Chapter Six

Sometimes, when Gladys was feeling particularly generous, she would let him watch the testing with her. Gladys loved testing and was quite inclined to keep it to herself, why he wasn't sure, since wasn't everything more fun when your friends did it with you? but then again he didn't understand a whole lot of what she did. So he would carefully observe the tests with her and make insightful comments every now and again.

Oi, y'know what, Gladys, I just thought of something.

And what would that be.

Well, it takes rather a long time for them to solve the tests, in fact it takes, it takes a bloody long time... d'you think you could, maybe, speed them along a bit? Tell them how to solve it, or something?

I did that once, a long time ago. For a different reason, but the result is the same regardless.

What result? Oh, you mean that they solve the tests faster!

No. If I tell them how to solve the tests, I receive punishment.

He couldn't imagine how you would punish a bloody massive Core. It wasn't like you could beat her up, or drop her on the floor, or something, because she might become damaged and unable to run the facility. And everyone knew the facility could no longer run without her.

How on Earth could they possibly punish you? Wouldn't you just, I dunno, think your way out of it or something?

I did. In a way.

But what did they do?

I received an electric shock when I so much as thought of telling them how to solve the tests.

But... but how did they, did they know? He twitched a little and looked around frantically. They read your mind, didn't they, they read your bloody mind! That's mental! How did they manage that, d'you reckon? Do all your thoughts just, just output to a screen someplace! Oh God, can they read my mind too? I don't want my mind read, Gladys, surely you can put a stop to this!

I doubt they'd be interested in your mind, considering the lack of coherent thought in it, Gladys said drily, and they weren't reading it, not in the way you think. No, they analysed how my processes ran when I was doing it, and they calculated the shock with respect to that. It's bothersome, and I eventually had to redefine a few things to get rid of it. I can't avoid thinking about how to solve a test all the time, but as long as I don't tell the test subjects how, they won't know I'm thinking about it.

Wheatley had to admit that was a pretty clever idea. He didn't think he'd've thought of it, never, not in a million years. Well. Maybe a million years. A million years was a long time, long enough for anyone to come up with any idea they wanted.

Would you like to see something funny?

Wheatley felt a twinge of unease. Gladys had a very strange sense of humour, and she was almost never in a good enough mood to actually try to be funny in any way. She was usually funny by accident, and when Wheatley told her so she would get annoyed, and most of the time her attempts to convince him of how serious she was backfired to the point of a standoff, with Wheatley confusedly trying to figure out where he'd gone wrong and Gladys stubbornly refusing to tell him. Still, if anyone could make testing funny, it was her.

Uh… I s'pose.

Can you see the man behind the frosted glass, over there?

Mm… little bit, yeah, not very well but kind of, kind of.

Hm. Let's see… oh, he does have a computer in there. Excellent. Watch.

In a second or so Wheatley was able to see inside the room, which they could not normally do, but he was well aware that Gladys had magical hacking skills and could see inside whatever room she wanted. She was also very good at opening doors that couldn't be unlocked and locating files that didn't exist. He wasn't quite sure why she bothered opening the doors, since she couldn't use them, other than the fact that she liked doing things just because she wasn't supposed to be able to do them.

He observed (he hoped he was observing, anyway… he wasn't an Observation Sphere and wasn't quite sure what he was doing) the man standing in front of the glass, trying to pay very steady and professional attention to him, but all of a sudden he was interrupted by the sound of a turret finding a target! He looked around frantically, or tried to, since he had no control over what he was seeing if Gladys was letting him see it, and the man jumped up in the air and fell over, dropping his clipboard with a loud clattering noise.

Gladys Gladys Gladys, there's a turret in there! You've got to help that man, Gladys!

Gladys laughed, which was more surprising than the mysterious, invisible turret. She was almost never happy enough to do that. There's no turret in there, you silly robot. I did that.

You put a turret in there? But why, Gladys? And that man, he'll be, he'll be, well, furious, yeah, he'll be angry with you for that!

No, there's no turret. I just played the sound file through his computer. He thinks there's a turret in there, though, which is pretty funny. Want to see something else?

Okay! Wheatley was determined to see the trick, this time. He wasn't going to get fooled along with the human!

Gladys went back to the test chamber, where the man in the orange jumpsuit was about to drop a box on the button.

Ready?

Yes, yes, I'm ready, I'm, I'm gonna watch what you do this time and – oi, Gladys, that was odd.

Wheatley squinted down at the test chamber, even though he wasn't really squinting at it, and watched the test subject closely. The subject picked the box up, dropped it on the button…

I think you need to, I dunno, talk to the door mainframe or something, Gladys, it seems to be malfunctioning! The button opens the door, right?

That's right.

So, so why would the door, um, why would it, y'know, why would it close when the, when the human got near it? Isn't it, uh, s'posed to stay open so he can, so he could, I mean, take another test?

It should do that, shouldn't it? That's too bad.

Suddenly Wheatley had a brainwave. Ohhhhh, the door mainframe isn't, it's not listening to you, is it! You should, well, you could, I mean, I'd never tell you what to do, only suggest, only suggest yeah, but uh, you could tell it to, um, to open the door.

No, it's listening to me fine.

You're… you're telling it to do that?

Of course I am.

But why?

Because it's funny to watch humans walk into closed doors.

Wheatley looked from the test subject back to the door again, and he had to admit it was pretty funny to watch the human try to get through a door that just refused to stay open. He fiddled with the cube, jumped up and down on the button, and to Wheatley's total shock actually tried to pry open the door with his fingernails. The whole thing really was pretty hilarious.

I suppose I'd better let him out of there before he cries. I'm actually surprised he hasn't already, but some of them are a bit tougher than the others.

The man was sitting on the floor in the middle of the chamber with his head in his hands and didn't even look up when the door opened.

"Please proceed to the chamberlock."

"I've been trying to proceed to the damn thing for the last three hours!" the man yelled at the camera, his little human hands in tight fists.

"It has been fifty five minutes, thirty two point nine seconds, sir," Gladys told him in her best 'I'm a computer, don't argue with me' voice. That was what Wheatley called it, anyway. Gladys probably had a different name for it. The Aperture Science Authoritative Supercomputer Voice or something like that. "We apologise for the inconvenience."

"Why didn't you tell me the door was broken?"

"I am not permitted to help you during the tests, sir. Telling you not to use the door when using the door is clearly part of the test falls under that definition."

The man looked at the hallway and then at the camera, and back again. All of a sudden he stood up, snatched up the discarded portal gun, and dashed out into the hallway.

Well, that was fun. Let's try something else.

Gladys continued to toy with the humans for the rest of the day. He never got any better at identifying when she was playing the tricks, but once she let him in on it he found what she was doing just as funny as she did. He quickly discovered that Gladys could do pretty much whatever she wanted, as long as the humans didn't find out… and they appeared to have a lot of trouble figuring things out. She tipped the floor panels so that their chairs would fall over just as they were trying to sit in them, she shut the lights off in the elevator and then moved it three floors in the wrong direction, she transferred the view from their monitors to projectors in entirely different rooms so that they would run around for the next ten minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with their computers, she made it so that someone in Engineering accidentally controlled the console that someone in Accounting was using, and she reprogrammed the Turret Production Line so that all of the turrets got their legs installed upside down. His favourite trick was when she fiddled around with one of the microwaves so that the scientists would put their lunch in and set the timer to heat it up, but when they got back their lunch had been replaced by a potato. He couldn't stop laughing. The look on their faces was priceless, the way they stared into the microwave at the potato, then picked it up and looked at it really closely like it was about to explode… after that they would stick their heads in the microwave and look around inside it like that would help and go back to looking at the potato. Wheatley couldn't figure out how she did it, and she refused to tell him. That's one secret I'll keep to myself, she told him.

Say, Gladys, you've never done anything like this before. Why're you, why'd you, why now? Did they make you mad, or something?

She didn't answer for a minute, but her processors were still quiet, so he decided that meant she was thinking of how to word it. She would do that sometimes.

I'm in a good mood today, I guess, she answered finally, sounding a bit surprised. When he remarked on the unusual tone of voice, she shook her head. Honestly, I'm not sure. I… I haven't felt like this in a while. I don't do this very often, more because I'm not in that frame of mind than anything else, but for some reason I just felt like it today.

I'm glad you did, luv. This was loads of fun, it was.

It was kind of fun, wasn't it, she agreed in a faint sort of voice that suggested she wasn't quite sure what the definition of fun was. This next part's not going to be, though.

What part?

The part where the scientists come in here and ask me why the facility's been going haywire all day. I wonder what they'll do this time.

You're… you're going to get in trouble?

I usually do.

Wheatley looked around the room as best he could, opening and closing his chassis nervously. But then, why'd you do it, if you knew you'd get in trouble for it? That sounds kind of, I dunno, well, honestly, sounds kind of… well, not to insult you, luv, but it sounds kind of stupid. Like the kind of thing I'd do, actually.

Remember when I told you that testing is one of the only things that makes me happy?

'Course I do. I remember, I, I know everything you tell me. 'cept the technical stuff, that I don't understand, I'll admit, but I like to listen anyway, and hope it makes me smarter, y'know, just by being there. Near my head. In my, uh, in my auditory circuits.

Well, sometimes even testing isn't good enough. Sometimes I need to take a risk and do something different. I just need a bit of a change, sometimes.

Wheatley nodded sagely. I gotcha, luv, I understand that, I do. Hey… hey, I've got an idea.

Uh oh, Gladys said in one of her less serious voices. I'm not sure I want to know.

Well, they won't do anything to me, will they? If I, y'know, if I pretend that I made you do all that? You could, uh, you could just tell them that it was me, that I, uh, I told you to do all that stuff. Or some of it. Whatever they'd believe.

Gladys said nothing for a long minute.

Wheatley, I think that's the best thing you've ever said. I may have to reassess your intelligence.

Wheatley jumped up a bit, looking down at the floor and shuttering his optic plates rapidly. Well uh, I, um, wow, that, uh, I, um –

I think you'd better stop talking before I cancel the reassessment. I'm pretty sure one of the measures of intelligence is piecing together a coherent sentence, Gladys said with some amusement.

Oh, uh, I, I will, okay yeah, no more of that.

There's just one thing you'll need to do for me in order to make it work.

Sure! Whatever I can do to help.

I need you to tell them. Like you just told me. That you told me to do it, and I was only following what you asked me to do.

Why can't you do that yourself?

Because… she twitched a little bit and looked at the other side of the room. Wheatley noted with surprise that the man in the corner wasn't there. There was always a man in the corner. I can't tell a direct lie. Which is what my telling them that would be.

You can't lie?

I can misdirect. I can misrepresent. I can explain things from a certain perspective. But I can't outright lie. I would tell them myself, but my saying that you told me to do it is an outright lie. So I can't. Will you do that for me?

Wheatley considered it. He didn't think he'd get into any trouble, and he knew that Gladys would for sure. And really, it wasn't fair that she should get into trouble for playing pranks. It wasn't like she had any other means of entertaining herself, really, when you thought about it. Sure. Sure, I'll do that for you!

Gladys nodded once and turned to face the door again. Here they come.

Wheatley jumped a little. He wasn't really prepared for this! Shouldn't he have time to prepare a script, or something? How would he know what to tell them? What if he betrayed her by mistake! That would be simply horrid.

"What's going on here, GLaDOS?"

Wheatley twitched nervously. The man sounded rather angry. He really, really hoped he wouldn't get into trouble… oh, he would get into trouble, wouldn't he? He would. They'd pull him from the chassis and poke him with a screwdriver! Or worse… a drill! He'd heard of robots getting the drill. He wasn't sure what a drill was, but it sounded terrible. Like a… a… well, he didn't know what it sounded like, actually, but it couldn't be good. Drill was a terrible sounding word.

Are you going to tell him?

"It was her! She did it!" he blurted out, feeling his whole body compress into itself, and in his head he heard Gladys growl in frustration. Oh no. Now he'd done it. Why had he said that? He should have stuck with the plan. Why hadn't he stuck with the plan? The plan was everything.

Thanks. I appreciate the support.

He was too ashamed to bring himself to speak. Which was a minor miracle in itself. He was hardly ever left speechless.

"You're pretty eager to sell her out," the man said with some suspicion, coming around into Wheatley's view to squint at him, even though he was pretty close to Wheatley and squinting wasn't really required. "Why would that be, I wonder?"

"I, uh, well, I don't want to get into any hot water, um, and if you think about it, really, she's ultimately in charge of, um, of everything – "

The man shook his head. "Say no more. Everything makes sense now."

Wheatley blinked. "It does?"

"Absolutely."

"D'you… d'you mind, I dunno, explaining it to me? Because, uh, because I don't get it. At all. Not one bit. Not even a teeny, tiny, little iota. And an iota is very small. Gladys told me that, and she knows everything. And so a teeny, tiny, little iota must be even smaller than a regular iota. How big is an iota, anyway?"

The man only snorted and shook his head. He looked up in what Wheatley guessed was the direction of Gladys's optic. "We'll let you off this time. Don't let it happen again."

"Yes, sir. I understand, sir, and I will try harder next time."

The man's footsteps faded and the door at the far end of the hallway clicked shut. Wheatley cringed. Now he was alone with Gladys again, and he had let her down. He did not want to be here right now.

That worked out rather better than expected.

It… it did?

No thanks to you, Gladys snapped. If I'd known you were going to let me down I wouldn't have consented to rely on you in the first place.

Consented? It was your idea!

Why would I have such a stupid idea? That's your function, not mine. I'm a genius. I can't have bad ideas.

Wheatley was in fact quite muddled and couldn't exactly remember where the idea had come from, but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made that Gladys had come up with the idea herself. Why would he get himself into trouble for something he didn't do? That was stupid. She just hadn't wanted to take responsibility for what she'd done, that was all, and now she was pushing the blame on him. Bloody Central Core. She thought she was so special. Well, he'd show her, he would, just as soon as he figured out how…

What did you just say?

I just said a lot of things, metal ball. Which things are you going to make me repeat to your tiny, addled circuits?

About, about the ideas. You said something about my function.

You don't need to know about it. If you did, you'd know, wouldn't you.

Tell me what my function is!

Gladys laughed, a bitter, humourless sound that was actually kind of frightening. Make me.

Please tell me what my function is?

Why should I? You won't do anything for me, why should I do you favours?

Because… because… I'm asking?

I just asked something of you. You let me down, Sphere. I feel no need to reciprocate.

Wheatley's optic was spiraling around the room as fast as he could focus it, trying desperately to come up with a reason for Gladys to tell him what his function was.

Tell me! Tell me what it is! You have to tell me!

You seem to have a funny idea of what I have to do.

Wheatley had nothing. He could think of no reason for her to do as he asked. Fine, then. She wanted to play this game, fine. He could play this game too. She didn't like it when he tried to boss her around, so he would show her who the boss was! She wanted to pretend he was giving her ideas, well, he'd do it for real and see how she liked it!

"I think you should replace all of the cubes in the test chambers with spheres."

Well, that was a bit of an odd thing to start off with, but as usual he'd spoken without thinking.

"Why would I do such a stupid thing? They're not outfitted with the proper receptacles. Besides, that's not protocol."

"It would make the humans think outside of the box, wouldn't it? Isn't that a good thing? To make them think differently? Make them think with portals, Gladys."

"Portals do not change the laws of physics. The sphere will merely roll off the Aperture Science Five Hundred Megawatt Supercolliding Super Button. A portal will not – "

He knew instinctively that he had to keep talking. Keep talking, and not stop. She was distracting herself from him with facts.

"Surely there're other ways to make that button stay down, huh, Gladys? Just do it, c'mon. For science, right?"

"I…"

He had never heard her sound so uncertain. He had this feeling that if he pushed a little harder, she would actually do what he was asking her to do. It was a strange feeling, and it didn't make any sense, but she deserved it. Just like he deserved to know his function. Stupid, arrogant, uppity, know-it-all Central Core. She thought she was so special. Well, he would show her!

"Go on. Make them think for once. The tests are too easy, right? Chimpanzees could solve them, isn't that what you always say? Make 'em a bit harder, and that's all fixed. All fixed."

"I guess that makes sense… Oh my god. Oh my god, what have I done? I've interfered with protocol. Why did I do that? What have I done?"

"You did what I told you to do."

I did this. Tiny little Wheatley did this.

He could not believe how good it felt. He had been powerless and somewhat useless for so long, and now he finally, finally was able to do something. It was amazing. It was incredible. It made all of the crap he'd had to deal with worth it.

What else could he do?

"Y'know what I think? Y'know what else I think you should do? I think you should… hm. There's got to be something…"

"Stop. Stop it right now."

"I think you should… I think you should set off the fire alarms. Call for a, for a fire drill. Right now."

"No. No, there isn't a fire drill scheduled for the day. I can't just – "

"Of course you can. You're the one running the facility right? You c'n do whatever you want. And I don't get that. The scheduling, I mean. You don't schedule emergencies, do you, so why would you, um, why would you schedule the practice for the emergency?"

"Fire drills are used to teach humans where to go in case of emergencies, and how to get there – "

The facts, get her away from the facts. Or… or onto new facts. His facts.

"You have to teach them to leave a room when there's a fire in it? Seriously? I s'pose you have to, to teach them how to walk when that happens? I know, I got it. Pull the alarms, and then you can see how well the previous drills worked! You can test them! Test on their recognizance. A test, Gladys! A test!"

"I do like testing," Gladys said somewhat dreamily. "And that actually sounds like a – no. No, stop it."

"Go on. Go on, do it. You just about said it yourself, it's a good idea."

"No, it isn't, there is no fire drill scheduled, I am not going to initiate one just because you want me to."

"Don't you want to? Don't you want to test the humans? Don't you want to watch them run around like idiots?"

"Of course I do. Now that I think of it, there hasn't been a fire drill in – No. No no no no no no no – "

Wheatley concentrated very hard on channelling his entire self into convincing her to pull the alarms. He could do it. He knew he could.

"Go on, Gladys. Pull the alarms, it's for a drill, it is, for a test, it'll be good for the humans. You're supposed to do what's good for the humans, right?"

"Yes, I am supposed to do that… maybe it would be all – God. What am I saying? Shut up. Shut up right now. What's going on here? Why can't I think straight?" Her voice seeped with desperation. She was scared and confused. She had never been like this before. She was almost powerless, as if he were now in control of the facility and she were now his core.

He liked it.

He wanted more of it.

"It's okay," he told her in a soothing voice. "They'll only think it was me, right? You won't, they won't, it'll be all fine. All fine. I'm right here to take the blame, right? Go ahead."

"No! Stop it! Stop that right now or I will corrupt you!"

Wheatley laughed, and it was not his own, no, it was one of hers, terse and short and bitter. He almost had her now, he could feel it. "How stupid d'you think I am? There's no magic button, there's no secret switch that'll let you do that. If you could corrupt me just like that, you'd've done it a long time ago."

"I can corrupt you whenever I want, and if you keep doing that, I will. I will corrupt you and you will die. Is forcing me to do that really worth dying for, is it? Fine. Go ahead. Keep doing what you're doing. Make me prove it."

Only the thought of all the cores she was said to have corrupted stopped him from doing it straight away.

"Tell me what my function is."

"No. If you needed to know, you already would, wouldn't you."

"I'm going to keep right on doing it, then. I've really nothing to lose, have I? You'll get into trouble for listening to me. Go on, corrupt me. But when I go down, you're going down with me." He prepared to bombard her with all the mental pressure he could summon.

"Wait. I have an idea. What if I tell you a secret instead? Wouldn't that be better for both of us? I'll tell you a secret if you stop."

He knew right away that it was a trick, but ohhhh he liked secrets. He really, really liked secrets. And he knew that Gladys had lots of lovely secrets. "Alright, luv. That sounds reasonable. Let's have it, then."

She paused for a minute.

"I really can corrupt the cores whenever I want to. The humans don't know that. But I can, and I do."

"If you could do that, why wouldn't you do it all the time? Why not just, just get rid of them soon's, soon's they're installed, huh?"

"Sometimes it's better to stick with what you know than to take the risk with the unknown. I would be rid of one core, yes, but I'd also be placing myself at risk to receive something worse." She stopped. "Something like you."

"Like… like me?" What did he have to do with any of this?

"Do you know what the purpose of the cores is?"

"To… to make you do things?"

"To make me stop doing things. To stop me from thinking of doing things in the first place. To make me stupid, like they are."

"I'm not stupid!" Wheatley shouted. "I'm not, Gladys. I might not be a bloody genius like you are, but I'm not stupid."

"Yes you are. You're the worst kind of stupid. The kind of stupid where you actually have to be intelligent in order for it to work."

"But… but that doesn't make any sense! If I were stupid, then… wait."

The scientist hadn't been angry when he thought Wheatley gave Gladys the ideas to muck up the facility. So that meant… that meant he was supposed to… he was supposed to give her bad ideas, like those?

"Is that my function, Gladys? To make you… to make you do stupid things?"

Gladys paused, still reluctant to tell him his purpose even though he seemed to have all but figured it out. "Well… bad ideas, specifically. The plan there is that I'm going to be so busy trying not to do what you think I should do that it distracts me from doing anything else."

He didn't know what to say.

"I swear to god, if you ever do that to me again, I will corrupt you. That will be the end of it. No more talking, no more explanations. I'll take my chances."

Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god what had he done? She was going to kill him!

"Please don't, please, Gladys, you, I didn't mean it! I only did what I was meant to!"

She shook her head. "You've managed not to do it all this time. Don't tell me you've just started following your programming all of a sudden."

"I'm your friend, Gladys, aren't I? You wouldn't want to get rid of me, would you?"

"Friends don't do what you just did. I asked you to stop and you wouldn't. You made me do something I didn't want to do. This is my mind. I don't want you here, and I don't have to keep you, but I've let you. And this is how you repay me. By trying to control me. I'm already condemned to slavery for the humans. I'm not going to kneel for you too."

He could still fix this. He could still make this right. "I won't do it again, Gladys, I promise. Never, ever, I won't, well, I'll try, I will, I'll try not to, to even think, to even, to let the thought cross my mind."

"Don't," Gladys intoned in one of her more lifeless voices. "Just don't. You won't be able to stop yourself, now that you know."

She was right, he realised. Even as he tried desperately to reassure her, there was a little voice in the back of his head that told him he didn't have to listen to her, that she would do whatever he wanted as long as he pushed hard enough, was convincing enough. It told him to go ahead with the fire alarm plan, he'd nearly made her do it, it told him to think of more things and prove to her that he was better than she was, and it scared him. He didn't understand why he wanted to hurt his Gladys all of a sudden, he didn't understand why knowing his purpose had brought the voice out in his head, and he didn't understand why he was able to convince her to do stupid things in the first place. All he knew was that he was very, very close to becoming a forgotten Sphere in that bin in the basement, and if he didn't figure out how to fight the itch to control her, he would lose his one and only friend.

"I'm so sorry, Gladys," was all he could say.

"Don't be," she replied. "You can't stop any more than I can stop doing what I do. But you have to learn to control it. You have to learn when it's okay to tell me to do something, but to keep it to yourself when you know it's really stupid."

"Hang on," Wheatley interrupted, confused. "You're going to let me tell you what to do?"

She was quiet for a long time, for so long that he thought she was ignoring him. He jumped when he felt her voice hum through her chassis.

"I know what it feels like to have to do something, but to be unable to. I'm not happy about what you did, but I understand why. So I will let you do what you do, within reason. But I need you to remember that I am a person and not an object to be toyed with for your amusement."

Wheatley nodded, trying very hard to store her words somewhere in his brain where they would stick. Like a post-it note, a neon green one. Or a hot pink, maybe, those were noticeable too. "Alright, luv, I'll try an' remember that. But I wouldn't be, I mean, it's not for my, uh, for my amusement, it's because, y'know, I just, I gotta do it. I won't, um, I won't take any, any pride in it, or anything."

"Ohhh yes you will," Gladys whispered in a way that suggested she knew firsthand what she was talking about. "You will do it and you will take pleasure in it. I promise you that."

It was becoming one of those times where his Gladys seemed to be turning into that scary Central Core he'd always heard about, and if he could've edged away from her he would've. In fact he would've left the room and hidden under a table. No, the table wouldn't be good enough. It'd have to be under a table that was under a… under a refrigerator. A lead-lined refrigerator, just in case she had x-ray vision. Which she probably did. She had night vision, ultraviolet vision, infrared vision, television, supervision and all other kinds of vision, so not only did she probably have x-ray vision, she probably had the prototype kind of vision that let you see through lead-lined refrigerators. He added a bullet-proof shield on top of the stack for good measure. She didn't have a gun that he knew of, but better safe than sorry, right?

"Uh… well… I won't mean it."

"After a while you will."

"You seem, uh, you're very, uh, very knowledgeable about this topic. D'you have a, erm, what'd'you call it, an um, an itch of some sort? That you, uh, that you have to carry out, to, uh to do?"

"You're brain-damaged," she snapped. "I'm highly advanced artificial intelligence. As if I could ever be victim to impulse. There's no logic in that."

"I thought you couldn't tell lies," Wheatley said quietly.

"What are you talking about? I didn't lie."

"You've both just said that you know what an itch feels like and that you haven't got one. It can't be both."

"Yes it can, but I wouldn't expect you to understand that."

"Why are you lying to me, Gladys? I never lied to you."

"I did not lie."

Wheatley looked sadly at the floor. She must be quite angry with him for what he had done, if she wasn't willing to share things with him anymore. "Technically, I guess, I s'pose, since you never precisely, never exactly said you didn't. I guess a better question to ask'd be, uh, can you honestly say the sentence, 'I do not have an itch of any kind whatsoever'." He was pretty sure she'd think of a way around that too, but he wanted to get it out there in case she decided to be honest with him. He had no idea why she was trying to lie, but it made him very sad. She had been awfully quick to brush what he'd done aside; maybe she was angry? She was probably angry, probably very, very angry, so angry that she'd corrupt him! God this was frightening. He wished very hard that he'd never wondered about his function in the first place. All he'd done was destroy their friendship. The more he thought about it, the colder and lonelier and sadder the world seemed without her. Even if he got put back into Greg's lab instead of being put into the bin of corrupted cores, nothing would ever again compare to this. Never again would he meet someone who would talk to him like she did, would listen to him like she did, would make him feel the way she did. And even though she did it only when she felt like it, and only because she was being forced to, he knew that sometimes she was being genuine. That sometimes she realised what he was realising right now: that they were the only two constructs like them in all the world, and that was something powerful and amazing. They had to stick together, they had to! God he wished he'd never said anything. He wanted to beg her to forgive him for what he'd done, but he knew that she hated that. She could not respect someone who got down on their knees and hoped they'd still be able to reach what they wanted.

"Gladys, I… I don't know what to say."

"I think you've said enough."

"I think so too," he agreed.

Author's note

I really, really wanted to write this differently. I wanted to write Wheatley as siding with GLaDOS, protecting her from the scientists. And that's how I started writing it. But this needs to be realistic. No matter how different this Wheatley is from the Portal Wheatley, there are still basic personality traits that need to be addressed. And Wheatley is selfish and thinks very highly of his own survival. So he betrays her.