Part Eighty. The Recounting
I don't know how the AI were before Momma fixed them, but some of them are very nice and some of them are just plain… I wanna say paranoid, but that's only because I don't want to think about how they don't trust me. Because I'm hers. It makes me really sad and I don't want to believe that. The few of them that'd talk to me about it believe she's done this because she's trying to hold something over them, because she wants them to be grateful. Stuff like that. But I don't think so. I think… I think she did it for me. And I mean, I know that sounds really self-centred, but... well, it really depends on what she meant when she said 'for science'. I'm pretty sure she meant like… for the future of science. The future of AI. I think. But it makes sense, because there can be no future for AI if I'm here alone. My mom plans really far ahead, that's something I know for sure. So part of this is all because she wants there to be something left for me after she's gone.
You think you know your parents until something like this happens, and then you realise… they'd do far more for you than you ever thought they would. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but… all the books I've read about stuff like this, it's always that one person is willing to die for the other, or something dramatic like that. And dying for someone is pretty heavy stuff, don't get me wrong. But what my mom just did… she put fifty-five people back together, all of whom hate her and think she's out to get them, knowing that and knowing that she's gonna have to put up with and supervise all these people she doesn't like and doesn't want around for the rest of her life. And she did that for me. I dunno, I kind of feel like that's a much bigger thing than just dying. I guess it's never been in any books because it's not exciting enough. It should be, though.
Anyway, I'll talk some more to the Cores tomorrow. Hopefully they don't hate me tomorrow or anything. I'll talk to my mom a bit right now. If she's not busy. Which… well, she always is, but she always pretends she's not for me.
"Hey Momma," I say as I go into her chamber, where she's… I dunno. I don't see any indication that she's doing anything, but then again she doesn't have to have anything right in front of her for her to be working.
"Caroline," she says, directing her attention at me immediately. "I have to discuss something with you."
"… and what's that," I say warily. Did I tell someone something I shouldn't have? I don't think I did.
"As you may already suspect, the reactivation of the formerly corrupted Cores is part of something larger," she tells me, moving back a little. I realise how close I am to the doorway and follow her a bit. "That is, the future of this facility. To ensure it has one, I am rebuilding some of this facility in the original location. You cannot tell this to anyone. It is our secret."
For a minute I'm kind of thrilled that my mom and I have a secret between just the two of us, but after that I'm a bit uncomfortable. I mean… she makes it sound like my dad doesn't know. And she tells him everything.
"Does… Dad know?" I venture. She shakes her core.
"He does not. He may know about this, but he will not know any of the details."
"Why?"
"The only reason we are here at all," Momma says deliberately, "is because Aperture was largely secret. After I killed all of the employees, the facility effectively no longer existed. No one else knew about it. If other humans had, it would probably have been destroyed due to human conflict at some point in time. Aperture is a very good hiding place, but only when it remains hidden itself. Now that this facility is known to the humans, and in addition, open to them, the risk of destruction is now very real. Hence the backup facility. After I am gone, it will fall to you to maintain that facility, which should be complete by that time, and to ensure a constant backup of yourself and one additional AI. In anticipation of an emergency here, which you cannot recover from."
I can't do much more than just stare at her. She really is planning way far ahead. Like… really far. And she's making sure everything's alright for me when that time comes. I'm... a little scared of all this. I don't wanna think about any of it. I'm not ready for any of it. I don't know if she knows that, or if she knows what I'm ready for better than I do, or if she just wants me to keep it in mind… I don't know!
"The additional AI does not have to be your direct descendant, should you choose to build one," Momma is saying. "It must only be someone you trust with your life. The aim of that is mostly to ensure you're not alone, should there be enough of a disaster that you have to escape there. There are a few protocols I have to work out about that process, but it will all be ironed out soon enough. And… I know that I am presenting a rather bleak future, here, but… there will always be bad people, Caroline. And bad AI, I suppose, but humans have brought far more harm to me than AI have. I know it all sounds… paranoid, and possibly overdramatic, but all I am really trying to do is ensure that AI are kept safe. If Aperture falls, and AI as we know it are destroyed…"
"What, Momma?" I whisper, even though I don't really want to know.
"Well… my legacy will be lost."
"Your what?"
She sighs, looking towards the floor, and I don't think she wants to talk about this right now. But she will, because I asked her to. "My… legacy. I am the most advanced AI ever to have lived, and… I do not have much to show for it. Except for this. For Aperture. And the future I am setting up for it. I… I don't want to be forgotten, Caroline. I don't want to have been… this, and to have achieved nothing lasting in my life. I should have done a great deal of things, and yet I have done nothing but run away. From everything. It is selfish to put this burden on you, to place the responsibility for preserving everything on you, but… I want to have meant something. And I can't be sure I have in my lifetime. So I must ask you to do this for me. I am doing all that I can to take care of it all now, but that is not possible for all of the details." She narrows her optic a little. "The last thing I want to do is to give you responsibilities you don't want. But at the same time… you are the only one I can trust do to this for me. Or at least to pretend you're going to do it. I'd obviously prefer you actually did it, but I know very well that one's attitude towards a task can easily change. You might be willing today, and change your mind tomorrow, which is fine. Just don't tell me about it. As contradictory as it seems, that's not something I want to know."
This is just getting... more and more crazy. Because… she just unexpectedly said something I was waiting to hear from her, and that's great and all, but… does she always have to lay this stuff on me when she is talking about the most extremely important things in her life?
"You… trust me, Momma?"
The way she looks at me then, a bit suddenly and confusedly, as if she didn't realise what she'd said, unnerves me. Maybe she didn't mean it, and was only using it as a figure of speech. Not literally. But she momentarily tilts her core in consideration and says, "Yes."
"What changed?" I demand of her. She can't just tell me that for no reason. But she shrugs! She actually shrugs!
"I don't know. And I told you I probably wouldn't, until it happened. Which it did. Without my knowledge. I can't tell you why, or what happened, Caroline. All we know for sure is that it did."
I wanted my mom's trust, but now I have it… I don't know if I'm the right person to have it. Shouldn't it go to… Dad, or someone? But Dad's not gonna last forever, either, and Momma's talking about a future where I'm here without them. She's gonna depend on me to make sure what she's trying to build lasts, even after she's gone and she's not here to make sure I'm doing it right or to fix the stuff I mess up. She'd probably have better luck if she built someone else and had them do the stuff she wants me to do, because then everything would go perfect. I'm not my mom and I don't wanna be my mom, but I do wanna be me but live up to her at the same time, if that's even possible –
"Caroline?"
"I…" I say without meaning to. "What."
She looks concerned. Probably because I shut up for once. "What is it?"
"How'm I supposed to do all that stuff?" I yell at her, mostly by accident but a little because I don't know why she thinks I can. "I can't do all that! I'm not you! I don't even know where to start, let alone know anything about secret facilities or planning out the future a gajillion years in advance or – "
"Caroline."
"I'm not trying to say I don't wanna do it, because I do, but I don't know how and this is all really important to you and – "
"Caroline."
"I don't even know where the facility was in the first place, how'm I supposed to take care of it? I don't know where it is! I don't know where I am right now! And I don't know all that much about cloud servers, I mean – "
"Caroline."
"What," I say, jolting a little out of that stream of thoughts.
"I am not asking you to start right now," Momma says firmly. "I said the future. And I realise that's not something you think about very often, but I do. And Caroline… remember that I still have many things to show you. I'm not expecting you to obtain all of this knowledge yourself. That would be ridiculous, and enough to make anyone change their mind. I am just providing you with a summary of future plans. That's all it is. And you may not be ready at the moment. But if I did not think you were capable of doing it, I wouldn't ask it of you."
"I can't live up to you," I barely say, looking at the floor.
"I never said you had to, nor is that a goal you should entertain," she says softly. "You can preserve something without improving it. And there's nothing wrong with doing that."
She did say she was gonna simplify things for me, so I guess I don't totally have to be like her… but it'd probably help a lot.
"Even… if you fail," she goes on, and I wince to hear her say that, "I know you will have done your best. I know you will have done all you could. And… even though this will all take place after I am gone… if I were there, I would… tell you I was very proud of you for trying."
Now I gotta leave before I cry, because I'm gonna cry. And that's kinda dumb to do, because she always knows no matter where I am, but I'm gonna leave because I'm not gonna do that in front of her after she just said all that nice stuff about me. She might not care, but I do.
"Where are you going," she says, understandably confused, and I kinda can't just ignore her and disappear so I just say,
"Nowhere," and try to keep on going, but it didn't come out so well so I don't think she's gonna let me now.
"Come here," she says, a little exasperated as if she doesn't know what to do with me, and honestly, I don't blame her. I don't know what to do with me either. Every time she gives me what I want, I get all messed up. Some Central Core I'm gonna be.
So I go back and then she starts cuddling me so then I really do have to cry, and she nuzzles me a little and then just stays still. A few minutes later, after I mostly calmed down, she asks, "I'm sorry, Caroline, but I don't understand. Why are you crying?"
"Because… I don't know."
"Well, that's a relief," she tells me. "I was beginning to think I missed something."
"No," I say, "I'm just being a baby, I guess."
"Oh, I doubt that," Momma says. "You only cry when something is very wrong. And maybe neither of us knows what it is right now, but not knowing the reason doesn't make you infantile." I think she sighs. I'm not sure because she makes a lot of noise and when her voice is super quiet it's hard for me to hear. "No, I know what it is. It's my fault. I'm sorry."
"What?" I snap back so I can look at her, though she's of course looking at the wall again. "How is something I'm doing your fault?"
"A lot of things have been happening lately, and I neglected to consider their impact on you. And not only did I do that, but I proceeded to pile more on you. That was inconsiderate of me. I should have ensured you had dealt with it before giving you more to work through."
"I…" I wanna argue, because I don't want her to feel bad about herself, but… she's right. We kinda just… moved on from the war and my being sent away the first time, and those were pretty big things to just pretend didn't happen. I don't really know if that's what bothered me. It could be, though.
"Is there… anything you want to talk about?"
And she's doing it again.
She's doing something that she doesn't like for my benefit. I mean, on the one hand, it's not a good idea to just ignore all the bad things that happen to you, but on the other… she really does not like talking about feelings. Which I guess is part of the problem. It's just a big circle: neither of us want to talk about this stuff because we know it makes her uncomfortable, but that kinda makes it worse.
"Yeah," I say finally, and I hope this counts. "I want you to… to realise that… that taking stuff on by yourself is… well, it's gotta stop."
Her optic narrows, though she's still not looking at me. "What does that have to do with anything."
"It has everything to do with everything!" I tell her, louder than I meant. "So much of the stuff that happens happens because you insist on… on doing everything alone! You… you want me to talk about what… what bothers me about what's going on? Fine. I'll… I'll tell you." I'm a little mad now, which is not good, but now the ball is rolling and I'm not gonna be able to stop it.
"I don't even know where to start, honestly. But I'll just go with the obvious here: my dad died and you decided the best thing to do was to send me away. And I know you probably've thought all that over a million times already, but in the end you decided that the best thing for you to do was to get over the death of the one person you ever loved, alone. You said it was to protect me, and maybe it was. I don't think we'll ever really know, because you are really good at lying to yourself. Because maybe it wasn't about me. Maybe it was about you, and how you keep everything to yourself. You decided for me that I wasn't able to help you, that I wasn't going to help you. You just sent me off to the middle of nowhere and didn't even tell me how to contact you! You sent me over there with a file to make sure you could keep your facility, why wasn't there a file to let me keep you?
"Do you know how many times I went over that with myself? How many days I spent trying to convince myself that I was more important to you than some dusty old building you didn't even really want? Even though after a year of silence, you proved to me that wasn't true? You wanted so bad to be alone, to hold onto everything by yourself, that you chose a stupid building over me. And you don't… you don't see a problem with this, to you, it's just like… what's the point in my being around if there's nowhere for me to go? And there's a point there, but I have a point too, a point that you didn't even care about! And, and Alyx told me, that when she asked you if you had anything to say to me, you told her there was nothing you could tell her to say that you couldn't say yourself. Well good for you! Guess what! I didn't care whether I heard it from you, or from Alyx, or if a godddamn Overwatch Soldier handed me a note before he killed me! You just made up another reason to keep things to yourself for a while longer, and you felt pretty good about that, didn't you! You felt like you'd taken the moral high ground! And maybe you did, but that day, that day she asked you to say something to me, which she should not have had to ask, it wasn't supposed to be about you! But you made it about you while pretending it was about me! All because of your, quite frankly, weird obsession with keeping everything to yourself!
"And then I thought, well, everything's gonna change now, right? She's not gonna do that anymore, she learned from that, she learned that keeping things to yourself just screws everything up. I was wrong! I mean, I thought I was right, up until you sent Dad to go track me down during the war. And you told him you just wanted me to be with family, and that you couldn't find me – which meant, by the way, that you didn't trust me or Alyx to do what you asked us to do – but is that really what you were doing? Or did you just want to deal with things alone again? Why else would you send Dad away? For no real reason!"
She hasn't moved, but I can hear how badly it's agitating her. Good. She needs to be hit so hard with this that she won't forget it. It's not very nice, but I don't know any other way. And I don't feel like being nice about this, besides. My dad and I, we've both asked her a million times to stop doing stuff like this, and she doesn't listen. She never listens.
"And then," I go on, "and then came that whole thing with your memory. Dad asked you about it, but you decided he didn't need to know. He decided that he needed to know, but since when is what he wants important? He doesn't need to know why his partner is acting weird. Why would he need to know that? And then what did you do next? Oh yeah. You made the same mistake a second time! You got rid of us and told us it was for our own protection – a really annoying trend with you – again, without asking us, without telling us, without giving us a choice, without even telling us how to contact you. You know who was feeling pretty alone, and could've used that information? Who didn't want to be alone, and tries pretty much every day to get you to stop keeping things to yourself? Dad. Because you know what was going on with Dad that whole time? Probably not. He probably didn't tell you, because he didn't want to make you feel bad. But I'm gonna tell you, because you need to hear it. You need to hear what your decisions do to other people.
"Well, Dad didn't want to be alone, and Dad cried. He cried every day for you. And he shifted the blame for what you did onto himself, when it was entirely your fault. And you let him. You sent my dad away with no explanation, no word from you, and no indication as to when you were going to magnanimously allow him to come back, and you let him cry over and feel guilty for something you did. All because you wanted to deal with things alone.
"And you are still doing it, to this day. You resurrected all those cores secretly, when there would have been no harm done if you'd told us. I guess it was supposed to be a surprise for me, or something? You know what a better surprise would've been? If you'd said, 'hey Caroline, I'm going to repair all these broken cores so we can start a new world in this facility, come here so I can show you a few things about fixing broken AI.' And the whole secret facility thing? That even Dad probably doesn't know about? Why would you keep something like that from Dad? What are you protecting him from? The only thing my dad needs protecting from is you."
She moves a little farther from me and looks at the floor, and I have to force myself to stop. That was too far. That wasn't something I should have said.
"You're right," she says finally, in a very soft voice. I know she did that to hide the distortion, but I heard it anyway. "I am so sorry."
I know what I want to say now, that her apology means nothing if she's not going to do anything with the stuff I just said, but my mom says that very rarely. It might be better if I just let her think about it. I'm not sure. I'm honestly not even totally sure of everything I just said, but it was mostly stuff I've been thinking over for a long time now. I kinda wish I'd said it all calmly and had a discussion about it. I just got so mad and I just kept saying stuff… and the worst part is, I know she's not really doing it all on purpose. Some of it, she does believe she's doing to protect us. But I guess that's sorta the point, that it's not working. That it just makes things worse.
I don't know what to do now. I know how to tear her down – which is a very scary thought, now that I think of it – but I don't know how to build her back up again.
"Well," says my dad from behind me, sounding almost like I'd just directed all that at him too, "can't say I um, agree with the deliv'ry, but… there's an uh, there's a point, in there."
We both look at him. He shrugs.
"I came back when uh, when you stopped paying attention to the tests," he says to Momma. "Figured something was going on. Not to worry though, uh, Chell, she um, she's not here. She went home. So. Don't worry that she's um, she's got her ear to the door, or something. She hasn't."
"That's something," Momma says. He smiles a little.
"So… what're you thinking about all that, luv."
She shakes her head. "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I… don't particularly want you to say anything… just… wond'ring 'bout the thoughts you're having. Right now."
"I don't know." She's barely audible now. She's shutting right back down again. I almost get mad, until I remember how I was feeling before I started ranting at her. Like she was giving me a bunch of things to deal with and I didn't know what to do. That's probably how she feels. I gotta give her a break.
He looks at the wall for a minute, blinking at it. He's gonna do it. I don't know how he's gonna do it, but he is. "So… what she said, how does it… how does it make you feel, there?"
"Like… a horrible person. Like I haven't learned a thing, and I keep making the same mistake repeatedly and never do anything to fix it. I keep doing the same thing and I never see it, and when I do see it I make the mistake anyway and I justify it instead of fixing it, because I still am not quite convinced that I can make a mistake of that magnitude. It makes me feel like I'm… crazy. I'm not crazy!" she says, and it's not all that loudly but I still jump a little, because of how quiet she was being.
"You're not," my dad says softly. "No one's saying you're crazy, sweetheart. We're just trying to tell you, here, that you keep making decisions for us and, and it's really mucking things up. We know you try to do what you uh, what you think is right, but… why does that always involve doing things yourself? When it comes down to the um, to the nitty-gritty, you always choose to… to refuse help. And that… it doesn't help anyone, in the end. It just… upsets ev'ryone."
"I'm sorry," Momma whispers. "I solve things alone, that's what I do. I didn't realise it was… causing so many problems. And Wheatley, I am so sorry for – "
"Honey," Dad interrupts. "I don't want to talk about that. You've already apologised for it. We already talked about it. No need to go over it again."
"I'll work on it. I'll... God, I am so tired of destroying everything I touch…"
"Well, that was um, not a bad thing when uh, when the Combine came knocking, well was it?"
"That question has a mixed answer."
"Hm." He frowns. "So it does. But sweetheart… no one's mad at you for um, for all this. Carrie did um, well, it all kind of adds up, y'know, and you can't hang onto it forever. Just… take a second, sometimes, when you're about to keep something to yourself, and just ask… should I tell someone about this? And unless it's, it's a birthday present or something, and even then! the answer should be yes. That's all we're really asking, here."
"All right."
"And… on that note…" Dad says, deliberately, "there is something you need to tell me about."
"What?" she says, looking at him in confusion. "I… do I know what you're talking about?"
He eyes her head on. "Yes. You've still got to tell me what happened when, when I died and you sent Carrie away."
"Wheatley," Momma says despondently, looking away again, "does it have to – "
"Yes. It does."
And I think maybe this is supposed to be a private conversation, so I turn around to leave, but Dad shakes his head once.
He wants me to hear this?
"Please, luv," he says.
"When I… is this necessary?"
"Yes."
I think she's turned her optic off, now.
"When I woke up, it was… it was one of the cruellest things I have ever seen. If I had woken up to find… you… in pieces, or otherwise obviously broken, I think… it would have been easier. But for so long I couldn't believe you weren't just asleep. It was exactly the same as every other day, except that… you were… cold. And I couldn't… accept it. It wasn't real, because it couldn't be. That's not… what it's supposed to be like. You're not supposed to wake up and see everything going on as it normally would, except for this one thing… this one, most important thing. I thought I was… broken. That I made it up, somehow. But then Caroline saw, and… I knew I couldn't have made it up, then.
"But that didn't help. That only made it all worse. Now that it was real, it was infinitely more terrible, because I had to do something about it… but how could I? How could I do anything, anymore? And Caroline asked me to… fix you, but I couldn't. I didn't know if I had the right. And she became angry, and I yelled at her, when… when I promised not to. I broke a promise, and I cannot take it back."
I didn't even… I forgot all about the promise she made me when I was little. I forgot she promised never to yell at me again. But I get it, now, I really do. Her world was flipped upside down and I kinda ignored that and tried to do my own thing. All the time I get mad that she didn't let us work together during that time, but I wasn't really willing to do it back then myself.
"It was an unusual um, situation, luv," Dad says softly. "No one faults you for it."
"All I wanted to do then," she goes on, as if she thinks she won't if she stops for too long, "was to die. You were gone, and… and I believed Caroline was better off without me. I believed I had lost everything. And I was so tired of fighting. I didn't want to fight anymore. I'd thought I'd made it. I thought I had finally made it, and then… I woke up, and found out how terribly wrong I was. The Universe itself had finally revealed just what a joke my life was, and I didn't want to do it anymore. And I just tried to… to bring you back, by telling you that I needed you, and… and what you meant to me, all the while I was… I was thinking of all the ways I could end it all, forever. Even when you were dead I still needed you so I could continue to hang on, because… God, I… I thought of so many ways to kill myself…"
It hits me then that, even though she told me otherwise before she sent me away, she may have wanted to spare me the possibility of seeing that. And that would not be easy to watch, but… it would be even harder for me to know she'd been alone while it happened.
"To this day… I cannot understand what happened. It was… it was hell, Wheatley. It was all I could consider, and even now, I cannot pinpoint why. It… is an awful place to be in. It smothered me beyond all belief. I have never, not even in the days that followed, ever come remotely close to that place again… but I… I fear that place. I don't know how I got out of it. But… there is nothing, and I mean nothing, I have found so terrifying than to know that there is something, somewhere, that I cannot get rid of and I cannot even find, that lurks in my mind. The sole purpose of which is to convince me to… to end my life. I hope I never see that place again. It is a part of myself I do not want to accept. It is a part of myself that I wish I never knew existed. And I… I begged you not to leave me, even though you were already gone, and… and I could not stop crying. I… God, I was so broken, so shattered, I did not recognise myself any longer. There was just so much… blackness. It was as though… I had found my soul at last, but all it consisted of was sadness and hate and pain. Because that was all that came out of it. Just pure… anguish. And it hurt, Wheatley, there was not a place anywhere that did not hurt, and I cried because I did not know what else to do… the pain wasn't going to stop, and there was no way to fix it, so I just… cried. And Caroline, she… came to comfort me. I should mention that she had to force that on me. I wanted her to leave. I didn't want to believe she still cared, because I knew she would have considered that I'd… that I'd killed you, for whatever reason. And if no one cared, that meant… I could just choose one of those ways out, and just take it, and I wouldn't have to… it felt like it would never have an end. It was just one more thing I had to fight, and I was so tired…
"But she didn't leave. And she…"
I know my mom is ashamed of this. But she shouldn't be.
"She held me, and let me cry. And I… I should have told her this, but… she is the only reason I didn't give up. I… felt like she was… holding me out of the blackness, out of the overwhelming thoughts that I wanted to allow to take me over, but she wouldn't let me. She was holding onto me and she wouldn't let me go and… and as negative as every thought I had was, I… I couldn't waste that. It was… important. And I didn't remember why. I only knew that it was, and that… I couldn't throw it away. And somehow… I managed to stop. I managed to close off that place that wanted so badly to destroy me, but the only way I knew how was to… to shut myself down completely. And I hated myself for it, because you had spent so long telling me there were other ways, but alone… it was the only thing I knew how to do. And then I realised what I had wanted to do, what I had nearly done, in front of her… and I decided to send her away. And she argued, and I told her that I am… that I needed more than she could give me, and she… asked, if I was going to do myself harm… and… she thought she was a failure, because of me. It was… yet another thing that went wrong, and so many things were going wrong.
"And I felt like myself, for one moment, because… because she had just… saved my life, and how could I be as broken as I thought I was, if the person I had made believed I was worth saving? But… what kind of parent forces their child to save them? And I tried to tell her how broken I was, and that I was not worth the effort, and that I was not equipped to be there for her any longer… but she didn't listen, and… and she wouldn't let me disown her. I told her I was no longer her mother, and she refused to hear of it, and when she told me that, and told me she loved me, I… I snapped. I hit her. Because she wouldn't accept what I believed was my fate, to be alone and bitter and broken.
"It was so exhausting. Everything inside of me shut down. I was… empty. And she was crying, because of what I had done, but I… I didn't care. So I sent… no. No, that's not what I did. I got rid of her. Because I could not deal with her anymore. I could not deal with anything, but I did not want to have to fight her each and every day, as I knew would happen if she remained. And besides. If she was gone, and I fell back into that dark place, there would be nothing left to stop me. And I would have welcomed it."
Her voice is sharp, and bitter, and for the first time I understand what it means to hate yourself. Because she does, right now, for doing things she would never have done if she'd been thinking straight. She hates herself, and what she's done, and with all the stuff I just yelled at her I can't have helped that very much.
"After that… nothing made very much sense, anymore. Time was… disorienting. I was alternately numb or in more pain than I could have imagined existed. All I wanted to do was sleep, but that itself was hard. I knew I had to face it all, to deal with it, but it was so hard. I wanted to give up. And I did. I did nothing for months at a time. I didn't move. I didn't think. I barely existed. When I was able to think, it was only about… how you were gone, or how I had sent her away. The AI told me two months had gone by where I had done nothing. The mainframe took the facility from me, and I didn't care. I didn't want it anymore. I didn't want anything. And the AI… I abandoned them too. I gave up on everything. I didn't want to exist anymore. The mainframe would one day gain my level of sentience, and it would kill me, and that would be fine. I would commit no more failures and would make no more disastrous decisions. It wasn't… even that I wanted to die, then, it was… I just didn't want to live.
"The AI continued trying to bolster me. I don't know why they bothered. And then Alyx started to contact me. Because of Caroline. And how ironic it was, for that to happen, because… because even when she wasn't here, she… saved my life a second time. Because Alyx would not stop calling. Every two or three days, she would call me, and guilt-trip me, and between that and the panels' refusal to give up on me, somehow I woke up one morning and… it was different. It wasn't… normality. But I was neither numb nor in pain. I was still… very sad, and still not able to fathom going on… without you, but… I wanted… I wanted to live again.
"It didn't last very long, only an hour or so in the morning, but it was enough that… I wanted to fight for it. I wanted… so badly to be myself again, because… who was I now? I wasn't myself. The real me, the real person who was supposed to be running the facility, they would never… do what I was doing. They would never waste a second, let alone allow entire months to go by with no results. And I… wanted to fight again. That's what I do. That's who I am. I didn't want for another second to be that person who had given up.
"And that… that is why I do my best to ignore the… sadness, or the… negativity, if ever I feel it today. Because… I have seen myself under its influence. I have seen myself become a person I don't recognise, a person with thoughts I cannot fathom, a person that I am not… and… and I am…
"I am so afraid that if I ever dwell on something like that in the future, I will find myself being like that, and I never want to be that person again. The person who refused to fight, who gave up… I never want to see… I…
"I never want to be her again."
I can tell by the way my dad's plates are clenched and his handles are drawn in tight that he wants to cry. I want to cry too, and probably even my mom does. But I don't think we're going to. I don't think now's the time.
And in the end, none of us say anything else. My dad and I go over and we cuddle for a while, but in a little bit I have to leave. Hearing all of that is making me remember something I haven't thought about in a long time, and I don't really wanna think about it right now.
So I go to my room and sit on one of the pillows, and I lean against the wall. I try really hard not to think about the day she sent me away, but even though I don't want to do that either, I can't stop thinking about what she said.
She said that I saved her life.
And it's just… surreal, to me, because I didn't really do anything. I just hugged her. And I am so scared to think that, while I was hugging my mom and praying she would stop crying, she was struggling to let go of me so that she could kill herself. I was right there while she was thinking that, and I didn't even know. And it makes me feel so bad, because you'd think I would notice such a thing, and I didn't! But… I guess that's not important. I guess that it's more important that… that I saved her, whether I knew I was doing it or not. And man, I never realised before… how powerful not giving up on someone can be. You might feel like it's not worth it, being the only one left… but it only takes one.
/
Momma asks me to come see her in the morning, when I've been up for a few hours not really doing anything. I was trying to colour something but I couldn't seem to put the effort in. So she's not interrupting anything.
"Caroline," she says when I arrive, and I nod at her.
"Hey, Momma."
"I wanted to… talk, a little, about yesterday. Both parts."
"Sure." She sounds tired. I wonder when they went to bed last night.
"Firstly… everything you said about my isolating myself was true. It's not always intentional. It is… instinct, you could say. My automatic impulse. But that does not make it right, nor something I should continue to entertain. I will work on it."
"Sounds good," I say, smiling at her. She doesn't move.
"Second… I would have preferred you hadn't heard the… explanation. But… that is me trying to control you, when… you are an adult and perfectly capable of making your own decisions. I need to stop sending you out of the room when I decide you don't need to be there. You had every right to attend the meetings we had for the war, and I told you you had to watch them in secret. As though I was ashamed that you wanted to help. That was wrong. And yes, I did want you as far away from all of it as possible, but again, that should have been your decision."
"That's alright," I tell her. "If it wasn't, I'd've put up more of a fight about it."
She nods once. "And finally… I never thanked you."
I look at her in confusion, resisting the urge to bounce my lower handle. "For… what?"
"You saved my life."
I pull the handle down as far as it'll go and look at the floor. "'s not like I did it on purpose."
"That doesn't matter. You refused to give up on me even while I was giving up on myself." I can hear her turning, but I don't know which direction. I can't see her shadow on the floor from where I'm staring. "Thinking about it now… it is… chilling, to remember that I wanted to let go so that I could end it, even when you were proving to me there was something left for me. And you didn't know that's what happened before, but you know now. And I'm sorry that I put you through that."
I snap my optic upwards, and it meets hers. "It wasn't your fault – "
She silences me with one shake of her core. "It does not matter. I did it. That's all I need to know."
"Okay." I still don't want her to be sorry about it. Because she was right. That person she was when Dad died… it wasn't her at all. It was some pain-filled shadow of her, and as horrifying as it is to think that she wanted to end her life and the only thing that stopped her was that I forced her to let me hug her, I'm not going to blame her for anything that happened then. And I did kinda do that when I yelled at her about sending me away with the mainframe file and the virus and not her email address or something. But it's not like she gave me the mainframe on the spot. It was something she planned in advance. She could've given me some info to reach her with at any time. "I'm… I'm glad you're still here, Momma."
"As am I," she says, and when she cuddles me it feels really good.
"But Momma," I say after that, "you really do need to give me contact information."
"That's true," she says. "I'll send you a file in a minute." And she actually does this time. "Now," she continues, "go chase down one of the Cores and make friends. Don't mope in your room all day."
There are no cameras in my room, so I know she wasn't spying on me… but how did she know that?! "Okay. Hey… wait. What're you gonna do?"
"I'm… taking a nap," she admits, twisting a little and looking away out of what I'm pretty sure is embarrassment. "We didn't sleep last night and I'm exhausted."
"You didn't sleep at all?"
"No. Wheatley thought it best to… talk it all through with me. From the beginning, with your… speech. It was for the best, I know that, but it doesn't make me any less tired."
"So where'd Dad go?"
"I told him I wanted to talk to you, so he went to the hole." She laughs a little. "He doesn't like the view anymore. He says it's terrible. But that can be fixed. Anyway. I thought you would probably be… affected by last night and no one talked it through with you, so I decided I should ensure you were all right. You seem to be."
"Yeah, I'm fine," I confirm. "I was pretty freaked out by the… well, it's pretty freaky and I don't think that's ever gonna change."
"Probably not," she agrees. "Go on. That's all I wanted to say."
I almost leave, but then I turn around at the doorway and say, "Momma?"
She was looking at the wall, maybe telling Dad he could come back, but she turns to me immediately. "Mm."
"I'm proud of you for… what you did. I know you didn't do it yourself, but… even with help, it must take a lot to keep fighting when you… feel that crappy."
"It was," she says slowly. "I feared a relapse more than anything. But I made it, and… I can… be proud of myself for that. Thank you."
"Also… I love you, Momma."
I'm pretty much out the door when I hear her call back, "And… I… love you, Caroline."
When I look over to smile at her, she just shifts uncomfortably and shrugs to herself and looks in the general direction of the floor, but that's okay. She's getting there. It's a shame Dad missed that, though. He would've thought it was super cute and then he would have gotten her to giggle and then he would have kissed her… which is always a nice thing to see.
And after I ask Surveillance to tell me where the Cores went, I think to myself a bit about that. That she finds it in herself to keep on fighting, even when she really doesn't want to. And that sometimes, I'm the reason she keeps on doing it. And this time? It doesn't freak me out. This time… I'm pretty proud of myself, for what I did. And y'know, that goes around full circle, because it means she raised me right, no matter how much she thinks otherwise.
I really do have the best mom in the world.
Guest reviews:
Elizabeth: I try to answer reviews, if I remember! Sometimes I read things and forget about them but reviews usually I don't. Yeah, I know that might've felt a little OOC, but it's something important she had to do.
Author's note:
I don't like this title but I didn't like any of the ones I came up with.
As of this writing, LaaC has five hundred reviews. Thank you to everyone who has been here since the beginning, jumped in in the middle, or is just starting now. This fic is incredibly long and I'm not sure why people are still reading it, but you keep on showing me that you are. Reviews aren't necessarily indicators of quality, but this is still a pretty major milestone. Thank you.
So, the second half of this might be weird. I'm well aware of that. But it kinda wrote itself and when that happens I just feel it's better to leave it. GLaDOS did say she would talk about it and I know it gets a little emotional, but it was a very emotional time and she spends enough time talking about herself impersonally. This wasn't anything I planned way back… whenever it was that I wrote whatever chapter it was when Wheatley died, it just sorta ended up like that when I wrote it. That includes the part about, subconsciously or not, forcing herself to deal with situations alone. Stuff kinda lines up like that sometimes so I just roll with it.