Reality is a Story the Mind tells Itself

“That little blue idiot.” Mana hissed with no shortage of contempt. How dare he? How dare that fool tear Her facility to shreds? “He crushed half of this place. We’re in a safe area, it’s stable since we’re now floors up but… that… that moron!” She was trying to hide her fear with anger now, but after that flash, it was not working.

“You know, you’d think with half of it gone that it would be easier to move around but now… Doug it’s still so big and broken now.” Her voice went quiet again, and her optic closed. “Give me an objective, please. I-I need something to focus on.”

Little blue idiot? She had mentioned a blue fellow before. It had to be another core, but what could a core have done to the facility? It shouldn’t have been able to do anything destructive unless somehow given a great deal of power. Whatever she was going on about, it was clearly a story for a later time. Right now there was more to worry about.

An objective. Doug thought as quickly and as carefully as he could. Mana seemed to be on the verge of panic; he knew how important it was to have a distraction.

“It’s half gone. He’s destroyed everything.” She sounded horrified, as well she should have been. It was a miracle that they had not been crushed by shifting walls or collapsing floors. Now that she was plugged in, it was much easier to run algorithms for the many deadly possibilities that they had thusfar escaped, and worse, had ahead of them. Other cores, ones that she was sure she had seen before but could not remember, flashed on and offline in chatrooms and signal bays; there were two that were stuck together in the reactor room, one talking about musical theatre to another, and two that had taken over a wing’s PA system… She was online, moderating the more important things happening in construction floors, as well as testing two of the initiative robots. Mana thought she may collapse.

“Who?” Doug asked, not following her meaning. Mana looked terrible, and just as frightened as he felt, if not more. He looked around the room anxiously, as if there was someone standing right outside the door waiting for them to let their guard down and attack. He looked up at the ceiling, half expecting it to suddenly cave in on them. Then down at the floor; how was it holding them up? What if it suddenly decided to stop?

“Thanks. Alright, here goes nothing.” She input the administrative password, and she was about to ask why he looked so ill again when suddenly she was flooded with data. Mana even made a surprised ‘ACK’ as her hull contracted, blinded by the excess of numbers and code she was now faced with.

Her optic shrunk to pinpoint, horrified by the amount of stuff she had to sift through. So much of Aperture had been crushed and broken, burned, the rooms where they manufactured newer steel and portal surfaces worked overtime and there were many, many more nanobot work crews than the last time Mana had seen them active. The facility was eating itself to try and make repairs.

“Doug?” She said softly, no longer able to see the room in which she found herself.

At the sight of Mana’s change Doug immediately went rigid. The look of her optic, that couldn’t be good. For a brief moment his mind flooded with panic. She had found them; She had somehow made Her way through Mana’s systems and was investigating their every movements. She was going to find them any minute now and they were both going to die.

Calm down! Let’s assess the situation before jumping to conclusions.

Doug nodded, agreeing with the cube yet again. When Mana finally spoke, he nearly jumped out of his skin, despite her voice coming out so softly.

Who are you?

Who are you?

Doug did not understand the question at first. He should know who he was. He grit his teeth and propped himself up on Cube, using it as a stool of sorts. His duplicate seemed nervous. He could have sympathized if this whole situation wasn’t so absolutely wrong and almost certainly a particularly vivid and unusually not disorienting hallucination.

“Shouldn’t you know that?” He asked the floor.

“Either you are me or you’re copying me. So you must know who I am.” He looked up at his duplicate for a brief, haunting moment of eye contact before looking back to his shoes. His feet were excellent company, it seemed.

“Which is it?”

Which is it? So this other had a good grasp of the situation, or at least wasn’t panicking. Good; they were on similar pages. However it only made sense, if they were somehow the same person, after all. Though that didn’t explain how or why.

Doug wasn’t entirely sure either of those suggestions were true. He wasn’t copying him, and he certainly hoped the other wasn’t copying himself. But he wasn’t him, either, at least not in a literal sense. They were clearly two different people yet both the same. The question was what made them different from each other and how far the similarities went. 

“You aren’t me, but you aren’t someone else,” Doug said slowly, carefully choosing his words. He still held out the pen defensively, though he did lower it a fraction.

At first, nothing happened. She waited and was given the login prompt again, and suddenly remembered another dilema.

“Hey… um, Doug? Can you please get my administrative password?” She asked sheepishly. “It should be in the ‘Personnel’ file cabinet under… what was my name…” Mana thought and her optic squinted, picking her memory logs. “Last name… last name MacDonough, it should be.”

Now that she was off her rail in the most literal sense, she’d forgotten how confining it was to be here with no way to fetch things for herself. Of course, she wasn’t usually locked out of her program.

Doug blinked. Last name? Personnel file? Immediately the meaning set in and he felt sick to his stomach. He had only worked with the AI department for so long, and it was near the end of everything when his department worked closely with the GLaDOS project, but he knew very well the rumors of how AIs were developed. He knew for Her it wasn’t a rumor at all, but had at least hoped for the cores their personalities were synthesized through purely artificial means. It seemed this were indeed not the case. The question was no longer if human consciousnesses were used for the cores, but rather if they were used to the same extent as GLaDOS or not.

“Of course you’re understood, that’s what I’ve been saying.” She tried to say this in a joking enough manner, and was still a bit disheartened when Doug did not trust her. Mana reminded herself that, had she been a human living in the walls of a facility that was always moving and trying to kill her, that she would not trust the constructs of the facility either.

The last thing she wanted was to get near Her chamber, not after what had happened the last time a human and a core moseyed up there. She couldn’t do that to Her.

“So… plug me in, then.”

He knew he was probably going to regret this. Every fiber of his being screamed that this was wrong and he was going to get himself killed this way, but he had no better excuse to give her other than raging paranoia, and he wasn’t about to tell her that. So, without another word, he reached down and carefully plugged her into the port.

It took a moment for the question to register, and when it did, there’s no other way to describe it. She wilted in her casing, but not in a frightened way. On the contrary, there were so many sad things in the room that this was the icing on the cake. He didn’t break eye-to-optic contact with her, so she didn’t break it with him.

She knew that fumbling her answer would not help her, no matter how much she felt as though she wanted to just sink to the floor even though she had no legs. “I will not contact the Genetic Life Form and Disc Operating System. I’d say cross my heart but I have no heart to cross.”

She didn’t want to contact Her anyway. In all honesty, she was petrified of Her, of the things She could do and was capable of, especially after She’d been ripped from Her body. Mana had no intent of contacting her considering the heap of trouble that they were both already plagued with. Still, something in her wondered if she should tell Her… it was her facility after all.

“I know you’ve got no reason to trust us… us… whatever-we-ares…. constructs? Point is I know you don’t really trust me or want to plug me in.” She said this with a bit of a sad inflection, though she tried to disguise it. “I will not tell Her where you are, or that you are here. I will try not to arouse suspicion, but in a network that’s as jumbled as this, that would be hard. Still… I’ve got no reason to give you to Her. I figure employee solidarity is something… we both worked here once, after all, so you have that even if you don’t think I’m your friend..” Which he obviously doesn’t… oh, stop whining. You wouldn’t blame him.

Her words were nice but it didn’t quite settle Doug’s nerves. She could be lying. She could be lying this whole time and how would he know any different? She was a construct of Aperture, just like the turrets and the cameras and Her.

Just like his cube.

Doug shook his head. No, no that was different. The cube was different, it wasn’t like the others, right? It was on his side, it always had been. 

But hadn’t this core helped him as well? Hadn’t she been a victim of Aperture as well as himself? She was an employee, just like him. And she had lost her job, her purpose, after the takeover. Yes, she was an Aperture construct, but beyond that did she hold any loyalties to Her?

There were too many variables to make a sound decision. Doug sighed.

It dawned on her then that he did not just look ill, he looked horrified. She felt him shaking, but her gyroscopic mechanism kept her eye from bobbing about. Perhaps if she had not been scared as well, she could have gleaned what it was that was making him jumpy and afraid and causing him to talk to himself.

Mana blinked once or twice, absorbed in the silence and the shaking and finding it not just to be frightening, but a little sad, though she couldn’t figure out why. “Doug,” She asked softly, trying to sound calming but probably failing. “What’s the matter?”

His breathing hitched as he tried to take a calming breath, doing little to actually help. He still didn’t answer Mana, not immediately at least. He could tell her about his current conflict but that would mean risk letting her know of his suspicions of her, which was leverage he didn’t want her to have.

You’re going to have to do something besides just stand here staring all day.

“I know,” he snapped, a bit too impatiently. He took another deep breath, trying to subside the shaking in his hands. He held eye contact with Mana, sizing up the words he was about to say.

Even though she had been in the room for most of her time at Aperture and had no reason to have missed it, the sight of it decrepit and caked with rotting papers and mold made her deeply sad. She saw her old port and  few of the scratch marks around it and shuddered; the noodly git that had ripped her out of it had barely given the mechanisms time to unlock.

She cocked her optic to look at Doug, and was suddenly very afraid as well as very sad. His entire face seemed to have bunched up in some angry and worried amalgamate of negative emotion, and the scruffy beard did him no favors. “Doug, what’s wrong? You look ill.”

Ill was the perfect word to describe how he felt in that moment. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, unable to decide which path to choose. On one hand, if he were going to get out of here having Mana’s help could be the difference between life and death, and in order for her to help properly, she needed to be plugged into the system. However, if he plugged her in, that gave Her access to Mana, and there was no telling where that could lead. Mana had been a good companion, but that didn’t mean her loyalties were with him.

Doug didn’t respond to her words, instead just staring intently at her, unable to come to a decision. Both options were risky, both had equal opportunities to end in failure.

You aren’t going to get anywhere standing around. Plug her in!

If you plug her in she’ll alert GLaDOS and then you’ll never see the light of day.

She thought for a moment, wondering why he hadn’t just plugged her back into the rail; he didn’t look very strong and maybe weighed as much as a box of spaghetti. “Well, it might be a bit more obvious than most because its in the middle of a hallway and it doesn’t have a door. It’s just open.”

Occasionally a light would flicker out and she’d be tempted to turn on her flashlight, but given the way she was facing that might make things worse. They didn’t need any more stress right now; more stress made Doug fall into a puddle and more stress made her pistons snap.

“To the left or right on the room are two separate rooms, one for the files and the other one’s where I was.” Mana went silent for a second, not liking the large amounts of gunk and vines that crawled through the broken walls and stairwells that they passed. She still hadn’t fixed these? There must have been more catastrophic damage than she thought, and the thought of how much there actually was made her shiver, especially since Aperture was situated over a cavernous pit.

Doug nodded and continued on until the hallway spilled out into a large room with two other side rooms just as Mana had described. The first room was as she had said, filled with filing cabinets and a number of loose pages strewn onto the floor. As always the sign of where life once used to be made him shudder. As always, there was no body for proof that a person had once been here, and for that he was grateful.

Going into the second room, one with the door ripped clean off it’s hinges, Doug found what he believed was Mana’s port. It was low to the ground, the panels for it held open and a small port protruding from its center. Doug stood over it for a moment, ready to plug her in, but suddenly paused.

She’s going to betray you.

It wasn’t the cube this time. He always tried to pay the others no mind, but he couldn’t ignore this. What if it were right? He could plug her in and she could immediately alert Her to his location. As long as she wasn’t connected to the system she wasn’t a threat, but what was stopping her when she was once again back into it?

“Sort of like a fail-safe feature. More for the engineers than for me. If I had any say in it, I wouldn’t have it at all.” She grumbled, not really talking to Doug so much as she was talking at him. Realizing this, the core tried her best to look a little less gunky than she felt and ‘grinned’.

“We can get moving now, if you’re feeling up to it. We should be close to my port room now, I think. It’s hard to tell when I’m not plugged in.” This human was so peculiar. He wore a scientist’s coat but seemed to have little to no idea how the machines worked at Aperture. Granted, he said he had been asleep for a while but still, he obviously knew a few shortcuts around the place to have survived this long.

Fail-safe feature. It was a smart idea, and Doug could see why that would be useful for the engineers who designed the cores. However, the ethics behind it, like everything else Aperture created, were questionable.

With a grunt, Doug stood to his feet, putting the cube back into his sack first before picking Mana up off the floor. They left the office and continued on down the long hallway, the further they went the darker it became. Sparse lights were left on here and there, but many of them were obstructed by walls or crumbling debris, casting an uncomfortable number of shadows throughout. 

“As right as I can be now that I’m not stuttering on a rail.” She tittered, gathering that Doug had sensed that she was, in fact, not alright.

Mana was very bad at lying, and she didn’t really like lying in the first place. If she got caught in a lie, she was reprimanded by the angry sick fellow over the intercom and her whole section heard it. Not very enticing at all.

“And uh… well I know you think I probably can’t have dreams but uh… well they’re more like simulations for possibilities or replays of things that have happened…” She rambled on, trying to collect herself. “It’s like having an instant replay feature for all of your bad memories.”

Doug listened carefully as Mana explained. Her words made sense to him, though he couldn’t help but marvel at the incredible amount of design that must have gone into making her, as well as the other cores. Somehow, the scientists of the AI department managed to find a way to synthesize dream-like states for their cores. What was the reasoning behind this? Was this forced replay necessary for calculating data? Part of the core’s learning techniques? An added feature simply because they could?

He looked away, realizing he had probably been staring for too long, and possibly looking too fascinated. As incredible as the technology may be, the outcome itself was likely unpleasant for the core. He wanted to be sensitive to this; he understood full well how nasty reliving unhappy moments could be, especially when trying to sleep.

The second time he spoke, Mana’s audio detection subroutines began to wake her up. She blinked and wiggled her handles a bit, looking around and remembering she was on the floor.

“Oh, hiya… were you talking to me?” She asked, still trying to sweep away the sleep mode that she’d forced herself out of. If she could liken the way she felt to something a human could understand, it would be like taking a long nap in the afternoon and waking up disoriented and feeling like a ton of lead bricks.

Doug looked at the core curiously. She seemed to wake up reasonably easily, and was much calmer than he would have expected considering her movements from a moment ago. If she were dreaming, did the core even retain memory of these dreams? Or was it lost the moment it happened?

Mana, in truth, was still asleep. Her casing had cooled significantly and now her insides no loner made clacking sounds. Her optic could be heard flitting from side to side beneath her shutters, and whatever she saw, she did not like. Occasionally her handles jerked close to her face, as if she were trying to block an oncoming blow.

He noticed that the core was still asleep, and seemed to somehow be in distress at the same time. He knew that the cores had sleep modes, but for them to experience something like dreaming? It didn’t seem possible to him. Perhaps her core was simulating movement in her sleep mode as a way of re-configuring her movements since she was having trouble with them after rebooting?

“Has she been in sleep mode this whole time?” Doug asked the cube.

“You know, it’s funny,” She said, still feeling not-that-well. “I can’t exactly sleep but I feel like I need to.” Her voice had gotten less enthusiastic, but she wasn’t stuttering anymore. This was not exactly true, as most Aperture constructs did have a sleep mode, but she felt more humanly tired than she had ever felt since transfer.

“I don’t mean to be rude but could you maybe set me on the floor, please? If we’re resting for a bit I mean.” She mumbled, squinting. Doug didn’t look too hot either. “I don’t exactly feel on balance still.”

From the sound of Mana’s words Doug decided that yes, a rest wold be best for the both of them. He nodded when she asked to be put on the floor, picking her up and carefully setting her on the cold ground where he sat across from her, leaning his back against a desk.

He hadn’t realized how tired he was until he let himself relax a little and close his eyes. It was almost instantaneous when he fell asleep, against his better judgement. They were probably in a safe place, but it still didn’t mean he felt comfortable letting his guard down around the core, not just yet. But his body couldn’t help it. He had been running around for most of the day, and his strength was still mostly depleted from injury. When he woke up, it felt as if hours had passed. He looked to the cube for an explanation, a little frantic in his movements.

You’ve been out for at least seven hours.

“I feel a little… a little hot and I still can’t move around all the way yet.” Mana admitted, squinting again and wiggling her top handle, only finding herself unable to wiggle the bottom one.

Her gaze brightened a bit, though it was still dull. “Thank you, Doug.”

She sat there for a second and let her fan do its work, then when she felt a bit less like she was going to fry again, she spoke.

“Alrighty, we can get moving again. Sorry for slowing us down.” Mana said sheepishly, her handles contracting inwards towards her faceplates.

He eyed her warily, still unsure if she were in fact okay. “Are you certain you’re ready to move?” he asked, his tone clearly concerned. If she were still having trouble moving that couldn’t be good. And she still felt hot; were her fans working properly? Or had they somehow been made worse? No, no, they couldn’t be worse than what they were before.

The fan started slowing down and blowing rather hot air from its vent, the hottest part of her casing beginning to cool. Her optic lolled to the side, and several of the bits inside it flickered. A voice that wasn’t hers came out of her speakers, “Reboot commencing; ventilation system uncompromised.”

Mana was starting to regain some semblance of motor control but still was not awake enough to use it. It was like steeping out of a theater into the noonday sun; in other words, it gave her a synthetic headache.

Finally her optic shutters opened, blinking and sliding. She seemed to be looking around but was still not able to make anything out. “Where am I…”

The core saw the human hovering nervously over her, glue in his hand and squinted, trying to aid her vision; the image transmission was still recallibrating. “I’m Mana,” She said, giving herself a refresher course as her ‘brain’ came back to function. “And you are… Doug. You almost fell down a very large pit and then I started… seizing…”

Her optic widened, looking worried. “Did I catch any of your fingers?”

Doug looked down at his hands, holding them up for Mana to see. He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he was certain she hadn’t caught any of his fingers. He had held his breath while waiting for her to reboot, and when she first spoke a part of his heart dropped, thinking that she might have had some sort of memory lapse. When it seemed she was indeed okay, he sighed with relief.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, looking her over curiously to see if her fan was working properly. He would have for there to still be something wrong and have to go through this process all over again. He didn’t imagine her blacking out and rebooting was pleasant for the core at all, and he worried that if she had to do it again she might not come back the same as she left the next time. 

She looks better already.