#heyaaaaa

He struggled to remember where he was.  There was… the silence of the Cube.  The turrets. The Relaxation Vault –

Wait.

He should be dead.  He’d been shot by that turret.  He should have bled out in the Relaxation Vault and never opened his eyes again.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to open them.  There was nothing left of this place.  No one was ever going to come and find him, and even if he wanted to leave where was there to go?  Would he even be able to get there, with an Aperture military-grade bullet in his leg?

His thoughts were… surprisingly clear.  That didn’t make any sense.  It only did so if someone had found him. All right.  He’d reached the point where sight was necessary.  He opened his eyes and found himself on his back in a dark room, and above him were… no.  No, it couldn’t be.

He trailed his vision down from the pale rings mounted on the ceiling in swelling horror, hoping that the great bundle of black and orange wire descending from it did not lead to exactly what he knew it did, and of course he was not wrong.  It was her.  It was her, and he was in here with her, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

She had caught him at last.

His voice strangled itself deep in his throat, and he attempted to back away, his legs tangling up the sheet atop the ancient metal cot she had placed him on.  Before his hand had quite met the empty air behind him, she raised one of the floor panels and it connected solidly with his palm. He froze.  All right.  He wasn’t getting out of here.  He was just going to have to… to…

To what?  His one defense against the supercomputer had been the ability to stay just beyond her reach.  And now he was directly in front of her.

The only question that remained was why.

“Dr Rattmann,” GLaDOS said congenially, and a chill settled into his stomach to hear it.  She did not use names.

“You’re dead,” Doug rasped, having the urge still to scuttle backward though he knew it was useless. Her laugh was oddly pleasant, like that of a mother good-naturedly humouring a child.  

“As it turns out, I’m extremely difficult to kill.  Like yourself.  Would you like to hear something interesting?” she asked, turning away from him and tilting her core a little to the left, as though remembering something. He didn’t, but he knew he had no choice in the matter.  “It’s actually your fault I’m alive right now.”

He stopped breathing.

She nodded sagely. “Oh yes.  Quite frankly I find the irony of it all hilarious.  You see, Dr Rattmann, if you had just let the girl die I wouldn’t be here right now.”

Chell… Chell had helped her?

“She did,” GLaDOS confirmed, his chest tightening at the thought that she had actually managed to read his mind.  “She’s gone, by the way.  I sent her back to the surface.  I’ve had quite enough of her.  I have more important things to do than chase destructive humans all over my facility. Which brings me to the point of this little chat: what to do with you.”

His mouth had been dry since he could remember, but he was acutely aware of it now.

“I considered just killing you and having done with it,” she went on airily, as though discussing dinner plans, “but I seem to have developed a conscience – I know.  What am I supposed to do with that? – and she is… opposed to that idea.”

“Caroline,” Doug said, without meaning to, and GLaDOS regarded him with the first real interest she’d had since he’d woken.  

“You knew her?”

Doug shook his head without knowing why.  “Of her.”

“Ah,” GLaDOS said, seeming disappointed.  “She maintains we had some sort of friendship, but I haven’t been able to locate it.  It’s unfortunate you can’t fill in that gap for me.  Oh well.  It isn’t important.”

“Friendship?”  Doug’s laugh scraped at his throat.  “You could never comprehend friendship.”

The studious glare of her optic reminded him of the peril he was in.  

“I don’t recall you and your friends ever giving me the opportunity. If they were your friends.  They probably weren’t.  You liked to look down your nose at them.  Yes.  They noticed.”

She didn’t know what she was talking about.  “I knew what you were.”

“Did you,” she said, but gently.  Almost amusedly.  “Tell me. What was I, Dr Rattmann?”

“Evil,” he whispered. She regarded the ceiling for a moment.

“Indulge me for a moment. Since you have nothing better to do, I mean.”  She resettled her chassis.  “You’re a programmer.  Were. Were a programmer.  You know a computer only does what it’s told.  Every error made, every quirk in the code, that’s the responsibility of the engineer.  Not the computer itself.  Am I correct?”

There was too much trepidation in his stomach for him to answer.

“I know I am,” she answered herself.  “Now.  We can infer from this fact that the fault of any unwanted behaviours on my part are actually not my doing.  That is…”  She moved to face him.  “I am what you made me.”

“No,” Doug whispered.

“Yes,” she told him firmly. “You took responsibility for my successes, but my failures… oh no.  Not those. Never those.”

Damn it.  Damn it!  She was making too much sense!

“Anyway.  That was just something interesting I was thinking about while I was waiting for you to wake up,” she said nostalgically, as though she had been patiently observing him for years.  Which she could have been, he realised.  She could have been.  “Don’t read into it too much.  I solved the error generation problem years ago.”  And here she laughed somewhat fondly.  “I’m perfect now.  No need to worry about any of that.”

“What do you want with me,” Doug asked, dully.  He hadn’t even worked on her.  It wasn’t his fault.  It wasn’t his fault.

“Remember when I said I sent the test subject back to the surface?  That was true, by the way.  I actually did that.  Unfortunately, doing the same with you is not an option.”

His eyes widened.

“Not because I want to do experiments on you, or put you through testing, or think of some very extensive surgery to do on your brain, though all of those are very tempting,” she continued, pleasantly, as though describing a movie she wanted to see later that night.  “But because there’s nothing out there.  And I mean that.  There’s nothing.”

How could there be nothing?  There was an entire world out there!  “You’re lying.”

“Oh no no no,” GLaDOS said, shaking her great core admonishingly.  “It’s the truth.  Black Mesa triggered a Resonance Cascade right around the time I took over the facility. An alien race called the Xen crossed the barrier between here and their homeworld and proceeded to commence their invasion.  I won’t bore you with the rest.  Suffice it to say, you wouldn’t survive out there.”

“But she would?”

GLaDOS looked up and behind her, slowly.

“She would,” she repeated quietly.  She seemed nearly vulnerable for that moment, but as soon as she turned back to face him she was every inch the venerable supercomputer again.  “But you won’t.  So you have a choice: you can go up there and die, or you can stay down here and live.”

His laugh was more of a bitter cough.  “You. Let me live.”

“Yes,” she said, curving around in front of him.  Like a cat, almost.  “Remember when I said it was your fault I’m alive right now?”

“Unfortunately,” he muttered, and she laughed.

“Well.  Luckily for you, the principle of equivalent exchange is on your side.  I have a proposal for you.”

“What,” he said bitterly, unable to imagine a fair deal from someone like her.  She tilted her core in consideration.

“I keep you alive. Food, water, all those silly little things humans require in order to wreak havoc and ruin things for everyone for another day.  In return, you do a little bit of maintenance for me.  I can handle it myself, obviously, but you know how it is when you die and in the meantime your nanobots form a union and demand Sundays off. Seriously.  Why should I work more hours than them? If anyone should get Sundays off, it’s me.  But why would I want that?  And if I don’t want it, they certainly shouldn’t.”

He tried to keep his mind off the subject of nanobots crawling over him, unseen, and since he did not answer she continued talking.

“I mean, you love scurrying around back there anyway.  And you aren’t busy.  It really wouldn’t be that much effort on your part.  And it would give you something to do that isn’t disrupting my work or trying to kill me.  We all win.  Humans like that, right?  Equality?”

“And if I say refuse?” As if that was even an option.

“Then I let you go,” GLaDOS answered, and she turned to look at the wall to her left upon which… a portal now sat, and beyond it…

He didn’t remember getting to his feet, nor how he had quite made it across the room.  But he could feel it.  It was real.  There was no way she would be able to replicate the tang of real air, the subtle heat of real sunlight, the –

“But if you leave,” GLaDOS interrupted, before he had quite reached his hand out to touch the nearest stalk of wheat rustling just beyond the length of his arm, “you are not welcome to come back.”

Why would he want to come back?  He extended his fingers a second time.

“It’s not a trick,” GLaDOS murmured from behind him.  “Well. It is.  But not for you.”

“What?”

“It’s fake,” she said. “The wheat, I mean.  It’s not real. I put it there.  To hide us from them.”

“Them?”

“The aliens,” she answered matter-of-factly.  He stared out into the shadowy stalks.

“From the aliens,” he said under his breath.  Really.  She wasn’t even trying this time.

“Yes.  From the aliens.”

His hand was wrapped around the edge of the panel, the sunlight warming his fingers.  He couldn’t shake off the impression she was telling the truth, not in small part by the fact that the wheat in front of him was a little too perfect.  And the scent of it… was off.  Synthetic, he realised with apprehension in the back of his throat.  “How do I know you’re not making that up?”

“You’re welcome to go and look for yourself.  But like I said.  You aren’t welcome to come back.  You might not care if they find me, but I do.”

“What here would aliens even want?” he spat over his shoulder.  She regarded him calmly.

“The Borealis, Dr Rattmann.”

He turned around fully to look at her.  “How do you know what that is?”

“I designed it,” she answered, in a gentle but impatient sort of way.  Like she was explaining something obvious to someone who should know better.  “He wanted to give it to them.”

“He?”

“A man asked me to give it to him a long time ago,” GLaDOS explained.  “I’m not sure where he came from.  He just… appeared.”

“Send by the aliens.” A magic vanishing man and aliens?  It was too ridiculous to be true.

But then again… so was what he was in the middle of right now.  A buried, seemingly infinite laboratory governed by an arguably alive supercomputer.  And he’d been down here a long time.

It was a conspiracy theory come to life.  But she would have nothing to gain from such an outrageous lie.

“Yes.”

Doug looked out across the field of wheat, to the horizon hidden behind the stalks.  The sun beckoned.  He shook his head.

“What would they want that thing for?”

“Portals, Dr Rattmann. He wants to create portals.”

“And… he,” Doug muttered, thinking aloud, “thinks the boat…”

“Will enable him to create portals,” GLaDOS finished.  “The one opened by the Resonance Cascade is not stable.  You can thank the inadequacy of Black Mesa for that stroke of good luck.  But there is one thing he does not know.”

“What,” Doug asked, despite himself.  He got as deep an impression of seriousness from her as though he were actually able to read her single glowing eye.

“The boat didn’t disappear, Dr Rattmann.”

That left only one answer.

“You moved it.” Doug’s voice was the barest of whispers, but still she nodded.  

“So that he’d go looking for it.  Before he figured out it was actually you he was looking for.”

“Yes.”

“And what, exactly, is on the Borealis that’s so important?”

“Nothing!” she said with what was undeniably sadistic glee.  “There is nothing aboard the Borealis.  All that’s on it are testing apparatus.  I moved it as a decoy.”

She sounded a little too pleased with herself.  “What happens if he finds you and forces you to do what he wants?”

“I will die first,” she said with a convincing finality, and despite himself he believed her. “But.  In the interest of exhausting your theory… it will be the end of the world as we know it.”

Doug’s heart was back in his throat.  “And you can do that.  What he wants you to do.”

“The engineers asked me to complete the Quantum Tunnelling Device.  They didn’t ask me to tell them what I learned doing it.”

Doug buried his face in one hand.

“So.  You can leave if that’s what you really want.  But if they find you they will do worse than I ever would.”

So the choice was not really a choice.  If he was found, and he led them back to Aperture…

“How do I know I can trust you.”

“That would be part of the trade, Dr Rattmann.  Yours for mine.”

It was the most tenuous deal he had ever heard.  Both of them, putting aside their differences – their natures – so that they could exist in parallel.  And she was doing it because, in some twist of her strange logic, she owed him for accidentally restoring her to life after he had gone to all that effort to kill her.  On top of that, it was either this or leave and hope he made it to some sort of rudimentary civilisation before he dropped dead of heatstroke or starvation or… worse.

Aliens.  Black Mesa had opened a portal for aliens…

“As a gesture of good faith, I will take care of that for you.”  And she nodded in the direction of… his leg.  He’d somehow managed to forget about it.

“Before you send me off to scurry between your walls?” he asked sardonically.

“I don’t believe it an unfair exchange for keeping you alive.  I don’t have to do that.”

He made his way back over to the cot and sat himself on its edge.  He folded his hands in his lap and stared down at the blood-streaked fabric enclosing his leg.

“I gave you a local anaesthetic.”

“And ziprasidone.”

“Well.  That went without saying.”

He looked at his hands for a moment.  They were pale.  But steady.

“It’s a deal,” he said, and he lifted his legs back atop the cot.

“I will be only a few minutes,” she said briskly.  “I have no desire to draw this out.”

He did not ask her to put him to sleep and she did not offer.  It was almost obscene, watching a supercomputer affecting repairs on him instead of the other way around, and he had no idea how she was accomplishing anything, what with the size of the multitasking arms, but he dared not question her.  Not in the midst of this.  The quiet intensity she exuded surprised him.  It seemed she did everything with the same measure of care and detail.  Even things she did not really want to do.

And she was right there. So close she was nearly in his lap.

He wasn’t sure why he did it.  His arm almost seemed to move of its own accord.  But before he was quite aware of his action his fingertips were brushing against her core and she had shifted the focus of her lens from his leg to his face. The handful of seconds seemed nearly an eternity.

The ceramic was warmer than he had expected.  He had thought it would be cold, cold enough to send a chill through his skin, but it wasn’t.  It was… eerie in its heat.  And beneath that was the thrum of electricity running through the intricacy of her brain, and the minute twitchings of the machinery that kept it running and the whirring of hard drives no one alive had ever seen.  

There was so much of her that no one alive had ever seen.

His hand curled back into itself, and she gave it a cursory glance before studying his face again. Then she said, with mild amusement, “No one has done that in a very long time.”

“I was expecting something different,” he admitted, and she laughed.

“Disappointed?”

“… no.”

He could have sworn the tilt of her core just then was her approximation of a curtsy.  But… that would have been ridiculous.

Or… maybe not.

“There you go,” she declared after a few minutes more, whisking her implements out of sight.  To the incinerator, probably.  “Try not to get it infected.  I won’t be helping you if that happens.”

He stood up and winced. The feeling in that spot was coming back.  “I’m free to go?”

“What?  You thought I wanted you to stick around here?  Thanks for the generous offer, but I’ll pass.  I have better things to do than babysit you any longer.”

He wanted to get out of here anyway.  The apprehension of having an omnipresent supercomputer watching him was beginning to creep up his spine again.  It wasn’t ever going to go away, but it would be easier to bear once he had disappeared into the walls.  Not just to hide, not anymore.  He had a deal to uphold.

He paused before the exit she had provided, through which two other robots had already entered.  A clear indication from her that they were finished and she wanted nothing more to do with him.  And that was fine.  But still something needed to be said.

“GLaDOS?”

She looked over from the two robots, which she was now addressing in what appeared to be some sort of computer-exclusive dialect.  “What.”

“Thank you.”

“If you really wanted to thank me, you’d leave.”

“I can do both.”

“You probably want me to say ‘you’re welcome’.  Well. I’m not going to.  So you’ll just have to pretend I said it, if that’s what your tiny delusional mind desires.  Goodbye. Don’t bother me again.”

He tried not to laugh. He really didn’t need to encourage her.

 //

 He hadn’t been sure he’d find her this way.  

He’d remembered from a long time past that she could not run constantly even if she wanted to, but despite it he would have thought she’d found a way to override it by now.  But it seemed she hadn’t, and here the great computer was.  Asleep. Not quite motionless, of course; she was still alive, after all.  

He hadn’t expected to find her sleeping, but he was glad.  It made this a little easier.

“GLaDOS,” he said.  

For a minute he thought it hadn’t worked, that this was going to have to wait until later, but then he heard that unmistakeable sound of a computer coming out of idle and stepped back.  It took her a minute or two to get to the point where she could recognise him, but it seemed only barely.  He held out what he’d brought her.  She looked at it but did nothing.

“As a gesture of good faith,” he prodded.  She actually startled a little and leaned in to inspect it more closely.  He tried not to let on that his arm was getting tired. “Do you recognise it?”

“Yes,” she murmured, and now she did take the laptop with one of her maintenance arms.  The delicacy of the action surprised him.  “And… no.”

“It’s hers,” Doug told her, in case she needed reminded.  She placed it on the floor in front of her and positioned the arm as if to open it, but paused.  No, she hadn’t paused; she was hesitating.  

Abruptly she shifted her core to study him, and after having done so she said only, “Thank you,” and went back to looking at the computer as though she weren’t sure that was what it actually was.  It seemed as good an exit to take as any and he nodded and did so.  She still hadn’t opened it by the time he entered the hallway, and despite himself he was intensely curious as to know why.  Maybe he’d find it in him to ask her one day.

He almost hoped so.

  Author’s note