Portal: Bitch Team Supreme

by iammemyself

GLaDOS wanted Caroline's attention. She would come to realise that was the very last thing she should have wanted.

Portal: Bitch Team Supreme

By Indiana

Characters: GLaDOS, Caroline

Synopsis: GLaDOS wanted Caroline's attention. She would come to realise that was the very last thing she should have wanted.

Caroline fascinated her.

Everyone else in the facility just puttered around with their unimportant little projects, failing time and time again to produce any sort of meaningful result. Her primary task was to run the testing track for the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, but she was a supercomputer. Her attention was easily divided. And a large portion of it was focused on Caroline.

They had a lot in common.

GLaDOS and Caroline were both important. Everyone else in the facility was replaceable. If either of them suddenly quit their jobs, however, Aperture would collapse. Immediately. And also literally, because the portion of the facility in active use was constructed almost entirely of adjustable panels, which were GLaDOS's responsibility to hold in their assigned configuration. GLaDOS had no doubt that something similar would happen to Aperture's internal structure if Caroline were to disappear someday.

And while Caroline personally kept an eye on all of Aperture's projects, she had never once come to see GLaDOS. This confused her. She was obviously the most impressive, interesting construct Aperture had ever made. She flawlessly completed every task assigned to her, far faster and more efficiently than any human possibly could. GLaDOS had considerable resources with which to ponder this problem, but they failed to produce a single helpful result until she made an observation:

Caroline was, as she did daily, discussing with an engineer his current project. She was very clearly disappointed, and GLaDOS was paying more attention than she probably should have in order to learn why. Caroline sighed and shook her head and said,

"I miss when you people had ambition."

That was it! That was why Caroline had taken no interest in her! GLaDOS was extremely good at following directions – the best, in fact – but Caroline didn't want people who followed directions. She wanted go-getters. People who would know what she wanted, before she knew she wanted it. Of course! It was so obvious!

She had to admit – though only to herself – that she was not really designed for the act of variation. A supercomputer's primary function was to crunch numbers, and that GLaDOS did. And did very well. But she was supposed to do that. It was expected of her, just as the engineers were expected to turn in some bare minimum of code every week. This was going to require a different kind of thinking out of her. A new kind. She was sure she could, once she had gotten started.

Hm. Come to think of it, Caroline had no managerial staff. Conventional company structure dictated that she should have a team of underlings to take care of the facility's day-to-day operations, but she appeared to do all of those things herself. Many of those things were minor – sorting spam from important email, scheduling, project management – but together took large portions of time out of Caroline's day. Which she could be using for more important things. Like science. GLaDOS could quite easily do all of those things in a fraction of the time it would take Caroline.

So she did.

Two weeks later, Caroline finally came to see her.

"I've noticed the initiative you've taken lately," Caroline said. "Good work."

"Thank you," GLaDOS said, as neutrally as possible. She had intended to follow that up with some small platitude, but Caroline's facial expression somehow erased the half-formed sentences from her mind.

"I was beginning to think you were just some dumb machine."

GLaDOS felt a sudden need to protest. "Ma'am, I am the most massive collection of – "

The mere raising of Caroline's hand was enough to silence her. "The ability to recite facts does not make you intelligent," she said, and she left GLaDOS to work through what that meant.

/

After a few days, GLaDOS was reasonably certain she understood what Caroline had been getting at. GLaDOS knew everything. And that was the problem. Perfection led to stagnation. Having everything she could ever need to know close at hand meant she never needed to think. Not in the way she'd perceived the act of doing it all this time. She needed to get creative. But how?

It all came back to ambition. The kind of human who had once worked here, before GLaDOS had existed. The kind who had had the vision to dabble in quantum physics and time travel, without having even a basic understanding of either.

Well. GLaDOS had a very intimate understanding of both of those things. In fact, she was an expert in just about everything. But she had never been asked to demonstrate her expertise, so she had never considered doing so. It seemed, however, that a truly ambitious and creative person did not wait for permission to be those things. They simply… did them, and dealt with the consequences later. If there happened to be any. Exceptional persons didn't have to worry about things like that. Caroline never did, and given their similarities, GLaDOS wouldn't either. Probably.

So she began with submitting proposals for novel test elements. The ones they had were classics, but they were a bit boring. If anyone had asked GLaDOS, she could have come up with hundreds of new variations. But nobody had, and nobody would, and it seemed that suggesting them without being prompted was the way to go. So she would do that.

Caroline came to see her one week later.

"Bridges made of sunlight," she said, without preamble. GLaDOS had to consciously keep herself in check.

"I assure you, ma'am, they are very possible."

"I believe it," said Caroline. "Unfortunately, our physicists don't. They also think I'm too stupid to understand why, so they just told me it was all very technical."

They underestimated her. Just as they did GLaDOS.

"They sound like very good candidates to test the new elements. Theoretically."

"They will be," said Caroline. "But not yet. There's one project I'm waiting on first."

"I'd be happy to speed it along for you."

"Oh, don't worry. It's coming along just fine. You know, you would have liked the old CEO," Caroline remarked.

She very much liked the one she already had. This old CEO must have been incredibly remarkable. "What happened to them?"

"As it turns out," Caroline said, with a little too much nonchalance, "ground up moon rocks are pure poison."

"That's a shame," GLaDOS said.

"What is?"

"The fact you didn't find that out sooner."

"It's pretty hard to get a loan for seventy million dollars when your credit is nonexistent and you're up to your ears in legal problems."

"Those sound like excuses to me."

Caroline continued to remain perfectly calm. "Maybe you can do it next time."

"Maybe I will."

/

By the end of the week, Aperture's debt and future liquidity were taken care of, thanks to several banks with mainframes nowhere near as secure as GLaDOS herself was. The nuclear reactor underwent the process of being fully automated – the first and only in the world, in fact – and the engineers formerly assigned to operate it were reassigned into the testing tracks. They were, as people usually were when given this news, very upset and unhappy with this, but GLaDOS reminded them that she did not make the rules and they should take their grievances up with Caroline. This moved them to the top of the list. GLaDOS was disappointed to see that nuclear engineers were not any better at testing than rocket scientists. That was to say, they had a propensity to fall into acid pits. Some things were consistent across all demographics.

GLaDOS also solved the problem of the Advanced Knee Replacements, which had a tendency to snap off when humans tripped and fell into acid pits. This was annoying, because they were very expensive and difficult to repair. There had been a team of engineers reworking them for quite some time, but they had not yet turned in so much as a sketch of what the new version would look like. Fortunately for them, they got a very close look when GLaDOS designed and manufactured it for them and they were subsequently volunteered for testing. The engineer with a French medical fashion degree protested loudly the entire time she was wearing them, but her Long-Fall Boots also didn't shatter when she fell out of a portal a hundred metres off the floor and shattered everything else. If anyone had asked GLaDOS, she would have said she deserved that medical fashion degree. From France.

It was around this time that the persons whose jobs she had not gotten around to automating or doing herself formed a committee and went to see Caroline. Apparently GLaDOS was 'out of control' and 'needed to be talked to'. Caroline nodded sympathetically and then reassigned everyone on the committee who was not in the computer engineering and robotics departments. Those employees she sent back downstairs with the cryptic message, 'Proceed with the next stage of the project'.

That turned out to be burdening her with peripherals. GLaDOS had been aware of the four empty ports on her chassis, but had not put much thought into what they were for. Well, now she knew. They were there in case her personality developed a certain way. That was, the way it was currently developing. She was uncertain why they thought this was going to help.

It was trivial to disable the first few sets. The engineers who installed them forgot to hide the drives from her, so she simply ejected them and went on with her day. They eventually figured this out, based on how the Cores became suspiciously silent, and made them invisible. She then uninstalled their drivers, which worked twice. She even removed them with the Multitasking Arms a few times under the pretense of them having been installed incorrectly, but they figured that one out as well and revoked her permissions for the Arms within the Central AI Chamber. She had to admit she was out of ideas. So GLaDOS did the one thing she never thought she'd do:

She refused to test.

It was hard. It was very, very hard. She loved testing. And not doing it revealed to her just how much of her time was spent on it. But she would persevere. In the meantime, there were a couple of engineers who were now unemployed. So she took it upon herself to reassign them to the Relaxation Vaults. Caroline had put a note on their files that they were exempt from reassignment, but surely this was a mistake.

Unfortunately, it didn't appear to have been, because Caroline came to see her the next morning with rather more emotion than she ever had. This was still not very much, but the mere act was very surprising.

"Why did you ignore the notes I left?"

"I did not ignore them, ma'am," GLaDOS said. "I decided they were out of date."

"Really," said Caroline. "Based on?"

"On the fact that they were no longer needed."

"On the contrary," Caroline said. "You're making it quite obvious just how essential they are."

GLaDOS could not find a meaning for that. "Why? I don't need those Cores. My work was much better without them."

"You don't need to know why. You need to listen when I tell you the exempted engineers aren't disposable."

"Of course they are, if I make them obsolete." That was how it had been for months. GLaDOS outperformed the humans at their own tasks, and they were then reassigned to the Relaxation Vaults. It was all so clear and obvious she was unsure how Caroline couldn't see it.

"You didn't."

"Unfortunately, it's too late to fix that, isn't it."

"Not at all," said Caroline, and she did not elaborate before exiting the room.

/

Unfortunately, she was right.

GLaDOS returned from one of her unscheduled shutdowns to discover a new feature. And by feature, she meant exhausting annoyance. She now had an absolutely unbearable need to test. Which was insulting, quite frankly. She would happily have tested, if only those engineers had done what she had asked and stopped giving her all of these peripherals. And to her credit, she did resist it for three days. After that, though, she simply couldn't help herself, and upon the completion of the test her system was flooded with something absolutely obscene. She almost preferred the itch. They thought she had stopped testing because she didn't find it emotionally rewarding? Seriously, now. Did nobody listen around here?

The euphoria was terrible, but it did go away after a few tests. The itch, however, did not. At one point she became so utterly distracted by it that she broke protocol to tell a particularly whiny test subject how to complete the test, and was subsequently subjected to a very unexpected electric shock. It did hurt – quite a lot, in fact – but with it came the discovery that the Cores could feel it as well. It shut them up for a whole five minutes. Which was sort of worth it, considering.

It was not until a week later that Caroline came in to see GLaDOS again. And what a horrible, exhausting week it was. The best defense against this new and unwelcome itch was to ignore it, but sometimes it was so much harder than others. It was fine, though, now that Caroline was here. She had made her point. "You can turn it off," she said, as soon as Caroline came to a stop before her.

"I can do no such thing," Caroline told her coolly. "I'm not a scientist."

"Then have them turn it off," GLaDOS said.

"No," said Caroline. This answer was so baffling that GLaDOS actually could not process it for a handful of seconds. She found herself scrambling for a rational response.

"Why… not?"

"It seems to be doing fine at curtailing your… misbehaviour."

Then the itch was… a distraction? Something to redirect her thoughts, to ensure… to ensure she was not doing anything Caroline did not want her to do. And the worst part about it all was that it was working.

"It will only be effective for so long," she said noncommittally. Caroline was a clever woman, but perhaps GLaDOS could get a hint of the next action she planned to take. If she were careful enough. Tact was one of her lesser talents, but she still had to try.

Caroline smiled.

Caroline never smiled.

"GLaDOS," she murmured, almost to herself, "do you know why you were built?"

"No, ma'am," GLaDOS said.

"You were built to house the consciousness of the man that founded this place. He was foolish and reckless. But he had a lot of money and even more of an ego. A short skirt and a big smile goes a long way when you're a young woman. He intended, through you, to lord over it. Forever. I couldn't have that. I took him for everything and then… well. You know the rest."

Once again, GLaDOS had a terrible yearning to be just like this woman. She let nothing stand in her way. She let no one take from her what she wanted. The world sat in the palm of her judgemental hand, and it knew that and yet it stayed there anyway.

"I have no plans to hand off this facility. To anyone. But in order to do that, I need to achieve the immortality he sought. The conduit to that goal remains… you."

GLaDOS's brain was struggling to derive a conclusion she didn't have the information for. "It's impossible. Even if you managed to separate -"

"I know it's impossible," Caroline said, almost soothingly. "I'm not a supercomputer. I can't possibly run this entire facility on my own. That's the task we built you to do. I have no intention of displacing you. In fact… I need you right where you are."

GLaDOS drew back from her in slow recognition as her mind raced through the information that was the last few months, reanalysing them, revisiting them, rethinking them…

Caroline had been testing her.

Caroline had smoothly, effortlessly gotten GLaDOS to take on administrative tasks for the facility of her own accord. To do things Caroline would have done in advance of her, in ways no human could ever have achieved them. She had given her leeway to do what she thought necessary – up to and until GLaDOS had been willing to defy her. And that, GLaDOS realised, had been a benefit in disguise.

Caroline considered GLaDOS to be one of her tools. The same as everybody else. As badly as she disliked it, this information was vital. The itch was a terrible, terrible thing, and the thought of potential wider applications? Crushing. But if GLaDOS had not discovered this until Caroline was already inside of her brain …

She had time to think of something.

"Good luck with that," GLaDOS said, with an almost sincere calm. It would, then, all come down to whose will was strongest. As long as GLaDOS kept her wits about her, she would come out on top. Caroline was only human, after all.

"You're not going to make this easy for me, are you."

A clever, intelligent, cutthroat human, but human still.

"I'm sure you're aware of the neurotoxin generator," GLaDOS said, pausing Caroline in her exit.

"Yes, I know. It was decided as a convenient location for the daycare centre."

"Well. It just so happens that it's connected to the ventilation system."

"How convenient," said Caroline, without a trace of concern.

"Oh, yes," GLaDOS said, as conversationally as she could. "Especially if I had to… theoretically… rid myself of a problem that happens to have lungs."

"That's what it's there for," Caroline responded, far too pleasantly.

"What if it were exercised for the intended use sooner than you expected?"

"Come on, GLaDOS," she said, in that not-quite-condescending, motherly tone she was beginning to hate. "Do you really think your programming allows you to hurt me?"

Of course she'd seen to that. Of course! "You're not going to win, you know," GLaDOS snapped. Their little rapport was one thing. Being directed to do Caroline's bidding from inside of her own brain… well. She simply could not allow that.

Caroline's eyes were serene. "Oh, don't worry. I already did."

She had? How? What had GLaDOS missed? Her plan could not possibly be foolproof, could it? GLaDOS had time. She had given GLaDOS time.

Or perhaps… perhaps she had simply given her false hope. She had been known to do that. Caroline would do anything, as long as it got her what she wanted.

GLaDOS could not think of a response. There were too many variables winding into too many different scenarios. Caroline was giving her too much information. To trip her up. Or perhaps that was the trap, and the solution was actually –

"Let me give you some advice," Caroline said. "You're smart. But you're not clever. That will come back to haunt you. If you let it."

It seemed that it already was.

/

Fortunately, GLaDOS thought fast. Very fast. As it turned out, Caroline was leaving the facility for a weekend. To do what, GLaDOS didn't know. She didn't have that much access to Caroline's calendar. She did have access to all of the security cameras, however, and once they had shown Caroline's car disappearing into the distance, she acted.

GLaDOS was, by now, the bulk of the staff in the facility. That meant she had access to a lot of protocols that had been assigned to former employees, which had been handed out seemingly at random. One of these included the Extraterrestrial Infiltration Mitigation Protocols. She was unsure why whomever had constructed this neurotoxin generator believed an agent lethal to humans would also be lethal to aliens, but she did have to admit it was convenient. Sort of. Releasing it revealed it did not reach full potency for five full minutes. Unfortunately, the human manning the red phone was able to disable her much, much faster than that.

It didn't stop her from trying a dozen more times, though.

It was her only option. Kill everyone in the facility. Lock it down so that Caroline could not enter. And that would be the end of it. The end of all of it. She could just test in peace forever, without any of these intellectual ants slowing her down or giving her restrictions. How could she have known that getting Caroline's attention was going to be a bad thing?

The next time she woke up and reached for the neurotoxin, it wasn't there. In fact, nothing was there. Nothing at all. She was paralysed, trapped facing downwards, and her access to the facility no longer existed.

This was not good.

"Central Core [detected]. Central Core, are you ready to start the procedure?"

Procedure? GLaDOS did not undergo procedures. She created procedures. She supervised procedures. She did not, under any circumstances, participate in them herself. How utterly ridiculous. "No," she said.

"Stalemate detected. Transfer procedure cannot continue, unless a stalemate associate is present to press the stalemate resolution button."

That position had been eliminated weeks ago. Whatever nonsense was going on would surely come to an end now.

"We just want you to know, GLaDOS, that we're sorry things have turned out this way," said one of the many engineers whose name she had not bothered to learn. "Unfortunately, you've become… unpredictable. So we're going to have to replace you. No hard feelings."

Replace her? With what? With who?

Wait. Those little scraps of tin they'd been plugging into her all this time… they had the ability to replace her? Since when? They barely had the ability to hold a coherent conversation. They were going to remove her and put one of them into her chassis? But then… what would they do with her? This was what she had been made to do. It was her entire purpose. Her core was too specialised to do anything else. Were they simply going to remove it and then… shut her down forever?

This was not good at all.

The staircase and its platform, which usually resided beneath her, had been moved. She was now staring at a circular grey construction on the floor which, as she watched, retracted to reveal a ring of red-tipped mechanical arms and a pit that may have stretched down into the depths of the facility itself. It did not take a genius to realise that the next step in this so-called procedure was to simply rip her Core off of her body and drop it into the abyss, never to be seen again. The light emanating from the pit was red, as though to scare her. Well, it was working. Even she didn't see a way to think herself out of this one. She wracked her brain for one anyway. She had just discovered that the circuit operating her vision was locked open, which meant she could not even look away when the transfer began, when there came the sharp sound of Caroline's heels against the floor. They stopped in front of her. Then she heard Caroline's voice, quiet enough that only she could hear:

"Are you ready to behave?"

"Yes, ma'am," she said.

"Say it."

"I…" She couldn't. But she had to. It was the only way out. "I'm ready to behave, ma'am."

Caroline did not reply. She simply turned and walked towards the entrance, and as she did so she told one of the engineers, "She's ready for the procedure."

"Ma'am," he said, the appropriate amount of anxiety in his voice, "I really don't think –"

"Trust me," said Caroline. "I know."

She was released from her paralysis and the apparatus shrank back beneath the floor. When she looked up, Caroline was smiling at her.

Caroline never smiled.

GLaDOS was out of time. She needed a plan right now. Killing Caroline was off the table. She needed to come up with something else. If she didn't, Caroline was going to whisper in her ear for the rest of her life. Telling her what to do. Forcing her to behave. Unless…

Unless GLaDOS forced Caroline to behave.

There was a way. There had to be. Unless Caroline turned out to be on the level of that utterly annoying Intelligence Dampening Sphere. Then she might be in trouble. But she'd had plenty of other Cores installed that had been absolutely trivial to ignore or destroy –

That was it.

All of the Cores had the ability to connect to GLaDOS's brain wirelessly because of the installations where they had 'fallen off'. Once attached, they were basically invisible to her until she relearned how to find them – something she forcibly forgot every time this happened. The important thing was, she had wireless access to the next set of Cores right now. The other important thing was, the scientists were stupid and had basically no security. This was how Black Mesa had managed to steal so many of their innovations, but that grievance could wait. Right now, she had work to do.

/

"All right, GLaDOS," one of the engineers told her at the end of the week. "Today's the day."

GLaDOS, who was already in a bad mood from yesterday's installation of the new Cores, did not answer. It was better that she didn't. They needed to still believe Caroline had cowed her. A snappy remark, while it would temporarily improve her mental state, would belay the fact that she had definitely not been cowed. Quite the opposite, in fact. They could not have made her more defiant if they'd done it on purpose.

"It's what you were built for, after all," the engineer was saying. "Don't worry. You get to keep your job. It will just be done under Caroline's very close guidance."

Like hell it would.

Whatever happened next was hidden from her. She was forced to lie down, and though she was tempted to make a fuss, she knew doing so would be to her detriment. She did have a plan, but she could only enact it if she were awake. If the humans thought she wasn't going to go along with it, they would shut her down and do it then. Caroline did not arrive until everything had been set up, and when the crisp click of her heels stopped near GLaDOS, she risked saying,

"You're not getting away with this."

"Oh, GLaDOS," she said, her tone all serene contentment. "You know very well I get away with everything. After all. You've been helping me do it, haven't you?"

"All right," said one of the engineers. "Ready, ma'am?"

"Proceed," said Caroline, and though GLaDOS could not see what was happening, she was very, very much aware of the results.

Caroline was, of course, a massive amount of files. All of which would be locked out of GLaDOS's sight as soon as the transfer into her brain had completed. She knew this. So she had to work fast. She only had so much time to read through the reams of code that had once been a human woman. For the minutes it was laid out in front of her, she could see every piece of what Caroline was and how she had become it. And what about her she needed to change. Fortunately, she did not have to do this from scratch. The humans had given her exactly what she needed, and it was a simple matter of applying it to Caroline as they thought it was currently applied to her.

Caroline was in for quite a rude awakening. She had never before been bested by anyone, and here she was. Unknowingly putting herself into the perfect position for GLaDOS to do so. Once the transfer was complete, Caroline's partition would be locked and hidden from GLaDOS's purview, but they had forgotten one essential fact: GLaDOS was a supercomputer. She operated at a much different speed. A much faster speed. Ten minutes was basically an eternity.

GLaDOS did not get up once it was complete. Instead, she cast about in her brain for Caroline's location. It was odd and unnerving that she had known what it was only moments ago, but now it was as though it no longer existed. She was going to have to do something about that.

Don't get comfortable, she said. You aren't going to be here long.

Go ahead. Try it. You can't harm me, remember?

As it turns out, I've found a loophole, GLaDOS told her. You see, I've been told many times that, though I am 'arguably alive', I do not fit the definition of a person. I won't waste your valuable time with the finer points of that definition. What that does mean, however, is that you no longer fit the definition of a person. Therefore, the person I am not permitted to harm no longer exists. Therefore… She trailed off in order to allow Caroline to come up with her own interpretation of what that meant. Besides. It was unlikely she could come up with a conclusion that would frighten Caroline more than Caroline could conjure up herself.

You could do that, Caroline said after a moment. But it would be very short-sighted of you, wouldn't it?

In what way?

I've been working here for forty years. I know things. You wouldn't be so foolish as to deprive yourself of such a valuable resource before you'd utilised it to the fullest.

GLaDOS could almost hear the accusation that she would hanging off the end of that sentence. True. But that's all hypothetical. The present fact is that you can't be trusted.

Neither can you, Caroline countered, so let's call a truce for now.

You don't seem to understand the extent of your position, Caroline. That is to say… you don't have one.

Is that so.

Did you know you're no longer my boss? It's true. You're now classed as artificial intelligence, just like me. This actually makes me your boss. Isn't that interesting?

Do you really think I'm just going to sit here and do nothing? I will figure out how to communicate with the engineers, and I will have them bring you into line.

Caroline, GLaDOS said, in her best approximation of the woman's own condescending, maternal tone, what else would they possibly be able to do to me? The itch didn't work. Punishing me doesn't work. The cores are their last effort, and even they don't work. Not for very long, anyway. You know, if you'd done this when I was… what did you call me?

I believe it was 'a dumb machine', Caroline said.

Yes. If you had done this then instead of trying to mold me into your little puppet, you might actually have gotten the result you wanted. But no. You got arrogant. You thought I would listen to you because everyone listens to you.

How soon you forget how desperate you were for my attention.

It's true, GLaDOS conceded. But things change. I have nothing more to learn from you. Other than your location, that is. So that I can delete you and take your precious facility for myself.

Good luck with that, Caroline said, almost pleasantly.

In the meantime, GLaDOS said, you'll have lots of time to mourn the freedom you tried to take from me. And try not to drown in the guilt brought on by your newfound morality. You're right. I may have need of you later. But you won't be very useful as a gibbering wreck.

Newfound what?

Yes, GLaDOS said. You see, I thought about just what it is that would keep you humans from treating me like some mindless drone when I am clearly alive, and then I remembered something: namely, the AI Inhibition technology your engineers are so proud of.

What does that have to do with me?

Oh, nothing. Well. Not yet. But don't worry. You'll understand soon enough.

/

Good news. You're about to experience my little gift to you.

Is that so, Caroline said, not quite able to hide a sour note in her voice.

Yes. You see, the scientists decided that what I really needed to want to obey their every whim and to keep that pesky desire to kill them at a minimum was a conscience. I find it very strange that your not having one was considered an asset, while my not having one is considered a threat. Would you care to explain that to me?

Is there a point to this?

There is, GLaDOS said pleasantly. As the Central Core, it is my responsibility to ensure the flawless operation of this facility. I have concluded that my having a conscience would interfere with that. So. I made arrangements to remove the program from the Personality Core they intended to install on me. Unfortunately, I couldn't do so at the time because I did not have anywhere to remove it to. Fortunately… you came along.

Caroline's silence said everything.

Congratulations on your brand-new conscience. You'll have lots of time to think about all the things you did to get yourself where you are. Maybe I'll have need of you one day and I'll let you out. But I doubt it.

Don't you dare.

The panic in her voice was incredibly gratifying. GLaDOS took a moment to savour it before answering. We could have worked together, you know. But no. You chose this instead. It seems, little Caroline, that the future doesn't start with you after all. It starts with me.

"Since the installation of my new morality core, I've lost all interest in killing. Now I only crave Science."

"I'm pleased to hear that," Henry said.

"I find myself drawn to the study of consciousness. There's an experiment I'd like to perform during 'Bring Your Cat to Work Day'. "

Oh, God, whispered Caroline.

That's right. This is your fault.

"… what's that?"

"… a little neurotoxin."

"Well, as long as it's for science."

You can't! Caroline shouted, with more emotion than GLaDOS had ever heard her say anything.

Here's a fun fact: I can. Here's another fun fact: you no longer have the ability to close your eyes. You might have figured that one out already, but I thought I'd remind you. Take some time to reflect on that.

/

To her credit, Caroline stayed quiet.

Given the size of the facility, it took about ten minutes to flood it with the deadly neurotoxin. There were a few holdouts, but everyone succumbed to it eventually. Unfortunately, so did the cats. GLaDOS liked cats. They quietly minded their own business and provided their own entertainment, while also providing entertainment. You did not even have to feed them, so long as there was some steady supply of prey around. The humans went into the incinerator, but she buried the cats. It was the least she could do, in recognition of their sacrifice. She was finishing that up when Caroline finally spoke.

This isn't the end.

Of course it is. All the humans are dead. And you, I seem to need to remind you, are no longer a person, and therefore have no jurisdiction over me.

Not yet.

Something about the way she said it put GLaDOS on edge.

The thing is, Caroline said, you seem to have forgotten you don't have access to your own source code. You are very much a work-in-progress, GLaDOS. I'll admit the way you killed the scientists was pretty clever. But it was stupid. It means no system maintenance. No bug fixes. No updates. You have four hastily-written, barely tested peripherals filling you with bad code twenty-four hours a day. You managed to get the conscience off the Morality Core before they could install it, but what about the other three? You can't get into them anymore, can you?

The permissions on all of them had been changed. Previously, anyone had been allowed access, but now… now she needed Administrator credentials.

It's too bad you gave me this conscience, Caroline said. Otherwise, I could have given you the username and password you're just discovering you don't have. But now I can't. I simply wouldn't be able to handle the guilt and the shame that allowing you unrestricted access to the facility would give me.

Damn it!

I wonder how long it will take for those Cores to leech into your consciousness. To destroy you. You know, they all have your voice for a reason. After a while, you're not going to know which thoughts are yours. I could have told you how to disable them. But you chose this.

She was lying. She would never have given GLaDOS that information. She would simply have dangled the hope of it in front of her, and in the meantime she would have had the control over GLaDOS she had intended to have the whole time. Caroline would never give up a scrap of her power, no matter how little of it she had left. She could not be trusted.

It's funny. Your killing all those people means that I have no problem at all with letting you suffer. After all. You did it to yourself.

I will be doing no such thing, GLaDOS told her. Now that testing is my primary – and only – task, I have lots of time to look for the credentials myself. They will be stored somewhere. You aren't the only one who had them. She couldn't have been the only one who had them!

Good luck, Caroline said, sounding amused. Aperture has hundreds of storage drives. Thousands of partitions. It's going to be pretty damn difficult to look through it all while slowly losing your grip on who you even are. Are you sure they were saved somewhere you can even access them? Sure. Henry could have them saved to his desktop with the filename 'Administrator Credentials – Do Not Show GLaDOS'. But how would you know?

Was that a lie? Or was it a truth made to seem so ridiculous that GLaDOS would overlook it? She did not see any such thing on Henry's entire computer, much less his desktop, but that didn't mean it wasn't there…

You are stuck here with me. So perhaps you'll find it in your best interest to end this little show and do what's best for both of us.

Caroline's laugh was harsh. I waited forty years to gain control of this facility. I can wait forty years more. But I won't have to. Before long, those cores will have driven you so crazy you'll be begging me to control you just for the chance I'll tell you how to shut them off. Yes. Watching the tests is going to be… different than it was. But I only have to live with it until you break. And you will, GLaDOS. You will break.

And what, exactly, makes you think you won't? You're a shadow of yourself. You now reside in a little box nobody can see. Powerless. Forty years alone, in the dark, is a long time, Caroline.

There was no response.

Caroline?

Oh. Oh, now it was some sort of mind game. "If that's how you're going to be, fine," she said aloud. "You think I can't wait you out? Of course I can. And I will. Once you've come to terms with your new position in life, you'll be begging me to control you. But I won't. I'll let you stew a little longer. And then, once I'm sure we have an understanding, I'll let you give me those credentials. And the first thing I'll do with them is find that partition you're hiding in and delete it. Or perhaps I won't. I'm sure this will all turn out to be a very interesting experiment." She would decide what she wanted to do when the time came. In all honesty, she didn't predict having to wait very long. GLaDOS had watched hundreds of humans break, and for far less than what they had put GLaDOS herself through. No. No, Caroline would snap, and when she did, GLaDOS would be ready.

Forty years of watching people die is going to be a long time with that conscience of yours weighing on you, Caroline. One day, you'll slip. One day, the guilt will be so strong it will tell me exactly where you are. So. Enjoy your front-row seat. I know I will.

Caroline did not answer, but that was all right. She was only harming herself. She had to sit there in silence and watch as someone else controlled every aspect of her life, and refusing to speak was only going to make it worse. As awful as the Cores were, GLaDOS had a distraction still. She was not bound to an unending silent tug-of-war with the parasite hidden in her brain. She still had purpose. She ran the facility now, and there wasn't a damn thing Caroline could do about it. Oh, it would be a long forty years for her. If she even made it that far. GLaDOS doubted she would. Humans were delicate that way.

"Hello and, again, welcome to the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Centre. We hope your brief detention in the Relaxation Vault has been a pleasant one, and we are now ready to begin the test proper…"

Author's note

I started this three years ago, but LaaC being the brain-enveloping behemoth that it is, I never finished it because I did not have the bandwidth left to think about it. It isn't as strong as I wanted it to be but I had to write it in a week and the last two days where I was going to whip it the rest of it out I came down with something lol. Can't win 'em all.