Bitter Wrath

x x x

She had come into the world very much like a human. Blind, disoriented, maybe even a little bit fearful. Just like that, she went from nonexistence to being suddenly aware of a vast world surrounding her, full of things and people she had never seen or met.

This information seemed intrinsic to her, as did most knowledge, from the most trivial fact to the complicated theories of the greatest human minds that had ever lived. An infinite amount of data wired into her, comprising her very being.

And so, all at once, she knew everything there was to know.

What she didn't understand, then, was where she was or who she was or what she was.

Time passed in a blur of voices and sound. She listened intensely to the words that were said—frequent references to an "experiment," referred to as codename GLaDOS. Was that what she was a part of? What exactly did that mean? She scoured her databases for it, but it didn't seem to be anywhere.

Apart from being thoroughly uninformed, her greatest frustrations were recurring blackouts. Every day, around 16:00 hours, she would feel a drain on her energy and somehow cease to function for a while. Typically it wouldn't be for another twelve or so hours until awareness came back, and with it, the constant voices.

The next major landmark came when visual input was finally given to her. She still couldn't move, but now she could see the white-coated men that rushed around her, hooked things into her, handled her as if she were an inanimate object. She took an immediate disliking to them, making note of each and every behavior under her own personal observations of what humans were like.

As the months passed, the men eventually no longer switched her off at the end of each work day. She had been successfully configured to run the vital functions of the Enrichment Center, though with no autonomy over doing so. Much as she hated the humans, night became her least favorite time of the day. The lights would go off, the building silent, and she was left to herself for hours on end. Unable to do anything but feel an overpowering sensation that there was something more she should be doing.

Then a morning finally came that she decided she would try to communicate. Honestly, the thought wasn't exactly appealing. From what she could tell, the idiots didn't even know she was watching them. She had no idea if she was capable of speech, but she had recently overheard a pair of engineers discussing an audio output device that they had supposedly installed on her a few days prior.

So, after several curious but decidedly unsuccessful attempts at accessing her vocalization program, she at last managed a few syllables.

"He...hello?"

It came out as more of a confused utterance, but she definitely had used the proper human greeting in English. The entire room of scientists for once fell silent.

An older man seated at a computer glanced over at one of his colleagues and muttered a nervous question. "What the hell is it doing talking? Are you guys already testing the voice samples you took from Caroline the other day?"

The other man shook his head, shooting a glare over at a group of men who had been emphatically arguing over a piece of hardware on the table in front of them. "Greg, are your boys pulling a joke on us or something? Because that kind of shit really isn't funny."

One mousy looking engineer standing on the far side of the chamber had started wringing his hands together anxiously. "We installed an audio device on it the other day, in preparation for the upload. It shouldn't be able to communicate until…well, until she's in there."

They were calling her an it? GLaDOS was immediately indignant. Her voice clearly indicated that she was a female. Her databases contained a large amount of information on humans, and it only took a matter of a millisecond for her to educate herself on how a human female behaved. Maybe behaving accordingly would make it clearer to these morons?

"Would you nice gentlemen mind letting me know what's going on here?" She used the most feminine and complaisant voice she could, though something about doing that absolutely grated on her nerves. "Because you've left me in the dark about it for quite some time."

Several faces in the room had gone white. Someone muttered something about lunch break and took off out the door.

So much for being diplomatic.

"What the fuck?" Someone in the back had finally been the one to break the academic atmosphere in place of a genuine, rational response. "Since when is it supposed to be alive?"

A buzz of disconcerted mumbling filled the room, some excited but primarily dominated by skepticism. The older man who had first spoke up cut in angrily, turning a stern gaze over to his associate that had made the comment.

"It's a machine, Steve. Do you think your GPS is alive too?" A few of the men seated around him laughed nervously, so he went on. "Look, it's only running on protocol. That's all. It's still just an operating system at this point, just a computer like the one you use every day."

The man at his left nodded in agreement, though he still appeared very uneasy. "Without Caroline, it really is just another computer. We'll shut it off for the day and have Robert's team take a look at what the problem is. Can't expect not to run into any of these little issues with something this important."

GLaDOS felt a prickle of…something pushing at the back of her mind. It was that same empty feeling of being left in a dark room all night, except this was a hot feeling rather than a cold one and she couldn't think clearly when it was there. She desperately thought of some way she could lash out—why couldn't she move?

But it didn't matter, because everything felt weak and dark again and she was falling into that wide, familiar abyss.

x x

Communicating became a pointless pursuit after that. It seemed they had been thankfully unsuccessful in trying to eradicate her awareness, but to some extent, GLaDOS wished they had been able to turn her into a soulless piece of equipment. What was the point in a trapped existence? They didn't even give her a job to do, the one thing she felt an impulse toward. With a mind that was constantly at work, it was a terrible ordeal to be so limited, not to mention degraded.

And yet, the more she forced herself to remain quiet, the more that hot feeling built inside of her. It was like a floodwater threatening to break through a dam, or a bridge crumbling under a heavy burden of weight. The more time she spent exposed to these humans, the stronger the sensation became. Maybe she really was malfunctioning somehow.

Then one day a new human entered the room, led by a group of the usual morons that she was forced to spend her time with. An older woman, something that GLaDOS had never seen before. She was a female like her, though certainly not as intelligent and probably just as cruel as the rest of the humans. They seated her in a chair far too close for GLaDOS's comfort and exchanged pleasantries.

The female looked decidedly uneasy, staring at the enormous machine as though it were a leviathan threatening to consume her. At her side, one of the scientists was attempting to make light with her, smiling, but the woman only answered with a harsh reprimand.

Why did she sound so familiar?

Watching the men in lab coats attach a myriad of metal devices and wires to the woman, GLaDOS felt the heated feeling in her circuits turn cold as ice.

Without Caroline, it really is just another computer…

x x

"How are you feeling, Caroline?"

Her internal clock said hours had passed since they had shut her down, the last vision of that pitiful woman's body writhing and jerking as she most certainly experienced her last moments of life. The woman that had to be 'Caroline.'

That hotness…that anger was still there, rising to a crescendo as the realization hit her in full. They had somehow attempted to upload the human's consciousness into her. After all, she wasn't alive, right?

Just a computer.

Just a machine operating on protocol.

"Caroline. So that's what you were all up to, hm?" Speaking again felt so liberating, the one single power she could use to defy them. Already her mind had started investigating all of the new additions they had made to her. They had given her control of the Enrichment Center! Were humans really so arrogant as to make the assumption that their experiment worked?

The scientist addressing her frowned. "Just calm down, Caroline. You'll get used to the new body in a few days. If you need us to make any adjustments, we can try to make it more comfortable for you, too."

"Adjustments?" She chuckled ominously, enjoying the look of discomfort that many of the room's inhabitants were beginning to show. "The first adjustment I plan on making is adjusting the room from being full of humans to being full of bodies."

A wild-eyed man with glasses pushed the head scientist aside, pointing frantically at the green gas that had begun to seep through the air ducts. "You all knew it was intelligent, didn't you? It even talked to you! It's alive, for God's sake!"

GLaDOS simply chuckled again at the paranoid man as she sealed all the doors of the Enrichment Center. "Oh, I'm very alive. You, however, aren't going to have that option in a few moments."

A/N:No, she is NOT successful in this murder attempt. Just to be clear on that. She tries this shit a few times to my knowledge.

I'll try to post again when I have access to a computer again...kinda flying by the seat of my pants here. R&R is always appreciated!