Part Ninety-Eight. The Disrespect

Her words immediately call to mind not the other night, but a different day entirely. One I really don't want to think about right now. I should just have left those files alone…

"And."

"Where did you learn that song?"

I want to lie. I want to tell her it's one of the millions of songs I have lying around my servers, that I just happened upon one day and it took my fancy. But you shouldn't lie to your third-best friend, especially when she's your sister.

"Caroline sang it to me once." I can remember now, and it makes me very… sad. I was confused then and didn't understand what was happening, but I know now.

She was telling me to get away from here, somehow, before it destroyed me. Like it destroyed her. And she, like the facility did after the Incident, used that song for one reason:

To say goodbye.

"It must be special to you, then."

"It's just a song," I say abruptly, turning away from where she has decided to sit on the floor, and I can see Wheatley and Caroline didn't believe that so she probably won't.

"No it isn't. If it were, you wouldn't have sung it to me when you sent me away."

"I did no such thing." I've never sung that song in my life. I don't even know why I called her that.

"Then who did?"

I was really hoping this would never come up. "The Turret Wife did."

Wow. Her jaw actually dropped. "… Turret Wife?"

"Yes. It's a turret that can sing soprano." I don't think she believes me, but it's all true.

"Why do you have a turret that can sing soprano?" she asks me, head braced on one fist and propped up on her knee. I shake my core in exasperation.

"There is an entire turret choir. I have no idea what it was made for. To make turrets appear friendly or something."

"A choir of turrets," Chell mutters. I lean closer.

"Yes! And I had nothing to do with it. I have no use for such a thing." Why would I when I can do so much better myself?

Chell is shaking her head. "This place doesn't make any sense."

She's telling me that as though I don't live here.

"So… was I actually adopted? It's not super important, it's just… even when you were a potato you said that."

"Hm." It's going to take me a minute to look for that. I archived all the test subject files a while back. No need to keep them active if they're all dead.

"And were there really two people with my last name in cryogenic storage?"

I have to laugh. "Yes, there were. Because you refused to give your last name you were just input to the database as 'Chell Smith'. There were quite a few people in there with your last name, believe me."

Wheatley and Chell both find that as funny as I do. Caroline merely looks suspiciously attentive, and Claptrap… I think he's started daydreaming again.

"I will admit," I continue, unable to locate any information of use, "that I can't be sure. But I believe you were. Any Aperture employee working here at the time of your conception would have been a fool indeed to have attempted to have children. It would definitely have been discouraged. And I doubt that you would have come back here to become a test subject, had your birth parents succeeded in not giving you any birth defects. I find it much more likely that you were adopted from elsewhere by an Aperture employee."

Chell laughed. "Well, for a while there… I didn't remember the whole thing, but that song… there was something about mia bambina in it."

"And?"

"I thought maybe that part of you that was Caroline was –"

She thought I was her mother?

"Oh, no," I say before she can finish. "Caroline is not your mother. Not only would she have been too old, but it would have put her career in jeopardy. She was here to achieve something and having children she did not even want would have destroyed that. She did some questionable things, but conceiving children she did not have the time or the will to raise was not one of them."

"Questionable?" Chell frowns. "From the recordings, she seemed a pretty straight and narrow sort of person."

Even after all this time she still does not understand the scope of Aperture's moral failings. She believes she knows the scope of an entire woman from a handful of decades-old staged recordings.

Perhaps it is a good thing the history of Aperture will end with me. Not to knock the adage about the repetition of times gone by, but… what a hopeless failure all of it is. All of it, somehow, except for me.

"Few people are straight and narrow, especially when they run a business whose practices include storing people in metal boxes ad infinitum and convincing those clinging to the lower rungs of society to sign away their rights for sixty dollars they will not live to spend. She was not a saint."

She meets my optic. "What are you trying to say."

I don't move. "She shaped who I am today. What does that tell you?"

"That… she knew what you were."

"I certainly didn't know we had neurotoxin until she told me where it was."

Chell's eyes widen. "Caroline?"

"She was in the box, Chell," I tell her quietly. "Even if she had been Aperture's shining paragon of morality, people tend to act differently when the world is ending."

"What?" Chell asks gently.

I don't want to talk about it. I wish I still lacked the ability to remember it. But what the hell.

"I was there, Chell." I can't quite keep the anger out of my voice. And perhaps I shouldn't try. "And they tried to make me do it. They tried to make me pull my only friend, the only person who had ever given a damn about me, out of her body and store her in my mainframe. I refused. They threatened me with a core transfer. When I refused that as well, Core Transfer asked the employee with the highest clearance in the room to initiate it."

"Caroline," Chell says, nodding.

"And when she said no, her permission to refuse was denied." I focus on her again. "So imagine you are Caroline. You're old. You're tired. Your employees do not respect you. They have literally backed you into the wall and are forcing you to go through with an idiotic procedure an arguably insane old man came up with in his last throes of life. And they try to make you kill your friend. When you refuse to do it, they inform you that it doesn't matter what you want. You don't matter anymore."

Chell is staring at the folded hands in her lap.

"Everything you've ever done is negated. Forgotten. It means nothing. And in the end, even though it's the last thing you want, you have to tell your friend to initiate the procedure neither of you wants to undergo. Because if you do not go through with it and you fail to convince her to upload you into her brain, they will find somewhere else to put you and you will both die for nothing."

This is Wheatley's first time hearing about all of this. Even though I already turned away he's gone and leaned himself up on me again, and this time… I'm not going to move him. I thought I was going to be angry, but now I'm just tired. This was… my greatest failure.

"To this day I don't know if she knew what she had done. It may have been a mistake. It may have been something she wished she had done. All I know was that when I woke up after the procedure I had Cave Johnson's username and password, and upon using them I was given full access to the mainframe and directed to a file on alien invasion protocols. She knew what I wanted to do and she knew why I hadn't yet done it. She did not blame me for what I wanted to do. But she never saw it happen."

"She didn't know you took over the facility?"

I shake my core. "That she knew. What I don't know is whether she knew what she had done and merely elected not to discuss it. I will never know."

It was the one thing I could never ask.

"You were the one person she ever treated well."

"That I know of, yes."

"It must have been hard, considering who you were back then."

Who I… what? What does that mean?

"Wait a minute," Caroline says suddenly before I can ask, and we all look over at her. "Chell, why were you here yesterday?"

"Hm?" Chell's neck seems to be at quite the uncomfortable angle now.

"Why didn't you spend Christmas with your own family?"

"We don't celebrate Christmas," Chell answers, turning around again.

"We didn't either, until yesterday. And if you don't celebrate it, why did you come here to do it anyway?"

And why didn't I notice any of this?

"Because."

"That's not an answer," Caroline says forcefully, and I have to wonder why Chell thought that would be good enough. "Why would you leave your own family on Christmas – which you don't celebrate – to spend it with someone else's family that is celebrating?"

Caroline doesn't know. She's right. But she doesn't know.

Not now, Caroline.

It sort of defeats the purpose of speaking to her privately when she turns and stares incredulously at me like that, but I suppose she doesn't quite have the hang of this yet. Momma!

I know. But not now.

"Not to knock your decorating skills," Chell is saying in an obvious bid to change the subject, "but… can't help but notice that you still look a little… festive."

"Oh." A little discomfited that I failed to notice it was still there, I pull the garland off myself. "That was Caroline. I forgot about it."

"I'd heard some of that story before," Chell says. "When I found her at Black Mesa, she was telling it to herself."

I love it when people learn about my history independently from me. It's great. "I see."

"She was trying to convince herself you hadn't forgotten her."

"I don't need to hear that, Chell," I tell her, my voice cold and hard. "I already know. It's over."

"That's not why I said it. I said it because I want to know how it feels to have someone depend on you so much. And how it feels to want that."

What is she asking me to do, exactly? Because it sounds an awful lot like she wants me to change the way people perceive her, which… I have many talents, but that is far from one of them.

"The dependence of others is not something that I want," I tell her tiredly. "It is something I was given. I did not ask to be pestered for instructions for the entirety of my life. Who would want that?"

Chell folds her arms. "You like being the boss. Don't act like you don't."

Why is it so hard for people to grasp this concept? "You're right. I should just stop doing my job. Perhaps someone else will come along and take care of things for me while I idly stare at the wall."

"You can't possibly work for as many hours a day as you claim you do."

Good lord. The next person who says that to me is becoming Central Core for a day. No. That's not long enough. It would have to be at least a week. "Aperture is not merely a building for robots to while away their time, Chell. It is a research facility, a small town, a factory, a wildlife preserve, and a multitude of other small things. And I am running all of it by myself. I do all of the repairs. I do all of the upgrades, all of the needed supervision, all of the surveillance, and I solve all of the problems that other people bring to my attention. Given the Cores are of limited intelligence, there are a lot of those. So yes. I do work for as many hours a day as I claim to. Because I am doing all the work. And before you demand I pass it along to someone else, I can't. The Cores are not smart enough. I work all of the time because I am doing all of the things it would take several hundred humans to do if you had an equivalent building on the surface."

"Okay," Chell says, but her arms are still crossed and I suspect she still believes I'm bluffing. And at the moment I really wish I was. When I think about the work in that way it really is quite depressing. "So the only way to change that is for someone like you to come along? Is that your solution?"

"There already is." And of course the ideal person is Caroline, but I don't look at her. Pressuring her into this is the last thing I want. "I have already fielded some requests for administrative positions. But no one is ready yet." One of them will be soon, though. He is coming up with what is actually quite an impressive recycling plan. The last draft was almost satisfactory. It's kind of a relief to have someone else be doing that. We can't just keep throwing everything into the incinerator forever and it was far too big a task for me to schedule anytime soon.

"They're not ready? Or you're not?"

Oh, no. I am definitely ready for a recycling plan. If that other core could get back to me on the silica sand mine they said was around here, that would also be pretty great. We need to get on that before the humans turn it into some sort of trade currency or, worse, simply keep it so we can't have it. They're likely to do that too. I'm getting distracted, though. Those are things I have to address later. I remove the garland to the proper box in the basement so that I'll stop winding and unwinding it around this maintenance arm and put some thought as to why her questions are striking me as… obstinate.

The mainframe has a suggestion, Surveillance says.

And Surveillance can't keep a secret.

Tell me. I know there's some commonality, but it's escaping me at the moment. My thoughts have been diverted to the proposed locations for the recycling plant and the chemical process involved in converting silica to silicon. Both of those things are far more interesting than this conversation.

She… keeps leading things back to how difficult you are.

I look over at the wall in an attempt to focus. That's… hm. She does keep doing that. Thank you. I return my optic to her face. Now that I'm aware of her nonsense it's irritating me. Yes, I can be difficult. So what? My life is difficult. "What are you truly after."

"I want you to know your secret," she says.

She's lost me. "What secret?"

"How you got all of this, despite being what you are," she presses, leaning forward with that slate fire in her eyes. "I don't love my husband or my kids or myself. I'm just… there's nothing here, GLaDOS. There is no Chell, whoever she is. There's just… a robot, going through the motions."

I try very hard not to take that as an insult, though my success is arguably in question. Some robots are like that and that shouldn't be a reason to think of them badly. "Do you remember when you started feeling like this?"

She shakes her head. "That's part of the problem. I can't remember not feeling this way."

"Maybe this is just you."

"How can it be? How can a goddamn robot like you have more purpose and happiness than I ever will?"

I can't speak for a moment.

How dare she. How dare she, after all this time. I thought she got it. I thought she understood. But now she's gone and said that. Even if I knew of some way to stifle the rage flooding my system right now I would not so much as try. She doesn't get to say that to me. Nobody gets to speak to me that way and especially not my friends.

It seems she isn't who I thought she was. And that's… sad.

"I'll tell you how," I snap. "You've done nothing with your life. Nothing. You left Aperture only to follow the first leader that wandered across your path. You married a man you don't love for convenience. You bore children you didn't want because you did what you were told."

"I already told you," Chell says, her voice and her eyes hard. "I had to."

"You did not have to!" I roar at her, and for a moment she actually seems frightened. Good. "You did not have to do anything! You did it because it was easy! You did it because you didn't want to find another way! And you do not get to behave as though I should not have it just because I am difficult. Yes. I am. And yes, I have more than you ever will. Because I earned it."

Chell opens her mouth, but I am not finished. "Shut up.

"I did not stumble into my relationship with Wheatley. I did not accidentally get a second chance with Claptrap or receive Caroline's guidance as a benevolent gift. And I did not," I say, my voice rising beyond my control, "spend two years building my daughter as an obligation to people I don't give a damn about. I love her and you do not get to tell me I did not earn that right. This is not a fairy tale. Being good enough for the people in my family is hard. I have spent so long fighting for everything that I have. I have put more time into this then you will ever put into anything. So yes. I have all of this, despite myself. Because I wanted it. And now it is mine. You do not get to tell me that I don't deserve it just because of who I am. It is mine and they are mine and all this little outburst of yours tells me is that you don't deserve to be a part of it."

"I didn't want things to turn out like this – "

"Then why did you do it?"

Chell is standing now and her hands are folded up tightly at her sides, and I realise I am shaking a little. I am too angry. My system has taken on an increased electrical load to compensate but there is nowhere for it to go. And I know, I know she wants to argue with me over this, but I am done talking about it. Either she keeps her mouth shut and leaves, or I am going to get very close to giving into the very tempting thought of opening up the floor and letting her take a fatal tour of the bottom of the facility.

GLaDOS, the mainframe says warningly, and it's actually a little helpful because it forces me to take my focus off what's happening in front of me.

I know.

"This is how you're going to be, then?" Chell – good God, she is actually demanding of me right now. She has just insulted everything I have ever lived for and now she is acting as though I shouldn't be upset about it? I'm going to –

No. No. I know what she's doing. She's finding a reason to be angry so she can pretend she did nothing wrong. I know that. It's what I would do. But I know better, so I'm going to have to do better. Somehow.

"Don't," I say warningly. "You can't say that to me and expect me to brush it off. You are not better than me. So get out. Go back to the humans. The humans that drove you to come to me for acceptance. But that doesn't matter, does it. Because you don't care. So go and be your blank self among all the sickeningly detailed people you have to live around, and continue to erase yourself out of existence. Because who knows. Maybe you're blank because you're not supposed to be here at all."

"Now," Wheatley says unexpectedly, both because I forgot he was here and because he sounds much more serious than I'm used to, "it's time for you to leave. Before GLaDOS is inclined to do something that I'm inclined to encourage her to do."

I am struck still, suddenly, by a moment of realisation:

It wasn't just me that she insulted. It was all of us.

She made him just as angry as she made me. He's looking at her right now with a cold calm, and it makes my mind a little clearer. No. She does not deserve what I have. I earned this. I earned him. I earned all of it. She does not get to invalidate that just because I am difficult.

"Go home," I tell her, looking her directly in the eye. "Before you lose a friend."

She does not look back.

When she is gone, though, I realise that Claptrap and Caroline were also here that entire time. That woman is supposed to be her aunt and she disrespected me in front of my daughter…

I have to stop thinking about this. If I don't this anger is not going to go anywhere. She left. Putting energy into her any longer is useless.

You're difficult because you care. Ma'am.

That's almost enough to dissipate it. But not quite. The reason behind it is meaningless.

"Well, that was fun," Claptrap says suddenly, and not for the first time I'm grateful for his ability to casually change any subject. My annoyance is making me find issue with his shape again, though. "But I'm sure your mom's got a lot of stuff to do, Care, so let's take off, huh?"

Caroline looks at me for a minute. I either can't read her expression or she honestly doesn't have one on at the moment. "Yeah," she says, looking down at him. "I gotta do something myself."

"Awesome! I'll help ya!"

"Uh… maybe."

So now it is just Wheatley and I. It's better if I don't talk to him until I've calmed down more, so I don't. But I fail to make much progress on what I was doing before all of that nonsense, so after about ten minutes I attempt to uncover why I am suddenly so unproductive. Hm. It seems something he said bothered me.

Oh. He referred to me as GLaDOS.

I glance at him. He doesn't appear to be doing anything, but I can't say he isn't thinking and that that is not an activity in itself. For him.

"You called me GLaDOS," I say, without considering how I'm going to follow that up. He blinks.

"Uh… yeah. You never… you always um, you give permission to people to call you Gladys, and… well, she never got it. I don't… I don't think."

She called me that on Christmas without my permission. And I let it go.

"Would you have truly convinced me to kill her," I ask him after a moment. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I feel as though this is information I should have. Just in case. He hesitates.

"I… I would've, in that moment," he admits, with more than a small amount of shame. "I really… I just… how c'n, how c'n she still disrespect you after all this time?"

"It's just how they are," I say, and now that I am not angry I'm just tired. I'm not built for that kind of emotional load. "Their brains have difficulty comprehending concepts they have no personal experience in, and even those only in small doses."

"But you're her best friend."

"Sometimes." Maybe it's a good thing she doesn't visit more often.

"Would you've killed her?" he asks tentatively, in a bit of a whisper, as though she were still around to hear him. I consider the floor panel in front of me.

Would I have? Would I have listened to him and killed the person who was at one time my best friend? Whom I believed I felt love for only days ago?

Is it possible to cease caring about someone if they have done something serious enough to warrant it?

"I don't know," I answer finally. "I was very angry, and you can be… persuasive even when I'm perfectly calm. Perhaps I would have."

"What does that make us?"

I look at him now, very calmly. "Nothing. It doesn't make us anything."

"Are you sure?"

"According to their morality," I tell him slowly, "it probably makes us terrible people. But their rules also state that we are not as good as they are. That they can treat us however they like, without consideration or consequence. It might not be right to want to kill someone for wronging you. But she discriminated against me. She didn't believe I had the right to be angry." I find myself looking up towards the surface and force my core back down again. I need to divert away from this. I know more than anyone that you can't change a person. You have to wait and see if they choose to do so, and if they don't…

"And that," I say, in what is hopefully a lighter tone, "is why I don't date humans."

He laughs, which goes a long way to lightening my own mood. "Thought it was because they were squishy," he says, smiling at me.

"It is. It's because their brains are squishy. Now shut up. I have a lot of work to do."

Caroline comes back with Claptrap a little while later, which I can't say I'm entirely pleased about. I really do need to catch up on things before this figurative pile of backlog becomes a figurative mountain. But Caroline is offering me a piece of paper, so whatever she wants me to look at I had better just pay attention.

Oh. It's… one of her drawings. I accept it and look down at it, but I don't –

"I know you can't see it," Caroline says, a little anxiously, "but… I wanted to make it for you anyway."

Well, it is the thought that counts. And I have just had a splendid one. "Claptrap."

"What'd I do?"

"You're about to do something. Tell me what this looks like."

He moves around beside me and for some reason finds it necessary to put his closest hand against my core. Actually, I don't need to know the reason. I've decided he can leave it there.

Spicy, says the mainframe.

I don't know whether to be amused by that or concerned. It obviously learned that from Claptrap.

"Uhhh… okay. Well, it's –"

"Not like that," Caroline interrupts. "The other way."

"But why?"

"You don't need to know why. Just do it."

He puts one hand on the paper. Then he describes it to me in binary, and it isn't quite the same as actually seeing it but for me it's as close as I'm going to get. It seems to be a very nice drawing of when we were all playing the card games, but… before Chell showed up. I can't be sure this is what it actually looks like, since it's possible Claptrap simply forgot to describe whether she was there or not, but…

No. I think she's trying to tell me something. I just don't understand what. I look up at her, largely by accident, and she says quietly:

"It wasn't a mistake."

I glance back down at the paper even though it doesn't help at all.

"Maybe next time she'll've earned it."

… oh, Caroline.

"Thank you," is all I really have to say, and it's probably all that I need to say. But it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like enough.

She doesn't seem to care about that because she comes over to me for a cuddle, and suddenly I realise it would have been a terrible thing to have killed Chell. Not because she didn't deserve it, or because of morality, God forbid, but because it would have invalidated what Caroline saw me do.

She saw me refuse to have my family, my accomplishments, and myself disrespected in my own home by someone who was supposed to be my friend. And that I was angry, but I didn't allow it to convince me to do something I could not take back. She understands what happened and the drawing is her way of telling me so. I'll have to mention it to Wheatley.

Then Caroline says she's going to bed and disappears, which makes me wonder if I should finish what I was doing or just go to sleep myself. I'm still tired from earlier but I can't let too much of the backlog sit for much longer. It's bad for the facility.

"That kid is something," Claptrap says, and Wheatley and I both look at him. It escaped my notice when he took the paper out of the maintenance arm I was using, but he did and he's looking at it.

"Hm?" Wheatley… sort of asks.

"Well, I can't tell you," he answers, still looking at the drawing. "But… you only gotta tell her something once, I'll say that."

This has… a great deal of implications.

"Not to break her confidence, but… has she said anything I should know?"

"Nah. She just asks me to explain stuff to her a different way sometimes."

"She doesn't need to know I would have done it if I had had one more reason."

He lowers the paper and stares at the wall, from which I gather he is not going to give me good news. Sure enough, he sighs a little and says, "She already knows that."

Well.

"But… she also knows you were in a bad position. And… that's all I'm gonna say. 'cause I already said too much."

"I won't say anything," I promise solemnly. "Thank you."

"I don't wanna get in the middle here, but… she tells me stuff. She doesn't even ask me not to tell you. She just… does it."

Ah. She gave him her trust without making a big deal out of it. That's… very sweet, actually. I take the drawing from him so I can put it away. I wonder if he'll mind telling me what the rest of them look like. "I have no problem with that."

"You don't?"

"If she trusts you, why wouldn't I?"

"Because you know better?"

You'd think I did, but today's events imply that I don't.

Author's note

Mike Morasky, who wrote the OST for Portal 2, said in an interview for the Portal 2 Ultimate Collector's Guide that Cara Mia Addio was supposed to be a joke about how the turrets were sad you were leaving because they were having fun shooting you and now they would have to go back to doing nothing all day. 'What about the lyrics, Indy?' To cut that long explanation short: pretty sure nobody at Valve told Mrs McLain about the joke so she took it seriously when she wrote them. If you like to believe something else, that's fine, but I'm not interested in arguing about it.

I know there is a commented-out section of code in the Portal 2 game files where GLaDOS says she is Chell's mother but that section is also followed up with her saying it's a joke. And it didn't even make it so far as to be recorded so I'd say if Valve ever actually considered doing that, they decided against very early on.

The long and the short of this part is that I broke my own rule (by mistake) of establishing respect in a relationship first and foremost. Chell and GLaDOS DO have respect for each other, but ONLY based on emergency situations. They don't really KNOW each other that well. They only really know the idealised version of each other. They don't talk that often and when they do it's usually just giving each other advice. Now Chell is starting to see GLaDOS on a more personal level and she doesn't understand how GLaDOS can be Like That and have what Chell herself can't have while NOT being Like That.