never cared that she held all the victories. Other than that one game of Crazy Eights, that was.

"Before we start this next one, luv," he said, hoping she'd take his suggestion, "how about I get Carrie, and she plays with us?"

"All right," she said, nodding once, and he got up to fetch her. Oddly enough, she was humming.

"What're you doing, Carrie?" he asked, frowning a little.

"I was looking in the files to see if there were pictures of humans that used to work here," Caroline said, looking up from a monitor. "I didn't find any, but I did find some music."

"Music," Wheatley said slowly. He didn't think GLaDOS would like hearing that news.

"Mmhm. It's a little weird, but I like it. Except for one song. It sounds like robots dancing. Sort of."

GLaDOS would not like hearing that news at all.

"Uh… I just wanted to know if you'd like to, to play a game with your mum and I," he said, wondering if this was a good idea given what Caroline had been doing.

"Oh, sure!" She disappeared before Wheatley could tell her not to tell GLaDOS what she had found, and he sighed and followed her. He wondered who she got that from.

When he re-entered GLaDOS's chamber, Caroline was saying, "Guess what I was doing, Momma!"

"I'm never going to guess, so I don't know why you always ask me to do that."

"I was looking for some pictures of humans, but I found this music instead!"

GLaDOS froze.

"What… music," she said, not sounding like she actually wanted to know.

"I dunno," Caroline said, shrugging. "It's just all named with weird names like 'sp_a4_finale4_z2'. I haven't gotten through all those yet. They seem to be the… uh… well, the unfinished parts of the other songs. Which also aren't really named."

"Oh… my… God," GLaDOS said, staring somewhat dazedly at Caroline. "How did you find those?"

"By accident," Caroline said disinterestedly. "What game are we going to play? Dad didn't mention that."

"Stay out of my files!"

Caroline looked up at her.

"They're yours?" she asked, sounding a little awestruck.

"Yes. And I… want you to stay out of them."

"Is there any more?"

Regrettably, Wheatley was fairly certain she got that from him. Cluelessly plowing on and on, even when it was quite clear she should have stopped a while ago.

"Some, but… that's not the point, Caroline, the point is –"

"Where are they?"

"You're… not listening, are you." She looked down at Caroline, seeming a little defeated.

"Yeah, I'm listening," Caroline said, a little too innocently. "You haven't said where it is yet."

Or… maybe not. She was doing it on purpose, where Wheatley usually did it by mistake. He shook his head a little, both proud and disbelieving. She knew full well how to play GLaDOS.

"Maybe I'm not going to tell you."

"And maybe you are, because if you don't I'm just going to keep asking. Or find it myself. I wonder what else I'll find if I look…"

"Fine! Fine. I'll show you later. For God's sake, Caroline, you don't know what you're doing. You're going to delete something by mistake."

Caroline only smiled at her.

GLaDOS showed them how to play a new game, one called 'Scrabble', which both GLaDOS and Caroline were very good at and Wheatley was… well, he couldn't spell. GLaDOS kept telling him to check his dictionary, but he was determined to play without it. He knew that Caroline and GLaDOS were probably using theirs, but they'd play the way they wanted and he'd do the same.

GLaDOS won, of course, and Wheatley lost, which he didn't care about, but Caroline only frowned at the board. "Are you sure you played fair?" she asked GLaDOS.

"I was playing actively, yes. I didn't even use my dictionary. I won. Fair's fair."

"I want a rematch," Caroline said, glowering at her. GLaDOS laughed.

"Are you sure about that?"

"Yes!"

Wheatley sat it out and instead kept score for them. Surprisingly, he wasn't too bad with that. For the first half of the game or so, Caroline was in the lead, which she was quite vocal about. But GLaDOS only continued to calmly place her words on the board. Wheatley knew she was dialling things down by the way she placed them on only the brown squares, and never a word over four letters, but Caroline didn't seem to notice. Then during the second half GLaDOS resoundingly took over the board, using her entire rack on more than one occasion, and Wheatley watched in awe in between letting them know the score. When the game was over, Caroline stared at the board as if that would change anything.

"You've never lost a game in your life, have you," she said finally.

"I lost one game of Crazy Eights ten years ago. That's about it."

"How did you do that?" She threw down the maintenance arm, frustrated. GLaDOS shrugged.

"I have no idea. I can just see it. That's all. It's not something I can help. I can play stupid intentionally, but then I'm not really playing, so I wouldn't bother."

"But then someone else could win!"

"If you want to win, play against Wheatley. Or Orange and Blue. You could potentially win against me. Even humans defeat supercomputers, sometimes. But I'm also sentient, so I don't find that likely." She hitched backwards a little.

"I'm not a supercomputer."

"No. Only I am a supercomputer."

"I want to be a supercomputer!"

"And you may be, one day."

Caroline looked up, still frowning. "I don't want to be… like you. I like this chassis."

"Caroline," Wheatley said warningly, knowing that GLaDOS didn't particularly like her chassis a lot of the time either.

"What?"

"Maybe your mum would uh, would like to be more mobile as well."

"Oh," Caroline said softly, looking GLaDOS up and down once. "Sorry, Momma."

"It's all right," she said reassuringly, and Wheatley was sure she wasn't lying.

"I mean, I'm glad you are like that," Caroline went on, twisting the maintenance arm against the panel anxiously, "but I don't think I'd want to be, myself."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Are you glad I'm like this."

Caroline squirmed a little, but GLaDOS continued to watch her calmly.

"Well… because… you know… you make me feel safe, and Dad doesn't, because he's small like me, and… yeah," she mumbled, giving the maintenance arm rather more attention than it deserved.

"Do you think your daughter might feel the same, one day?"

"I don't mind if she goes to you when she's scared." She'd gone even quieter and was twisting the arm more violently.

"Don't take this the wrong way," GLaDOS said softly, bending down to look at Caroline directly. "I'm not saying you need to be like this later. But you need to think about these things. I didn't. I got lucky. But you can't depend on luck. You can't assume she'll feel the way you do. Perhaps my size will frighten her."

"It won't," Caroline said fiercely, dropping the arm and looking up at GLaDOS from underneath the rim of her optic.

Wheatley expected GLaDOS to argue the point, because she loved getting into philosophical discussions, especially ones she could back with science, but she only backed away and said, "That's not what I meant, anyway. Once I'm finished my research, I should be able to program on crystal. It's… a bit technical, but suffice it to say that once I've figured that out, quantum computers will not be far off. Then anyone can be a supercomputer."

"How come you're a supercomputer and not a regular one?"

"Because I'm connected to a large quantity of computers in the basement. Five floors' worth."

"Whoa!" Caroline said, bracing herself on her lower handle and leaning forward on the panel. "Can I look at them?"

"As long as you do not touch anything."

"So… if you were disconnected from those supercomputers, would you still win every game you played?"

"Of course I would," GLaDOS said, as if that were obvious. "I don't even use most of those supercomputers anymore."

"Then why don't you shut them off?"

"Because humans are terrible at designing computer architecture. The facility would probably explode if I did that. Though I did lose that one floor and nothing terrible happened."

Caroline jumped up a little in excitement. "Tell me that story again!"

"Again? Why? It's not going to be any better the third time."

"Because."

So GLaDOS sighed and put the board away, and after she'd come down to Caroline's level she told the story for what was apparently the third time. Wheatley wasn't really listening. He was too busy contentedly watching Caroline react to the events of the story, and GLaDOS as she told it. For all her reluctance, it didn't seem like she actually minded telling it again.

Eventually Caroline got up to leave, probably to look for the supercomputers, but she stopped at the doorway and called, "Send me the coordinates!"

"I already did."

"And the directory for the music?"

GLaDOS made an electronic noise and twitched a little. "… not yet."

"Now."

"Why are you so bossy," GLaDOS muttered to herself, but she must have done it because Caroline nodded in satisfaction.

"Can I have the one for your collection too?"

GLaDOS looked up, lifting her chassis towards the doorway.

"Only if you promise not to load them all onto your hard drive. There isn't enough space. You must leave them where they are and stream them from the server."

"How will I be able to save the ones I like?"

"Just save the filenames in a text file and I'll show you how to make a playlist later."

"Okay, I promise."

Guest reviews:

Fishapedvanilla: I don't know why the author's note is there twice but I just haven't been bothered to fix it.

Author's Note:

The guy who wrote the OST for Portal, whose name escapes me at the moment, says he wrote it to sound like a robot could have done so. So GLaDOS did here.

Not too much else to say about this.