Part 113. The Reflection

I came to ask my mom if I'm allowed to use her special drafting pencils yet, but I'm stopped before I get very far into her chamber because Claptrap is arguing with her about something that seems to be super serious. In fact, he's a lot more animated than he's been in… oh. This is about his depression, isn't it. "Yes, I do want you to do it!" Claptrap is saying. "I do know what the consequences are and I don't care!"

"The Claptrap I know might not love himself," says Momma. "But he does love everyone around him. So much so that he would never ask me to change him if it meant he could never show those people how much he loved them ever again."

"Oh, I bet you impressed yourself with that one!" snarls Claptrap. "Real pretty! I know what I want!"

"No. You don't."

"Yes! I do! I want you to go back in there and fix whatever it is that makes me like this! I'm done! I'm not doing it anymore! Fix it!"

"I already told you," Momma says, and she's being way more calm about this than I think I could be. "I can't modify any more of your code without destroying you. I did as much as possible. If I could do anything more, I would. But the causes of this are so deep inside of you I can't get them out. It's too far down. If I were to go that distance and extract all of the things that make you feel this way, you would no longer be you."

"Good!" Claptrap cries out, every inch of his chassis full of frustration. "I want you to do that! I'm tired of being me! I want to be someone else!"

It's way worse than I thought.

"I won't do it."

"Then what's the point? What's the point of saying you'll help me if you won't give me the help I ask for?"

"I will help you. But doing that would not be helping. I'm not holding out on you. If there was a way to produce the magic lines that would fix all of this for you, I would have written them already. But they simply don't exist. I can't destroy you and fix you at the same time."

"Then destroy me!" shouts Claptrap. "At least if I was someone else my existence wouldn't be worthless!"

"It isn't," Momma says softly.

"Don't you think I would know?"

"I think you would be the very last person to know."

How does she have so much composure at a time like this? Has she done this kind of thing before and just not mentioned it? Or… does seeing someone like this just not scare her like it does me?

"You know what?" Claptrap says suddenly, throwing up his arms. "Fine. Fine. You don't wanna do it, I know lots of people who will. Thanks for nothing. No, you know what? Fuck you, GLaDOS, fuck – "

There's total, complete silence. None of us moves or makes a sound, and Momma… that didn't hurt her. Almost like she was expecting it.

"Oh my God," Claptrap whispers. "I forgot."

Momma says nothing. She is very, very still.

"Oh my God," Claptrap repeats, moving away from her and pressing his hands against his optic. "Ohhh no. Oh no oh no – "

"Claptrap."

"I'm so sorry," he interrupts in a desperate rush, turning to face her. "I didn't – I didn't mean to say that. I forgot it was off, I didn't mean it like that, I – "

"Claptrap," Momma says, gentle but firm. Almost the voice she uses to calm me down, but not quite. "I'm not upset."

"I'm sorry," he repeats, as though didn't hear her. "I'm so messed up right now."

"Would you like to sit down for a minute," asks Momma very kindly, and after a few moments Claptrap says,

"Yeah."

She raises the panel behind him to the appropriate height and he hoists himself back onto it. He just sits there for a minute or so and I start to wonder if maybe I should leave. Then he says, worryingly quiet, "I think something's really screwed up this time."

Momma nods.

"This has happened before," he goes on. "Tons of times. But it's never gone on this long or been this bad! And GLaDOS, I'm… I'm starting to have some thoughts that really scare me."

"We've been asking you about this for a while," says Momma, still almost in the voice she uses to nicely explain things to me when I'm upset. "Why did you refuse to mention any of this?"

Claptrap puts up his hands weakly. "I've always been able to handle it before. Usually I just tough it out for a while and it goes away!"

"You don't need to do that anymore," Momma tells him. "That's what your friends are for."

He fits his hands together and looks down at them. "But I'm already so much of a hassle," he says, very quietly.

"Sometimes," said GLaDOS. "But let's be honest. Who isn't?"

She's been waiting for this to happen. She's spent a while thinking long and hard how to deal with it. That's how she knows what to do and what do say. And that means she does this for all other kinds of situations. Maybe even conversations she's going to have to have with the humans. I knew she spends a lot of time making predictions, but… I thought they all had to do with math.

I think she's wrong. I think she is a great leader. That's exactly the kind of thing a great leader would do.

Claptrap goes up to her core and presses himself into it, hands flat in front of him, and he starts crying. It's not a little bit of crying, either, like it usually is. He's… straight up sobbing into her as though someone he loves a lot has just died, and all she does is press her optic assembly into the side of his chassis and wait.

I shouldn't be here and now I'm sure of it, but I need to know how she handles this. I've done it before, but… not this gently.

"GLaDOS," Claptrap says after a minute, his voice very quiet.

"Yes, my friend."

"I don't really want you to destroy me. I dunno why I said that."

"I know. There must be some other way of fixing this. I just haven't thought of it yet."

"But I don't wanna keep hating myself," Claptrap goes on. "I was okay for a while and then it all came back worse than before! I want it to go away, GLaDOS. I want to go away."

"No. You don't," Momma says calmly. "You came to me. That means you want help."

"But… wouldn't it just be easier if I just went away? Think of all the hassle you'd be free of! If you just made me into somebody better, you –"

"Somebody better?" Momma asks incredulously. "Who?"

"Well... I don't know, I'm sure you – "

"Of all the people I have ever been cruel to," Momma cuts in, "it was you who got the worst of me. And you knew that. But you came back anyway. You loved me when I didn't deserve to be loved and now it is my turn to show you how that feels even if your belief that you don't deserve it is wrong. Now. Where is your Pandoracorn?"

"It's… it's right here," Claptrap says in confusion, pulling it out of storage as she moves out of reach. "Why do you –"

"You're going to sleep. Lie down."

"But I can't!" he protests, even though Momma is already pushing on the top of his chassis with a maintenance arm to get him started. "What if –"

"Nothing is going to happen. You're not going to miss it when nothing happens." Having gotten him on the floor, she produces a pink blanket from someplace and spreads it over him. "Look. You don't sleep enough. You need to so your system can do maintenance. All of that junk hanging around is what makes it so difficult for you to keep track of your thoughts. It wouldn't have prevented this, but it would have helped."

"But… but then how would I watch you sleep?"

She pauses in her arranging of the blanket. "You can still do that. Just a little less, that's all."

"But –"

"Shut up," she interrupts. "I'm not arguing with you. You're going to sleep right now and that's final." And she presses a kiss into the corner of his chassis, but before she can move back he holds up the Pandoracorn and says, "Wait! Could you… I know it's dumb but –"

She just nods and kisses it on the head underneath the horns, or pretends to, anyway, and he brings it back against his chassis with one arm. He puts his other hand against the side of her core and they just… look at each other like that for a minute. I really, really wonder what they're thinking.

"I'm so sorry," Claptrap says, voice well below normal volume. "I know you hate dealing with stuff like this but I feel so bad about myself and my life and you're the only one I know can help me. And I'm sorry to put this on you 'cause you got so much important stuff to do and here I am getting in the way again –"

"I'm sorry I didn't prevent this," Momma says quietly. "I should have seen it coming. But I didn't."

Claptrap goes silent, and I have to stop myself from moving forward to argue. This isn't her fault any more than her own depression was her fault! But she probably doesn't mean it in a personal way. She means it in a logical way. So I should stay quiet about it.

"I will fix this. I promise you that."

"GLaDOS, I don't… this wasn't –"

"Enough," Momma says, moving out of reach. "Go to sleep."

I think he wants to continue with what he'd been trying to say by the way he's holding his bent arm over his chassis, but he doesn't. He pulls up the blanket a little and then puts that arm over the Pandoracorn too. "GLaDOS, be honest," he says, even though she told him to go to sleep. "Is there even a point in trying to fix me?"

"What do you mean?" Momma asks, frowning a little. He sighs and crosses his arms.

"I've been like this my whole life. It's all on purpose. I was literally made to feel like crap all of the time. So what's the point in trying to fix something I'm supposed to be?"

"That… depends on the view you want to take."

"How many are there?"

"Well…" she says slowly, "there are infinite ways to view your own existence. From a cosmic perspective, everything is pointless. Your life is and will always be little more than a gnat upon the grand scale."

That's not very encouraging, and Claptrap seems to feel the same as me judging by the tightening of his arms. Before he can argue, she continues,

"But… we aren't cosmic beings. So we need to think smaller. You could say the next level would be your influence on a galactic and a planetary scale, depending on how heavily populated your solar system happens to be. And you undeniably had an impact on that. It's not something a lot of people can say."

"… I guess it isn't."

"The inversion goes on from there, in which you're less important to the universe as a concept but moreso to the smaller physical space you occupy and, more importantly, can comprehend. That would be your influence on strangers, friends, and family. The meaning of that influence will always consist of infinite small things that nonetheless couldn't have happened without you."

… I'm glad I'm here for this.

She shifts her chassis a little and looks up, though not at anything in particular. "I suppose what I'm trying to say is… the point is what you make it. Sometimes it's hard to find one that seems worth it. But it's not something anyone can do for you, or even convince you to do. I can't tell you what the point is. I can only remind you of the options."

"Okay," says Claptrap. "That sounds all deep and stuff and I don't really get it, but… maybe I will later. Thank you."

When it sounds like he's really asleep, Momma sighs like she hasn't slept in three days but she just now realised the mainframe needs to be defragmented right this minute. I guess this kind of thing still takes a lot out of her even when she plans for it. "Before you ask," she says heavily, making me jump because I didn't think she knew I was there, "I don't know what I'm going to do."

She doesn't?

"I thought I fixed this."

Ohhhh, I missed that! She keeps saying 'fix', like she doesn't realise she can't. And I know she's not great at emotional stuff, so… "Hey, don't worry about it," I say, going around in front of her. "I can help you."

"Now isn't the best time for me to teach you how to code."

I should've guessed that's what she'd think I meant. "No, Momma. I don't mean his programming. You can't just fix him like he's got a bug or something."

"What?" Momma asks, sounding genuinely confused. "Why not?"

"Because…" How do I explain this? "Because… even if you did, he would…" How do I explain feelings scientifically? Especially robot feelings, which I actually know less about than human ones?

"He would what?"

She sounds patient enough that it helps me come up with my answer. "Even if you could just… get rid of the program that makes him depressed, that doesn't mean he would never be depressed again. He'd still have all the memories and feelings and reactions to stuff stored in him from before. So you could delete it, but it would still keep happening, because… it's…"

"A learned behaviour?"

"Yes! It's that."

"And where do you come in?"

That's a lot easier to explain. "When I lived with the humans I was around depressed people all the time. I was easily accessible and I didn't have anything to do, so… I learned how to help them out."

Momma looks away from me suddenly, and I get the feeling that what I said bothered her. When I ask her why she says,

"I hate when it seems as though my giving you away was a good thing."

"You didn't give me away," I tell her. It makes me a little anxious that she said that instead of 'sent' like she usually does. "And it was a good thing. We already agreed on that."

She doesn't say anything.

"You don't still feel bad about it, do you?"

"I am going to feel bad about it every day for the rest of my life," she answers tiredly.

… every day?

"Why?"

"Caroline, I don't – " She sighs and looks back down at Claptrap again. He hasn't moved at all and it's actually really disturbing. "Because I should have done better and an entire year went by where I did progressively worse. I should have fixed Wheatley, but I didn't. I should have kept you here – I should have said goodbye to you – but I didn't. I didn't contact you, or anticipate the retrospectively obvious goal of the mainframe, or tell Alyx what, exactly, I had demanded she take care of. Every single decision I made that year was the wrong one. I am never going to see a day again where I don't think about how much and for how long I failed."

"The only thing you did wrong," I tell her quietly, "was not let me talk to you. That's it. It should have been me calling you, not Alyx. But I already told you this and I already told you I understand why you did those things. So why do you still feel so bad?"

She starts to feel old, suddenly. I don't know why that happens, especially now that she's been fixed up. Maybe it's some subtle difference in the way she holds herself that I notice but also don't. She sounds very tired when she says,

"Because it was the culmination of all the things that made me a terrible mother."

"Momma – "

"You asked," she says, her serious look silencing me. "I'm answering.

"I should never have made you to begin with. Half the reason I did it was spite, which is a terrible reason to build a child. The other half is something I still don't know. But I do know that I shouldn't have. I was too angry. Too demanding and too impatient. I should either have waited or not done it at all. You were there. You heard me say that I couldn't raise you by myself. And if Wheatley had… remained dead, I can't say for sure that I could have. Whatever I ended up being would not have been good for you because I never was to begin with."

"If you were a bad mom, I would have been a bad kid," I tell her firmly, but she's already shaking her core before I've finished.

"That's not how it works."

"Then how does it work?"

"Some people," she says, "are more inclined to things than others. You have certain traits that neither I or Wheatley have, some of which helped you to be less affected by all of my mistakes. The plain fact is, I got lucky. You were and have always been inclined to listen to everything I say and seek my approval for everything you do. Without these behaviours, you would have turned out very differently. You probably would have elected to stay at Black Mesa and commiserate with all the other children about how stupid it was that they were made when their parents obviously aren't suited to raise them."

"But you always tried," I say, a little scared that what she's saying is true and that if I had woken up slightly different that I would see her different.

"That's not always good enough. It depends. It was enough for you. To a child that was not inclined to notice or, as was within their rights, resented the results… it wouldn't have been."

It's scary to think of a version of me who's like that. We wouldn't even be the same person.

"Conversely," she continues, "I could have been perfect in every way and you could have ended up a horrible, unpleasant brat. Children aren't an exact science. A lot of parenting is sort of just… hoping for the best."

"You think you're a good mom now, though, right?"

She shrugs a little. "Does it still matter?"

"Huh?"

"You're an adult. You don't need parented anymore."

I don't think I am, really, not yet. But I get her point. "You said you would baby me as long as I want, though."

She laughs. "Yes, Caroline," she says, sounding amused, "I will baby you for the rest of your life."

"Because I'm spoiled but not a brat."

"If that's what you choose to believe."

"Momma!"

That makes her laugh again. "All right. You're not a brat. You're a good daughter and a good person and I am very proud you became those things despite me."

She said all that without even pausing. I'm glad she's starting to relax about the kind of stuff she had so much trouble talking about before. "If I was a brat, would you still love me?"

"Yes," she answers without hesitation, "but I wouldn't like you. And that would be worse."

I remember how that feels. Yeah. I'd take liking my mom over loving her. It would be kind of pointless to love someone I couldn't stand talking to or being around. "Hey, Momma, remember what you said about… having to find the point for yourself?"

"I said it ten minutes ago, so you'd better hope so."

"What's the point for you?"

Her lens retracts into her optic assembly, which is how I know she's taken aback by the question. "It's…" she begins, and I'm sure she isn't thinking of an answer on the spot and is just thinking of how to word it.

"… the idea that I can always be something, but never nothing," she says finally, narrowing her optic a little more or less in the direction of the floor. "That is, even if I died tomorrow I would continue to have meaning. Even when I'm not, I'll always have been, and it's up to me to decide what the meaning of that time will be. I can't dictate it, exactly, but I can do things to influence it. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah," I say, nodding. "Can I ask how you came up with that?"

"Well," she says, "traditionally when one is asked to think about what they hope to achieve with their life, it's… usually along the lines of being a good person. Of doing good in the world. Or about being good for their family or the kinds of things they hope to gain personally. Most of those things I don't care about. I don't have morals, so it doesn't matter to me whether I'm a good person or whether what I do is good or not. Whether or not I'm good for my family isn't actually my decision, since you all proved already that you don't care if I'm terrible as long as I'm making some genuine attempt at not being terrible. And I don't want anything. I have everything I want right here. So after all of that, what's left? Quite basically: my purpose."

"Your purpose?" I repeat. "You mean as Central Core?"

"Yes," she answers. "When it's several hundred years from now and we're on our third or fourth Central Core, what kind of meaning do I want that person to take from the role? When they think back to all the people that came before them, what kind of Central Core will it drive them to be? I hate humans. I hate supervising them, and putting up with them, and I detest the fact that they're so close to me and they won't move because they want me to help them. I'm getting angry just thinking about it. But you were right. I have to be… accommodating because it isn't just me that's going to have to live with them. That's going to be going on for a long time. Hopefully not forever, but – "

"Wait," I interrupt, since she seems to be finished. "You put something I said into the way you think about stuff?"

"You may find," she answers, "that having yourself mirrored in the shape of someone else forces you to examine quite a lot of your thoughts."

"You aren't forced," I correct. "You choose to do that. You decide to rethink that stuff."

"It's easier to pretend I don't," she answers. "Having to re-evaluate means I was wrong. And being wrong is very difficult for me."

I'm about to say that it's hard for everyone, but then I remember that not everyone has to have a ninety-nine percent success rate in almost everything they do. So I don't.

"All right," she says determinedly, looking back down at Claptrap, "how do we fix this?"

Not gonna lie, it's a bit thrilling to hear her say 'we'. "Well, we can't fix it. We can only help mange it. Remember? You can't fix it just like that."

"Of course I can," she says, sounding confused. "You said you knew how."

"I said I knew how to help. That's all you can do with something like this."

"That can't be right, Caroline," she says. "It's never been this bad before. It's always been a manageable cycle, up until…" She raises her core, and it's hard to tell but I think her optic loses focus.

"Until what?"

"This is something I did," she says, her voice very low. "I made some change during my edits of his OS that broke him." She looks over at the wall. "Damn it."

It can't be that bad. I know she's going to catastrophize like always, though, and it'll be tough to get her to see that. "Can't you just revert the changes?"

"No," she says, shaking her core. "Reversion would effectively mean erasing his life between that point and now. If I absolutely have to, I will. But that's too extreme to be the answer."

"You must have a list of all the stuff you did." I've been told many times about her love of lists.

"Yes," she answers. "I'm going to have to go through all his code again and figure out which edit produced the problem."

"You can do that," I suggest, "and I'll help him manage it in the meantime."

"I wish I could…" Instead of finishing, she just shakes her core and sighs.

"You wish you could what?"

"Just unlink all the events that caused it to become a learned behaviour. But that would effectively destroy his personality, and that I won't do."

"It's a good idea, though."

"It actually isn't," Momma tells me. "Any time I start a sentence with 'I wish' is a sign I've stopped thinking rationally."

Okay. That's a good point.

I'm guessing she's going to start looking at Claptrap's code now and I don't understand the languages it was written in so I'm not going to be too useful about that. While she does that, I'm going to go see if there are any books on this in the Database of External Origin. I know what to do, but I want to be able to do it with as much grace and calm as she did and those are two things I'm not good at.

"Caroline," Momma says, but when I turn around so she can finish, she doesn't.

"Yeah?" I prompt. Oh, she's trying to tell me about something she's feeling, isn't she. I should have said something… I dunno. More encouraging.

"I'm… excited to work with you in the future," she says, in what I'm shocked to realise is a bit of a shy voice. "This," and here she sort of nods at Claptrap, "isn't that, exactly, but it reminded me of it."

"Oh," I say, trying not to smile too much. "I thought that was gonna make you sad."

"It does," she says thoughtfully, "but… not as much as I thought it would. I think because… I didn't expect to like you this much."

As usual, she's more confusing than offensive. "Huh?"

"I like you as my daughter, obviously," she answers. "But also as a person. The degree to which I do… I wasn't expecting that."

She's so weird, sometimes. I mean, it's just like her to have a filing system for all the stages she sees someone have, but I mean… me as a daughter and me as a person can't be that different.

Actually… maybe they can. Maybe that's why she only called Dad my father once in my entire life: because his role to her is almost always as him, the person. Or… him her partner, maybe. Now I'm a little curious what she's going to do when she has to reconcile me, the daughter, with me, the mom.

I haven't talked to her about that, but I have with Alyx a lot. I know my mom has the rule about having to do it with someone else, but… when I think about it, having a daughter is way more important to me than finding someone to do it with. I know she'll let me do it myself if I ask. And I don't know when I'm going to be ready, but I do know I haven't worked hard enough yet. I've been messing around too much and not treating the stuff I need to learn seriously enough. I'm hoping when I've taken care of all that I'll just… know.

It's part of why I asked her to move me into this chassis, even though I kind of didn't want that. There are things I have to start doing, and I have to stop making excuses about why I'm not doing them. Now that I have the best hardware in the facility, I have to start living up to it.

"I think I'll always be a little sad," Momma is saying. "But… that's something I'll have to work through myself."

"Why are you always going to be sad?" I ask.

"Because…" She looks over at the floor. "There's some part of me that… and I know I shouldn't. But it wants you to always need me. The older you get, the less you do."

"I'll always need you the same amount, Momma," I tell her. "It's just what I need you for will be different."

"My point," says Momma, "is that I should be happy if you don't need me. It implies you're successful and self-sufficient."

"You're successful and self-sufficient and you still need me." It's probably based on nothing, but I get anxious enough to follow it up with, "Right?"

"Of course," Momma says, and I don't know if her voice is soothing on purpose but it helps. "The middle ground will always be a bit difficult for me to grasp, I'm afraid."

I go to leave again, but this time I stop myself. There's something I need to tell her, but it's different because it's not from daughter to mom like it always is. It's from me, the person, to GLaDOS, the person, and I hope when I say it she understands there's a difference.

"You did a fantastic job with him," I tell her, and her lens twitches the barest bit. "I hope I can work hard enough to learn how to be as compassionate and reassuring as you are."

"… compassionate and reassuring?" she repeats, sounding both disbelieving and confused. And I expected that. Those aren't words she'd ever use to describe herself, which is why I said them.

"Yes," I nod. "I'll see you later."

When we've got this all worked out and Claptrap is back to normal, I'll ask her to show me whatever she ends up doing. I only know one language right now and if I'm to be Central Core, I need to know as many of them and how they work as possible. Not only does Aperture itself run on more than one, it's necessary on large projects and I have a lot of stuff to write for the secret facility.

I glance back at her to see she's just sort of looking pensively at Claptrap, and I wonder if she understands what I really meant yet. Because the thing with saying I'm her reflection is… that means she's also mine. And while I've known for a while I don't want to be her, there are a lot of things I want for us to be able to see in each other.

Author's note

Due to personal experience and what I remember of the university personality psychology that helped spawn this fic, I feel that most of someone's personality is innate. It's less formed by nurture than it is slowly drawn out over the course of their life. So by this metric you can have two kids, say only children, raised much the same way by parents who go right in some places but wrong in others, but one kid will accept that their parents are flawed and not hold it against them and the other will hold the parents as responsible for all of the flaws they've developed. Obviously this doesn't apply for genuinely garbage parents who refuse to admit the wrong they've done and continue to do; this is more about that vein of parents who are well-meaning but not perfect. Some kids can accept that, some can't. Carrie, because of the random traits that were generated when she was built, is able to accept it. If GLaDOS were to have built a second child (no, she's not going to) it's not likely she would have hit the jackpot twice. And GLaDOS being a crappy but generally well-meaning parent was an intentional decision. It would have been out of character for her to be great right off the bat, but you see in fanfiction these characters who are all perfect parents and their kids are angels and fights and stuff only happen when the writer is out of ideas, and one of the biggest things I didn't want for this story was clean relationships where everyone makes the right choices. Everyone sucks on purpose and sometimes they make bad decisions that have good outcomes because life's just like that. If I'd REALLY wanted to be really realistic, I would've written this with Carrie being resentful of GLaDOS, but I don't think I could have handled the complexity of that kind of situation when I started this fic.

If I mentioned before that GLaDOS does care about being a good person, this is a retcon and I'll fix it later. I think it's far more interesting to think about what someone's motivations are when they don't have a conscience to guide them into things.

The Database of External Origins is a library.