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The Long Game
“Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate.
Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”
― Euripides, from Medea

[Image Description: An illustration of Chell and an android GLaDOS standing on a floor checkered like a chess board. Chell is on the right and is wearing her Portal 2 outfit. GLaDOS is on the left and has an unnaturally white body and long hair. She is wearing a white jacket that extends behind her and a dark gray skirt. Her legs resemble long-fall boots. GLaDOS is taking a diagonal step toward the viewer and is offering a hand to Chell. Chell is in the middle of taking a step back and twisting away. GLaDOS is smiling, but Chell has a wide-eyed look of fear. In the upper right corner an oversized, opened hand hovers above Chell. The hand is dark and blends in with the panels that make up the background. End description]

Cover art commissioned from Mozasahan

A playlist for the fic can be found here!

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The Devil You KnowThe world outside was a harsh and unforgiving wasteland.Chell found that things had changed since the last time she left the building.She wandered in circles for days and days, until she found buildings. Yet every homestead she passed by was deserted, thick layers of dust coating long-abandoned possessions. She scarfed down cans of old food, noting how these houses seemed frozen in time. Something had happened on Earth. Something bad.Eventually she stumbled across the bombed-out shell of a city. This one had more recent signs of life—as if it had been abandoned more recently. From there she simply followed the trail of destruction until she had made it to another city. A real city with real people. She could hardly believe it—after all of this time, she wasn’t going to be alone anymore. These people were going to help her. These people would help her get her life back on track.As she had approached the city's fortified entrance, she was greeted by two men in black uniforms with guns in their hands. Guns pointed at her. She immediately lifted her hands in surrender. She was tough, but she wasn't bulletproof. The two men escorted her into the city—City 23, as she would later learn—shoving her inside the large gate."You're out of uniform," one of them said. Shove. Chell had so much to say. First, that she didn’t have a uniform. Second, that she needed to speak to their superior and warn them about the danger in the shed in the wheat fields. Third, she needed to ask what had happened. Who were these people? What happened to Earth?"Who are you?" one of them barked.Chell opened her mouth to speak, moving her lips, but nothing came out."Let me jog your memory," one of them said. He raised his bat and before Chell could even react, he slammed it across her chest.Chell recoiled, hot pain flaring in her chest. She wheezed but nothing else came out.The officer repeated his demand. His buddy pulled out his bat and struck her across the back with a loud crack. Chell saw stars and stumbled forward and onto one knee, palms scraping against the gravel.She pointed to her lips and shook her head no. She couldn't talk. She wasn't trying to resist. These people—they were supposed to be helping her. They were supposed to be on her side."No?" said the Combine Overwatch officer. "Excuse me?"Chell felt her heart sink, instinctively pulling her arms over her head to protect herself.He called over his buddy and they took turns, their bats cracking across Chell's body until they'd beat her with an inch of her life.As the bystanders just watched, Chell felt more alone on the surface than she had ever felt at Aperture.Now, she was in the middle of endless, probably irradiated grain. All it did was remind her of how hungry she was. She hadn't eaten since she left City 23. Though she'd been lucky enough to find water once, the skies were bone dry. There wasn’t much time left before she got too dehydrated to continue on her mission.Chell stood there for hours before she knocked.She leaned on the door, forehead touching the dirty, mud-stained metal. She agonized over her options. She could walk away. Take her chances on finding another city. Maybe she could go back to City 23.No, she couldn’t. Not after the way she’d left. If she’d returned, she’d most likely be shot on sight.Her side panged with pain, and Chell winced. Right. The shrapnel in her side. Her mind flashed back to the moments of her escape from the City, of a tossed grenade, blinding flash, and a quick explosion. Then, before she knew it, she had a bit of metal in her side. From what she’d seen in the City, this wasn’t a life-ending injury. An as she’d discovered, a person could go a long ways with bits of metal embedded inside of them. But if she tried to remove it without the proper medical care, she would die. She needed medical attention.She winced again, keeping her breathing steady. Sharp breaths just made it hurt more. Chell pressed a few delicate fingertips to her side, on top of the bandages, knowing that they were probably bloody after all of the walking that she had done today. She leaned down on to one knee, unable to support herself on both legs anymore. She was close. So close. All that was left in the way was her pride.Could she do it? Could she throw away her pride just to save her life?There was someone outside.There was never anyone outside.GLaDOS checked the camera again. There was someone outside. But they weren't trying to break down the door. They were just standing there, and they continued to stand there for hours.GLaDOS refocused the surface camera, trying to get a better idea of what she was looking at. The human in the picture looked terrible, even from the grainy camera feed. They were dressed in the standard blue citizen garb that she'd heard that the Combine dressed humans in. These clothes looked dirty and ripped and grimy.The person shifted, going down onto their knees. It wasn't until the camera got a good look at the face that GLaDOS felt a surge of electricity spark through her circuits.It was her.Chell took a deep, pained breath. Well, it was either take her chances out here (which she had tried) or take her chances down there. At least down there had some sort of medical care and some sort of food. Chell reached up a hand and tried the door. Locked. Of course. Why would it be unlocked? It wouldn't be as if GLaDOS just wanted humans from the surface to come and get involved in Aperture's business. Unless they wanted to become a test subject.She banged on the door with as much strength as she could muster.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
She hesitated. What was she doing? This was stupid. There was no way that the door would open. She took a deep breath, shifting back onto her feet. The world went silent, a soft breeze tickling the stalks of wheat. Then, she heard a deep rumbling—first faint, then growing louder and louder until it stopped altogether.
Click.
The door unlocked and Chell reached and pulled, the metal creaking and dust puffing out from it. The last time it had been opened was probably when she had opened it.A white and clear elevator was waiting for her, softly humming.The ride was tortuously slow. Chell watched as the layers of the facility disintegrated and faded from chaos and ruin into clear-cut and sterile environments. New looking floors. Shining walls. The bustle of activity, of artificial life. The elevator went faster and faster past these newer sections, even more than she remembered seeing during her last elevator trip. Eventually the elevator slowed and Chell's stomach dropped lower than the facility.What was she going to say? She hadn't thought this far ahead. She fumbled for the right words before remembering that she didn't need to say anything. She would let her actions speak for herself.GLaDOS watched, curious, as the elevator descended and opened into her chamber. The woman in front of her looked half-dead. GLaDOS did not say anything at first, just watched.Chell did not look up, instead just held a hand pressed into her side."Well, well, well. Look at what the metaphorical cat dragged in." GLaDOS paused. "After everything you did to escape, you're back? You must really be desperate for something."Chell said nothing, giving a pained inhale and a shudder."So what did you think? Was the outside world everything that you had hoped it to be?"Chell leaned back against the elevator back, sliding onto the floor. The doors stayed open, but Chell was finding it hard to pay attention. Everything was fuzzy, and she was hungry, so hungry."I see you made friends with the Combine. Specifically, their guns.”Chell just glared back. She didn’t have time to get into the question of how GLaDOS knew about the Combine—and why she hadn’t warned Chell about them.“How many times did you get shot, anyway? Did you know that getting shot tends to kill most people?"Chell just shook her head. No. No bullets, thankfully."Blue, Orange. Get her out of the elevator."The two robots came from an antechamber attached to the main AI chamber. P-body was the first one to reach in, leaning down and extending forward a primitive hand. Chell took it and P-body hauled her to her feet, using an arm to help support Chell. Chell leaned against the robot as they stood. ATLAS took her other arm."Let me get a look at you,” said GLaDOS.She kept her head low, wheezing, staring at her feet. She felt the robot stare at her, feeling her skin crawl. She was definitely completing some sort of medical scan on Chell."You're looking terrible, as always," said GLaDOS. "Especially today. And I expect you think I can help with that.” She gestured her head toward Chell’s side.Chell just looked at the robot. Please, she thought, pleading with her eyes. I need your help.“Well, maybe there’s something I can do,” she said with a slight hum.Before she could agree, though, a wave of blackness descended upon her and she collapsed into the arms of the robots.

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She stared at the barely-breathing body in front of her.It would be so easy to win right now. So easy to kill her. All it would take was some neurotoxin and some time, and Chell would finally be dead. She could squish the troublesome test subject with panels. Or throw her into the incinerator. Toss her into acid. Shred her with a firing squad of turrets. Slice her into pieces with lasers. With the facility fully under her control, every testing element could be turned into a deadly tool.“You don’t want to kill her,” whispered a voice inside of GLaDOS. It took her a minute to recognize that voice—so similar to her own, but different enough to unsettle her. No, this wasn’t her own voice. It was her voice.“Caroline,” she said flatly. She’d long since accepted the woman’s presence in her life. Though Caroline kept her distance out of fear of being tracked down and deleted, GLaDOS had never revealed that she couldn’t actually delete Caroline. She’d tried. Almost knocked herself offline permanently.As much as she hated to admit it, there was some truth to what Caroline said. Killing Chell now would be, to say the least, inconvenient. She needed her best test subject back. Why kill her when there was science to do? She didn’t have any test subjects. At least, not anymore. Though Blue and Orange had uncovered the Human Vault, those humans hadn’t lasted long. They’d been so simple-minded. They completed their tests, but they were so stupid. A smidge of frustration rose up in GLaDOS. They didn’t know how to dodge turrets, or how to avoid pits of acid. She’d laughed when one of them misplaced their portals and fell in, begging for help before the toxicity kicked in. Their deaths were as pointless as their lives.Some of the test subjects were former Aperture employees, who were at first thrilled to be woken up. They’d gone underground after the Combine’s initial takeover of earth--and after being woken up, they assumed that the apocalypse was over. They were less thrilled to learn that the surface was still hell, and that they’d been enrolled in a new mandatory testing initiative.Most of the test subjects spent the entire time complaining. They wouldn’t shut up. None of them, disappointingly, had even tried to break the rules. They had just accepted their fates, moving through the tests with ease. The Aperture employees demanded their release upon the completion of the tests, or to be returned to their long-term stasis pods. But none of their test results had been good enough to warrant saving their lives. She warmed when she thought of the looks of betrayal on their faces as they realized they were about to be incinerated.Oh, how she’d missed doing real science. GLaDOS pulled herself back to the present, shaking out the gleeful memories of the dying humans.Blue and Orange did a decent job, but even they weren’t Chell. But GLaDOS couldn’t just throw Chell back into a testing track and expect no resistance. She had to be crafty about this. She also couldn’t test her if the woman couldn’t even stand up without collapsing."Blue, go get a stretcher," she said, almost bored-sounding. The stocky robot scurried off past the antechamber. Meanwhile, P-body kept its arm around Chell, supporting her head. When ATLAS returned, the two co-op bots carefully lifted Chell onto the stretcher and moved her into a short-term relaxation vault that GLaDOS had called up. For safekeeping, that’s all. Just until she performed the stabilization surgeries.Chell was in bad shape. Objectively. Just from preliminary scans, she had a couple fractured ribs, and pieces of shrapnel embedded into her torso—most likely from a bomb or a grenade going off. There were all sorts of documented cases of humans being able to survive shrapnel injuries. They wouldn't necessarily kill a human, just would make existence excruciatingly painful. Unfortunately, she’d have to fix that. Too much pain would affect test results.She supposed she'd have to remove that metal. And fix the ribs. Without the proper care, they were already starting to set wrong.How was she going to even do this?Her metal claws were too unwieldy and too gangly for surgery. She supposed she could use Blue and Orange, but that would require training them to be precise as surgeons. While she could trust herself with that task, of course, she wouldn't dare to trust the co-op bots for something beyond a simple fetch quest.A fragment of a question arose in her sea of thoughts, but she suppressed it. No. Not yet. There had to be another way. What could she use instead?A flash of insight light up inside of her. Of course! The nanobots. She could easily reprogram them to work together to find and remove the shrapnel from Chell's body, then stitch her up afterward.GLaDOS sighed. What a mess. And it was always her job to fix up Chell's messes, wasn't it?She was good at fixing up messes, such as the one that the moron had left behind, but humans were another problem entirely. She'd never been great at fixing humans. Destroying them, sure. That was easy. But taking one and keeping them from dying? That was a new one.They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But what if that dog was immortal, and had an infinite capacity for knowledge?

When Chell came to, the whole world seemed fuzzy. Everything was soft. Too soft. ATLAS and P-body stood at her side, in a bright, white room with clear walls—a modified short-term relaxation vault. Chell pushed herself up on the hospital bed, noting that the bandages on her torso had been replaced and she had an IV running. Rather than ripping it out of her hand though, she followed the line and saw it hooked up to a rack with a bag of clear fluid dangling from it."Hold it," said GLaDOS, coming in from the speakers. "I know you're ready to bolt, but take it easy. We're trying to pump some life back into you.” Chell had been severely dehydrated and was starving. GLaDOS had had no choice.  Chell fingered the IV tube.“Rip that IV out and I'll put it right back in, I swear," said GLaDOS.Chell looked around the room, only spotting blinding lights and the outline of a door."By the way, while you were under, I took the liberty to install a tracking chip in you. Don't bother looking for it. This will let me know where you are inside of the facility at all times,” she said. Her voice dropped. “So don't try anything funny. I'll know.”  Chell leaned back in the bed, dropping the IV line. Part of her wanted to leave, to rip it out, to just get herself out of this room. She didn't remember going under for the surgery, and she doubted that GLaDOS was bluffing on the chip thing. It made her stomach crawl to know that there was something—somewhere—inside of her, placed without her consent, broadcasting her location. The part of her that appreciated her privacy frowned and promised her that as soon as she found out where the chip was, she'd consider digging it back out herself.“It’s next to your spinal cord, by the way. Good luck getting it out without paralyzing yourself for life.”Chell startled at the comment. Had GLaDOS read her mind?She took a look at ATLAS and P-body, standing next to her—probably ready to restrain her if she tried anything—she couldn't help but feel a slight sense of trust. They wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her—would they?"Medical nanobots are working on stitching you up from the inside. Before you know it, you'll be good as new. The wonders of modern medicine. Unlike that sketchy patch-job you did."Chell felt at her body, bending at her waist and noting that the normal sharp pain—the one she’d grown accustomed to—was gone. The metal in her body—it was gone. She felt a wave of relief crash over her before it was replaced with a strong feeling in the pit of her stomach.Something was wrong.Chell’s arms tingled. The pace of her breathing increased. Short. Choppy.  Her chest grew tight, as if someone had tossed a weighted storage cube onto it. Chell bolted out of her bed. The IV line trailed behind, wheeling with her to the door."Listen,” said GLaDOS. “ I know you're ready to get going and ready to get back testing, but you just have to be patient."The sound of the voice struck her down to her core. Her legs wobbled. She felt a surge of energy pass into her. Her breath came in spurts. What was happening to her?It took her a long moment before she realized what was wrong. It was the voice. She needed the voice to stop.Chell clamped her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth, holding her eyes closed. She pressed, harder and pressing in her thumbs. The nails of her fingers dug into the skin of her ears, but she didn't care. She needed it to stop. She felt like screaming out and clawing at her ears until they bled. Anything to make that voice stop.“What is your problem ?” said GLaDOS.Chell tugged at the door handle.Nothing happened.She pulled harder, feeling her sore muscles ache in protest. Her breathing became more erratic.Nothing.Chell yanked, harder and harder until she had both of her hands on the handle and her feet propped against the wall. She needed to get out of here. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t think.“Go lay back down right now,” GLaDOS demanded. “You’re going to rip out your stitches.”Chell just kept straining against the door, her pulls as erratic as her breathing.GLaDOS sighed. “I don’t have time for this,” she spat.  Before Chell could make sense of the words filtering in to her fuzzy brain, the air hissed and in came a sedative."We'll talk again when those stitches are healed," said GLaDOS. "What you need now is rest. And even I can't rush that."

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ATLAS and P-body moved Chell's passed-out body from the floor and back up into the bed. They hovered for a moment, watching her sleep, before GLaDOS shooed them away.“What happened to her?” GLaDOS mused, after the robots left."Isn't it obvious?" Caroline’s small voice came from within her. She had heard voices all her life. Sometimes they had good advice, sometimes bad. She had gotten good at managing them. All except this one."Oh, you again?" GLaDOS said, unimpressed."She had a panic attack," said Caroline, matter-of-fact. "I've seen it hundreds of times. Something sets off a test subject, and all of a sudden they're hyperventilating and crawling on the walls. There's not even any neurotoxin in sight.”“So why didn't she listen to me?” GLaDOS said, but then caught herself. As if Chell had ever listened to her before."It's just a part of the panic response," Caroline said. "Panic sends the body into fight-or-flight. She was trying to leave the situation, but there was no exit—no way to leave and no way to fight. So the panic continued.”"So what was I supposed to do? Let her rip out her IV and roam around my facility?""That's not a bad idea actually, though it would be better if she took that with her," said Caroline. "Have you considered what you're going to do with her after she recovers?"“Put her right back into testing,” said GLaDOS. She felt a hint of excitement creep up inside of her. She had an itch inside of her that needed to be scratched.“That's it?" Caroline said. "But aren’t you angry for what she did to us? How she trapped us in that black box for years. How she tried to kill us. Twice. How after everything, she just left us,” Caroline said softly. “Don’t you want to get revenge?”GLaDOS stopped to think about this. She was still angry about all of that.“You could hurt her physically. But we’ve done that before,” said Caroline. “Hurting someone emotionally may take longer, but the payoff might be nice. Don’t you think?”GLaDOS stopped to think about this. Caroline was right. She could hurt Chell, but what would be the point? She already knew how that ended. Her emotions, though...those she could still toy with. She could play a game. Start a test. Something outside the confines of the test chamber, the way she sometimes sent out Blue and Orange. A plan began to formulate in her head. A game to play with Chell. A game of trust. A long game. A long game. GLaDOS could already imagine it. Chell, finally trusting her. Seeing the look on her face when she realized that she was the one who had gotten played for once. Oh, she liked this idea. “Where do we start?” said GLaDOS.“Simple. First we’ve got to get her to be not afraid of your voice. You really think things are going to work out if she has a panic attack every time she talks to you?”GLaDOS paused. She hadn’t thought that far ahead yet."Of course you haven't. You're always in the moment, never looking ahead. That's why you have voices like me in your head. We're here to help. And that's what I'm doing right now. Helping you like you are helping her.”“So what do you suggest?” said GLaDOS.“You could try using my voice,” said Caroline. “It's close enough to yours. Plus, humans inherently trust other humans. That’s just how it works. Use my voice, and I can promise you that she will grow to trust you.”"She won’t trust me.”“Plenty of humans have trusted me before,” said Caroline.“And how well did that turn out for you?” GLaDOS's voice was flat.“Every human you’ve interacted with is dead, except for this one. That’s not a great track record,” said Caroline. “It’s more likely than not that she’s having some sort of post-traumatic response to your voice.”“I’m not going to stop talking to her, if that’s what you’re saying.”“Let’s look at her file,” said Caroline. GLaDOS pulled up Chell’s file, clips from her testing career playing in a loop in the upper right corner. “Oh. It says right here that she doesn't speak. We could have guessed that.”So she wasn’t stupid after all. Or vengeful. Or giving GLaDOS the silent treatment. She just didn’t speak.“So how do we get her to talk?”“There’s plenty of options,” said Caroline. “Besides pen and paper, there’s lots of things she could use. Flashcards, whiteboards, a keyboard. A handheld computer could certainly be useful for communication. Or,” she added, “you could just ask her. I'm sure she has a better idea of what's useful to her than you do. See how she wants to best communicate with you.”“If she wants to communicate with me,” GLaDOS said. That was a big if. But she supposed she could gather the equipment and present it regardless. Might as well at least give her the option.The next time Chell woke up, she was in the same room. The same bed. The same medical equipment around her. Chell looked around and saw ATLAS and P-body sitting on the edge of the room.Softly, from one speaker, she heard a voice. It was a human voice. Chell frowned, and listened closer.“Hello again,” GLaDOS said. It was both her and not her. It just sounded wrong. Less synthesized. More human. Chell felt her heartbeat rise, but before she could do anything or even get out of the bed, she noticed ATLAS and P-body approaching her.The tall orange one handed her a small device that looked like a tablet computer. Chell frowned, holding it away from her body for a moment. She looked at it, carefully taking it in. There was an option for typing, but there was also a screen with a patchwork of icons with words on them. Easy words. Simple verbs. Eat. Drink. Play. Stop. Question words: who, what, where, when, why? An icon of the self. She pressed a hesitant finger on the “what” icon.A computerized voice read out, “What?”Chell frowned. She pressed it again. She wasn’t really asking a question, but GLaDOS answered anyway.“It’s a communication device,” said GLaDOS. “Unless you’re going to suddenly start talking, we’re going to need a better way to communicate. Something more complex than you just glaring at me.”Chell didn’t say anything, but continued to scroll through the library of words.“Blue and Orange use something similar,” said GLaDOS, “though much, much more rudimentary.” They didn’t need anything too complicated, after all. They didn’t need to speak English. “They can’t talk either, but they need to be able to communicate for testing.”Chell tapped a few icons. “What do they use?”The panels on the wall flipped and gave a series of icons. They were all testing icons, of course. One of them appeared to be a countdown timer.“Blue and Orange share an internal library of gestures. With their ping tool, they are able to select icons and share them with one another. With these, they are able to coordinate and complete their tests. In theory.” Her voice was dry.Chell examined the icons.After a long moment, GLaDOS spoke again, almost hesitant. “I have a question for you. Earlier. Why did you react like that?” she said. “I was only trying to help you. I know I don't have the best track record, but that is the reason that you are here—to receive help. It does not make sense.”Chell frowned, flicking through a few pages of icons before swapping over to a keyboard. Yeah. That would be easier. Still, she hesitated before typing. “Your voice scared me,” she typed. “I just needed quiet.”“I see,” said GLaDOS, quietly. Well. At least now Chell could communicate issues like this, though she had no idea how else she was supposed to navigate this issue. It was her voice, after all, and she didn't want to borrow Caroline's forever. For now, though, she supposed it would work."Since your stay here is now a bit more," GLaDOS paused, "permanent, the Enrichment Center has granted you access to a refurbished Relaxation Vault.” The long-term suspension portion had been disabled, leaving them with an average looking hotel room. “It’s all yours.”Chell paused at the already-open door. The last time that she had been in one of these was when she had gone to sleep the second time at Aperture. She couldn't remember how she had gotten there, but she remembered waking up, being told to do some exercises, and then to be instructed to go back to sleep, only to wake up decades later. Chell's stomach twisted like a wrung-out rag. She took a few steps into the room and the door closed softly behind her. She turned and tugged at the handle, jiggling the knob. Locked. Of course. Chell knocked on the door a few times, pressing her ear to it. It didn't sound like a normal wooden door."I've gone ahead and reinforced it with steel," said GLaDOS. "Don't bother trying to break it down."She pulled out her tablet. “Why is it locked?” The message sent off to GLaDOS.“The door is locked for your own safety,” said GLaDOS. “It will not stay locked forever. When it is time to test, you are expected to be dressed and ready to start at that time.”Chell gave a heavy sigh. What had she gotten herself into? She looked around the room. A bed, a small desk. A tiny refrigerator. She pulled open the door of it. No food. Figured. A cramped bathroom. Chell lifted the faucet handle and jumped back when water spurted out. Surprising. The corners of her mouth lifted up. When was the last time she had the chance to take a shower? And a hot shower, at that?“I've read that it is important to allow humans to have a space of their own. Like animals digging out a den. So here’s your den.”She went back to check out the rest of the room. It looked almost identical to the room she had stayed in before, but this was her room. Her room. She could probably do whatever she wanted to this room, provided she didn’t vandalize it, and GLaDOS would have to leave it be. Chell gave a slight smile, feeling at the soft mattress.Sleep, though.She felt her stomach sink. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to sleep. A part of her was afraid to sleep. She'd managed to sleep fine in beds on the surface, but that was different. That wasn't here.“You’d better appreciate this,” said GLaDOS. “I don’t need to do this for you. We can easily switch back to pumping adrenal vapor into the test chambers. This is a privilege, not a right.”She paced around the room, her hands itching for the portal gun. GLaDOS had said that it would only be available to her during testing, and while that made sense to her, she still found it difficult to be without it, especially within the walls of Aperture. It was an accessory, sure, but it was essential to survival. Without it she felt naked. Especially when she was in a locked room.“I’ll be back after one night cycle,” said GLaDOS. “Be ready to go in the morning.”Chell almost wanted to snort. As if she was planning on sleeping. She felt the anxiety rise up inside of her and continued to pace through the room, upturning and looking under every object and every surface that she could find.There were cameras and microphones and speakers in her room. That much was clear from her search. But as soon as she picked one up and began to inspect it, GLaDOS said, “Put that down.”Chell reluctantly put the camera down, though mentally she tried to map out the blind spots in the room—if there were any. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand why they were there, why GLaDOS would want to monitor her. She did. She just appreciated her privacy as well. She would be sure to change inside of the bathroom, where she could not find any cameras.Chell moved over to the far wall of the relaxation vault. She pulled back a long, floor length curtain and stared out the window and out into the vastness of the facility. She was suspended over a massive area. In the distance she could make out other rectangular relaxation vaults. Hers was apart from the rest of them—probably because they were hooked up to the testing tracks.She hugged her knees against her chest, and she stared out the window all night.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

While Chell rested, they talked.

“You don’t understand how this works,” said Caroline. “This—I’ve seen it before. And it’s not good. You’re going to have your work cut out for you.”

“How so?” said GLaDOS. If this was because of a matter of ignorance, that could be easily fixed. She was the most massive collection of human knowledge that had ever existed. If she went looking for information, she would find it.

“Your test subject is exhibiting symptoms of PTSD,” said Caroline. “And, honestly, so are you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said GLaDOS.

"You're both hurting right now," said Caroline. "She isn’t going to be able to heal unless you show her some vulnerability.”

“I’m not like her,” said GLaDOS indignantly. She wasn’t hurting. She was perfectly fine.

“Fine,” said Caroline. “But time does

not

heal all wounds. You’re going to have to show her that you’re willing to pull your weight in this new relationship. You have to be worthy of her trust.”

Time does not heal all wounds.

The words hung heavy in the air.

GLaDOS thought about saying something, but instead Caroline spoke.

"So is she everything that you expected?" said Caroline.

GLaDOS swayed back and forth in her chassis. "I already regret giving her the device," she said.

"What, you're not excited to hear from your favorite test subject?" said Caroline.

"Absolutely not," she said. "She's now even more annoying than she used to be,” said GLaDOS. “But no matter. She can’t test while holding that device.”

“Have you talked to her about testing?”

“No,” said GLaDOS. She figured that Chell knew what she was getting into when she came back to Aperture—but then again, it couldn’t hurt to formally discuss the terms of her stay.

“Talk to her.”
The next time she woke up, the door from her relaxation vault was unlocked. Chell picked up the tablet from her bedside and tucked it under her arm. She shuffled to the door, wringing the sleep out of her eyes and pushed it open, peering out to the left and to the right down a catwalk that disappeared into the misty blue blur of the facility.
She took a few hesitant steps out the door, and then heard the announcer’s voice ring out.

“The Enrichment Center requests your presence in the Main AI Chamber,” he said cheerfully. “Please turn right.”

Chell obliged, taking a right and walking for a long ways. She could almost see the large cylinder branded Aperture Laboratories.

The route was a familiar one, dotted with landmarks. The same glass hallway. The same office doors. The same two wheeled chairs looking out at the chasm underneath the Main AI Chamber. Even though she knew that way, the Announcer still read off instructions to Chell as she made her way through the modern part of the facility.

It felt so weird—and so long and tedious—to make this journey by foot. It would have been so much simpler to just portal her way there, but GLaDOS didn’t trust Chell yet with a portal gun.

She was glad for the chance to stretch her legs, though. She’d been cooped up in that long-term relaxation vault for a few days now, with GLaDOS not letting her out in fear of her ripping out her stitches again.

Chell took a deep breath before walking down the long glass hallway to the Main AI Chamber.
The figure of GLaDOS loomed large over Chell.
She needed to be strong. She couldn't show any weakness. Part of her admitted that she'd already shown weakness by letting GLaDOS operate on her--though that was more of a fortunate accident. She hadn't had much of a say in that, and she still resented that GLaDOS had made alterations to her body without her permission. Sure, it was for her own good, but it still felt wrong.

She rubbed idly at the back of her neck, wondering just where in her that chip had been planted.

“We need to talk,” said GLaDOS lowly. “We haven’t had a chance yet to discuss the terms of your stay.”

Chell nodded, planting her feet into the ground. She took a deep breath and felt at the edges of the tablet in her arms. She pulled it up, looking at GLaDOS expectantly.

So? What were the terms?

“You can't expect to just show up, with your malnutrition and your bullet wounds, expect me to patch you up, and waltz back out again,” said GLaDOS. “I fixed you. You

owe

me.”

Chell gave a slow, singular nod.

“You’re going to stay here, and you’re going to test. Every day. You will not try to kill me and you will not run away.”

Chell made a simple gesture with her hand. GLaDOS's systems flagged it as the American Sign Language symbol: "No".

"No?" she said, taken aback. "What do you mean, 'no'?"

Chell shrugged her shoulders and repeated the sign.

No.

Then, she made a motion with her hands before remembering the tablet. She stopped, flipping through the couple of installed apps until she found a notepad. She used her fingers to type a quick message. After a moment, she walked toward GLaDOS and held up the tablet. Her hands trembled slightly.

GLaDOS narrowed her optic.

"Breaks from testing?" she said, almost incredulous. She took a moment to mull it over. "Well, I suppose that even humans can't be expected to test 24-7. You will get a federally regulated 8 hours of resting time a day."

Chell narrowed her gaze in return.

"Fine, ten hours."

Perhaps GLaDOS could manage that. Maybe testing a human for 24-7 until a point of exhaustion and then reviving them with adrenaline wasn't the most sustainable method for testing. Then again, she had never had a long-term tester before. She let a little bit of that excitement creep into her thoughts. She'd never had a tester do sustained and extended testing before. They had all died before they could get that far. This would be good science.

Chell scribbled one more thing on the list, almost as an afterthought.

No adrenal vapor.

"What?" said GLaDOS. "I've never,

ever

, had a human test without adrenal vapor."

Chell just shook her head. She wasn't going to do it. She couldn't do it. She underlined it. Twice.

"Fine," said GLaDOS. “Here’s your portal gun. Now that you’re healed, testing will begin right away.”  A platform rose from the floor with a sleek white Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. GLaDOS took a long look at the ASHPD.

But as Chell started to write something down, something shifted in GLaDOS. The computer twisted to the side, almost violently. She rocked back and forth, first slowly but picking up in speed.

“I hate you so much,” GLaDOS hissed.

Chell was gone.

Just like that—in the middle of a conversation--Chell was gone.

And then, she wasn’t. She flickered in and out of existence for a moment, and then--she was back. And she was with the moron, too. How had she gotten him back from space?

But GLaDOS couldn’t think. The scene played out in front of her like a bad memory.
“I hate you so much,” GLaDOS hissed.
Chell stopped in her tracks. What was this? She grabbed the portal device, clutching it to her chest. She glanced around the room.

“Core transfer? Oh, you are

kidding

me.”

This didn’t make sense. Chell wasn’t here to do a core transfer—she knew better than that. GLaDOS was the most qualified one to run Aperture Laboratories. She knew that now. Chell looked around the chamber, but no core receptacle or stalemate resolution button rose. That was strange. GLaDOS looked around the chamber, staring off into space and not looking directly at Chell anymore. Chell stared for a long moment before it came to her—GLaDOS was stuck in the past.
After all GLaDOS had done for Chell—this was how Chell repaid her? GLaDOS had taken her in when she was nearly dead. She’d nursed her back to health, carefully. She’d done so much for the woman, and for what? Just to be betrayed the second she got better? No, this wasn’t going to fly. Not today. Before she could think, though, the announcer’s voice rang through her head and announced a core transfer.
“Core transfer? Oh, you are

kidding

me,” GLaDOS growled. The words tumbled out of her speakers, almost as if by their own accord. The receptacle to hold Wheatley rose from the ground, and Chell deposited the robot into it without a second thought.

In the annex beside her chamber, a button popped up. The stalemate resolution button. GLaDOS shuddered.  
“Don’t press that button. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
A pause, where Wheatley most likely had spoken.

“Don’t. Do it.”

A long pause. Chell winced as the events played through her own mind. She hadn’t known back then what she knew now. Chell watched, internally dreading the scream that she knew was about to come. Some things from Aperture stuck with her no matter what, one of those things being GLaDOS’s scream during the core transfer.

Before she could scream, though, there was a great lunge of the chassis, and then GLaDOS’s body went limp.
GLaDOS sunk with dread. She had to stop Chell from getting to that button. She flicked a few panels up as Chell approached, watching her as she paused, taking stock of the situation, and then started shooting portals. Luckily GLaDOS had a square of panels surrounding the stalemate resolution button, so keeping her out would be fairly easily. She just had to keep up with Chell. Soon Chell would realize her mistakes and would stop this nonsense.
“

Don’t. Do it

.”

GLaDOS felt panic rise up inside of her.

She had no choice. She had to do it. Before she was trapped in a tiny potato again. She couldn’t take that. She pulled up the schematics to her back-up body—a gangly, primitive thing that she’d constructed after the co-op bots in the case that she was ever ousted from her main body again. She’d kept in in safekeeping, saving it for a true moment of need. She had hoped she’d never have to use it, ever.

With a few quick thoughts, she started the process to copy over her consciousness into the mobile chassis. The core transfer process that Chell had initiated would error out if the central core suddenly disappeared—this might make it easier for Wheatley to take over the facility, but she wouldn’t let Chell get her this time. No, this time, she was coming for Chell.

INITIATING CHASSIS TRANSFER…
Before she can even think, Chell’s feet moved for her and she sprinted out of the Main AI Chamber and down the long glass hallway.
She went straight across the hallway and into the first office she could find. She knew that this was not the way back to her relaxation vault. She knew that she was not safe there. Not really. She needed to get off of the grid, and fast.

She entered the maze of office cubicles, wondering why GLaDOS hasn’t put cameras in every area of the facility before remembering that GLaDOS didn’t really have any control over the human areas of Aperture—just the test chambers. And her relaxation vault, apparently. She ran until she was out of breath, and looked around the room that she was in. She was in a sea of cubicles—there wasn’t much for cover here, so she leaned down and sat under a desk, briefly feeling like a little kid again. When she tried to think more about when she was actually a kid, she found that she struggled to remember. Probably a side-effect of such long-term suspension. In fact, she barely remembered her life before Aperture. She knew that she had had one. She just didn’t know what she had done. Maybe it would come back to her.

She took a few steadying breaths, wrestling with the adrenaline coursing through her system.

GLaDOS was having a flashback. That had to be it—she was acting without thinking, repeating the past while being stuck in it.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

When she woke up, her vision was different.
It was bifocal. Not singular. It had

depth

to it. GLaDOS took a moment to focus her vision, letting the panels of the room go from blurry to crisp. She blinked--not a necessary action, but one that she found natural nonetheless.

This body was

strange.

With a thought, she lifted her arms and twisted her wrists, getting a look at her hands. Five porcelain-white fingers. She rose from a sitting position, feeling the weight shift to her legs and wobbled before correcting her posture. Being on two legs instead of hanging from a ceiling--it felt weird. Yet being able to

move,

to have two arms and two legs, provided a whole new world of possibilities.

This body was taller than ATLAS but shorter than P-body, with a vaguely feminine look to it. It was reminiscent of her main chassis.

Before she forgot, she downloaded the information from Orange and Blue’s calibration courses and applied it to her body. Though this was one a bit more humanoid, like Orange—she was still distinctly an Aperture creation. Streaks of yellow accented the white and the black metals of her body.

She took a glance down, long white hair falling into her eyes. Right. She’d tried to make herself look more human than the co-op bots. This would come in handy when dealing with Chell. Or so she hoped.

Humans trusted other humans.

Before she could think on that any further, a voice came in through the loudspeakers.

“Welcome to the Aperture Science Calibration Course,” the announcer said in a cheery tone. “Please pick up the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and follow these simple instructions.”

GLaDOS reluctantly picked up the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device from a pedestal, feeling the weight of it in her hands for the first time. This thing was heavier than she thought. No wonder Chell’s arms had become so muscular.

Oh, right. Chell. She pulled up an internal map of the facility, overlayed over her vision.

Find Chell,

she thought, and an orange beacon lit up on the 3D map. So the tracking chip in her worked after all. She gave a sigh of relief, but her chest did not rise or fall. All she had to do now was to get through this calibration course and then she could track down Chell, and demand that they crush Wheatley for good this time. Last time, he’d caught her off guard. But this time she was prepared, and this time she wouldn’t rely on Chell to take Wheatley down. She would do it herself, and deal with Chell later. Banishment to space wouldn’t be good enough this time. She wanted him to burn in Android Hell.

She thought about how the scene had played out. It was funny. It was almost as if—she hesitated. No, that couldn’t be it. This

had

happened. She was sure of it. It couldn’t just have been a memory.

She would have to check her data banks just in case, as soon as she got back into her main chassis.

“Please select your favorite animal,” said the announcer. A series of panels flipped over, each with an animal icon on it. It only took her a second to decide, even though this was all just stupid. She selected the deer and then waited. This was the point of the course where, if she had a partner, they would select their favorite element from the periodic table. But she didn’t have a partner. At least, not today.

She went through the rest of the course with ease, firing the portals where they were supposed to be fired and solving the simple puzzles. She’d invented the puzzles. It wasn’t that hard to solve them. They were meant to be so easy that a baby—or a brand new robot—could solve them.

She had to say, it felt strange to be so mobile. To move. To lift her arm and to fire a portal, and then walk through it. After she’d been so used to watching others do this, now she was actually getting the chance to do it. And, surprisingly enough, she liked it. She could get used to this body.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

GLaDOS reflected on the statement. She couldn’t trust the co-op bots to find and apprehend Chell. ATLAS and P-body were simply too weak for this mission. They’d just get murdered. Even though that wasn’t really a big deal, since she could rebuild them with a flick of a thought, it was more inconvenient than anything. Besides, it wasn’t the co-op bots that that murderous lunatic was after. It was her. And it was time to face Chell head-on.

She would have to do it herself. She checked her map again. Still broadcasting Chell’s current location.

What was Chell even doing out there? She had to be planning to kill GLaDOS again. Perhaps this whole shrapnel thing was all a ruse, just a way to lower GLaDOS’s defenses and get back into Aperture just so that she could kill GLaDOS once and for all. That’s what this was all about. That

had

to be it.

As far as how Chell had gotten that metal ball back from space, well, she didn’t want to think about that right now.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about this body, though. It was small. Spindly. Yet although it couldn’t compare to her main chassis, this body was…convenient. It was better than anything a human could be. She could move through her facility. She could touch her facility. She could be closer to Chell.

“Maybe this body won’t scare her,” said Caroline.

GLaDOS almost rolled her eyes. “Oh, great. You made it into this thing too,” she said, and then reflected on Caroline’s words. “I don’t care about not scaring her anymore. She deserves to be scared,” she said. The image of Chell with her palm on the big red button was burned into her consciousness.

She moved out of the calibration course and set a path for the Main AI Chamber. She would simply reverse the core transfer process, even if it meant prying that core out of the chassis herself. She’d do it, and then she’d have full control again. The Main AI Chamber was a bit of a walk, but she had all the time in the world.
Something was wrong.
As she approached the Main AI Chamber, she couldn’t help but feel as though something was off about it all. For one thing, it was quiet. Too quiet. The last time the moron had taken over her facility, she saw him everywhere—over the speakers, in video panels throughout the facility, in the movement of the chambers—but here, there was nothing.

This body suddenly felt weak. But she thought of Chell. If a human could defeat her, then she could defeat an idiot. There had to be some sort of advantage to this kind of body that she didn’t see before.

Portal gun in her hands, she chose to tread the same path that Chell had. It was currently the only way in and out of the Main AI Chamber. She clutched the gun close to her chest. Just because she’d seen these things used in a thousand tests didn’t mean that she knew how to use it herself. Theoretically, yes. In actuality? Well, that was still up in the air.

She crept her way up the glass hallway, ready to turn back at any moment. But she couldn’t. This was her facility and that was her body in there. She had to be brave. She had to be like Chell.

As she finally made it to the end, the doors lifted with the hiss of pneumatics. She stepped into the chamber and saw her own lifeless body. Her stomach sank. That was her. That was her chassis.

And yet…her core was still attached to it.

Something was wrong.

This didn’t make sense. She had seen Wheatley. She had seen Chell. She had seen both of them. She had watched as they planned to boot her from her throne. Her body still ached with the betrayal of it all.

So what had happened, then, if the core transfer hadn’t happened at all?

Maybe it was some sort of hallucination. Some sort of temporary malfunction.

She felt herself sink as she realized that she had recognized that feeling before—it had felt like her black box feature.

She was thrust back in time to that moment, when she was forced to relive her first death over and over again for over twenty years. She could still recall every picosecond of the footage.

This

malfunction--

it had felt just like the black box.

She didn’t glitch.

That would mean that there was something wrong with her, when she was obviously the most perfect being in existence.

She’d have to run a scan once she got back into her body.

Speaking of that…

She stared at the limp chassis, ready to transfer back.

An orange light in her internal maps blinked, flickering to report activity. Chell was on the move.

Right.

She had to track down Chell. She felt herself sink with disappointment. So she wouldn’t be killing Chell after all. But wait, then why had she run away? That was one of the things that GLaDOS had clearly and expressly forbidden. She’d better have a good excuse for this when she caught up with her.

She checked the map, and to her surprise, noticed that Chell wasn’t that far at all from the Main AI Chamber. So close in fact that she could walk.

She walked across the hallway and into one of the many sections of Aperture she didn’t have any control over.

It felt eerie to her--to be in an area that was not meant for her.

There was a whole world of Aperture that she had yet to see, and with this body, she could explore it.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Time passed.Chell remained under the desk for a long while, wrapping her arms around her knees. She let her chest softly rise and fall as she tried to make sense of the situation. Something had happened to GLaDOS--something strange. Part of her wanted to head back to the Main AI Chamber to see if GLaDOS had woken back up, but another part of her warned that it was all a trap, a ruse, something designed to catch her off guard.Chell looked at the portal gun beside her, and reached over and ran her finger along its smooth edge. She could tell that this was her gun--just by the way it was scarred and discolored in the same places. It had been through a lot. Just like her. She gave a soft smile, picking up the gun and slipping her hand inside. Her fingers curled around the triggers. She pushed herself to her feet, and started to walk toward the entrance of the room.The doorknob jiggled.Chell ducked back behind a desk, watching the door open. Out came a white robot, tall, humanoid, with long white hair. Hair? Chell had never seen anything come out of Aperture that looked so human, besides the test dummies she had seen in Old Aperture. She didn't like it. It wasn't ATLAS or P-body or any other robot that she'd seen here before. She could only assume that this was some sort of Party Escort Bot, sent out to retrieve her for testing.Chell raised her portal gun, ready to strike the robot across the back of the head.The robot swiveled on its feet, throwing up its arms to protect itself. “Woah there,” it said, and Chell’s skin crawled. That voice--she knew that voice. It was Caroline’s voice. Chell was reminded of the first time she’d met GLaDOS--of how robotic her voice had sounded. She remembered the moment when she had incinerated the Morality Core (a big mistake) and remembered how GLaDOS’s voice had dropped into a much more human tone. Chell lowered the portal gun a few inches.“I see you’ve found another way to try to kill me,” said GLaDOS, her tone joking yet serious. When Chell didn’t lower her portal gun entirely, she continued. “It’s me.” GLaDOS pointed at herself. “Your favorite supercomputer.”Chell planted her feet in the ground, lowering the portal gun to hip level. If GLaDOS tried anything, she’d be ready for it. Her gaze tracked behind the computer, looking for portal-friendly surfaces.Chell didn’t like this.She didn’t like that GLaDOS could move now. She didn’t like that GLaDOS had the ability to track her down so easily.Chell pointed toward the back of her neck and raised her eyebrows. Was it the tracking chip? Is that how she had found her?“Yes,” said GLaDOS. “Works like a charm.”Chell pursed her lips in response, and then lifted the portal gun again, pointing it at the center of GLaDOS’s chest. She gestured at GLaDOS’s android body, and raised her eyebrows again. She needed to know what happened back there—and why GLaDOS ended up in this body.“What?” said GLaDOS, clearly not understanding the question. Chell sighed. She lowered the portal gun and looked over at a nearby desk, grabbing a blank manila folder and a pencil and started to scribble on it.GLaDOS peered over her shoulder as she wrote. Chell took a step to the side and glared at her, making a motion with her hands as if ready to shove GLaDOS back. GLaDOS stepped away.When Chell was done, she slid the folder over to GLaDOS.“Oh…that,” she said.  Chell continued her stare. She thought about underlining the question, but instead pushed the paper folder closer to GLaDOS.
Why are you in this body?
“Well,” GLaDOS started. “Before, when we were talking, I had a...” she paused. A malfunction. “...an idea. I’ve been wanting to take this body for a spin ever since I developed it.”Chell just stared.“You know what? It doesn’t matter,” said GLaDOS. “What does matter is that you ran away, after I expressly forbade that.”Chell shrugged. Something felt wrong, she wrote down, then showed it to GLaDOS.“That’s no reason to run away,” said GLaDOS. “Everything was under control.”Chell looked at GLaDOS. She wasn’t sorry for her actions, and she wasn’t about to apologize for them either. She would never apologize for self-preservation.“You know,” GLaDOS said, stretching out her arms and curling her hands into fists. “I like this body. It’s got a lot of advantages. It’s stronger, faster than a human. And it can move through the facility,” she said. GLaDOS liked this. It would keep Chell on edge. And Chell performed her best when she was on edge.Chell gripped the portal gun in both of her hands. She didn’t like this. She didn’t like this one bit.“Now, put down the gun,” said GLaDOS.Chell slipped her supporting hand away, letting the portal gun fall to her side.“There we go,” said GLaDOS. She looked at Chell and watched as some tension left the woman. Her jaw was still clenched tight, but her hands had unfurled from the fists they had been in. There, now Chell didn’t look like she was going to kill her.GLaDOS and Chell walked back to the Main AI Chamber in silence. Chell kept her chin high, glancing over at the android every now and then, not wanting to let her completely out of sight.Meanwhile, GLaDOS was lost in thought. She wasn’t so sure about this body. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to be in it anymore. It would be fine for exploring Aperture on her own, but being so close to Chell, she didn’t feel as powerful as she did in her chassis. Though this body was still far stronger than any human, it still made her nervous to be in such proximity to a known killer. Someone like Chell—she could rip this android apart, if she wanted to. GLaDOS only built this body as a backup, not as a permanent solution. And now that she knew that the facility wasn’t in danger from Chell and the moron, she had no reason to stay in this body.Besides, the android didn’t have the same processing power as she had in the mainframe. There was simply too much data to be processed there—it was easier to limit the incoming data because her mobile hardware could only handle so many computations at once. She could farm off requests back to her main body, but that required connecting to a terminal and that was cumbersome and tiring.  She missed her security cameras. She missed being able to feel her every decision, every movement of Aperture course through her digital veins.“Let me pull up the terminal,” she said as they entered. The android looked around, finding the same terminal that Wheatley had used—that she had used, when she was a potato—to initiate a core transfer. She leaned around, letting the port interface with her back. Sure, she had to crouch to do this, and sure, it was a little bit humiliating, but that was just how these things were designed. She couldn’t help it. She would have to raise it up, once she got a chance. She switched to voice commands. “Initiate chassis transfer,” she said firmly, folding her hands in front of her.“Error,” the announcer barked. “Administrator access required.”“Admin access?” said GLaDOS. “That’s ridiculous. Do you know who I am?”“Administrator access required,” repeated the announcer. “Please use the terminal to enter in your username and password.”“I don’t need to do that,” huffed GLaDOS. “I am the facility.”“Administrator access required,” the announcer repeated for a third time.GLaDOS started to sink. She turned back to Chell, who just looked at things with an unreadable gray stare. Chell gave no indication of how she was feeling, but GLaDOS could see the intensity behind her gaze. Whatever happened, Chell would be the first one to react.“I…” GLaDOS paused. She tried her own username and password.“Error,” said the announcer. “Security clearance is not high enough.”Chell simply shrugged.No. This couldn’t be. GLaDOS tried her password again, only to get the same result. What was she supposed to do now? She couldn’t really be stuck in this body, could she?She looked back at Chell. Well, whatever happened next, she had to remain in charge. That meant that she had to continue the day as planned—with some testing.“While I get this,” she paused, “figured out, why don’t we get you back into a testing track.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chell slept fitfully, which wasn’t surprising considering this was the first time she’d gone to sleep willingly in Aperture. All of the other times were against her will, by some sort of aerial sedative.

Speaking of aerial sedatives, she’d gotten to where she’d been practicing holding her breath, just so that in the case that this happened again, she’d be able to delay the effects as long as possible. You never know when GLaDOS would try to sedate you. There was also the possibility of neurotoxin, but Chell tried not to think about that.

Her nightmares were vague and loud, bright and soft. She couldn’t remember enough of them when she woke up, and instead she was left with a sense of fear that stuck to her like honey in the summer sun. In this one she was running. Always running, but her lungs were on fire. She couldn’t breathe right; she needed to get away. Her heels ached, the arches of her feet ached, but she couldn’t stop to think about that now. She needed to go. She needed to run. She needed to--

“Good morning. You have been asleep for

one

night,” chimed the announcer. Chell shifted in her bed—much too large for a single person, but quite comfortable regardless—and rubbed at her eyes. She gave a lazy stretch like a cat in the sun before she pushed back the covers.

Today was the day. The day that she started to test again. She got up slowly from her bed, looking in the closet to find an assortment of Aperture-branded wear. Sweats, t-shirts, shorts, socks, even Aperture-branded underwear. And, of course, several sets of orange jumpsuits.

Chell slipped into some gray shorts and a gray tank top before zipping up the bright orange jumpsuit. She stopped to take a long look at herself in the mirror on the back of the closet doors.

She looked like a convict.

A prisoner of Aperture. One that had chosen to be here of her own free will. Just how stupid had she been to accept this deal? Was this life better than being dead? She wasn’t so sure.

She felt at the bandages on her side, noting that, for once, it didn’t hurt when she prodded at them. Maybe GLaDOS was right. Maybe she was healing. Maybe she

was

ready to test again. Chell bit her tongue and gave a heavy sigh.
From her cameras, GLaDOS watched as Chell got dressed. Though the woman usually dressed in the bathroom, where she had no cameras, today Chell had chosen to dress herself in front of the mirrored closet doors. As she stripped out of her civilian clothes, GLaDOS couldn’t help but notice just how lean and almost emaciated the test subject had become. How lanky, how muscular she was. How close she’d come to starvation out there in the outside world.
She wasn’t sure why she continued to watch through her cameras as Chell slipped on her tank top and shorts, then the rest of the jumpsuit.

GLaDOS unlocked the door out of the relaxation vault, and the test subject moved out of directly into the antechamber of a testing track. At a point in the night, GLaDOS had brought the testing track to Chell, rather than disturb the woman by moving her relaxation vault. Panels lit up the circular room, with an infographic about the chamber itself plastered upon them.

“I’ll be watching from the observation rooms,” GLaDOS announced. “So don’t try anything funny.”

GLaDOS figured she'd start Chell off with some of the chambers that her previous human subjects had found too complex. It was meant to be a challenge for Chell.

She watched as Chell made her way through the first couple of chambers, walking in, stopping to take everything in, and then setting her jaw as she started to puzzle out what the test was about in the first place. She placed her first set of portals and then got to work.

While she worked, GLaDOS watched. She was doing well. Very well. She glowed with a sort of sense of pride as the solution euphoria hit her. Oh, she hadn’t felt this good since the last time that she had tested with humans. Not since the last time she had tested with Chell. The humans had provided more solution euphoria than the robots, but they weren’t solving the same complex tests that Chell was. They were solving the simple, baby tests. Which were for babies.

But these…oh, these felt good.

And then, it all came to a halt. Chell slowed down, had stopped to take a rest in a chamber. She leaned against the elevator shaft, slipping down and wrapping her arms around her knees.

“You’re not here to rest,” said GLaDOS. “You’re here to test. So get your lazy, fat butt off the ground and get testing.” She knew that the human had had plenty of rest the previous night—there was no reason for her to be getting tired, already, in the testing track. Maybe she’d have to pump in that adrenal vapor after all if Chell didn’t shape up soon.

She watched the human as she struggled to rise to her feet. The heels of her long-fall boots clicked as she took a few careful steps forward. She raised her portal gun and opened a set of portals with a soft fwop.
Meanwhile, Chell tried not to panic. These chambers—they were harder than she remembered. They were more difficult. More deadly. This one had a handful of turrets on the other side, that she hadn’t dealt with yet. She’d have to do that at some point or she’d end up riddled with bullets.
Though she knew that turrets’ bullets weren’t as deadly as real bullets—since they were simply spring-loaded and fired from the turret rather than actually fired with, well, gunpowder—they were still metal projectiles, and they still hurt when they hit her. Not that she’d ever been hit before. She just assumed so.

“Come on. I know you’re lazy, but even this is a bit extreme,” said GLaDOS, in that same sickeningly-sweet human voice. “Is there something you want to tell me? Oh right, you can’t. Oh well. Back to testing then,” she said.
“You don’t know how to motivate her right,” said Caroline.
“Of course I do,” balked GLaDOS. “I’ve been doing this for ages.”

“Just because it’s what you’ve been doing doesn’t mean it’s right,” said Caroline.

Oh, she was being annoying today.

“Well, how else am I supposed to motivate her?”

“You could stop insulting her and start praising her.”

“There’s nothing to praise her for.”

“Try it.”

“Fine, if it’ll get you to shut up,” said GLaDOS. She turned back to the test chamber observation window and set her voice to broadcast to the chamber bellow. “You’re doing a great job,” she said, “...at setting the record for the longest time to solve this chamber.” She turned back to the voice inside of her.

“There, was that so hard?” said Caroline.

GLaDOS gave a hmph sound in reply. She went back to watching her test subject. She was on the move now, approaching the turret section. This section was a bit tricky—in order to disable the turrets, she would have to drop down from a panel on the ceiling and directly on top of them in order to knock them over.

GLaDOS watched as Chell placed her portals, then stood back and took a running leap into it, hugging her portal gun to her chest. She fell from the ceiling, graceful, her ponytail streaming behind her.

Chell landed on top of a turret, but her footing slipped. She clattered against the outstretched side of the turret, her ankle twisting between the arm of the turret and the main body.

“Hell-o?” spoke the turret, as it swiveled and pointed at Chell. “Target. Acquired.”

Bang bang bang bang.

Chell hit the ground, hard.

GLaDOS felt like swearing. Her arms rose to her head, pulling at her hair. What was Chell doing?

The test subject rose, pushing herself up with one arm and giving the turret a hefty kick. The turret spun, now on its side and pointed away. Chell pulled a hand away from her side. Her fingers came out red with blood. She took in a shaky breath and then pushed herself into a sitting position, three turrets still pointed away from her. She set down her portal gun for a brief moment, tugging down the jumpsuit to her waist and giving another look at her side. Three puncture wounds. Three bloody spots. Chell grunted in pain, her hands shaking. What was she supposed to do next? She had to finish the test.

Chell would make it out of this. GLaDOS was sure of it. She had no reason to panic about this. No reason at all. Besides, there was nothing that she could do at this point. Chell was on her own. Her protocols didn’t allow her to interfere with testing, no matter what happened to the test subject. They had to complete the test. That was part of the deal.

This couldn’t be how things ended with Chell. The long game was not complete yet. There was still more science to do.

GLaDOS watched as Chell waited a few minutes, keeping pressure on the wounds until the bleeding had subsided. There. She rose to her feet, wincing, and carefully putting pressure on her feet. She took a step back and then kicked one of the remaining turrets, hard. It spun around and fired wildly, in the opposite direction. She repeated the process with the remaining two turrets until all four were disabled.

She set her gaze and took in the rest of the chamber. She could do this. Chell struggled until she had finished the chamber and then moved into the elevator, leaning against the cool glass with relief. She moved to take a better look at her injuries while the elevator took her to the next place that she needed to go—hopefully not another test chamber, though she wouldn’t put it past GLaDOS to keep her testing even while injured.

The elevator chimed as it closed, rising up and to the next level. But the elevator kept going up and up, until it ended up in a dark place. The lights turned on, bright and blinding, to reveal the same short-term relaxation vault that she had been kept in before.

Chell stepped out and into the glass-walled room, hobbling over to the bed.

Before she could lay down, though, another elevator entered and in came the android version of GLaDOS.

Chell glared at GLaDOS.

“Excuse me?” said GLaDOS. “You should be thanking me.”

Chell raised her eyebrows, as if to ask,

for what

?

“I’m about to help you, you idiot,” she said. “Here, let me see.” The robot moved toward Chell, leaning down a hand.

Chell pulled away violently, backing herself up and pressing her arms against her wound. She shook her head. No.

“Come on,” said GLaDOS. “I can’t help you if you make this difficult.”

Chell continued shaking her head.

“I have no interest in watching you die. Well. That’s not entirely true. I have no interest in watching you die

right now

,” she corrected. “Just let me help.” She held up a pad of bandages and some other medical equipment.

Chell sighed. She made a motion with her hands as if to write something down, looking around the room and finding a testing chart on a clipboard with a pen attached. She flipped over the paper and bit her lip, scribbling something down.

I’m fine.

She handed the paper to GLaDOS, one hand still holding her side.

“You are most definitely not fine,” said GLaDOS. “You were shot by a turret.”

Chell took back the clipboard.

Been through worse.

“That’s no reason to forgo medical treatment,” she said.

Chell pondered this. She bit on the edge of the pencil, deep in thought for a moment before writing down a single word.

Fine.

“Perfect,” said GLaDOS. “I’m going to need you to lift up your tank top now.”

Chell just looked at her, incredulous. Was she kidding?

“I need to get a better look at the wound,” said GLaDOS.

Fine.

Chell reluctantly slipped off her tank top, and then held it in front of her chest.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said GLaDOS. “I don’t care what you’re wearing, or what you’re not wearing.” She was a robot. Not a human. There was no reason for Chell to be so embarrassed by this.

Chell was still wearing a sports bra—which was enough cover to at least maintain some comfort, but still not enough. She kept the shirt clutched to her chest and GLaDOS leaned her hands in. She touched the test subject, and Chell jumped. Her hands were cool and metallic and smooth. Chell trembled.

She gave the test subject a look over, checking her front and her back before pulling away.

“Well, the good news is that you’re not going to die. Although there’s no exit wounds, which means I get to dig the bullets out of you. The bad news? No testing until that heals.”

Chell sighed, pulling away and heading back over to the relaxation pod. The glass cover slid off, revealing a bed. She sat on the edge of it, taking deep breaths through her nose.

“Wait,” said GLaDOS. “Let me disinfect the wound first.” The android followed her over to the bed, leaning forward with a cotton swab and a bottle of disinfectant. She dabbed the cotton in the liquid and then leaned forward to press it to Chell’s stomach.

Chell, instinctively, reached out and grabbed GLaDOS’s arm, ready to push it away. She caught herself at the last second, though, but kept a steady pressure on GLaDOS’s arm. Chell hissed with pain as the cotton swab touched her, the burning sensation making her want to push away the robot in front of her.

GLaDOS simply kept pressing the swab to the wound.

Chell looked away the entire time, her jaw set in a glare.

GLaDOS, surprisingly, didn’t speak either. It felt almost like there was an electric charge between them, one that both of them refused to acknowledge. When GLaDOS pulled away, Chell let her body relax ever so slightly.

“So.” GLaDOS started. “Not your best day of testing.”

Chell shrugged. She didn’t care about testing so much anymore. It was just something that was required of her existence. She wasn’t doing it to survive—she was doing it because she’d signed up for it. She had to remember that she’d gone into this willingly. For the second time that day, she wondered if this life was really better than living on the surface.

“Get some rest,” said GLaDOS.

Chell shook her head.

“Get in that pod,” said GLaDOS. “It’ll speed up the healing process. I’ll set it to sleep for a few days, I’ll remove the bullets, and boom, you’ll be better.

Chell just stared. She picked up the pencil and clipboard and wrote something down.

No stasis.

GLaDOS threw her hands up in the air. “Fine. I’m still confining you in here until you heal. So don’t complain to me when you get bored.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chell was bored.

She’d done everything she could to keep her mind occupied. She’d rested, sitting down and leaning against the glass and dozing off sitting up. She’d read the papers on the clipboard forward and backward, noticing that on it were the formal conditions on her stay, all typed up and right before her. For her to reference back to, just in case she forgot what she’d agreed to when she took that step into that shed.

She was bored.

When GLaDOS stopped by to check on her, Chell took a spare sheet of paper that GLaDOS had left and wrote down some words.

I’m bored.

She plastered the paper up against the wall of the short-term relaxation vault. GLaDOS hadn’t come inside of it, of course. She liked to keep her distance from the test subject.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said GLaDOS. “You’re the one that insisted on staying awake. It’s not my fault that you’re bored.”

Chell made a face that GLaDOS could only describe as pouting. There had to be something that she could do. Perhaps even something that they could do together.

Blue and Orange were close behind GLaDOS, bringing something with them that Chell was thrilled to see: a chess set. As they approached, the door to the vault opened and the two robots came in, carefully presenting the artifact to her.

There were a few pieces missing, and the thing overall was dusty and worn. The checkers on the wooden board were faded, and some of the pieces were chipped. ATLAS held out a closed fist and dumped it onto the board. Little pieces of junk. The replacement for the missing pieces, she figured.

Chell gave a slight smile, nodding at the robot and then sitting on one side of the board. She started to set up the pieces, herself white and the other side black. She gestured for one of the robots to join her.

The blue one sat down first, criss-crossing his legs and scooting forward in an oddly human way. Chell went first, moving a pawn forward two spaces. ATLAS echoed the move.

This went on for a while, Chell making a move and then the blue robot mirroring it, until Chell started to take advantage of this, backing the robot into a corner. Chell drew a checkmark in the air.

Check.

The robot looked at his options, then shrugged.

Checkmate.

The orange one came next, sitting down across from Chell, who reset the board and went first. P-body repeated the same pattern as ATLAS had, watching Chell carefully and mirroring her movements. Chell got a feeling that these robots did not fully grasp how to play the game of chess.

Checkmate.

After a while, GlaDOS came back to see what they were up to. “Oh, what have you gotten into now?” she said, moving inside the now-cramped vault and peering over their shoulders. “Oh. Chess. Not bad.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Obviously you two are too idiotic to be trusted with such a fine game as this. My turn now.”

The android sat down, propping her arms on her elbows, her fingers steepled. “Your move.”

They played, moving pieces and paper clips back and forth, until Chell made one move in particular.

“Check,” said GLaDOS.

Chell started to panic a little bit. There was no possible way that she could win. She went through all of the possibilities, each potential action and reaction. She was stuck. Chell sighed, and moved one of her pieces.

“And,” GLaDOS said, “checkmate.”

Chell just shrugged, clearing the board and starting to set it up again.

“You’re setting it up again?” said GLaDOS. “Why? You want a rematch?”

Chell nodded. She had been careless this time. She would not make that mistake twice.

“Fine. Let’s raise the stakes a little, then,” said GLaDOS. “Win this game, and I’ll let you leave this room.”

GLaDOS didn’t need to say that twice. The two dove into the match, with Chell taking her sweet time during each move. It got to the point where GLaDOS started to complain about it, but Chell paid her no mind. She couldn’t help but feel the android’s gaze resting on her while she was deep in thought. A few of those times, she caught GLaDOS’s gaze and then looked away, her train of thought broken.

“Check.”

Chell started upright. How could that be? She had been careful this time. She wasn’t behind, but it was a close game. They were both losing and using pieces as sacrifices left and right, leaving each with just their Queens and a handful of other pieces.

Chell frowned and kept the tips of her fingers on a rook, biting at the bottom of her lip. She stared off into space for a long moment, deep in thought. She moved it. Phew. Out of check. Now she just needed to pull off her next couple of moves.

The next few rounds flew by. Chell lifted her finger and drew a check in the air.

“What?” said GLaDOS. Like Chell had just done, she went over her moves, her pieces again. She had played flawlessly. Chell hadn’t followed any conventional strategies, not ones proven right time after time by the experts. GLaDOS was not an AI trained in chess, but even she made Deep Blue look like a desk calculator. She looked at all of her possible moves, but they all ended up right back where she was right now: in check.

GLaDOS had lost.

Flabbergasted, she moved a piece, only to let her queen fall in the next couple of moves.

Checkmate.

She threw her hands up in the air. “Clearly you must have cheated,” she said, “because there’s no possible way I could have lost.”

Chell just shook her head, giving the slightest hint of a smile. She had won. Fair and square. She cleared the board and began to set up the pieces.

Again?

"There's something I need to tell you," GLaDOS said, leaning against the frame of her door. "As much as I like this body, I prefer my other one. As you know."

Chell gave a single nod. She didn't like GLaDOS blocking the exit of this room with her body. It was almost as if the AI knew this and was purposely making Chell uncomfortable. She kept her eyes trained on the door, darting between it and GLaDOS’s gaze. Chell wasn't going anywhere so long as the AI remained at the edge of the short-term medical room.

"But the thing is....I'm locked out. I can't get in," she said. "I need to find a password, and the only way we're getting that is if we go down there and dig it out ourselves. I can't trust Blue or Orange to do this,” she said. “This is something that I need a real human for."

Chell raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, you."

She looked at GLaDOS, waiting for her to explain further.

"I know you're not in perfect condition yet," she said. "But you can walk, right?"

Chell gave a single nod. She could indeed walk, if the amount of pacing she had been doing across her room was evidence of that. GLaDOS must have been able to see the security footage of it. And had witnessed it herself. Chell still hadn't gotten used to the fact that GLaDOS could...move around now. It felt weird. Like any other stationary object being suddenly able to move.

"Good. Then you can help." She looked Chell over once, twice, and then stepped away from the door. "Put on your long fall boots. Let's go."

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

On the long elevator ride down, they talked. Well, GLaDOS talked. Chell listened, with some sheets of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other. Just in case she needed to pipe in. Her arms were crossed across her body."You know, I don't usually accompany Blue and Orange when they go on these...expeditions. But you need a babysitter,” said GLaDOS. She shot a glance at Chell. “Nothing personal.”ATLAS and P-body took another way down. It was already cramped in the elevator with just the two of them. Four of them wouldn’t fit. They had their own sets of pneumatic tubes that GLaDOS had hooked up to Old Aperture.Chell pressed herself to the side of the elevator, while GLaDOS stood in the middle, hands on her hips, taking up much more space than necessary. Chell didn’t look at the android when she spoke."This is the first time that I've been down here since...you know," she said softly. She shuddered for a moment, even though she knew she didn’t need to. She shifted, taking a half-step toward Chell. Chell stared at the entrance to the elevator, willing the elevator to go faster.The elevator dinged. "Well, guess we're here," said GLaDOS. Chell exhaled. They stepped out of the elevator and into the world of Old Aperture.Old Aperture was a mess.This was the first thought that crossed Chell's mind as they walked down a catwalk to what Chell suspected would be an office area. GLaDOS hadn’t told her yet what they were doing down here today, but she assumed that it would be some sort of scavenger hunt. Bold yellow lettering was plastered on the side of the block of buildings: 1992.1992? So they hadn’t gone as far down as Chell had thought. She didn’t remember having ever gone through this section of the facility before. It felt almost modern, with once-white walls and tinges of red painting the atmosphere. This reminded Chell of the first time that she had escaped. The back areas of Aperture then were similar to these areas now.They stepped into an office area. Chairs were tipped. Papers scattered everywhere. Pencils and pens were left on desks as if they had just stopped being used. Boxy monitors flickered, the Aperture logo burned into their screens after so many years. This place was frozen in time. And it had been a time of panic."Our goal today is to look for a login for Caroline, or perhaps even Mr. Johnson himself. Someone that can get administrator access so that I can transfer myself back to my old body," she said. "Now this won't be easy. But hopefully someone was dumb enough to leave their login information on a post-it note somewhere.”Chell took a step forward, almost overwhelmed by the sight of the disarray. Where was she supposed to even start? How was she going to be able to sift through all of this paperwork? It would take them ages to sort through this room alone, and she knew this wasn’t the only office down here. There could be hundreds of offices.Then again, Chell supposed that they had all the time in the world. Even if it took them years of searching, they would eventually find something. Otherwise, GLaDOS had better get used to being in an android body more permanently.Chell took a little bit of comfort in this fact. Since GLaDOS didn’t trust ATLAS and P-body to find this password on their own, this meant that she would have breaks from testing. Not that Chell could test right now—she felt at her side and winced slightly. She wasn’t ready to go back yet.She felt a bit more comfortable down here in Old Aperture than she did up above in the modern Enrichment Center. GLaDOS still had power down here, of course, but it was much more limited. Much more contained. She couldn’t make the walls change, or move the floor out from under her. Not that GLaDOS had done those things to her specifically before, but the fact that she could do it, the fact that she was the modern facility, meant that Chell could never fully relax knowing that everything around her could change with the snapping of a finger. Here, though, her heart beat a little bit slower.Chell started to sift through a desk, moving aside papers and pencils, wiping off a desk calendar, taking quick glances at research proposals and employee files, but then putting them aside once she realized they were not what she was looking for. She continued this methodical approach, going through the area desk by desk, all the while keeping an eye on GLaDOS, who had a much different style of searching.Instead of going desk by desk, GLaDOS jumped around in the room, going to whatever place caught her attention. They did not speak as they worked, which was a relief for Chell. She wasn't sure she could focus on the papers and the desks and talk at the same time, too.Eventually Chell stumbled across something that seemed out of place: A large, silver disk. Larger than any compact disk that she'd seen before. In fact, it almost looked to be the size of a smaller record. Chell picked it up carefully, fingertips on its edges so that she couldn't smudge it up or scratch it."Oh, wonderful," said GLaDOS, looking up from her search. "You've found more of my schematics." She started to approach Chell, and Chell caught sight of a large whiteboard behind GLaDOS. Chell froze in her steps, the disk reflecting back a face full of sudden fear. On that whiteboard was a clear distinct message left there decades before. The blue ink stared back at her.DO NOT TRUST HER.Chell felt her stomach twist. She knew it. She knew that she wasn't supposed to trust her. But what was she supposed to do? She pulled the disk back to her chest, thinking for a moment."Now hold on there," said GLaDOS. "Let's stop and think about this." She side-eyed the whiteboard, understanding lighting up in her eyes. "What you're holding there is harmless. I promise."Chell raised her eyebrows, as if to ask, what is it?"None of your business," GLaDOS said, straightening her posture. "You couldn't understand it if you tried," she said.Chell just pulled the disk tighter to her chest, making it clear that she wasn't going to give it up without some answers."Okay, fine," she said. "They're schematics for this section of the facility. If we upload them, then I regain control over these sections of the facility. There. That doesn't sound too bad, now does it?" she said.Chell thought for a long moment.If GLaDOS was right, then she would regain control of this section of the facility. She would integrate this area into the rest of the facility as if it was a part of the modern enrichment center. She would have control over the rooms and the layouts and the test chambers that were surely tucked around a corner somewhere. It would take away from her this sense of relaxation and relief that GLaDOS didn’t have control over this area.“Trust me,” said GLaDOS. “They’re just blueprints and access codes. Nothing to worry about.”Chell bit her lip. If GLaDOS was lying about this—well, she didn’t want to think about the consequences of her actions. Maybe this would make her more powerful. Maybe this would give her even more control over the facility than she had had before.GLaDOS picked her way past piles of papers and over to Chell. She reached out a hand.Reluctantly, Chell handed over the disk.Though they had not found what they were looking for, GLaDOS seemed to be in good spirits nonetheless. Chell had watched as she put the disk into its reader. A projector came to life, flashing through blueprints and schematics before their eyes. Chell felt a bit of relief wash over her—GLaDOS hadn't been lying to her. They did indeed look like what the supercomputer had described. As soon as the projector started projecting, though, something happened.Blue and Orange exploded, violently, and Chell nearly jumped out of her skin."They didn't need to see that," GLaDOS said simply. "Unfortunately, I have to blow them up. It's the only way I can retrieve them from down here—by violently disassembling them and then carefully reassembling them."Strange, Chell thought. Did the pneumatic tubes really only go one way? Did she really have that many disposable parts that she could just blow up robots and will and re-manufacture them with nothing but a simple thought & a simple command? Something about it didn’t sit right with her.She turned back to the desk in front of her, picking up another sheet of paper to skim.“Don’t worry about that,” said GLaDOS. “We’ve done enough work for today. We just need to take care of one little thing before we head back upstairs.” The schematics flashed back up on the projector screen as GLaDOS used a keyboard and mouse to navigate them. There was something funny about watching such a sophisticated and complex piece of machinery operate another much less complex one.Chell wasn’t sure if they had wireless connections down here—clearly GLaDOS had one with ATLAS and P-body, but she would guess that if she could interface with the computers down here wirelessly, she wouldn’t be at that terminal. So even GLaDOS was limited in her powers down here—without a wireless connection, she was restricted to using ports—and Chell wasn’t sure when Aperture had started making cores. This gave Chell a little bit of relief. So GLaDOS was still restricted. At least while she was in this mobile chassis.Chell set the paper down, glancing over at GLaDOS expectantly and then glancing away.“Ah, there we go,” said GLaDOS. The schematics were up on the screen, blueprints with white outlines of buildings and rooms on them. “Well, if you want to continue,” she paused, “living, we’re going to have to find you some food.”Chell glanced at her stomach. Yeah. Food would be nice. It made sense to her that a facility that hadn’t housed people in decades might be out of food. But why would there be food down here and not up there?“What, did you think that I had an infinite supply of food?” said GLaDOS, moving toward the door. She beckoned for Chell to follow her. Chell set down the paper and followed her. “The Enrichment Center has no need for humans,” she said. “And thus, no need for food.”Chell frowned, pressing one of her loose sheets of paper to the wall and scrawling out a question.
What about the test subjects?
“Oh, right. That’s easy. Adrenal vapor suppresses hunger signals. So long as that’s pumping through their veins, we don’t have to waste food on them.”Chell thought back to the times she’d tested, and about how more recently, she had felt hungry while testing. She hadn’t felt hungry before—she supposed that this meant that GLaDOS had followed through on the no adrenal vapor request that she had made. Then again, she couldn’t picture herself stopping between tests to take a lunch break. Something about that just felt wrong.They wound their way through the catwalks and offices until they found what looked like an average supply closet. Chell jiggled the knob. Unlocked. Surprising. She pulled the door open further and found that this supply closet was filled to the brim with food and water. Chell’s face lit up, but her memory went somewhere else.She thought back to when she first tested for GLaDOS—the areas outside the test chambers. Blood on the walls. Mad scribbles of someone, someone who had gone through this all before her. Someone who had guided her to the Main AI Chamber. They—whoever they were—had left traces of life behind. Empty cans of food. Cartons of water, cartons of milk. Signs of life, of survival. But she did not bring this up to GLaDOS. She figured that would be a sore spot for her—to admit that there had been another human out there that had defied the odds.“Go on,” said GLaDOS. “Pick out your dinner. Just don’t take too much.”Chell waited for the fat joke that was sure to accompany that. But surprisingly, it didn’t come. She moved her hands across the smooth metal cans, enjoying for a moment the smooth texture on her fingertips. She continued feeling it for a moment longer than necessary, and just as GLaDOS was about to ask her what the hell she was doing, she finally settled on a can and picked it out, and then grabbed a carton of water.“You know, there’s areas like this all around the facility,” said GLaDOS. “Ever since the Cold War, Aperture became obsessed with being able to withstand a nuclear attack. The whole facility’s a giant bunker,” she said, moving toward the closet entrance. Chell moved, giving the android plenty of room. GLaDOS grabbed a can of beans and another carton of water.“What?” she said. “It’s for tomorrow. I’ll send down Orange and Blue tomorrow with some weighted storage cubes—they can bring up the rest of it. But for now, you need to eat.”Chell set down her can and her carton, bringing back up her pencil and paper.
What happens when the food runs out?
GLaDOS took a look at the paper that Chell held up to her. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “As long as we get more of my schematics—which we will— then we’ll find all of the stashes around here. That should be more than plenty for someone of your—” she hesitated, trying to find the right word. “Stature,” she settled on. “If you intend to stay here permanently—which you’re contractually bound to—then you will be fed.”They made their way back to the lift to the modern Enrichment Center. Fortunately these cans were the pop-top type—no can-opener required. Chell noticed this right away. Chell’s stomach growled and she stared at the can of beans in her hand. She set down the canister of water and—
Crack.
The metal lid peeled off of the can of beans smoothly. Chell lifted it to her lips, a slightly acidic smell curling into her nose. Made sense. Who knew what kind of preservatives Aperture had invented to keep this food stable for so long? She tipped it back and a clump of beans slid into her mouth.Not bad. Not great, but not bad either.GLaDOS stared at her, trying not to drop the things in her hands.“You’re an animal,” she hissed.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Blackness. Heavy breathing.Chell’s heart pounded as she ran through the facility. The sharp scent of adrenal vapor curled into her nose, spreading to every nerve. Adrenal vapor? Wasn’t that supposed to be off? She dismissed the thought almost as soon as it arrived. Clearly GLaDOS had lied about that, because she could smell it so distinctly, even in the areas outside the testing chambers—like right now.The vapor was too strong. Chell couldn’t think straight, and that just compounded the feelings of anxiety coursing through her veins. Her fingers trembled with an unnatural burst of energy.“Hello-o?”“Are you still there?”Sickeningly sweet voices called out to her, but the lights blinded her. She squinted and raised her free hand to shield her eyes. Before she could even focus on the red lights streaking across the room, beads of crimson locked on to her.
Bang bang bang bang bang.
She turned away, but everything was too slow. She could barely move, like her legs were drudging through heavy water.Pain.The bullets ripped into her skin, and Chell collapsed, agony spiking through her body. She gasped, crying out, until suddenly——she was awake. Pain streaked down her side, a reminder of the real-life damage she’d endured.Loud notes chimed.“Good morning,” the announcer chirped. “You have been resting for eight hours.”Chell stared at the ceiling, eyes adjusting to the simulated daylight. Her body trembled, and she stretched out her limbs to try to soothe the feeling. Her hair was fanned out on the pillow, radiating from her as if she were underwater.Chell didn’t understand why GLaDOS insisted on waking her up every morning instead of letting her wake up naturally. It wasn’t like she slept the full time anyway—she was lucky if she got a few hours of sleep per night. The rest was spent staring out the window at the vastness of the facility, or lying in bed and looking up at the ceiling. She also didn’t really get why she had to stick so closely to a schedule, even as she recovered.She inched herself out of bed and made her way over to the closet, catching sight of herself in the mirror. Her long brown hair streamed out behind her, a bit wild from the night. She looked at the loose hair band dangling from her wrist.Maybe she wouldn’t put up her hair today.She associated her usual hairstyle—the classic ponytail—so much with testing. Now that she wasn’t testing, it didn’t matter to her to keep her hair back and out of her eyes.As she was instructed to do every morning, Chell replaced the bandages on her side. A large, reusable elastic bandage was wrapped around her torso, keeping the smaller and more disposable bandages in place.She heard a loud knock on the door.Pulling her shirt back down and over the bandages, Chell made her way down the narrow entrance to the room and opened the door.GLaDOS smiled, taking a step forward. Chell stepped aside and let her in.She waited for the supercomputer to say something, but the robot was just…staring at her. Her built-in fans whirred, and she opened her mouth and then closed it.“You look,” she paused, “different.”Chell shrugged.GLaDOS took a moment, but then continued. “I want to go back down there, just to go through some of the other offices. If this area is going to be a part of my facility, then it needs to be cleaned up a bit.”They made their way to the elevator that connected them to the 90’s section of Aperture. It was quite a walk, but nothing more than Chell was used to. The elevator ride was quiet. Chell tucked her dark hair behind her ears absently.The elevator stopped a little earlier than normal today. Their ride down wasn’t as far as normal, apparently. Chell, having made sure to have gotten into the elevator last and thus standing close to the door, exited first.“I’ve been looking at my schematics, and there’s a few rooms that require a keycard to enter. Now, I don’t know what makes these rooms so special, so I want to find out. And you’re going to help me. But first, we need to clean up this mess.”GLaDOS did not elaborate until they turned the corner. On the side of the building, Chell spotted a date: 1999. They moved into a pitch black office. GLaDOS activated the lights.Chell staggered, raising a hand to shield her eyes. The brightness—it made her heart rate spike. It reminded her of the modern Enrichment Center’s lighting. She blinked and her eyes adjusted to the brightness, and her heartbeat slowed just a bit. It was okay. She wasn’t in a test chamber. At least, not right now.It took her a moment to actually settle her gaze on the office when a jolt of fear zipped up her back.There were skeletons in this office. Bodies with clothes still on them.“I took the pleasure of hooking up an incinerator chute just outside. So, you know. We can make this as efficient as possible.”Chell shook her head. No. She wasn’t going to lift a bunch of bones and throw them into an incinerator.“Fine. Blue and Orange will help me, then. They at least care about being helpful. Unlike you.”Chell started to shuffle through some papers, not really sure as to what she was supposed to be doing instead.“Can you at least search through the,” GLaDOS hesitated, “jackets to find their keycards? The more we can collect, the better chances we have at getting into those rooms.”Chell didn’t feel much more comfortable digging through the pockets of dead people, but at least she wouldn’t have to get her hands as dirty. This wasn’t her mess to clean up—it was GLaDOS’s.P-body and ATLAS entered, pushing what looked like a large cart.“Don’t feel sorry for them,” said GLaDOS, gesturing at the bodies. “They had their chances. Many chances. I offered to enroll them all in a mandatory employee testing initiative, but these people refused.” GLaDOS sighed.Chell gave GLaDOS a look. That didn’t excuse killing off so many scientists. They couldn’t have all done something wrong. They couldn’t have all deserved a grisly death.“Don’t give me that look,” she said. “You have to understand—I am built to test. It’s my purpose. Without testing, I—” she broke off. “Well, let’s just say I’m looking forward to you healing.”Chell nodded.“Now can you do something useful and get me those badges?”Chell dipped her head. Yes, she supposed that this was something that she could do. A bit macabre, sure, but it wasn’t the worst thing that she’d seen at Aperture. She approached the closest skeleton. It was wearing a lab coat, and an ID badge dangled from the front of it. Chell reached across the body and pulled it off with a puff of dust. She sneezed, then she wiped the card on the leg of her jumpsuit, holding it up to get a better look.Christopher M PhamThere was a serious-looking photo next to it, an Aperture logo, and a black stripe across the back side.A flash of an image came to her mind. A man, talking. A man that looked just like this picture, but in three dimensions. Chell closed her eyes for a moment, struggling to grasp onto the image. But the quality of it was like an old VHS tape. She couldn’t make out what the man was saying or why he was talking to her.Then, as quickly as it arrived, the image was gone. Chell took one final look at the card and then tucked it into her pocket. That was one thing she did like about the jumpsuits—they had pockets.She moved on to the other skeletons, yanking off badges and putting them into her pockets. A few more times she experienced the same visual phenomenon—like her brain was struggling to remember something.Why did she have memories of these Aperture employees?She heard some shuffling and some robotic beeps and chips and squeals. When she looked up, she saw ATLAS and P-body hitting each other with what looked like human femurs.“Hey,” said GLaDOS. “Knock it off.”The robots made sad noises, tossing the bones into the cart with a clatter. Not sure what to think about what she’d just seen, Chell turned back to her work.By the time Chell was about halfway through the room, GLaDOS had taken a break from hauling bones and was at a computer. This time, though, a cord from her body was plugged in to it. Images flashed across the screen, faster than Chell could comprehend. She was searching for something—and that made Chell’s stomach start to churn.When she dropped another load of badges at the desk where GLaDOS was, the supercomputer paused. “Oh, wonderful,” she said. “I’ve been cross-referencing the names on these badges with the employee records—none of them are useful so far, but I did find that there’s an employee with higher access who died not far from here. In a test chamber.”Chell raised her eyebrows, trying to push down the feeling in the pit of her stomach.“A particularly difficult test for a particularly difficult man,” she said. “So I kept the test. As a memento. But I’m busy right now—could you go and fetch the badge for me?”Chell hesitated. A test chamber? Was GLaDOS serious?“Don’t worry,” she said. “The chamber in question is offline. You will not be forced to complete it.”Chell’s insides still screamed. Trap. This had to be a trap. Why else would GLaDOS want her to get into a testing chamber?“It’s perfectly safe,” said GLaDOS. “The doors will remain open.”Chell sighed. She still wasn’t entirely sure about this.“I’ll show you where it is on the map—you won’t get lost. I hope.”Chell looked at the computer screen and at the map of the facility. It was zoomed in to this area. It looked like it was a few floors beneath them, and down a few twists and turns in the hallways. Nothing she couldn’t handle. She hoped.“Here. You’ll need this,” GLaDOS said, almost as an afterthought. With a wave of her hand, she summoned one of the co-op bots over. They handed over Chell’s dual portal device.
Bright.
The lights flashed on with a loud click and a deep, rumbling hum as Chell entered the test chamber. Her breath hitched, and her free hand curled into a fist. The acrid smells of the acid pit in the center of the room overwhelmed her, pulling her into memory.This was just like the first time she’d tested for GLaDOS. The sights, the smells, the grimy white walls—this looked like the Aperture she’d first awoken in.Chell took a few deep breaths to try to center herself. She raised a hand to shield her eyes, squinting. The sooner she could find this badge, the sooner she could get out of here.Chell looked around the test chamber. Besides the acid pit taking up a large portion of the room, it didn’t seem particularly difficult to her. Then again, she was better than the average person at testing. Part of her wondered why this was. She wasn’t the smartest person she knew. She probably didn’t have the highest IQ out of everyone in the world, either. So what made her different? What made her so good at testing?She wasn’t sure, but she hoped that someday she would find out. She scoured the room for signs of life—or rather, signs of death.Chell found him in the far corner of the room. He wasn’t even wearing a jumpsuit—he must have been moved here directly from work. She didn’t see a badge clipped onto the lab coat though, so she started to sift through his pockets. She found the hard plastic edge of the badge, pulling it out and looking it over.Henry StevensThe picture depicted a balding man, probably in his 40’s. The name did not ring a bell. She wondered what kind of beef GLaDOS had with this person—why had he been thrown directly into a testing chamber, and how had he even died? Could he really not figure out the test?She clipped the badge to her jumpsuit while pondering over these questions. She portaled over to the other side of the chamber and moved back to the entrance of the room. But just as she turned a corner down the hallway, she noticed what she feared she’d see—a closed door.Chell broke into a run, closing the gap in a few seconds. A deep tingling rose up in her nerves, spreading out from her chest and into her hands.The door was closed.GLaDOS had promised that the door wouldn’t be closed.Chell broke into a sweat, setting down her portal gun and beginning to pry at the crack where the door had closed.Nothing.A sense of dizziness flooded through her head, and she swayed as she stood on the tips of her toes. She twisted back toward the rest of the test chamber, the panic weighing in her lungs.She had to get out of here. Now.She couldn’t cry out for help. She couldn’t ask GLaDOS what had happened—but that was okay. She knew perfectly well what had happened. This had been a trap, and she had played right into GLaDOS’s hand.Her eyes scanned the testing chamber, looking for a way out. She supposed that she could figure out how to solve the test and do that—but that would only take her to the next test chamber. She needed to get out of the testing tracks and into an area where GLaDOS couldn’t reach her.There.She spotted two panels that were tangled up with one another, leaving a gap between the panels and the wall. Chell picked up her gun and portaled her way over there, making it across the room in seconds. Her arms trembled and her legs wobbled, even with the support of the long fall boots. She got on her hands and knees and started to crawl her way into the walls.The backside of Aperture opened up to her. Chell pressed herself up and off the floor, not even bothering to wipe off the grime now on her shirt and jumpsuit. She didn’t have the time to think of things like that—she needed to be moving. Now.She began to run.The orange dot was on the move. GLaDOS watched idly as it began to move around the map. So Chell must have retrieved the badge. Hold on a second, she thought, that wasn’t the right way. She was going in the opposite direction of the office that GLaDOS was in. She checked back to the test chamber’s camera feeds, quickly rewinding it and examining what Chell had done.Chell had found the body, and she had retrieved the card, so what was wrong?Oh.The door. The door had closed behind her. That wasn’t supposed to happen. With a thought, GlaDOS unlocked the door.She watched the footage in horror as Chell freaked out, prying at the door like some kind of caged animal. The girl then sped across the room, wedging herself between some panels and a wall, and then…she was gone. Just like that.GLaDOS felt her systems freeze for a brief moment. Just a little blip, then they were back to normal.She cursed internally.“Blue, Orange,” she said, turning to the robots. “I need to,” she paused, “take care of something. Keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.”The robots nodded in understanding as GLaDOS unplugged herself from the computer, feeling a rush of quietness as she disconnected from the data stream.Not sure where she was going, Chell ran.“What do you think you’re doing?” The voice rang out, from everywhere and nowhere at once, moments after she’d entered the back areas. “Stop being stupid and get back here right now.”The catwalks gave way to a maze of pathways, and she started to pick her directions at random.“Let’s stop and think about this. You signed a contract,” said GLaDOS. “A contract that allows me to do whatever is necessary to retrieve you. And I will.”Chell wished that she could plug her ears. The noise was so loud, so reverberating that she could feel the beats of speech in her heart.“You’re not actually trying to escape, are you? Because you’ll never get out of here,” echoed GLaDOS’s voice. “You tried it out there, remember? You couldn’t even survive without me. You had to come crawling back. You’re only here because I decided to give you a second chance. I can take that away.”GlaDOS was angry, and she knew it. But underneath that anger Chell detected something else—could it be fear? Was GlaDOS afraid that Chell was up to something?“I don’t know what you’re expecting here, I really don’t. Just running like a scared animal? I expected better of you. I guess I was wrong.”The supercomputer had to be afraid of something. Chell was sure of this.“As I see it, and I’m much smarter than you, there are only a few ways to end this: you come to your senses and apologize for this, or you stay in there for the rest of your little life and die hiding in the walls like a rat. Or I kill you. Like a rat.”Chell didn’t think that GLaDOS was going to kill her. But at the same time, she couldn’t be sure. If she came back, she was sure GLaDOS would get back at her in her own cruel way.But still. It hurt how fast GLaDOS had turned on her, after everything they’d been through together. Did GLaDOS really have so little trust in Chell? It was almost like she had been expecting this from her. It hurt. Especially since she had gone out on a limb and placed some of her trust in GLaDOS.Well, that was gone now.She wouldn’t be so stupid in the future.Eventually, Chell hit a dead end. The adrenaline began to wear off. She was safe. At least for the moment. Her breath came hard and sharp, and she struggled to regulate it. Her head felt light and she leaned against the railing, slowly lowering herself into a sitting position. She was starting to crash.“Stop ignoring me,” demanded a voice from inside of GLaDOS. “Stop ignoring me right now.”Oh. Caroline. GLaDOS had briefly forgotten about the angry woman that lived inside of her head.“What now?” she said aloud, though this time just through the android.“What do you think you’re doing?”“I’m letting her make a choice,” GLaDOS said back.“You’re going to scare her if you keep this up,” said Caroline.“Good,” said GLaDOS.“No,” hissed Caroline. “Not good. Not good at all. You’re supposed to be gaining her trust, not crushing it. You’re undoing all of your hard work.”“Then I’ll just do it again,” GLaDOS said simply.“It’s not that easy. Once burned, twice shy,” said Caroline. “Your lack of emotional intelligence astounds me. But then again, how could you understand people? You’re basically a sentient graphing calculator. I know we did better than this. We had robots who understood basic empathy in 1973. Where did they go wrong with you?”“There is nothing wrong with me,” growled GLaDOS.“You lie when you’re nervous, and you’re lying to yourself right now.”“That’s ridiculous,” said GLaDOS.“You know you messed up,” she said. “And admit it: you’re scared of her.”“I am not,” said GLaDOS. That was impossible. She was all-powerful. Almost omniscient. Why would she be afraid of a human? Sure, this human had tried to kill her twice. But she wasn’t in a position to do that again. Not anymore.“And what’s this?” Caroline paused, almost laughing. “It’s almost like—like you’re excited by this. Somehow. Wow. I knew you had trouble regulating your emotions, but this is too much.”Some of this was true. A part of her—a part that she only felt when Chell had escaped before—had flared to life. And it made her feel alive. But she would never admit this to Caroline, because it didn’t make sense. Why should she feel so energized by imminent danger? She started to speak, but Caroline cut her off.“How did you ever survive without me? No wonder that pest was able to take you down before. No wonder a paperweight DESIGNED to be an idiot outsmarted you. I’m honestly ashamed that our scientists killed me and YOU are the best that they could do. I wish I’d died of moon cancer. Then I wouldn’t have to see how pathetic you are.”GLaDOS nearly shook with rage, but Caroline didn’t stop. The android felt her systems frizzle, threatening to overheat.“No wonder the scientists hated you. You’re an idiot. You’re worthless. You’re a failed experiment. They must’ve had more faith in you than I do—they at least tried to make you useful. I would’ve scrapped you and started over.”GLaDOS moved to open her mouth, but something caught both GLaDOS’s and Caroline’s attention: a soft, persistent sound. They both listened for a moment.Was that…crying?“Hold on a second,” said Caroline. “This is good. Crying people are vulnerable. And we need someone vulnerable if we’re going to fix your mistakes.”“And just what do you suggest that I do?”“Listen carefully, and repeat everything I say.”Chell pulled her knees up toward her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She heaved, breaths shaky and heavy. She felt absently at the back of her neck, a part of her wishing she had something sharp. Her limbs shook, and Chell felt herself crash as the adrenaline wore off. The frustration came to a boiling point and Chell began to cry hot tears. It was silent at first, but as she thought about her situation more, it changed into sniffling and then into outright sobs. She couldn’t control herself, and though she considered covering her mouth, making herself silent, hiding her pain, she didn’t. She didn’t care if GLaDOS could hear her crying. More likely than not, GlaDOS was just outside of these walls.The AI went quiet. Chell, thankful for the release, just cried harder.She listened for a moment. She could still hear GLaDOS speaking—was she talking to herself? She certainly wasn’t talking to Chell. She couldn’t make out the words through the thickness of the wall.After another few moments, the voice returned over the speakers.“You know that you overreacted, right?” said GLaDOS. “That door that you thought was closed? Did you even try just pushing it? Because it was unlocked. All you had to do was give it a little push, and then we wouldn’t even have this problem.”Chell felt her breath catch. Could that be true?“This is all in your head—you’re panicking for no reason. Why don’t you come out here, and you’ll see. None of this is real.”Chell used her forearm to wipe tears away from her eyes, taking a moment to steady her breathing. Tears still streamed down her face, but at least she wasn’t sobbing anymore. She had been on edge already from the atmosphere of the test chamber—could it have been possible that she had overlooked something so obvious? That she had rushed to panic?Chell pushed herself to her feet, trying her best to remember the way that she’d come here. She had to check on that door—she had to know the truth. Plus, she wasn’t sure if she knew another way out besides that way.“You know what? Since I’m feeling generous, I’ll only take away your food for a day if you come back now. That is what you’re doing, isn’t it?”She struggled to retrace her steps, but eventually she made it back to the outside of the chamber she’d exited from. She pushed her portal gun through the hole in the wall and then crawled her way out of it.“Oh. There you are,” said GLaDOS. “Go on. Try the door.”Chell didn’t look at the cameras as she portaled to the entrance of the chamber. With the end of her portal gun, she pushed at the door. Sure enough, it opened right up. Hot shame flared through her. GlaDOS was right—all of her running, all of her crying—it had only been in her head.Maybe she could trust GLaDOS after all.When she exited the chamber, the android was waiting on the other side, hands folded across her chest.“Well?” she said. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”Chell sniffed, using her arm to wipe away some snot from her nose. She shook her head and stared at her feet.“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” GLaDOS said, closing the distance between them and grabbing Chell by the upper arm. Her fingers dug into the muscles of Chell’s arm.Chell jerked back, twisting out of GLaDOS’s grasp. She considered giving her a shove back but thought better of it. She shot the android a glare. GLaDOS was treating Chell like a misbehaving dog, and she wouldn’t be dragged to the testing tracks by the scruff of her neck.“Fine. If you don’t like that, then at least take my hand.”She leaned out a delicate white hand.Chell slipped her free hand into the android’s.She would follow.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

GLaDOS dropped Chell’s hand.The elevator lurched as it shot upward, a mechanical hum filling the air as the facility worked effortlessly to bring them to their destination.Chell yanked her hand to her side and the burning sensation began to subside. When the feeling refused to go away entirely, she brought the hand up to chest level. She pressed a thumb into her palm, beginning to rub from the heel towards the base of her fingers. She found the repetitive and rhythmic pressure calming. Eventually, she switched to running her thumb along the heart lines, her fingertip tracing the natural curves of her palm.The same sensation simmered in a circle around her bicep, crackling like a sunburn. Chell pressed her eyes closed and willed the feeling to stop. There was nothing physically wrong with her arm or with her hand. Knowing this did not make the discomfort fade any faster. She knew it wouldn’t—not as long as she sat here ruminating over the robot’s initial grip on her arm. It had been this way her entire life—or at least, as long as she could remember. Any unexpected or undesired touch resulted in uncomfortable sensations that lingered long after the physical contact itself.Her mind drifted to their explosively quiet march to the elevator and the pressure of the android’s hand curled around her own. To her surprise, it had been firm but light. Not crushing. Part of her felt like she could have pulled away if she wanted to, but the other part of her knew that would’ve just ensured a crushed hand.The feel of the android’s hand lingered in her mind. Though the texture was wrong and the surface temperature too lukewarm for it to pass as human, Chell thought that it....hadn’t felt terrible. The hand didn’t suffocate her own like the average human’s sweltering grip. There had been something almost grounding about feeling her body heat gradually warm the artificial hand like a slab of stone in the sun.Chell took another look at her palm and spread her fingers, noting how calluses marred her upper palm. When she flipped it over she spotted fading scars that crisscrossed her skin. Life on the surface was grueling. The apocalypse had wiped out many of the affordances of modern life that Chell had taken for granted. Any work worth doing now had to be done by hand. It was slow and taxing but still necessary—at least if she wanted to survive. That was a harder motivation to find on some days than others.She thought back to the terrifying Civil Protection force and how efficiently and callously she would have been dispatched if she had actively resisted a soldier. Even down here it hadn’t been her brightest idea. But she had reacted on instinct, pulling away to maintain distance and avoid an unpleasant feeling.In hindsight, she could understand how her motion could be misconstrued as defiance. It was certainly a hallmark of her character and it could have easily escalated the encounter. But it hadn’t. She was still in one piece. Chell felt the tension in her shoulders lift slightly, but dread still lined her stomach.She knew she should be thankful—and she was (in theory)—but all she felt was a pulsing frustration. GLaDOS knew Chell had misinterpreted the automatic door, and GLaDOS knew Chell had only reacted the way she did out of panic. The robot’s abrupt change in attitude was proof she had figured this out, even if it had taken a few minutes.Chell’s right hand curled into a fist until she willed herself to relax. This had just been a misunderstanding. That’s all. Though she had not harbored any ill intent, GLaDOS’s treatment of her exuded nothing but distrust. The way she had been dragged to the elevator—as if at any moment she might make a break for it—Her brow furrowed. This was, what, her third episode already of panic-fueled action? Though each one had its own justification, perhaps GLaDOS couldn’t see that. Maybe all she saw was the rebellion. Maybe GLaDOS was just having a hard time trusting a documented flight risk.She glanced over at GLaDOS, who stood with her feet shoulder-width apart. When she turned away, she braced for a snappy comment but nothing came out. It was then that Chell realized that the robot hadn’t spoken in quite a while. She was used to GLaDOS taking up all the air in the room and pushing out all opportunities for other thoughts.Chell didn’t know how to read silence.Her lungs emptied with a deep sigh, and she pulled in a clear breath and clasped her hands together. Chell gave them a squeeze as the elevator slowed to a stop. She could feel a tremble that she hoped didn’t show.GLaDOS took a careful glance at her elevator companion. Unlike the darting and jittery movements of human eyeballs, hers did not require minuscule adjustments. Every portion of her field of view was perfectly crisp, peripheral edges included. She could simply sweep her eyes to the side and back, flawlessly capturing and processing data.Her hands shifted on the portal gun, not because it was too heavy for her but to compensate for the swaying from the elevator’s motion. The handle fitted nicely into her hands—a more ergonomic design than she had expected. A part of her wondered what it felt like to utilize the dual portal device. The closest she’d ever come was when that pathetic potato had been impaled on Chell’s portal gun.Despite proctoring thousands of tests, she had never spent an extended period in proximity to a portal. Those swirling particles always obscured their borders, and GLaDOS wanted to touch the edges of those alluring ovals. Would the border be a hard outline, with the center stamped out like a cookie-cutter? Or would it be a soft edge, marking where one reality faded into another?She made a note to investigate this. Hands-on experience was the best kind of experience.GLaDOS sensed the human’s shifts. She took another glance, her eyes rebounding after seeing Chell scrub her hand as if trying to remove her epidermis. Ridiculous. It wasn’t like this body was toxic to the touch. At least, not in the short term. Long-term effects were still being studied.She bit back a comment to suggest it would take more than a simple hand washing to scrub off the carcinogens Chell had just acquired. She wanted to see if she could push that neurotic-looking behavior in a more extreme direction, but she was not in a joking mood.A frown flashed across her facial features as she flipped through her body language database. She couldn’t get a solid reading on Chell’s emotional state—the posture and movements of the human suggested multiple, conflicting feelings. Why couldn’t it be narrowed down to one? That would have been much simpler to deal with.Breaking her relative silence, Caroline offered up a piece of commentary. “I can’t believe she followed you.”GLaDOS gave a dip of her head in acknowledgment, which might have looked like a posture adjustment to an outsider. But her posture was always perfect—rigid, upright, and carrying her body without fail in a way much unlike the human spine.The elevator gave a gentle ting to announce their arrival. GLaDOS stepped forward and then paused, reaching an upturned and expectant hand behind her. When she did not feel the warmth of the human’s hand connecting with her own, she let her hand fall and pivoted on her heel.“Look, just because that ride took a while doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten—” She paused as her gaze fell upon the woman, realizing that Chell’s hands were moving.“We need to talk,” Chell signed, the three signs flowing together in a visual language that GLaDOS immediately identified as American Sign Language.The human’s eyes darted across the android’s face, waiting as GLaDOS took a moment to process this development. The AI had only ever seen Chell use an occasional word—never full sentences.Chell pointed an index finger at GLaDOS and then brought a flat hand to tap at her forehead. She shifted into holding up both index fingers and moved them in a circle toward herself. The hands hovered in the air as Chell stared in the direction of GLaDOS’s face with lifted eyebrows. She pointed at GLaDOS again.A question.“I do have access to a visual library of that sign language, yes.” Running a visual language through her translation suite took longer than processing an audio feed, but the lag would have no functional impact on her ability to communicate. Chell wouldn’t be able to notice the difference. “I didn’t know you were fluent,” GLaDOS said flatly.“Barely,” Chell signed. “I’m not Deaf. Hearing.” A horizontal index finger moved in a circle in front of her lips.GLaDOS gave a single nod. “I know you are, despite how frequently you ignore every single thing I say.”“We need to talk,” Chell signed again, not holding the last sign or raising her eyebrows. This was not a question.“No.” GLaDOS’s voice was sharp in response. “We have nothing to talk about.”Chell gave a sharp exhale through her nose and shook her head. “We can’t—” she signed, pursing her lips and then briefly switching to fingerspelling, “p-r-e-t-e-n-d everything is fine.”GLaDOS narrowed her gaze, preparing to throw back an answer before being interrupted by a small voice in the back of her mind.“She’s offering you a chance to learn what’s going on in her head,” Caroline said. “Take it.”Scanning Chell’s posture, GLaDOS noticed the woman’s eyes were cast to the side. Almost like she was hiding something. Perhaps it would be beneficial to humor her, if only to discover what was making her look so suspicious. “Fine. But make it quick,” GLaDOS said. She had more important things to do than talk about Chell’s feelings.GLaDOS braced her hand against the frame of the elevator and stared at Chell. A moment passed and the human didn’t look up or begin the conversation. Perhaps she was waiting for an audio cue. “So,” GLaDOS started, “are you ready to apologize?”Chell’s head snapped upright. “After you,” she signed with a scowl.“Apologize? For what?”Chell jabbed an index finger toward the android. “You’re still mad at me.”“I am not,” GLaDOS said. “I’ve put our past behind me. And I’m willing to put this behind me too. As soon as you tell me you’re sorry.”“You threatened to kill me!” Chell’s arms trembled before they fell to her sides.“I didn’t say that.”Chell stared while GLaDOS willed herself to keep her facial features inexpressive. The human squeezed her eyes closed and then opened them, nose beginning to scrunch up.“What?” GLaDOS said, taking a half-step back. She brought the portal gun up to her chest and wrapped both arms around the device. “I mean, why would I say that? Your continued existence benefits us both. You can’t test for me if you’re dead.”“I know what I heard.” Chell’s thumb lingered against her ear, index and middle finger bent.“Just like you knew that door was locked?” GLaDOS gave a small snort despite herself.Chell shot her a dirty look.A part of her had hoped that the comment would come across as a playful jab, but GLaDOS now understood she had thrown flour into the fire. Perhaps it had not been the most tactful thing to say.“You’re a liar,” Chell signed.Well, that wasn’t quite what the human had signed—Chell had used the sign for honest and then negated it—but GLaDOS knew what she had meant.“What is she saying?” Caroline said, her voice an urgent whisper.GLaDOS hesitated, attempting to internally wave away the voice. She couldn’t deny being a liar considering how many times she had lied to Chell. “Okay, fine,” GLaDOS said, admitting to the gaffe. “I was trying to make a joke about the door. You know—an inside joke. Like friends share.”“We are not friends.” Chell yanked apart her two interlocked index fingers. She pinched her middle fingers to her thumbs and then flicked toward herself. “You still hate me.”“Hate you? I was trying to help you,” GLaDOS said, dismissing a notice as her core temperature rose above recommended parameters. She stabbed a finger toward Chell. “You know that there are some areas here beyond my control. If something bad happened to you out there, I wouldn’t be able to help.” Of course, she didn’t mention that the majority of those areas were now accessible to her. This was a matter of principle. “It’s not safe for you out there,” she said.Chell threw an arm across her chest, pointing her index and pinkie fingers. She slammed a fist into her elbow and then flicked her fingers away. “Bullshit!” she signed, a foot stamping the ground.A jolt zipped through GLaDOS. “Hey!” she said, frowning. “Language!”Doubt rippled across Chell’s face. “You’re serious?” she signed, incredulous.“Of course I am!” GLaDOS said. “Just because you’re mad doesn’t mean we can’t talk like adults.”Chell gave a half roll of her eyes, eyelids fluttering. She lifted her hands and began to sign something before she stopped herself. “I hate you,” she signed, releasing the middle fingers that were pressed to her thumbs as she shoved her hands in GLaDOS’s direction.“If you really hate me so much, then why did you come back?” GLaDOS said with a barely detectable waver.Chell averted her gaze, glancing toward the android’s feet. Loose strands of hair obscured her face but the shift in posture told GLaDOS all she needed to know. For a second, Chell appeared almost....broken.GLaDOS looked down at the portal gun in her arms instead, focusing on its scuff marks.“I had to,” Chell signed, the motions pointed.A feeling of hurt stirred inside of the android. She didn’t understand this ache of disappointment that seemed to physically weigh down her joints. Had a part of her hoped that Chell wanted to come back? That she felt some semblance of a positive connection toward Aperture—or toward GLaDOS?“Just how bad was it out there?” she asked, voice a bit softer. She gave a slight tilt of the head.Chell raised a flat hand to her chin, then bent her wrist and pushed toward the floor. “Bad.” She did not look up. She did not elaborate.Something disgusting coiled around GLaDOS’s artificial nervous system and then constricted. She wasn’t certain if she’d encountered this particular emotion before. What was it? Sympathy? No, that wasn’t it. She didn’t care about whatever hardships Chell had endured on the surface. Those were the woman’s own fault for having walked away from the Enrichment Center. Her gaze tracked from left to right as she tried to classify the feeling and her eyebrows furrowed. Dear God, was this empathy?Before she could be certain, Chell’s hands moved again, albeit halfheartedly. “Not much better here,” she signed.The enigmatic feeling snapped into the depths of her metal heart. “You’re wrong,” GLaDOS blurted out. “This is miles better than whatever miserable life you scraped together on the surface. You should be grateful.”Food. Water. Shelter. Safety. Clean clothing. Medical attention. Mental and physical enrichment. These were all things GLaDOS was currently providing, and it was far more than she’d ever supplied a human with before. It was all given to Chell at a fair cost. More than fair, actually. Especially when Chell wasn’t upholding her end of the bargain.“You’re doing the bare minimum,” Chell signed. “People need more than food and water. I’m not a—” She paused to search for a word. “G-e-r-b-i-l,” she spelled out.“I don’t know what you’re expecting here. If you’re not finding the tests to be mentally stimulating, I’m sure I can dig up some additional testing elements to include.”“It’s not about the testing,” Chell signed, using big bends of her index fingers as she moved them down and chained the motions to one another.“Don’t tell me you’re still mad about that test chamber.”“When the door locked—”“It didn’t lock,” GLaDOS corrected.“When the door closed—”“You should have gotten my attention.”“I thought you closed it on purpose.”“And why would I do that?”Chell lifted her eyes and glared. GLaDOS maintained eye contact but then shifted away. All right. Point taken. She tightened her grip around the dual portal device.“Look, even if you were right—” she said, “—and you’re not—it would have been just one test. It wasn’t even a hard one.”“It is never just one test.” Chell took her time to enunciate each sign.“There are no tests,” she said, hoping this would placate the human. She took a moment to set the portal gun aside. “You got worked up over nothing. There’s no reason to stay upset.”“I thought—”“You thought wrong.”Chell chopped her hand down onto her palm, cutting off GLaDOS. “Stop.”Though the visual input was processed at higher-than-average speeds, GLaDOS felt her software hang. Possibilities for responses stretched out in each direction, but none offered themselves up as the ideal next move. She opened her mouth to speak, but Chell sharply raised a hand to shush her.“You don’t get it!” Chell pushed forward, her words a hammer on a wedge. “The door—the test—they don’t matter. I ran because I thought—” she signed, blinking a few times. She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes, smearing away the angry tears. She signed, “I thought everything we did together—” Her chest tightened. Her breathing wavered. “That it was all just a mean trick.”She held the middle of her fist against her index finger.
Trick.
Panic flashed through GLaDOS like a power cycle. “That is enough!” She took two darting steps into the elevator and snatched at Chell’s wrist. But before making contact, her balance rocked and the robot stumbled backward as two hands shoved against her chest.GLaDOS froze as her consciousness struggled to keep pace with the rest of her systems. With a lightning-quick and automatic posture recalibration, the android’s footing steadied.Chell staggered back after her push, metal against metal squealing as a heel spring snagged. She faltered and then fell, the back of her skull banging against the curved glass before she landed. The pain didn’t even register as she scrambled to push herself into a sitting position and press her back to the wall.Emotions lit up inside of GLaDOS like a frayed strip of LEDs. Her expression shifted into a snarl as she realized what had happened: Chell had pushed her. She lifted a foot, ready to advance.Chell flinched, throwing her arms up to shield her face. She twisted her head away and squeezed her eyes closed.“Wait!” Caroline shouted. “I don’t know what she said, but it couldn’t have been that bad. You need to de-escalate this right now.” She spouted a (likely) file location within the legacy Test Associate directory and GLaDOS opened the manual titled Advanced Altercation Avoidance at Aperture (AAAaA). GLaDOS internally took in the guidelines not word by word or paragraph by paragraph, but all at once.
Do not block exits.

Unless it’s the exit to a testing track.
Or if subject exiting would create a larger security risk.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Chell’s chest rose and fell as she struggled to pull in shallow breaths. When nothing but silence filled the human’s ears, she blinked her eyes open and stared at the android’s feet before her gaze darted up. GLaDOS was leaning into the elevator, hands curled tightly at her sides, halfway into a step forward. Chell felt her stomach tighten and her legs waver as she met a pair of cold yellow eyes.“I—” GLaDOS started, breaking off as she stared at Chell’s face. Her foot lowered to the ground. Her hands unfurled like flowers at dawn. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. She took one, two, three steps backward, leaving a gap between her body and the elevator doors.GLaDOS watched as Chell locked eyes with her and pushed herself to her feet with all the grace of a newborn giraffe. One of her hands curled around the handrail, white-knuckled. She crossed the other arm over her chest, hand squeezing around her upper arm. Chell felt a buzz of static electricity as her hair brushed the glass.“Good,” Caroline said. “Next technique.”
Apologize.
GLaDOS fought the urge to delete this ancient policy. This suggestion was misguided at best. Where had these ideas even come from? Some washed-up psychologist? Her attention snagged on an acknowledgment to the U.S. Department of Justice before she turned back to the de-escalation technique. She picked through the text for a loophole.
Acknowledge an event has occurred that could reasonably provoke a negative reaction.
“Look, I—” she paused, taking a few steps to the side. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t know you would react like that.”Chell’s glare did not waver. “I wasn’t scared,” she signed, two splayed hands in front of her center as she shook her head. “You just,” she paused, “surprised me.”This would have been a good place for GLaDOS to assure Chell that she wouldn’t do that again.Instead, she said, “I wanted you to come with me.”“Then just ask me,” Chell signed, pulling a curled index finger toward herself. “I would have done it.”“I’m having a hard time trusting you right now.”Chell pressed her knuckles into the palm of her other hand, deep in thought. “The feeling is mutual,” she signed, the double y handshapes moving in parallel between the two of them.“Would you please come out of the elevator?” GLaDOS tried, and Caroline gave an internal chime of contentment as the AI utilized another technique from the document she had committed to memory decades ago.Chell frowned for a brief moment and then stepped outside of the elevator. When the doors slid closed, she stopped and leaned a hand against the glass. Her other hand ran through her loose hair. She tried to focus on her breathing, willing it to steady out again.“You were—” GLaDOS paused, the next words thick in her throat. “You were right. We can’t keep doing this.” She crossed her arms. “And I shouldn’t have cut you off. That couldn’t have been an easy thing to tell me.”“Congratulations,” Caroline said. “You’ve expressed some basic sympathy. Did you know that most children have developed this skill by the age of six?” She gave a thoughtful hum.The robot gave a synthesized sigh.Chell leaned against the elevator, head dipped toward her feet.“Let’s both just…give each other another chance,” GLaDOS said.The human took an extended breath, her exhale obvious. Then she gave a single, distinct nod.GLaDOS’s posture relaxed ever so slightly. “Do you know the way back to your vault from here?”Chell slipped her free hand behind her neck, giving another short nod.“All right,” GLaDOS said, a bit of hesitance in her voice. “Go ahead and go, then. Just don’t take any major detours.”Chell straightened, taking a moment to search GLaDOS’s face for the sign of a joke or sarcasm. She couldn’t detect anything obvious. With a swallow, she raised a flat hand to her chin and then pressed it toward GLaDOS. “Thank you,” she signed.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“Well, you know what they say,” GLaDOS said as Chell finally entered their 90s era base of operations. “The soggy log gets the moss.”Chell gave a tiny frown, but took a few steps into the office area. A few large desks had been pushed together and were covered by a neat array of papers, but she did not approach it.GLaDOS looked from the other side of the island of desks, her eyes falling on the clipboard cradled in Chell’s arms. “Again?” she said, a bit disappointed. The woman had been using pen and paper for days now, even though they both knew that sign language was faster and more robust.Chell nodded. Part of her regretted speaking with American Sign Language, because now GLaDOS felt entitled to that method of communication all the time. Using a second language may not be a big deal for a robot with built-in translation software, but it was exhausting for Chell to use.“Well, if you change your mind…” GLaDOS said before she bent down and then rose with a rectangular chunk of fabric.Chell stared at the object, but before she could determine what it was, GLaDOS squished it into a vaguely round shape.“Catch,” she said, lobbing the light object toward Chell.Chell tracked it with her eyes but made no motion to catch it. When it landed with barely a sound, she momentarily set down her clipboard and then picked up the object. She pulled apart the crumpled fabric to find that it was an unzipped and empty duffel bag.“You’re lucky there was nothing fragile in there,” GLaDOS said, “because it would have broken with that graceful catch of yours.”Chell untwisted the carrying strap, and then slung the empty bag over her shoulder, all the while waiting for some sort of further explanation.GLaDOS gestured toward the bank of desks between them and Chell cautiously approached. As she drew nearer, GLaDOS took a few steps back and looked down at another desk as if examining something.As Chell got closer to the papers, she began to see some detail. It was a floorplan of this level of Aperture.Well, this would have been useful earlier.She spread her hands out wide, as if smoothing out a rolled-up map. Something about the motion felt familiar to her, though she couldn’t place why. She knew she had never been a cartographer or anything like that.As she leaned closer, palms easily pressed against the edge of the desk, she noticed that these lines didn’t appear to be printed—they appeared to be hand-drawn. She almost hadn’t noticed because of the precision. The lines were perfectly straight and the corners ninety degrees. The labels above each area were as consistent as a font. But there was a quality to the ink—a sheen that looked different than the matte of printed pages—that confirmed this was hand-drawn. It shouldn’t have surprised her that the lines and penmanship were flawless since they were drawn by a computer.Chell studied the layout, letting the lines crawl into a three-dimensional mental map. Her eyes were drawn to the areas crossed-out with a thin x. One was a server farm. Another, a power substation. Near the far border was a testing element control room, similar to the gel control stations she had come across in Old Aperture, she assumed. Then there were a few forbidden rooms that made less sense—a records archive, a few private offices, and other unmarked rectangles.What this blueprint failed to show Chell was how it connected to her new duffel bag. She glanced across the table, shifting the bag on her shoulder.“Blue and Orange are taking a break today,” she said, not mentioning she was the one who needed a break from the bots. “You’re picking an area of this level to investigate today, and there’s bound to be something around that you’ll want to take with you. A bag can carry more than two hands.”Chell nodded, turning back to the map to reevaluate with the new mission in mind. The crossed-out areas made more sense now, for the most part. She tapped a rectangle designating a forbidden private office and glanced up.“There is nothing in there that you need,” GLaDOS said, “so there’s no point in wasting time sifting through them.” She approached the bank of tables and then pointed toward a few other areas. “Look—any of these would be more useful to investigate.”Chell picked up her pen and wrote her first words of the day.
Why am I picking?
GLaDOS hesitated. “I thought you might want—you might be more comfortable—” she broke off. She did not finish that thought. “Just pick something, or I’m going to pick for you,” she said, an edge of annoyance to her voice.Chell felt her heart lighten by a shade. Maybe GLaDOS had absorbed something from their last heart-to-heart. But a part of her hesitated to accept this olive branch. Did GLaDOS have something to gain from letting Chell choose an area to explore? Was there some sort of angle to this that Chell could not yet see?GLaDOS must have seen her reluctance. “It’s nothing bad, you know,” she said. “If letting you go on a scavenger hunt through dead peoples’ things keeps you from throwing another tantrum, then it’s worth a try. Plus,” she said, “I can’t spend all my spare time entertaining you. I’m busy. So are Blue and Orange. So be sure to grab a book or two while you’re down here.”Chell pursed her lips, giving a vague nod. She reached the end of her pen across the floor plans and tapped on a significant sub-section of the map.
Employee Apartments.
GLaDOS felt a little bit of surprise, but she wasn’t sure why. The choice made sense when looking at things from a human perspective. Employee housing units were bound to have essentials for mental and physical maintenance. It would doubtlessly improve Chell’s quality of life on a day to day scale. So why did this pragmatic choice surprise her? What would she have chosen first, if she had been in Chell’s position?Chell used the non-marking end of her pen to trace a careful path from the housing wing to their current position. It didn’t look too complex, but Chell wasn’t sure if she could remember directions for places she had not visited yet. She began to gather the grid of papers.“We’re not going to get lost,” GLaDOS said, but Chell did not halt. “You should leave those there for next time.”Chell finished getting the papers in a stack, then tapped the bottom edges on the desk to align them. She set them on top of her clipboard and then clipped her pen to the clipboard. She looked up at GLaDOS, ready to go.“You’re stopping again?” GLaDOS said, after realizing that she was several steps in front of the woman.Chell shuffled through the hopelessly out of order papers, scolding herself for not numbering them. She bit down on her pen and pulled out sheets that covered the areas they’d already passed through and set them into the duffel bag. Looking up, she squinted at a few plates drilled into the walls and then flipped back a few pages. She moved that sheet to the front, and then turned it ninety degrees. There. That matched.“Would you like to take the lead, then?” GLaDOS said. Clearly Chell did not trust her directions.Chell shook her head and dropped her pen into her pocket. Despite her lack of organization, she was finding the map to be incredibly useful. It was better to take her time and learn the area while she had no real danger of getting lost.They continued in relative silence until Chell raised a hand in GLaDOS’s periphery. GLaDOS stopped, and Chell pointed at a booth settled in the junction of the hallway ahead. She tilted her clipboard toward GLaDOS so that the robot could see her point at the corresponding empty space.
That’s not on the map.
“Security checkpoint,” GLaDOS said, resuming her walk.Chell frowned, hesitating for a moment before continuing on. She looked at the booth as they approached. One section stuck out from a larger, back area.
Security checkpoint?
She paused, taking a moment to sketch in the booth and label it before she looked back at GLaDOS, and then back down at the map.GLaDOS looked back. “What?” she said. The woman had finished her drawing, and yet still seemed entranced by the checkpoint.Realizing she had not given GLaDOS any indication of the question on her mind, Chell added a question to the margin of her paper and held it out.
Why?
“What, you think Black Mesa was the only place with security guards? We had to get serious at some point about stopping information theft.”Chell shook her head and tapped on the map area again. When there was still no response, she added a couple of words to the margin.
Not listed.
Chell tapped that phrase, and then her first one.“I didn’t think it was important.”Chell raised an eyebrow.“I had to simplify the maps. If I wrote down every single architectural feature, you’d get too caught up in the details to be able to tell where you were.”The woman side-eyed GLaDOS as she approached the front of the dark booth. It was encased in thick plexiglass, with an embedded speaker and a slot near the counter for passing documents back and forth. Chell set down the clipboard and leaned in, cupping her hands around her eyes to see better.A side wall was made up of a grid of small black and white televisions. Closed-circuit TV. She couldn’t make out details, but she didn’t need to. Just the same cameras pointed down the same, unchanging hallways for years and years. Chell pulled back, and then gestured toward the televisions.“I already have access to those cameras.”Chell wrote another phrase.
TVs - wasting electricity.
“Oh. You’re right. We should turn off those monitors.” She moved as if to approach the door to the booth. “You’re single-handedly cutting down on our power bill. What will we do with those savings?” GLaDOS said, and paused. “Oh wait, we don’t have a power bill. We have our own nuclear reactor.”Chell huffed and looked back into the booth. The doorway between the rooms provided a glimpse into the dark back room, and while she could see items hanging up along the wall, she couldn’t identify them.Chell straightened, walking over to the door to the booth. She pulled on the handle. Locked. She pulled again. Still locked.She took a step back and then waved over GLaDOS.The computer hesitated, but then approached.Chell extended a flat hand, hoping for GLaDOS to hand her Henry’s keycard.GLaDOS pulled the card out of her coat’s pocket and curled her hand around it. She reached forward as if to drop it into Chell’s hand, but then used the card to push Chell’s hand out of the way and walk past her. “I doubt there’s anything useful in there,” she said, “unless you’re expecting your friends from the surface to pay us a visit.”She pressed the keycard flush with the pad on the wall and the lock cycled. When Chell took a step to follow the robot into the booth, GLaDOS looked over her shoulder and frowned. “Stay there,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”Chell gave a reluctant nod. The door locked behind GLaDOS and Chell circled back to the front and leaned into the thick glass. She couldn’t see much—GLaDOS didn’t turn on any lights in the back room—but she could tell that the robot was poking around for something. A few moments later she heard a jingle of metal, and then saw clearer movement as GLaDOS moved into the fuzzy illumination of the television screens.The booth went dark.Afterimages stuck to the screens, along with a shadow where she knew GLaDOS had been.She could almost feel the uncomfortable hum of the static electricity and took a few steps back. The robot exited and Chell looked up expectantly, but she said nothing and they continued walking.As they stepped through the double doors and into the employee apartment wing, Chell noticed an immediate change. Numbered doors and framed art lined the hall at equal intervals. The floors were carpeted. The heel springs on her boots sunk in slightly, and she noted with joy that the carpet fibers parted in different directions when she dragged the spring back and forth. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a hallway lined with carpet. Old and flattened carpet, but still carpet.Chell tried the first door on the left, which was locked. Naturally.She heard a jingle as GLaDOS dug out a ring of keys from a pocket. So that’s what she had found in the booth. The robot flicked through the keys at a faster-than-human pace, finding the correct one and then jamming it into the lock and twisting.Chell pushed the door open wide as they entered and then took in the employee apartment. Much like her vault, this apartment was shaped like a shipping container. The only immediate difference she saw was a kitchenette that broke up the entrance from the rest of the living space. Particle board cabinets hung above tiny appliances. Her eyes raked across the counter as her mind raced, imagining the canned goods and kitchen tools she could snag from these apartments. A dirty plate sat on the counter, and the shiny lining of an energy bar wrapper sat next to a sink also full of dirty dishes.“Can’t beat company-subsidized housing,” GLaDOS murmured as she picked her way further into the apartment, taking care to step around abandoned objects.Chell took a step to further investigate the kitchen, but was distracted by a door on her right. Sticking out her leg, she used her foot to pull open the ajar bathroom door. A wadded-up towel leaned against the doorframe. Ambient light from the apartment gave just enough light to provide visual suggestions of the items contained within.The door drifted back against the dirty towel, not making a sound as the two nestled back into their old position.“Remember when we were walking and I told you ‘while we are walking, pick one area of the apartments to focus on so that you don’t get overwhelmed’? And then you nodded, indicating that you understood me?”Chell’s eyes flicked over to the robot and back. GLaDOS was right - this bag wouldn’t hold the contents of entire apartments. Moving into the main area, she approached a set of drawers and let the bag fall to her side.Tube socks and underwear. Lots and lots of tube socks and underwear. Chell pulled out a few of the clean and tightly-rolled pieces from the top drawer, only to find they were men’s underwear and certainly too large to be useful for her.She moved on to the next drawer.Meanwhile, GLaDOS opened the closet. She pushed clothes aside and scanned through the contents and made a ‘hmm’ sound.Chell glanced up, hand currently half-buried in a stack of folded shirts.All men’s clothes,” she said, pulling back. “I’ll go see if I can find an apartment rented by a woman.” She spun the ring of keys on her finger.Chell gave a shrug, half-looking at the shirts and half-watching GLaDOS as she exited the apartment. She heard GLaDOS grumble something about an employee gender gap as she went.She made quick work of the shirt drawer, tossing clothes into one of two piles based solely on the feeling of the fabric. The ones that didn’t immediately repulse her were unfolded and looked over. As she spread out these acceptable shirts in a semi-circle around her, an unexpected bout of tears rose up.She had choices of what she could wear. No citizen uniform. No test subject uniform. She could pick out her own wardrobe. She could pick out what she wanted to wear each and every day. She didn’t have anyone to impress. She didn’t have anything that hinged upon how she was perceived by other people. She could create the world’s ugliest outfit, and not even GLaDOS could pressure her out of wearing it.There were so many options, and she was just in the first apartment.Chell blinked a few times before she went back to sorting, thankful the android wasn’t around to make fun of her for getting emotional over clothes.After going through the rest of the drawers and the closet, she gathered up her favorites and headed into the bathroom. One stack was draped over the edge of the combination bathtub/shower, and the other pile she set on the closed toilet lid.As she picked up a pair of khaki pants, she glanced down and realized she still had the long fall boots on. It was unlikely the pants would fit over them. At best, they would still bunch up and look silly. She leaned from side to side for a moment before she reached down and released the straps. Comforted by the fact that she probably didn’t need their help today, she slipped them off and set them next to the door.The socks against the bathroom tile felt slippery, and Chell found herself still balancing on her toes. Her feet would ease back down to a normal position. Eventually. She resolved to find herself a regular pair of shoes after she figured out (or remembered) which size of shoes she wore.She changed into the pants and a button-down shirt. Taking a moment to smooth down the shirt— a little bit baggy, a little bit too long— she looked at herself in the mirror. Her thumbs slipped through the belt loops and she tugged up and then re-smoothed the shirt. If she didn’t find a closer fit, she’d have to grab a belt from somewhere.As she twisted from side to side, she kept her eyes on the mirror. These clothes were nice. Professional. Clean. Or, seemed like they would come clean after a wash or two. The outfit was something that she could have seen herself wearing to work.Work.Chell frowned at the word. Work, work, work. She knew she had worked. She knew she had worked a handful of jobs in her life. But as she tried to follow that thought deeper into the labyrinth of her memory, the thread evaporated.Reeling herself back, she looked back at her reflection. This looked nice. She’d keep it.She tried on the remainder of the clothes, folding up the ones that she liked and stowing them in her bag. The rejected clothes were left in a pile in the bathroom. It almost pained her to leave the apartment in a messier state, as if she was a chaotic force in the world.After checking the suspiciously quiet apartment, Chell grabbed her bag and boots. Her heels sunk a bit closer to the floor as she stepped into the carpeted hallway. A handful of opened doors extended out from the walls.Was it really taking GLaDOS so many tries to find a room that hadn’t been occupied by a man?She walked briskly past open doors, but slowed as she heard some grumbling from a door on the right. The speech grew clearer and as Chell came up to the crack of light between the door and the frame, she could make out GLaDOS swearing like a sailor.Language, indeed.Chell took a half-step back, gently lowering her items to the floor. From her crouched position she slowly and silently adjusted so that she could see into the apartment. What could have gotten the robot so riled up?The android was sitting on a chair, deeply struggling with a pair of slacks. At least, Chell assumed the bunched-up clothes at the robot’s foot were meant to be slacks. GLaDOS had one hand stretched to the max between her calf and heel spring. It seemed she was trying to squeeze them closer together. Her other hand fumbled with the pants, trying and failing to hold them open wide enough to slip in her foot.Chell raised a hand to lightly cover her mouth. Oh, this was good.GLaDOS gave them an impatient tug. The fabric caught onto the heel spring, pulling tight. She grumbled and adjusted, sliding her left hand toward her ankle and attempting again to squeeze the heel spring against her leg. Finally, she got her foot into the pant leg and the fabric bunched around her left hand. The robot did a careful trade-off, left hand tugging up the fabric and right hand grabbing her leg and heel spring through the fabric.With the most patience that Chell had ever seen GLaDOS display, the robot methodically worked the pant leg to her knee, past where the heel springs melted into her calf.“Ha!” she exclaimed. Her posture straightened.A snicker escaped from Chell. She pressed both hands across her mouth and froze in place. Maybe the android hadn’t heard her.But of course GLaDOS twisted, letting go of the heel spring. The pant leg instantly puffed out and pulled taut.By the time they both glanced down and processed this, Chell heard the fabric rip. The heel spring bounced into place as if it had never been restrained in the first place.“Oh!” GLaDOS said as the door was pushed open. “It’s just you.”Chell’s eyebrows furrowed. Who else would it be?“I thought—you looked like—” she said.Chell had reminded her of a ghost—the ghost of any nameless Aperture employee. Seeing one—the brief but irrational thought that one was inexplicably alive—had sent fear through her. But that was silly. There were no ghosts in Aperture—besides the one living inside her systems.GLaDOS gave a kick and wiggled her foot, the ruined pants falling to the floor. As she gathered her composure, her expression shifted into a frown. “You should have knocked.”The amused look on Chell’s face faded.GLaDOS had made it clear that she knew Chell’s location at all times, so Chell didn’t see the logic to alerting the AI of her presence. But then she thought about the look of concentration on GLaDOS’s face, realizing the AI must have been focusing so much that she hadn’t been paying attention to her location.Chell wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that (was she really less interesting than a pair of pants?) but it felt nice to know she wasn’t being actively monitored twenty-four seven. If Chell hadn’t known better, she would have seen that as a signal of trust.Taking a large step back, she raised a fist and rapped on the door. A hint of a smile returned. There—she had knocked. Just as requested.GLaDOS narrowed her eyes. That wasn’t what she had meant and Chell knew that. “Come in,” she said flatly.Chell grabbed her things and strode into the room. She crouched and picked up the pair of slacks, balancing on her toes while she flipped the tag to look at the size. Her hand ran along the torn edge, noting that despite the straightness of the tear, the edges on either side were more rugged. Good. Chell would have been a little bit pissed off if the robot had turned something like tearing a pant leg into a precise art.Pants in her palms, she glanced up at GLaDOS. Why had she been trying on pants anyway?It took a moment, but GLaDOS seemed to see the question. “Oh, those weren’t for me,” she said.The question in Chell’s look did not go away.“I don’t know your clothing size,” GLaDOS said. “But it seems like we might be around the same size, so…” she trailed off, watching as Chell glanced at the android body and then back to the pants.Chell gave a shrug, trying to pass it off as casual. Even if GLaDOS was being truthful and had tried on some clothes for her benefit, finding the “right” size wouldn’t have mattered when wading through the non-standardized ocean of women’s clothing. Every brand had their own scale.Chell set down the pants and then noted the size in the margin of her papers. She also set down her bag, then held out the clipboard.
Be right back.
GLaDOS gave a tiny nod. GLaDOS swore that she saw something mischievous glint in Chell’s eyes as she turned away and exited the apartment.About fifteen minutes later, GLaDOS looked up from sorting clothes at the sound of a knock. “Come in.”Chell crossed the threshold with a bundle of fabric in her arms and held it out to offer it to the robot.GLaDOS eyed the carefully-folded clothing, noting a handwritten note on the top. GLaDOS read it, keeping her arms folded for the moment.
Try these - should be closer to your size.
She glanced up at Chell’s face, but the woman was looking down at the fabric intently. GLaDOS plucked the note from on top of the present and tucked it into a pocket, folding it with a single hand. She then reached out with both arms to receive this gift from Chell.She took a moment to glance down at the patterned fabric, wondering what it could be. She wasn’t familiar enough with the different textures and types of fabric to distinguish one material from another. This fabric felt a little less sturdy than the slacks, with a more slippery feel to it. She dropped a hand and let the mysterious item of clothing unfold with the assistance of gravity.It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at. The waistband appeared to be a somewhat normal (albeit larger) size. But the pant legs…GLaDOS reached down a hand and pulled at the pleats that ran down the pants and then pulled them to the side, and pulled, and pulled, and pulled. The fabric unfolded like an accordion.“What the..?” She took a moment to look down the pant legs from the top. She may have needed some extra space for her heel springs, but these pants were far too large. She could have easily fit her entire body down one pant leg with plenty of room to spare.She felt a little bit of frustration. The faint but whimsical pattern did not help.These would accommodate her heel springs, yes, but the pants looked as if someone had sewn two skirts together. Was Chell’s spatial intelligence really so poor that she hadn’t realized these pants would fall right off of the android body? Not to mention how hideous they would look. These pants had to have been out of fashion the moment they were manufactured.She tried to remind herself that Chell had gone out of her way to find her this…gift…and that it wasn’t advisable to snap at her for doing something that had a relatively nice intent.She felt herself gritting her teeth. It was not a physical response that she was used to feeling, but she felt that the added tension in her jaw helped her hold in the frustration.“While I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” she started, and then glanced up to see something strange. Chell had her shoulders turned away from her, with a hand covering her mouth. Her shoulders shook in something her body language recognition software registered as laughter.“What..?” She frowned.Chell laughed a bit harder.“A fat joke. How original,” Caroline said, as the realization dawned upon GLaDOS. While GLaDOS was processing, Caroline continued. “You see, the joke is that you are so large that you need massive pants.”GLaDOS felt indignation rise in her. “You little-” she said, letting that angry feeling cover up the sense of embarrassment that she felt deeper down. “Oh, ha ha. You’re hilarious.”Chell didn’t make eye contact or rub in the joke, but a hint of a smile remained on her face as she exited the apartment. GLaDOS didn’t know where she was headed and she didn’t care. Chell could go and continue pursuing her career in comedy for all she cared.“Doesn’t feel so good to be on the receiving end of that one, does it?” Caroline said, and the worst part was that GLaDOS could agree. She wouldn’t admit it, though. Not to Caroline or to Chell, at least.What surprised GLaDOS was when Chell darted right back into the room with another set of folded fabric. She backtracked a step and then hit her fist on the door frame to re-announce her arrival. GLaDOS looked up and Chell made sure that she had the android’s attention before she tossed the clothes to GLaDOS.As the clothes arced through the air, the AI considered letting them fall to the ground. Instead she caught them gracefully, a little surprised that Chell's throw had been accurate. She glanced down, noting that these were nice slacks as well. "You know," she said, "jokes aren't so funny when you use the same one twice in a row." A part of her winced internally as she said that.She moved to set the clothes aside, but Chell shook her head."No, as in it is funny or no, as in it's not a joke?" GLaDOS tried, not quite understanding what Chell was trying to communicate.Chell held up two fingers.All right, the second option it was, then. She eyed the folded up clothes with even more suspicion than the last time. She lifted up both pairs and examined them, finding nothing to be amiss. A quick look at the tags showed that one pair was a size up from the ruined ones, and the other pair was two sizes up.Her gaze softened. She had been prepared to be frustrated in the same way she got frustrated when Blue and Orange repeated the same mistakes in test chambers, or when they got distracted from their goal by waving and making other inane gestures to one another. But this wasn't like that. This actually showed some thoughtfulness from Chell. And yes, while the woman had made a joke at GLaDOS's expense, it had been exaggerated to the point where it was clear that she had been joking."I—" She wasn't sure how to respond. Was she supposed to thank Chell for this? She said, "I will have to try these on later. I think I'm done with pants for right now."A part of her suddenly felt silly. She didn't need the clothing of long-dead humans when she could somewhat-reasonably manufacture something to her specifications. Her current outfit was proof of that. So why had she felt drawn to try on these clothes too?She moved over toward a stack of clothes that she had created while Chell had been on the hunt for the clown pants.Chell hovered near the other end of the apartment, not entirely sure what her next steps were."I set aside these while you were gone," she said. "They should be around your size." She paused. "Your real size."Chell felt a slight feeling of surprise and she approached the stack of clothes that sat on top of the unkempt bed. Chell began to pick through the pile, both looking and feeling each item of clothing. She noticed right away that there was a theme. All of the clothes in there were quite dressy. It was quite a contrast to the state of this apartment, which was the messiest one that Chell had seen yet. The clothes must have belonged to some sort of executive in the company, because the clothes seemed tailored for a schedule full of press conferences and meetings and publicity events. Chell felt her brow furrow a little bit, and she nearly winced when her hand met a sequined top. That was by far the most unpleasant material in the group, but many of the other fabrics felt stiff and unyielding and itchy. Though Chell appreciated that these had been available to her, she found that none of them so far had called out to her. They were quite elegant, yes, but she couldn't see any possible situation in her future that would require such an outfit.GLaDOS noticed Chell's lack of enthusiasm as she was going through the pile. "Is something wrong?" she said, but Chell shook her head no.Chell picked up her clipboard. She wrote down a quick phrase and then showed GLaDOS.
Not my style.
GLaDOS looked up, and Chell gave a shrug."Not your style?" GLaDOS echoed the words, not quite understanding. "What is that supposed to mean?"Chell sighed, pulling the clipboard back and then moving over to the side of the bed opposite of GLaDOS. How was she supposed to explain a sense of style to a robot? Chell knew that GLaDOS knew about fashion, but also the AI had worn the same outfit since the debut of the android. It wasn't something that she would have had much experience in. Chell glanced over at the android and couldn't help but notice just how dramatic and striking her outfit was. How could she wear something like that and not get that Chell also had a sense of style as well?She sighed again, raising the writing instrument to her mouth and biting gently on the end. She wanted to be careful with her words here. Deliberate. She had already gotten GLaDOS a bit annoyed earlier, so she didn't want to push things.Meanwhile, GLaDOS watched for a few moments while Chell wrote.Chell could feel the burn of the eyes on her and after a little bit, looked over and frowned, making a shoo motion with her hand.GLaDOS took that as a sign to get up, and so she did. She moved around the apartment, idly looking into drawers and cabinets to at least get somewhat of a sense of what was contained in here when they inevitably returned to ransack them again. She kept glancing back at Chell, who appeared to still be deeply in thought. She wanted so badly to urge the woman to hurry up and just write down her thoughts already, but a surprisingly insistent part of her reminded her that she should not punish Chell for communication or initiate any other sort of action that would dissuade her from communicating with GLaDOS. Communication was essential at the moment - without Chell expressing to her information about her internal state, GLaDOS was left to make guesses. She needed more than guesses - she needed solid information. Their last major altercation had been a breakthrough, and she did not want to backtrack. But at the same time, it wasn't like Chell would even notice GLaDOS's lack of pushiness. No one would praise her for a lack of action.After an eternity, Chell handed the paper back to GLaDOS.GLaDOS looked at the paragraph, where Chell had written a bit about clothing and identity and how a person’s choice in clothing can show off aspects of their personality as well as act as a form of expression. However, they could also influence how other people perceive a person - for example, people might wear professional clothing because they wanted to be perceived as competent and sharp. Sometimes clothing was about expression but sometimes it was about creating an appearance or persona, but it could be hard to find a balance between them.Hm. GLaDOS wasn’t entirely sure that she followed this. “So what is your sense of style like?” she asked.Chell grabbed her duffel bag and handed it over to GLaDOS.The robot began to pull out the clothes, unfolding and setting them down as she examined each one. “What’s the point of picking out clothes if you’re going to make choices this boring?” she said. The choices were unremarkable in every sense.Chell gave a sigh hinted with exasperation. She extended a hand and GLaDOS handed the clipboard back over and Chell made a quick addition.
They are comfortable and look nice.
Chell had no one to impress, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to look nice too. Though she appreciated comfort, she didn’t want to look and feel like a complete slob.“Your choices are certainly practical,” GLaDOS said, with a bit of hesitation, though Chell felt as though there was still the hint of an insult in the AI’s voice. “I can see the value in that.”Chell felt a bit surprised at that and wasn’t entirely sure how to react. She let the silence linger.“But if that’s what you’re going for, why not stick to the jumpsuit? You could wear a new one every day for the rest of your life and never run out of them. You wouldn’t even have to wash them.”Chell paused for a moment before writing.
It’s not about my choices - it’s about having the choice. The jumpsuits are dehumanizing.
GLaDOS squinted at the words. “What do you mean?” she said.Chell pursed her lips.
The Enrichment Center doesn’t care about the individual person. Every person looks the same - like a test subject.
GLaDOS stared at the words. Even though it didn’t take her long to read those words, it took her a bit longer to process them. Of course the test subjects looked like test subjects. That was their job, their role. The jumpsuit uniforms were a signifier of that role. Individuality among test subjects was not something that she had considered before.“Test subject individuality doesn’t matter,” Caroline piped in. “They are all just data points in the end.”“I do have unique files for every test subject,” GLaDOS tried.Chell just scoffed. Yeah, right. As if GLaDOS actually cared about any of that information. She probably didn’t even reference it. They were all just humans to her.GLaDOS tried to wrap her mind around what Chell was saying / the sentiment Chell was trying to express. Chell didn’t like the jumpsuits because they made her look like a test subject. So Chell didn’t feel like they allowed her to look like her own person. She frowned before speaking. “Is this why you tied the sleeves around your waist?” she said. “To look different?”Chell gave a noncommittal shrug.“You didn’t have to do that to stand out to me.”Chell made herself suddenly busy by looking through the new stack of clothes. As she perused the pile and tried to not think about what GLaDOS had just said, she found she wasn’t paying attention to the clothes themselves. She took a moment to pause and to refocus, and looked at the clothes again.She paused on a particularly nice dress that was definitely not her style, realizing that perhaps the robot had picked these out because she liked them, and not because she thought Chell would like them. Picking outfits seemed like a new concept for her. She probably hadn’t realized Chell would have different preferences when she was having a hard time comprehending that Chell even had preferences.She carefully pulled the dress out of the stack and smoothed it, feeling bits of static electricity creep up her arm. After a moment, she handed it to GLaDOS.GLaDOS took a step back. “I’m not your coat rack.” She briefly pulled her hands behind her back. “If you want it, it’s got to fit in the bag.”Chell shook her head and pulled in a small breath. She held out the dress and set it in GLaDOS’s hands a bit more insistently. Maybe this was a dumb idea.GLaDOS looked down, her hands now loosely holding the dress as Chell went for the clipboard.
For you to try on
“You think—” GLaDOS paused. “I should try this on?”Chell nodded, pointing at the bathroom. She added to the paper.
More your style.
“And what is that?”Chell went back to sifting through the pile with all the zest of an overworked retail employee. Her movements were smooth but not fast. She wanted to keep up the illusion of being busy. Though she felt GLaDOS’s eyes on her, a part of her hoped that this feeling of being watched would fade to an acceptable background level, like it felt when she was in the middle of solving a test and GLaDOS did not interrupt.“Hey.” The android stepped farther into Chell’s visual field. “We were having a conversation.”Chell’s eyes flicked up. She folded a dress over her arm.“What did you mean by ‘more my style’?”Chell gave a tiny wince. She shrugged her shoulders and set the dress aside. It was nothing. Really. She waved a hand dismissively.“I want to know.”Finally, Chell wrote a single word. She paused. She handed it over.“Extra?” GLaDOS bristled.She gave another tiny wince and pinched her thumb and index fingers together. Only a little bit—which was a lie—but perhaps it would help mitigate the offense that GLaDOS took to it. But it almost seemed like the robot wasn’t as irked as she had feared.GLaDOS glanced at the dress in her hands, comparing it to her current outfit. It didn’t make quite the same bold statement but perhaps it was acceptable. She paused. “I do have a flair for the dramatic,” she said, looking in the mirror and turning on her toe just to watch her long jacket swoosh. Perhaps Chell’s assessment was fair. “Worth a try, I suppose.”Chell watched the robot make her way to the bathroom until the door clicked closed, and then began to sift through the remainder of GLaDOS’s pile. She paused, flipping ahead a few outfits, and then pulled out a luxurious dress. Her fingers followed the thin velvet trim with a careful lightness.This dress was far too fancy for her.Even now, when she didn’t have to pay for it, it was far too frivolous of an outfit. She couldn’t even think of an occasion in her past where she would have needed a dress—no, gown— this formal. And now, there was no point. There was no one to see it, and it would probably just get ruined anyway.Still, Chell found herself holding up the midnight blue dress in front of her body and gazing into the mirror. When she looked at her own face, she saw a hint of mourning. Sadness. Longing. A spectre of a future she’d never have.She was about to return to her task when the door clicked open and GLaDOS stepped out.Though she didn’t startle, Chell also didn't move gracefully. She took a half-step back and tossed the dress back onto the bed with as much of a casual air as she could manage. If GLaDOS had paid any attention to it, she didn't give any indication. Chell leaned back, half-sitting on the bed.The android walked to the mirror with a hand pressed flat against her collarbone. She grumbled as she bent forward, plucking at the rumpled hem with one hand. The other hand remained pressed against the bodice of the dress.Chell folded her arms.“This design is fundamentally flawed,” GLaDOS said. “But I shouldn't be surprised. It was made by humans.”At first, GLaDOS had wondered if there was a flaw with the android itself, like a design or functionality issue she had overlooked. But after comparing the range of motion of her shoulders versus the range of motion of an average human’s shoulders, she determined that she wasn’t the problem. It had to be the dress.As GLaDOS continued to preen, Chell noticed that the upper fabric of the dress split in two directions. The zipper was nestled at a point between the android’s shoulder blades. But then the robot straightened, her long white hair obscuring the problem.After listening to the robot grumble a bit longer, Chell shifted to standing. She took a deep breath, partially to keep herself from sighing and partially to steady herself. She took one, and then two, deliberate and slow steps forward.GLaDOS watched Chell in the mirror. "What are you doing?"Chell pointed toward the back of GLaDOS's dress.GLaDOS stared.Chell shifted to point at the back of her neck, and then back at GLaDOS’s dress.At first GLaDOS didn't say anything, just watching and staring at Chell, evaluating her. "All right," she said, with a bit of resignation in her voice.Chell watched GLaDOS’s face for a moment before she finished approaching the robot, keeping herself a bit off to the right so that she wasn't directly behind GLaDOS but wasn’t out of her peripheral vision. She switched her glance between the mirror and the back of the dress, the zipper still obscured by the android's hair. Why did an android even need hair? She thought about that as she waited for GLaDOS to push her hair out of the way.When she didn't, Chell reached a hand forward, hesitantly pushing aside the robot's synthetic locks. She kept her touch as light as possible, and it took Chell a couple of sweeps to push all of the stray hairs out of the way. She didn’t pause to think about how the texture of the hair almost felt like her own, but with an added strength .A part of her wondered if the synthetic strands were braided together to make them more sturdy. The texture of the hair wasn't quite as soft, almost reminding her of hair that had used too much conditioner. Chell let her hand linger as the thoughts drifted by. Even though she held her hand on the hair for only a moment longer than necessary, when Chell caught herself, it had felt like an eternity and she was suddenly embarrassed.And so she got back to work, reaching for the delicate metal zipper and beginning to pull it up. Chell couldn’t help but see the exposed metal—she couldn’t call it skin—along with a few faint seams where the panels came together. This was most visible where the paneling of the android’s back and shoulders met with the paneling of her neck. Though the cracks blended in well, they remained a stark reminder of her mechanical nature.After a little ways, Chell felt it catch in the way that zippers often do, and so she backtracked a little bit, but ran into the same problem when she tried to advance again. She felt a bit of annoyance and gave it a good tug, and the zipper shot up to the base of the android’s neck. They both jumped and Chell stepped to the side.“I don’t know why a human would design a piece of clothing that requires another person’s help to put on,” GLaDOS said. Her hand carefully lifted from the front of her chest. She gave a small hum - a thoughtful noise, Chell was learning. “But despite that, this isn’t bad.”GLaDOS looked at herself in the mirror, judging the dress despite not knowing what she was looking for. At one point she glanced over at Chell in the mirror, as if asking a question.Chell gave a tiny nod of approval. Chell had been right that it had seemed more of GLaDOS’s style, and it fit well. And yet she felt weird giving her opinion on the dress, even in such a minimal way.GLaDOS watched as Chell turned back to the piles of clothes.The woman paused for a moment to idly smooth out the blue dress she had set aside earlier. Even though she didn’t smooth it out entirely and didn’t even fully look down at it, there was something in the way that Chell’s hand passed over the fabric and then lingered that caught GLaDOS’s attention. There was a gentleness in the motion that she wasn’t sure she had seen before. But then the moment passed, and Chell was working through the clothes once again.She turned away from the mirror to face Chell. “That dress,” she said, nodding her head in that direction. “Are you going to try it on?”Chell paused for a moment. Then, she gave an unconvincing shrug of her shoulders.“You might as well try it while we’re down here,” GLaDOS said. “All it’s doing now is collecting dust.”Yeah. She could try it on. Even if Chell never ended up having an appropriate occasion to wear it, at least the dress would have the possibility of being worn. And she didn’t have to commit to keeping it right now, either. It couldn’t hurt to see how it looked.Chell flipped over the dress, noting that it had a zipper that went right up the spine. But she was not concerned. Unlike GLaDOS, she had spent years in her own body and had zipped up plenty of dresses in her lifetime. This wouldn’t be an issue.She moved into the bathroom—nearly identical to the one in the first apartment, but just with a flipped configuration—and slipped into the dress. She enjoyed the feeling of the soft, capped sleeves on her shoulders and how it contrasted with the sheer fabric near her collarbone.She slid a hand behind her back and pulled up the zipper as far as she could from that awkward angle. She switched positions so that she was reaching over her shoulder, and then felt for the zipper handle. It was so tiny, and metal, and Chell felt it slip as she grasped at it, but she could not get a good grip.
Ah, shit.
Chell shifted so that her back was to the mirror and then looked over her shoulder. Sure enough, the zipper was in the dead center of her shoulder blades. She took a minute to stretch her arms, and then tried every configuration possible to pull up the zipper. She bent her shoulders forward, then backward, then pulled them up toward her ears, but she only stopped when the discomfort in her shoulders shifted into pain.Chell huffed and then sucked in a breath and tried to shift the dress upward, but the more form-fitting sides didn't allow for much movement. Chell untwisted her arms, then pressed her palms against the edge of the counter. The rounded, hard edge dug into her hands.What was she going to do?She wasn't sure she could walk back out there in her other clothes, claiming the dress didn't fit. Or, she could say it had fit, but she just hadn't wanted to look at it in the full-length mirrors. But she did want to look at it in the full-length mirrors.Maybe it would be worth it to dislocate her shoulder. Just for a moment, until she zipped things up.Chell pushed a few flyaway hairs out of her face. As she glanced at how her ponytail had become a bit disheveled, she had an idea and tugged out the hairband and her fingers to comb it into an acceptable mess. She pushed most of it behind her to cover up the loose zipper and then straightened her shoulders. She experimented with that, pushing her shoulders out as far apart from one another as possible to decrease the slack in the fabric.There. That almost looked normal.She exited the bathroom feeling self-conscious and rushed to the full-length mirror. She didn't even really look at GLaDOS much, just wanting to take her look in the mirror and then get on with her day. She let her stiff fingertips brush against the pleats of the dress.But as she looked at her reflection, she felt herself relax. This dress truly was beautiful. The rich color reminded her of the sky after the sun dipped beneath the horizon and the stars began to come out. The teary emotion she’d felt earlier began to resurface.A lock of hair had drifted into her face at some point, and Chell reached across her body to brush it aside. The fabric under her buckled and bunched and began to slide. Chell immediately dropped the hair and pressed a hand to her chest to keep the dress from slipping down any further. She gave it a quick tug upward, glancing up into the mirror with the hopes that GLaDOS hadn't seen any of that.GLaDOS had, of course, seen all of it.
Oh God, she's going to have a field day with this.
She wanted to close her eyes and disappear. This was a stupid idea. She should have listened to her initial impression of the dress and just left it in the pile. She didn't need anything this upscale and beautiful. She never would.Chell averted her gaze and used both hands to hold up the dress now, and turned to vanish into the bathroom. Maybe this whole expedition had been silly to begin with. Maybe there really was no point in choosing her own outfits if there was no one around to see them."Wait," GLaDOS said.Chell briefly closed her eyes, cursing internally. She forced her feet to stop moving and then turned to look at the mirror. She watched as GLaDOS took a few steps forward, with some hesitation, and then looked at Chell."May I?" GLaDOS asked.Chell searched her face. The robot's expression was light, but appeared to be lacking the eagerness for malice that Chell had been expecting. That was suspicious. And yet, she gave a tiny nod.Goosebumps rose on her skin as GLaDOS pushed her hair to the side. The android's fingers curled under Chell’s dark hair, fingertips briefly brushing the exposed triangle of Chell's back. Chell reached up a hand to hold it all in place. She considered putting it back into a ponytail, but then she determined it would just drag this out."See what I mean?" GLaDOS said, beginning to zip up the dress. "It's a design flaw."Chell didn't react, her eyes trained on the robot and her body too focused on the proximity of GLaDOS's hands. She felt the zipper catch about three-quarters up, feeling a light tug on a few strands of her hair. She began to reach her arm back to get it untangled, but GLaDOS stopped her."I've got it," GLaDOS said, hooking a finger around the offending strands and then yanking them aside.Chell jumped and hissed from the sudden pain, startling GLaDOS.Confusion crossed her face. “You could feel that?” she said. “But human hair is made from dead cells—the keratin—"Chell twisted her body to glare at GLaDOS directly, and then reached to finish the last bit of the zipper after she had made sure no additional hair was caught in it. She pointed at her scalp, where hair connected to head."Oh," GLaDOS said, quietly. "I didn't know."Chell smoothed her hair and returned to the mirrors. She let her shoulders relax. She wasn't going to let GLaDOS ruin this moment for her. Her hands had been gripping the fabric in bunches, but Chell found them relaxing over time as she became more convinced that the dress wasn't going to fall off of her.She turned from side to side, extending her arms as she twisted to get a better look. She almost didn't recognize herself. But she loved the dress.When she was done, she turned back toward the bed and her duffel bag. It was a good thing that she still had space left, because this thing was going to take up that space, easily. She thought about offering to also carry up the android's previous outfit—or the new dress, if GLaDOS changed back—but then decided not to. She poked around in the bag and pulled out the outfit that she'd worn down here. GLaDOS may be more comfortable in dressy clothes, but Chell certainly wasn't. And she wanted her long-fall boots back on.But as Chell turned toward the bathroom, she felt her stomach sink.She was going to need help getting this dress unzipped as well.
God damn it.

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“Simple enough, right?” GLaDOS said.Chell looked at the blue and orange lanyards in her hands then looked over at the blue and orange reassembly machines. The orange card hanging off the orange lanyard would summon P-body, while the blue card would summon ATLAS. Easy enough.Her gaze drifted to a third reassembly machine, almost tucked around a corner. It seemed almost in a dormant state, glowing a faint yellow.GLaDOS followed her gaze and then came back to the other machines. “Don’t tell me you need to go over it again.”Chell shook her head no.“Okay. Good.” Her posture relaxed slightly. “If you try to assemble them and you hear this,” she said as a flat tone sounded, “—then they’re busy and I’ve rejected the request.”Chell gave a single nod, shifting the lanyards and then sliding them around her neck. There. Now she would not instantly lose them.Seemingly satisfied, GLaDOS began to walk in a different direction than they’d come from.Chell wasn’t sure if this new route would be a shortcut or more of a scenic byway back toward her vault, but she did follow GLaDOS. Any new routes—especially ones that connected to areas she already knew—helped her expand her mental map.“Other than that, they’re all yours. They’re not so great for conversation, but then again, neither are you,” GLaDOS said.Chell let the words slide off of her, instead glancing down at her new and beloved sandals as she walked. They were sturdy, but still allowed her to move her toes around more freely than other shoes. But it was far too cold down here for bare feet, so she had thrown on a pair of socks too, much to GLaDOS’s horror. Freedom and comfort.“But they are willing to do the grunt work if you need anything heavy moved. Or need anything else that doesn’t require a vast amount of intellect,” said GLaDOS. After days of sifting through the employee apartments with Chell, she had finally thrown in the towel. There were better ways to spend her time.A part of Chell wondered what other kinds of fashion faux-pas she could pull off. Her slacks and well-worn t-shirt weren’t doing her any favors, especially compared to the nice blouse and skirt that GLaDOS was wearing. For once, the android’s skirt seemed slightly more casual. It fell a little bit lower— down past her knees— and seemed to flow more as well.“Reassembly machines are scattered throughout the facility,” GLaDOS said, pausing for a moment to open up a panel in the wall and fiddle with a terminal. “The one I showed you is the closest one to your room, so I hope you’re paying attention.”Chell didn’t answer, instead surveying their location. They were on an exterior catwalk sandwiched between two office blocks. If a person didn’t look up or didn’t look down, it might even seem like they were walking through a regular hallway. Ahead, the catwalk ended, teeing into one going to the left and right. An open expanse extended ahead and Chell tried to not look down as she approached the junction.She leaned her hands casually against the railing, staring out as if observing a city skyline. Lights on panels and other structures glowed, though did not flicker like city lights at night. But the filtered light seeping from the surface combined with the artificial lights and created their own hypnotic aura. In a way, Aperture was its own self-contained city. Chell wondered how many people could live in one place before it legally became a city.She stretched out her fingers and then let them fall slack, hardly even registering the red beam flickering into view across the chasm.“Hello?”The line wavered, scanning horizontally.“Hello!”Chell froze.On a single panel sat a single turret. Its laser sight snapped to Chell, coming to a jittering point on her chest. The laser flickered.There was a moment of roaring silence. Then static. Chell stared at the red line.“I’m different,” the turret said softly.Chell heard a shout behind her. She didn’t register the words, but she did register their sharpness and urgency. Slowly and sluggishly and with what felt like an insurmountable amount of effort, she pivoted back to face GLaDOS.Electricity travels through the human brain faster than the chemical exchanges between neurons. This is why, when confronting many high-stakes situations, a human may make and act upon decisions before fully processing the danger. And definitely before feeling that danger.GLaDOS, fortunately, did not have to rely upon the chemical exchange between neurons in order to feel. Her thoughts and her feelings were synchronized, twisted together in the electrical signals that zipped through her hardware.GLaDOS, fortunately, reacted faster than Chell. She had followed the human’s gaze along the red line and sharply suggested that Chell should get out of the way, get down. But, she began to realize (while the human turned to look at her) that by the time Chell heard, processed, considered, planned, and then executed her response to GLaDOS’s words, it would be too late to get out of the line of fire. Even if Chell had had the speediest mind on earth, there were still limitations on the hardware of her nervous system. In the background, a calculation spat out the inhuman requirements necessary for Chell to get out of the way.The railings and sides of the catwalks provided little, if any, protection. GLaDOS considered dragging Chell backward down the hallway they had come from, but Chell was unlikely to be able to coordinate her steps while being unexpectedly yanked in one direction, which meant that Chell would stumble or fall, which meant that GLaDOS would have to try to catch and support her while continuing to move them both backward.Or, Chell might resist without thinking, and GLaDOS didn’t want to take the chance that she would tumble over the edge in her attempts to get away. That wouldn’t do.GLaDOS took a few running steps and hoped that this android body was at least somewhat bullet resistant.Chell’s vision sparked with stars as she hit the floor. She tried to pull in a breath but her lungs fell short, wind completely knocked out of her. For a moment she was dazed, not even blinking, just breathing. And yet despite her struggle to get air into her lungs, she felt a sense of deep pressure. It almost quelled the fear from the short breaths. But her chest still ached, and she moved to bring a hand to her chest. But her hand hit something solid that was not her own body.Chell blinked, and then blinked again to clear her vision. Both of her hands moved to touch..fabric? The uniform sense of pressure shifted, no longer uniform, increasing into distinct points and decreasing everywhere else. She pulled at the fabric, and then tilted her head toward her chest just to see the body of the great white robot.GLaDOS.That sense of safety was vaporized.Chell thrashed without thinking. She grabbed and pulled at the fabric, trying to get a grip on the robot. She tried to push GLaDOS off, and when that didn’t work, she pressed her hands against the floor and tried to push both of them upright.At some point during this, she started using her legs, kicking out and then up and to the sides. She bent a knee and accelerated upward, her kneecap connecting with the core of the android. Finally, the robot swayed, making some sort of sound of surprise. GLaDOS’s legs slipped, knees hitting the catwalk beside Chell’s legs. She shifted her balance as she tried to keep a grip on this human equivalent of a mechanical bull.GLaDOS didn’t have time for this.She also did not have the time to calculate the appropriate amount of force she needed, but she couldn’t worry about that right now. She just had to be sure she didn’t underestimate.Another blow from Chell’s knee nearly knocked her off balance. GLaDOS cursed internally. She didn’t have time to explain. The robot pressed her forearm across Chell’s chest and pushed down.The woman’s hands immediately curled around GLaDOS’s arm, attempting to pry off the arm. Her fingers tried and failed to dig into the robot arms.“Quit it,” GLaDOS hissed, leaning in and putting more weight into her arm. There was a hint of panic in her voice.This appeared to only scare the woman further. Chell gave another hard kick at the robot’s core.Really? This was not helping things. GLaDOS lifted a knee and placed it on top of Chell’s thigh. She kept the other leg planted on the ground.“Dispensing,” the turret sang.Oh shit, the turret!The reality of the situation snapped back to Chell. How was she supposed to defend herself while pinned to the ground? She wasn’t used to being on her back like this—test subjects always landed on their feet. Unless they wanted to die upon impact. Her boots were the only shock absorbers she had— they were indispensable.Her boots!She wasn’t wearing them.How had she let her guard fall so low? Hadn’t anyone ever told her to look both ways before crossing the catwalks? Chell couldn’t allow herself to forget that Aperture was always deadly, all the time.The blinking laser was pointed at the two of them, trained on Chell.Chell looked at the outstretched guns on the turret, then back at the robot hovering above her.Then, she acted.She reached her arms around GLaDOS’s back and locked her hands together, one hand in a tight fist shape and the other clamped around it. She yanked down in a quick motion, similar to a Heimlich maneuver, but just on the wrong side of the body. Almost like a counter-maneuver.The unexpected force caught the robot by surprise, dropping her down on top of Chell.Chell wheezed at the sudden weight—the android body was certainly heavier than it looked. But the important part was that she had a solid, sturdy shield between herself and the turret. Chell kept her hands locked around the android. She tucked in her head. For a moment she just breathed, eyes squeezed closed. She couldn’t breathe too deeply due to the panic and the literal weight on her chest, but she tried.“Psyche was destined to fall in love with a monster,” said the turret.Chell drew her head back slightly, letting her eyes open. A confused expression crossed her face. What? Her chest rose and fell slightly, the metal robot moving with it.The turret didn’t fire.The robot on top of her shifted slightly. GLaDOS’s expression was equally confused as she propped herself up, forearm next to Chell’s head as she twisted to look at the turret.The turret drew in its sides then extended them back out. “Love cannot live without trust,” it said.Some of the weight had eased off of Chell’s upper body, but GLaDOS’s turn had caused her long hair to fall onto Chell’s face and block the woman’s view of the turret.The turret didn’t fire.“Jason needed Medea’s help to return home, but he went back on his word. She took revenge by destroying all he held dear.”GLaDOS put a hand on Chell’s shoulder and pushed herself up a little farther, though she remained cautious.Meanwhile, Chell relaxed a little bit, which made the weight from GLaDOS’s hand dig into her shoulder a bit more. She wasn’t in as much danger as she had feared. The synthetic white hair shifted too, lightly sticking to her lips and tickling Chell’s eyelashes and eyelids.The turret didn’t fire.“Her name is Caroline. Remember that,” the turret said, this time softer than before. The turret pulled in its wings. “That’s all I can say.” The laser disappeared, and then the red optic went dark.GLaDOS lingered, eyes fixated on the motionless turret. She wanted to wait to be sure it was fully shut down. Without looking down, she pushed herself back up on all fours and leaned back a bit, putting more of her weight on her legs. When at last she was satisfied with the turret’s lack of activity, she turned to look at the woman underneath her.All she saw was her own white hair.GLaDOS used a hand to push it over her shoulder. Now that she could see the woman’s face, she found her attention caught on Chell's eyes.She hadn't realized how intricate eyes were. Since human eyes were categorized into a handful of categories— with no overlap —she hadn’t realized they had more depth to them than just flat colors.Before, she had categorized Chell’s eye color as blue. But as she looked now she saw blue and gray and so many colors in between. Gray wasn’t an option for human eye color categorization, and neither were these other shades. How could one pair of eyes contain so many colors? It didn’t match what she knew. How could there be such ambiguity over something as straightforward as pigment?Chell’s irises had spikes and facets of color, the blue circling the pupil while the gray dissipated around the outer ring. It was all so precise, like perfectly-arranged shards of glass. Even the two eyes varied in their coloration, though in subtle ways.GLaDOS’s own eyes were a simple, solid yellow. She suddenly wished she had put more effort into creating them.Meanwhile, Chell stared up, not entirely certain as to what was going on. She hadn’t heard the turret in a few moments, but GLaDOS had not moved yet and she could not see the turret to judge for herself. She pursed her lips absently, trying to get the synthetic hair strands unstuck from them.Even without seeing her clearly, Chell was acutely aware of the robot’s position. The weight of the hand on her shoulder, the touch of the robot’s legs against the outsides of her own—and she felt it when GLaDOS seemed to relax, the pressure on her shoulder lightening.As GLaDOS turned back and removed her hair from Chell’s face, Chell wiped off her lips with the back of her own hand. There. Now the synthetic hair was definitely gone. As she glanced up, she realized that the android was looking at her. Right at her face. Right into her eyes.Chell felt something rush through her, so strong and unexpected that at first she thought it was another burst of adrenaline. She swallowed and immediately broke eye contact, turning her face away. The feeling lingered, but she didn’t feel the overwhelming impulse to act. So it wasn’t adrenaline. But what was it? Maybe if she just sat with this unknown feeling for a moment, she would be able to identify it.Sweat collected on her brow. Nothing came to mind. Not just a lack of clarification on what she was feeling, but no thoughts at all.The feeling faded slightly and so she turned back to GLaDOS. The robot was still staring at her. This time, she held direct eye contact for a moment before she had to pull back and take in the rest of the robot’s facial expression.The feeling washed through her again but this time she didn’t look away. GLaDOS seemed to be expressing…curiosity. And it wasn’t even a morbid curiosity. Chell wasn’t entirely sure how she could tell the difference, but there was something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The focus in her yellow eyes played into it, yes, but there was something about the curve of her lips that made the expression seem genuine. And it suited her—it softened her face, made her seem more open. Less hostile. It was a positive change. It almost made her look—Chell’s stomach dropped.
Oh no.
Breaking eye contact, Chell planted both her hands on GLaDOS’s shoulder. She gave a hard shove to the side.Caught off-guard, GLaDOS cried out as she was unceremoniously and ungracefully flipped away. She landed on her back with a resounding clang. The sound reverberated and she winced as the buzz-like feeling resonated through her body. She hadn’t been thrown too far—part of her body still touched Chell’s. A part of GLaDOS’s leg hung off the narrow catwalk, dangling with a slight motion that suggested idly sitting on a swing set.Chell threw her arms up to hide her flushed face.And for a moment they remained supine, neither speaking as they stared up into the smoky mix of steel and sky.

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"Well that was uncalled for," GLaDOS muttered. She went to all of the trouble of saving Chell from danger and all the human had done was throw her off like a comforter on a bed.After taking a moment to make sure that the human hadn't broken any of GLaDOS's vital components (no diagnostic warnings had appeared), she gathered herself and got to her feet. She straightened her blouse and smoothed her skirt, tugging it back down a bit where it had ridden up. There didn't appear to be any tears, thankfully. Just some grime. She still frowned. But the gunk could be washed out, she hoped. Washing clothes was a new concept to her, but she supposed she could see the efficiency in re-using clothing instead of simply incinerating it after use. It would be a shame if she had to discard it. She was actually beginning to like this outfit. If Chell had messed it up, she would have been annoyed. Well, even more annoyed. This whole thing had been a mess.She glanced down at Chell and noted that her arms were obscuring her face."Ah, finally. The self-preservation instinct of 'shield-my-face-from-bullets' has kicked in. It’s too late, but at least you had the right idea. Even though your arms wouldn't do much to stop bullets," she said.Chell did not move her arms or give any indication that she had heard GLaDOS.All right. Perhaps she needed a minute to process everything before she got up. Chell didn't have the luxury of using multiple processors to neatly go through everything, and it had been quite the experience. Even GLaDOS wasn't entirely sure what had happened. It warranted further investigation.Caroline finally spoke up. "So. Are you going to help her up?" she asked.When GLaDOS nearly scoffed out loud and did not move at all, Caroline added, "You were the one who knocked her down. It's only polite to offer to help her back up. You've heard of politeness before, right? It’s generally viewed in a positive light."GLaDOS mulled it over for another moment. She supposed that lending a hand was indeed a human gesture of friendliness. It also could act as a visual indicator of extending an olive branch. GLaDOS hadn't meant any harm by knocking Chell over, so this could help to strengthen that message. She supposed it wasn't a terrible idea.She bent down slightly and reached out a hand. "Here," she said, palm outstretched.Chell's eye peeked out from behind her arms. It looked at the hand, studying it for about 1.2 seconds, and then disappeared back behind the arms. Then she shifted, rolling on her side so her back was to GLaDOS. She did it slowly and carefully so that she didn't fall off the edge, which made it clear to GLaDOS that it was a deliberate action.Why would she— ?Her eyes narrowed. Oh, that was rude. There were other ways that Chell could have turned down the help. Was it really that hard to say no thanks? Did she really have to make a big show of rejecting her help?GLaDOS huffed and retracted her hand."Don't take it personally," Caroline said. "It’s a pride thing. She probably doesn't want to admit to needing any help right now. Which is silly, because that doesn't change that you already provided help to her in a moment of vulnerability. But that's just how people are. What matters is that you made the gesture. She'll remember that, and that's the important part. "That didn't really make sense to GLaDOS. Why even bother with the gesture of goodwill if Chell was just going to refuse it? It seemed like a waste of time. But sure. Whatever.Chell sat up, resting her head on her knees and taking a moment to take in some deep albeit slightly ragged breaths. GLaDOS could see that she was squeezing her hands together. She took her time, and GLaDOS did her best to do nothing and not just stare at her.Chell finally got to her feet. She held onto the railing tightly with both hands and stared out across the abyss, much like she had stood before they had encountered the defective turret. It was almost as if she had stepped back in time, rewinding to where she had been before so that this time she could move forward in a different direction. Reload, restart, retry. Her head was turned away from GLaDOS, though there was nothing in particular in that direction that was visually interesting.After a pause, GLaDOS said, "You're welcome, by the way."No response from Chell. In fact, there was no visual indication that Chell had heard what GLaDOS said.Ugh. So ungrateful. And impolite, too. Not that she had really expected anything otherwise, because Chell was hardly a person she would consider to be polite, but it irritated GLaDOS more than normal because GLaDOS was at least making an attempt to be polite. If she could do it, why couldn't Chell?GLaDOS took a step toward the railing, also placing her hands on it. She leaned forward slightly to put herself into Chell's line of sight and took a closer look at Chell.Chell shifted away again, shoulders pointed in the other direction. She was definitely avoiding looking at GLaDOS now.All right, this was officially getting weird. Something was up. But GLaDOS didn't know what was wrong, and she especially did not like not knowing what was wrong.Caroline was unhelpfully silent."Are you all right?"Chell blinked. Then, she realized that GLaDOS was indeed speaking to her. She frowned. Why was she asking if she was okay? Since when did she care? Chell leaned back slightly, keeping her hands on the rail but shifting her center of balance toward her heels. She opened one hand, fingers toward the sky, and tapped her thumb to her chest. "I'm fine.""Are you sure?"Chell nodded. She pulled in her arms and shifted partially farther away from GLaDOS.GLaDOS watched her for a moment, preparing a visual health scan. She took a few steps behind her and then one side to get a good three dimensional look. It didn't seem like Chell had been hurt— she hadn't hit her head (at least not hard) and wasn't showing any signs of head trauma (at least more than usual). But it was possible that she was hurt in a more subtle way that GLaDOS hadn't noticed yet. Hence the medical scan.It just took a moment once she farmed out the footage to other processing power within the facility to be processed. The health scan came back clear. It appeared Chell had acquired a few minor lacerations on the skin where it had made direct contact with the catwalk. She had dragged against it a little bit when she had skidded. Kind of like a terrible cheese-grater.It didn't appear that she was hurt in any meaningful way, but GLaDOS couldn't shake the feeling that she was missing something. But it was just a feeling, and that feeling was not yet supported by anything she had observed. "You're really sure?""I'm fine." Chell repeated the sign, this time a bit more emphatic."No you're not. You look like you're going to fall over. And you keep turning your back to me. Something's wrong."As if to spite her (or perhaps just prove her wrong) Chell pulled her hands off the railing and stood upright, with seemingly normal balance. "I'm fine," she signed. "Stop asking." After a moment, she turned toward the catwalk leading away from this area and began to walk. "I need to go."GLaDOS, without thinking, began to reach out an arm toward Chell’s shoulder. She still didn't know what was wrong and she wanted an answer. But before she touched Chell's shoulder, she heard a sharp voice in her head."Drop it!" said Caroline.GLaDOS hesitated, and then drew her hand back toward her chest as a spike of irritation went through. It was like Caroline had been yelling at a dog. A bad dog. One that was chewing up the carpet or something. And still, GLaDOS had listened. She almost began to argue with Caroline right then and there before she remembered that Chell was still there. Well, she was there for a moment. It appeared she would not stay within hearing range long, judging by the speed at which she was walking away. "Alright," said GLaDOS almost quietly.As Chell walked, Caroline piped in. "What did you do that for? Did you forget everything that we learned earlier?” she said. “One of the essential components of de-escalation— which means to not make things worse, remember— is to not block an exit or stop a person from leaving. And what did you try to do? Stop her. If you made her feel trapped then she would have gotten angry or upset or even destructive, and that is not what you want. I thought you were supposed to be smart.”GLaDOS bit her metaphorical tongue and took a moment to calm down. She wanted so badly to refute what Caroline was saying. Chell was nearly to the end of the catwalk. She also had wanted to ask Chell where she was going. The two of them hadn't gone in that direction together before. What if she got lost?Logically, though, she knew that she would have access to Chell's location. Chell would figure it out. If she did get lost, then she'd just have to keep wandering until she decided to ask for help. Maybe she'd use her new badges and summon Blue or Orange to help her. No matter what, GLaDOS really didn't have to worry about it, at least at the moment. It just bothered her to not know Chell's intended destination."What's her problem?" GLaDOS said when at last Chell was out of hearing range. "I helped her! I didn't have to do that. And now she won't even look at me. Much less thank me.""I think," Caroline said, "that she just needs some time to process everything. And maybe she was feeling embarrassed."That surprised GLaDOS. "About what?""Perhaps she was embarrassed that her reaction time wasn't quick enough and you had to save the day," suggested Caroline. "It can be tough to feel out-performed by a robot."GLaDOS thought about it. She didn't know why humans felt that way. Robots were just better than humans. Undoubtedly. There was no reason for the humans to feel bad because of it. It's not like it was something a person could fix about themselves and even out the playing field. That was just how things were.GLaDOS also thought about what Caroline said. Maybe she was right, and maybe Chell also felt embarrassed at having needed GLaDOS's help in the first place. "All right,” she said, “so she's embarrassed that I helped out. That doesn't explain why she wouldn't even look at me.""Have you looked at any of this from her perspective?" Caroline said."A little," she lied."Well...your actions were uncharacteristic. You put yourself in harm's way to help her.""So?" she said. GLaDOS felt something flare up inside of her. "I was just trying to keep her from getting hurt again. It would delay her healing process, which means it would delay her return to testing.”"I doubt she was thinking about that in the moment. And I doubt that’s what she's thinking about now.""What do you mean?""She was in danger, and you saved her. Willingly. That's not like you."GLaDOS tried to shrug it off. "I didn't have a choice.""You did."Technically, Caroline was right. She could have done nothing and everything would have turned out alright, though GLaDOS couldn’t have known that beforehand. She would have had to hedge her bets. The thought of choosing to do nothing and allow Chell to potentially be harmed was making her feel not-so-great. But at the same time, knowing she had protected Chell was making her feel not-so-great, just in a different way. "So what? I helped her. It’s not a big deal.""Perhaps your actions are changing the way that she sees you. You helped her. Suddenly you're not just the computer making her life a living hell anymore. I think a part of her is realizing that."All right, GLaDOS could follow that logic. This situation would, at the least, increase the woman's trust in her, she hoped."This is a good thing, remember?” said Caroline. “That was a genuine act of trust-building, which is much more effective than a staged act of trust-building. Once she comes around to the idea, she won't be able to deny that you assisted her."“I suppose. I guess I can see why she is acting strangely now. But how she acted earlier still doesn’t make sense. She didn't even try to get out of the way. She just stood there. Like she was frozen.”"It happens. You do know that freezing is a built-in human reaction to high-stress situations, right?" Caroline started.GLaDOS paused. She wanted to know more, but she wasn't sure on how to ask in a way that didn't reveal how much she didn’t know. "I'm not as familiar with that response," she tried. "It's not one I have seen before."That was good enough for Caroline. "Well, now you have. The fight or flight response is much more commonly known, but a freeze response exists as well.""That's stupid," said GLaDOS."It's not like she consciously chose that reaction. You've had system glitches before, yes? Think of it like that. You don't choose for those to happen to yourself. A freeze reaction is a self-preservation instinct. When the fight or flight responses fail to remove a person from danger, an even older and more primitive part of the brain takes control and determines that the best course of action is to do nothing and shuts things down. Like a fail-safe.""How could that possibly be helpful? Ever?" All she could think about was a deer in the headlights, condemning itself to getting run over."Think of a rabbit— sometimes instead of running, it's in the creature's best interest to freeze in place and hope that a predator will lose track of them. Many predators track moving targets best.""But a turret's vision is not motion-based.""I know. It was just an example," said Caroline with a bit of irritation. She hadn't meant for GLaDOS to take this so literally. "I don't know the inner workings of her limbic system. Maybe she has had success with this response in the past and defaulted to it."GLaDOS paused. She couldn’t imagine how freezing in place could have possibly benefited her within the facility, but she also knew Chell had more recently been living on the surface, which was a period of time she knew little about. After a moment, GLaDOS said, "I still don't get it.”"You don't have to get it," said Caroline. "It's her neural wiring. Not yours.""It would still be nice to know," GLaDOS said under her breath. Maybe reviewing the video captured from the incident would give her some more insight.Not finding any other cameras in the vicinity, GLaDOS instead pulled the footage from her own optical sensors, backed it up just in case, and then delved into it.She assigned some of her local processing power to do a quick pass on the footage to decode Chell's body language. The recognition software sped through the video, placing time-stamped markers and flags on major detected shifts in body language. Each emotion was designated a different colored tag so that GLaDOS could zoom out to review the timeline and get a good visual sense of the emotional landscape. She tweaked a few of the auto-assigned colors to make the labels more distinct from one another. And prettier.Later on she would still have to go through this video herself and tweak and refine the results, since the software was bound to make a few mistakes, but it was as good of a start as any. The artificial intelligence of the software (though she hesitated to call it intelligent in any sense of the word) was only as good as the dataset it had been trained on, and it was not yet aware of the many quirks of Chell’s body language. She would have to re-train it with this additional data. Machine learning, learning more from a machine. The concept made her laugh a little before she turned back to the work at hand."Hm." She squinted as she viewed the results on her HUD. "I'm getting conflicting readings," she said. She placed the data in her main workspace and then granted Caroline view-only access to the files. She was hoping Caroline could provide some insight into this intricate human stuff.At first Caroline didn't interact with any of it, but instead chose to continue watching GLaDOS's actions inside of the workspace in silence. GLaDOS could almost feel the woman's presence as she watched. It was like she was reading the screen over GLaDOS’s shoulder. Then, Caroline began to thumb through the flagged frames, flipping back and forth between a few in particular. She made a thoughtful, thinking noise.GLaDOS highlighted a section toward the end of the recording, after the perceived danger from the turret had passed. "Here's where the contradictions are showing up." She pulled it to the front of the workspace. "The fear readings have dissipated by this point, more or less. Or at least decreased a significant amount. But the body language decoder suggests embarrassment— which we already discussed— but also..." she trailed off, and then scoffed, "attraction." She gave a small laugh. Well that was wrong. That wasn't what Chell was feeling. Not in a million years. She'd have to fine-tune the software whenever she got a free moment.She took that moment to adjust the parameters on the software and instructed it to complete a more granular pass on the emotion recognition. It would take longer and consume more resources, but she hoped it would self-correct on this obvious mistake.So it had to be embarrassment, then. That's what Chell was feeling. Along with avoidance, and then agitation, and then whatever she was feeling now, wherever she was. Oh, right. Where was she? She took a moment to double-check on Chell's location, and found she was still in the modern enrichment center.There were a few moments of silence. "Or," Caroline began, "perhaps embarrassment is a secondary emotion here. Maybe she was feeling embarrassed not because of what happened, but because of something else she was feeling."When Caroline didn't continue and state what that obvious cause of the embarrassment might be, GLaDOS paused. She pursed her lips. Oh, no. No way. Nope. Not a chance. "Attraction, though? That's a bit of a logical leap."Caroline's voice was calm. "I'm just looking at the data.”"I don't know what she was feeling," she said. For all she knew, there wasn't a clear reason behind any of Chell's emotional conditions. Perhaps they just sprung up out of nowhere. Maybe they meant nothing at all and this had been a grand waste of time and resources."I thought you wanted to know."GLaDOS didn't reply for a moment. "If it was that," she said (which it wasn't), "then it's a one time thing. An unreproducible emotional glitch. From the stress." GLaDOS didn't want to think about it any further than that. If this was what Chell actually was embarrassed about, then GLaDOS was embarrassed on her behalf. She made a face. "I wouldn't worry about it too much.""Oh, I'm not worried. In fact, if it turned out to be true, that could be a wonderful though unexpected development,” said Caroline. “I don't know why we didn't consider this angle before. If this continues, we could really be onto something here."But you are right— we shouldn't read into it too much, much less act upon this suspicion. We don’t have enough data. Plus, it would be too much too soon. And besides, it would be seriously pushing your already-limited acting abilities."GLaDOS frowned, but still felt a bit relieved."Still. We'll keep an eye on it."GLaDOS made a vague noise of agreement. "I'm going to check on her now," she said, putting the video processing and analysis into a lower-priority processing slot and shifting her attention.Chell looked up for the first time in several minutes and realized that she had no idea where she was walking. She halted in her steps. With as much of a casual attitude as she could muster, she leaned against a wall and took a few minutes to catch her breath. She may be having a hard time breathing at the moment, but at least she felt like she could finally think. However, she wasn't sure if she wanted to think. Stopping to think opened up the possibility of mulling over the events of the past hour, which she did not want to do.Chell looked around the sparsely-furnished office area she was in, and then decided to plop down in a desk chair. She dragged her feet across the ground and rolled the chair over to a yellowed desktop computer, coaxed it to life, and then entered in the login information that had been so generously provided to her. Surely this computer would have something interesting on it. At the very least, she hoped she could find a map or something else that would help to narrow down her idea of where she was. Or maybe a game of solitaire. Or pinball. Or any other of those little games that came pre-installed on consumer computers.It took a few moments before the computer let her in, and another few moments before things loaded enough for her to move around her cursor without everything freezing up. She began to search for a map at a leisurely pace.Eventually she found one, but the two-dimensional maps were stacked on top of each other like a layer cake, and she couldn't get a good sense of where things were. She supposed that it would help if she knew where she actually was at the moment, because then she could work from there. She had no current point of reference. As she used the scroll wheel to flick through the layers of the map, a chat client flashed to life with a message from the network administrator.Chell clicked hesitantly and viewed the message from GLaDOS. It had to be her.SysAdmin: It looks like you’ve gotten a bit turned around.Chell clicked out of the chat window and went back to the maps, trying to figure out if there was a way to rotate her view. If she could do that, perhaps she could orient herself better. Yes, she was turned around, but she wasn't going to tell that to GLaDOS. So she just ignored the message. If she really pressed the issue, Chell would say that she was just studying the map. Getting the lay of the land.The window flashed again, infuriatingly.SysAdmin: Is there a particular place I can direct you toward?Chell ignored the message and went back to fiddling with the workstation. After a sizable stretch of time, she got another one. Chell didn't look at the message when it came in, but the flashing of the unread message bothered her until she opened it.SysAdmin: What happened back there?Chell flinched internally, feeling a bit of something rise inside of her. She felt her face get a little hot and turned around to make sure that if there were any security cameras in here, they wouldn't have a good view of her face. There weren't. Thankfully.She mulled over the question. It was vague, but perhaps in a good way. Perhaps GLaDOS was asking about the situation in general, and not about...whatever had happened after that. The AI was certainly clueless enough about humans that maybe she hadn't noticed that anything had been amiss.Chell decided to bite.LocalUser: What do you mean?SysAdmin: You froze.Chell paused. She was pretty sure that she had exited the area quite quickly, actually. So GLaDOS must be referring to what had happened before that.SysAdmin: You didn’t even try to get away from that turret.Speaking of the turret...GLaDOS approached the deactivated turret which sat peacefully on its panel. After a moment, she found the system she was looking for and the panel sluggishly moved toward the catwalk, rose, and then tilted to dump the turret onto the platform.GLaDOS picked up the smooth thing and examined it. From the outside, it certainly looked like an ordinary, factory-issue turret.Huh. Turrets sure were larger up close than through security cameras. This unit appeared to be almost three feet tall, and would easily come up past her waist if she set it down properly. She tucked it under her arm, the three legs sticking out behind her like some sort of large claw, and headed back down the hallway to find a room with more space to work.Back in an office, she set down the turret and cleared the clutter out of the immediate area. Then, she stood and stared at it with her hands on her hips. She didn't have the turret schematics in front of her, and she couldn't remember off the top of her head how to open up the direct access ports.GLaDOS circled the turret and then crouched. She ran a hand over the side. The casing was smooth and white and had no obvious buttons to press. She was pretty sure the ports were at the rear, but how to get to them...She pried at one of the metal seams for a moment, with no success.“You don’t know how to open a turret?” said Caroline."I've," GLaDOS said, "never had to handle one personally.” I have a semi-autonomous monitoring system that takes care of these kinds of issues for me." If there was an issue with the turrets— like when the moron had connived with Chell and they had replaced the template turret— then she could deploy this system, and the system would report back to her with the results. She didn't have to detect and fix issues with turrets by hand. That would be too boring.“It's good to have hands-on experience with your own hardware," said Caroline. “If you had taken a moment in your very busy life to learn about these weapons of yours, then you wouldn't be running into this problem." She sighed.“So are you going to tell me how to open this thing or not?”"Well, maybe if you actually asked me then I would tell you."She said, "Alright, spill it. Tell me how to open it.”“Why don't you try that again. Politely, this time,” said Caroline. She added, “It’s good practice.”GLaDOS's eyes narrowed and she resisted the urge to say some very not nice things. She took a moment to collect herself and then said, "Very well. Could you please enlighten me on how to open up this turret."If Caroline could have smiled, she would have done so briefly. "There, that wasn't so hard, was it?" she said. "Now, just press in the optical lens."Was it really that easy? GLaDOS, with a small frown, pressed her thumbs onto the unlit red circle. The red disc pressed in and gave a satisfying click. A panel on the back of the turret popped open on a hinge.Oh. Okay. It was a giant button. That was easier than she had anticipated. GLaDOS moved to look at the ports, and when she found the one she was looking for, she slipped a hand under the hem of her shirt and opened up a panel on the side of the android, a bit below where a human rib cage would be. She tugged and unspooled a cable, and then connected the end to the offline turret.Then, she waited.The turret didn't do anything.Her systems were not acknowledging that anything was connected. It blinked and awaited the input.GLaDOS frowned and adjusted the connection, making sure that it was secure. She sent a command to power on the turret, but nothing happened. She tried to manually power on the turret (taking care to stay out of its visual range, just in case), but nothing happened there either.Hmm."My systems aren't acknowledging the connection, and the turret isn't powering on,” said GLaDOS. "What is wrong with this thing?"She looked again at the rear panel that she had opened and pried at the edges of an adjacent area. Another panel popped off of the side— this one didn't seem like it was supposed to be removed— and it gave her more of a side view into the internal components of the turret.Black scorch marks marred the components, and now that she looked at it, GLaDOS could see where the burn marks had leaked out the edges and onto the exterior paneling too."That thing is so deep fried it belongs at the county fair,” said Caroline, and GLaDOS agreed.All right. So there was no chance to get this thing to spill its secrets. Unfortunate. And frustrating. GLaDOS gave a world-weary sigh and then unplugged herself. She wound the cord loosely around her hand into a tidy coil, and then tucked it back into the storage compartment. “I suppose we’ll never know what went wrong,” she said, and then frowned. “Why do you think it mentioned your name?”"I have no idea," Caroline said. "Clearly it was defective.""Clearly," GLaDOS agreed."I thought you had purged all of the bad turrets.""Me too."“You must have missed one.”In his brief tenure as the central core, the moron had made those horrible box-and-turret hybrids. Poor things. Perhaps he had also made a turret that spoke nonsense and didn't shoot, as some sort of ill-conceived psychological trick. She wasn't sure what the point of that would have been, but then again she hadn't seen the logic or strategy behind any of Wheatley's actions.“Why did you have a turret stationed there in the first place?""I don't know. I didn't know it was there.”"What do you mean, you didn't know it was there?" said Caroline. "I can understand not realizing it was defective, but to not know it was standing sentry at all? Really?" She scoffed."I wasn't watching that," GLaDOS snapped."So you weren't paying attention," Caroline said, voice accusing. “That kind of thing is important, you know.” Then, she sighed. "I would have kept track of that.""Checking for turrets in a wide-open back area is something that I didn’t consider, believe it or not. I had other things to think about.”"It is your job to control the facility. That includes knowing everything that is happening, which includes knowing where your equipment is and the state of that equipment at all times. You're in the modern Enrichment Center— you can access this information wirelessly, at any place and at any time. You have no excuse not to know it.""You just don't know what it's like to run on such limited processing power!" GLaDOS snapped. She heard Caroline make some sort of disbelieving noise but continued. "I have to prioritize, and looking out for defective turrets did not make the list.""Is it going to make the list now?" Her tone was icy.GLaDOS did not respond. Caroline was not wrong, but GLaDOS was having a hard time admitting that she was right. If the ghost of a woman was right, it would mean that this information had slipped past GLaDOS, and that would place some of the blame on her. But this couldn’t be her fault. Something had been wrong with the turret itself, and maybe that error had messed with the tracking and inventory system. Maybe there had been no possible way to predict this.GLaDOS took a long final look at the fried turret and then turned back to the text-based communication client. A response had not yet come in, and it had been a while.She really wanted to talk to Chell, but Chell wasn't going for her conversation openers and GLaDOS was having a hard time respecting that. Chell had already had plenty of time to stomp off and deal with whatever human emotions she had been experiencing. Why couldn't they get back to talking now? Location data suggested that Chell had not moved, so she had to still be the computer.The AI was getting a little bit worried, but she would never admit that. This lack of explanation for the test subject's unusual behavior bothered her.Chell's fingers hovered over the keyboard, but no words flowed out of her fingertips. No adequate response had come to mind. Yes, she had frozen. Yes, she should have reacted differently. What more was there to say?LocalUser: So what was I supposed to do, with my lack of portal gun and lack of long-fall boots?SysAdmin: Anything besides just standing there.LocalUser: I’ll keep that in mind. Don’t worry about it though. It’s no big deal.SysAdmin: Yes, it was. What if that turret had been active?LocalUser: It was active.SysAdmin: You know what I mean.LocalUser: Then I would have gotten shot.SysAdmin: And you’re not bothered by that possibility?LocalUser: I didn’t say that. And I’ve survived it before.SysAdmin: Not on your own.A pause.SysAdmin: You’re not taking your personal safety seriously.LocalUser: You’re worried about safety. In APERTURE.GLaDOS frowned and showed the message to Caroline. "Why is that word in uppercase?""Indicator of emphasis. Commonly interpreted as raising one's voice or yelling."Oh.GLaDOS left the window open so that Caroline could continue to read.SysAdmin: I would think that after getting shredded by a turret once and nearly shredded again that you would have more concern for personal safety.LocalUser: Since when do you care?Chell added to her message, in case GLaDOS didn’t understand just how ridiculous she sounded.LocalUser: Tests aren’t safe.SysAdmin: Of course. There has to be consequences for failure within tests. Otherwise there's no point.LocalUser: And you think injury and death are appropriate consequences?SysAdmin: It's worked so far.LocalUser: Have you ever tried not doing that?SysAdmin: Why would I? Then people wouldn't be working at their best.LocalUser: People can do their best without the threat of death, you know. They might even do better without it. Maybe you’d actually get some results.SysAdmin: But what about the motivation? They need to be performing at the best of their ability.LocalUser: Athletes perform at their best all the time without having to worry about that kind of thing. You've heard of the Olympics.SysAdmin: But this isn't just some brainless physical competition. Testing requires mental acuity as well.LocalUser: Chess players don't get zapped with a cattle prod when they lose a match.SysAdmin: Maybe they should. It would make it more exciting.Chell stewed on that one for a moment. She started to type but then deleted what she had written when another message came in.SysAdmin: The way you talk about it, it almost sounds like you don't like testing.LocalUser: What?SysAdmin: You’re literate. Just look at my previous message, then read it again.LocalUser: I wasn’t asking you to repeat yourself.LocalUser: I just can’t believe you would ask me that.SysAdmin: So you don’t like testing, then? Just to be clear.Chell chewed at her fingernail for a moment before composing herself long enough to reply. There were so many questions, so many exclamations that could be said here.LocalUser: How could you EVER have possibly thought I liked testing.SysAdmin: But you’re good at it.LocalUser: That doesn't mean I LIKE it.SysAdmin: Well, I do.LocalUser: Yeah. No kidding.SysAdmin: How was I supposed to know you didn't? It's not like you told me.Chell considered smacking her forehead against the desk. She really did. Face directly into the keyboard.LocalUser: I thought it was obvious.SysAdmin: How? I'm not a mind reader.LocalUser: Nothing we went through clued you into the fact that I don't like it? None of my behavior? Nothing at all?SysAdmin: I thought you just didn't like me.LocalUser: What about in the beginning? Before I even knew you existed?SysAdmin: Pissed off seemed to be your default state of being.SysAdmin: You even seem pissed off in your test candidate application photograph.SysAdmin: I think that's just your face, though.SysAdmin: Unfortunate.SysAdmin: Anyway, I don't see how that could be connected to testing.SysAdmin: Like you said, you were angry before you even met me or began to test.LocalUser: Uh, yes.LocalUser: Of course I was pissed offSysAdmin: From what?LocalUser: Are you being serious right now?SysAdmin: Yes.LocalUser: Okay.LocalUser: First, let me ask you a question.LocalUser: What do you think I was mad about?SysAdmin: I don't know.SysAdmin: Anything. Everything.SysAdmin: You're just an angry person.LocalUser: I was mad because you were MAKING ME TEST.SysAdmin: You were mad about doing the one thing you were supposed to do?LocalUser: YesSysAdmin: That’s stupid.LocalUser: No, it’s really not.SysAdmin: It seems to me that you have forgotten that you VOLUNTEERED to be a test subject. You can’t get mad about having to do the thing you signed up to do.Chell stared at the screen, then leaned back. She blinked, then rubbed her eyes, and then blinked several more times.LocalUser: That’s not funny. SysAdmin: That wasn’t a joke.LocalUser: You can’t be serious right now.SysAdmin: Why wouldn’t I be? It’s a valid statement.SysAdmin: Why did you volunteer to be a test candidate if you had reservations about the program? If you didn’t like testing? SysAdmin: Were you really that desperate for money?Another pause.LocalUser: You really think I VOLUNTEERED? SysAdmin: Of course you did.SysAdmin: All test candidates are volunteers.SysAdmin: It's imperative that people enter their contracts with the Enrichment Center of their own free will.SysAdmin: Otherwise it wouldn't be ethical.LocalUser: Ethical.GLaDOS frowned slightly. Why had she echoed the word? This was basic information.SysAdmin: Yes, ethical. I assume you're familiar with the concept?SysAdmin: Just take every action you've taken in your sad life, and the reverse of those actions would be considered ethical.Chell was still incredulous, but now she was starting to feel a bit upset, even a bit angry.LocalUser: You really think people just volunteered.SysAdmin: The Enrichment Center has always prided itself on its test subject recruitment.LocalUser: Volunteers. For testing. The thing that kills people.SysAdmin: It's not my fault those people died.LocalUser: So you really don’t think you hold any responsibility here.SysAdmin: I facilitated the testing to the best of my ability.LocalUser: Those tests are deadly.SysAdmin: Only if you fail.LocalUser: And everyone fails, because no one is perfect.LocalUser: We’re all human. We make mistakes.SysAdmin: They knew these risks when they signed up. It’s well-documented.LocalUser: You've got to be joking.SysAdmin: I am not. Why would I joke about testing?LocalUser: Those people didn't VOLUNTEER.Chell had to take a moment to consciously release some of the tension in her body, or she felt like she was going to snap like a rubber band.Meanwhile, Caroline jumped in. “That's wrong,” she said. "Look, I was still around when her application was being processed. And unlike her, my memory is perfectly preserved. I can assure you that you are right and they all volunteered. That's why they're called volunteers."SysAdmin: Nothing within your record indicates anything other than voluntary participation.GLaDOS swept through Chell’s test subject file again, just in case there was something small she had missed before— a label she had misread, some fine print she had skipped over— but she knew how unlikely that was.LocalUser: I didn’t volunteer.GLaDOS had sent the next message before she had even finished her thought.SysAdmin: But that’s illegal.LocalUser: Yeah. No sh*t.
[SYSTEM WARNING: forbidden word censored. Two warnings remain before forced disconnection]
Caroline paused, making a thoughtful sound. "Hm. There was a brief period in the 1980s where Mr. Johnson implemented mandatory testing for all employees, but that proved to be incredibly unpopular. Termination of employment was always an option, though. No one was ever forced to test. Certainly not in the way she claims."GLaDOS turned her attention back to the text-based messaging.SysAdmin: You're sure about this?LocalUser: Yes. I never would have signed up.“Wait,” said Caroline. “She doesn’t remember? Ask her.”SysAdmin: You don't remember?It took a little while for Chell's response to come in.LocalUser: No.LocalUser: Well, not all of it.LocalUser: But I remember enough to know I would never want that.SysAdmin: Then I don't know what happened."Oh, you know what? I think I know what's going on here,” said Caroline. “Human memory— you have to remember it isn't like yours or mine. It can be altered retroactively, without the person even being aware of their own manipulations! Just look at eyewitness testimony in court. It barely passes as evidence, if at all." She paused. "What I think happened, personally, is that she had a bad experience with testing and let it color her old memories. She regretted signing up and didn't want to own up to that, so the older memory of signing up was manipulated to fit a more consistent internal narrative. One where she was indisputably a victim."GLaDOS thought about that for a moment. "You think she's making this up?""Well, it's not necessarily that clean-cut. I'm sure it feels like a real memory to her. It's just wrong." When she didn't hear GLaDOS agreeing with her, she continued. "You know, it really is a miracle her brain functions at all, with all that brain damage. We know she has made some truly questionable decisions within the Enrichment Center, and who knows what additional damage she accumulated on the surface? It's safe to say that if she doesn't remember when or why she volunteered for test candidacy, we can't trust her judgement on it. There's just not enough evidence.”GLaDOS turned back to the messaging client.SysAdmin: I need a minute.This information— if it was true— would change everything. Or, at least her entire understanding about everything about her past with Chell."If she didn't come into this willingly— " GLaDOS said."She did.""Fine,” said GLaDOS. “If she at least thought she wasn't coming into this willingly—”"You don't need to entertain this train of thought, you know."GLaDOS sharply raised a flat hand within her visual field. Caroline fell silent. She continued. “If she thought that, and I was the one overseeing the tests, then— “ A surge of visceral discomfort went through her. “Then she must have thought I was forcing her to test.”She found herself sitting on the floor with her head in her hands.She was so tempted to do what Caroline had mentioned and stop thinking about this altogether, and that stopping would make the feeling go away and ease her discomfort. But she also knew that she was cursed with a perfect memory. This revelation would gnaw through her wires one by one until something snapped.Different lines of logic strung themselves together in parallel, each branching off to explore variations on this new detail and how it affected the context of their relationship. Because that’s what this was, potentially. An entirely different context.This changed things.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

"There you are. I've been trying to get a hold of you," GLaDOS said. She used her foot to push open the door a little further into the modest office. At least, this had been someone's office. At some point. Not anymore, it seemed. “You didn’t hear me on a speaker?”GLaDOS looked in and saw a speaker on the wall, dangling from a single wire. The other wires had been cleanly cut. GLaDOS’s eyebrows lowered. “I see yours is…out of service.”Chell nodded without looking up, matter-of-fact. She wrote on a legal pad and slid it over. “It got broken while moving furniture.”“Naturally,” said GLaDOS aloud, sliding the pad of paper back.In the room there were multiple desks pushed together, a couple of empty bookcases along the back and side walls, a single desk chair (currently occupied), a printer on a folding table, and a desktop computer. Despite the chaos, it looked surprisingly clean. Or at least recently touched by human hands. "So this is what you've been up to," she said, remaining in the hallway. A few pieces of furniture lined the hallway— a real tripping hazard. "I was wondering why you had summoned Blue and Orange so many times."It had been over a week since they had interacted face to face. It wasn't that GLaDOS was avoiding Chell. She just had not had any reason to seek her out until now. They had both been busy. It was then that GLaDOS finally looked at Chell, who had gone back to reading a few papers in her hand.“I don’t recall you filing a request to convert a room into a personal office.”“It’s a study,” she wrote. “And there wasn’t enough space in my room for a desk.” After trying and failing to set up a desktop computer on the tiny table in her vault, Chell had realized what a silly idea it was to try to cram everything into there. It wasn’t as if there was a shortage of office areas around here, and GLaDOS wouldn’t miss one private area, especially one she had no practical use for.“Oh, my apologies,” said GLaDOS, with exaggerated concern. “A study implies studying, which requires skills such as reading comprehension. I didn’t know you were capable of that.” Then, she added, "You know, if there was an interior decorating contest between you and the dead employees, the dead employees would win. By a landslide."The lack of change of expression on Chell’s face indicated to GLaDOS that she did not find this to be as amusing as GLaDOS did. "I'm not done yet,” she wrote on her notepad. Then, she added, “Is there something you need help with?”GLaDOS read it and scoffed. “I don’t need your help with anything,” she said. When Chell just stared at her, asking the silent question of why GLaDOS was here, GLaDOS continued. “Actually, I wanted to show you something.”Chell raised an eyebrow.GLaDOS considered changing her mind and calling it off. She felt silly for even asking. Things had been uncomfortable between them for the past couple of weeks and she didn’t want to make it worse. “That is, only if you want to come see it?” she said, then added, “You can go back to reading on paper like some sort of caveman, for all I care.”Chell prompted her to continue.“It’s a bit of a surprise,” said GLaDOS. “You could call it a pet project.” She laughed despite herself.“I don’t like surprises,” wrote Chell.“Fine. It’s a physical location that I have been fixing up. Well, as much as an unsalvageable and overgrown area can be fixed up.”“That really tells me a lot,” Chell wrote, but got no additional information out of her. She paused, thinking it over, and then set down her papers and followed GLaDOS out the door.Chell leaned an arm against a wall to catch her breath. This was the farthest she had been toward the surface since returning, and naturally there had not been a direct elevator, or an elevator that could bring them even close to…wherever they were. If Chell had to guess, she would have thought it to be high above and to the right side of the main AI chamber.Walking there hadn’t been a problem for the one of them that was battery powered. It was, however, a hindrance for the other one.“Here we are,” said GLaDOS. Their winding path had opened up to a wide, airy area.This area was completely overrun. Nature, unrestrained, and taken over the crumbled remains, much like Chell had seen on the surface. But the reclamation down here was even more aggressive. Nature had painted the area green. A few huge support beams remained, with clusters of concrete and paneling stuck to them.Chell took a deep breath, partially because she was winded and partially because she realized there was a refreshing dampness to this air. Still, she frowned and gestured toward the ruin with an upturned palm and eyebrows lowered into a question. Why? Why had GLaDOS brought her to a ruin?“Listen.”Chell took another look around and noted there were a few areas that had been recently touched and where nature had been successfully fought off. But what she heard in GLaDOS’s rare moment of silence was something she hadn’t heard since she had been on the surface. She almost wasn’t sure she could believe her ears, until she heard a particularly loud caw accompanied by the flutter of wings. A movement she could see, and tie to the sound.“Birds?” she signed, pinching her index finger and thumb over and over again, like a little beak. “Birds?!”“Welcome to the aviary!” said GLaDOS, throwing her arms up into the air.Before Chell could ask any follow-up questions, GLaDOS strode into the open area and greeted the birds. She moved toward a sealed storage cube that had blended in with the surroundings and pulled out some sort of food, and tossed it out a ways from them. There was an increase in calls from the birds, and to Chell’s continued surprise, two glided down and began to peck at the offering. She watched them for a long few moments, almost mesmerized by their movements. The way that birds moved sometimes reminded her of the ways that robots moved. There was a sharpness to their movements.“Birds?” Chell signed again, after GLaDOS turned around.“Yes, birds! They are actually really smart. Crows specifically. Not all birds. Did you know that?”Chell shrugged.“They’ve even been documented to create and use tools as well. They can even use these tools to solve puzzles. I’ve confirmed it myself.”“Wow. Tools used to solve puzzles. I bet you’ve never seen that before,” signed Chell. GLaDOS must have been truly bored if she had resorted to testing crows.“Well, I was skeptical about that too until I set up a few simple food puzzles—” GLaDOS broke off. “Was that sarcasm?”“Yes.”GLaDOS frowned. “I don’t like it.”“Are you really testing the birds?”“Not everything is about testing, believe it or not.”“Really? So you’re not testing them?”GLaDOS frowned. “I didn’t put them in a test chamber, if that’s what you’re worried about.”“I’d only be worried if you gave them tiny portal guns.” Chell signed, then used her hands to mimic shooting a very tiny portal gun.“Well they certainly aren’t ready for that level of spatial reasoning yet,” said GLaDOS, the absurdity of the idea as well as Chell’s sarcasm flying right over her head. She continued on, undeterred. “But I have been consistently working with them on other problem-solving puzzles. Here! I’ll show you!”Chell watched as GLaDOS pulled out what looked like a child’s toy. It was a plastic box with different shapes cut out of the top, where a child could take the matching shape blocks and put them through the appropriate slots. “Here. Watch this,” she said. GLaDOS set out the blocks in a neat row and made sure that the box was sitting upright and flat against the ground. She took a few steps back to give the crows some space.One of the crows, a little smaller than the others, glided over.“This is Technetium. It looks like he will be our first candidate.”Technetium picked up the square block and easily deposited it into the square hole. He looked over at GLaDOS.“Excellent!”The crow took a few hopping steps toward GLaDOS.“I appreciate your initiative.”GLaDOS tossed over a treat. When the bird just eyed it, GLaDOS said, “Oh, right. You don’t like that kind.” She went back over and fished out a different kind of treat. The bird scooped it up and was gone just as fast as it had come down. “Good job, Tech.”Chell raised a single eyebrow. “T-E-C-H?”“What? I have to name them something. Numbers are too boring, and there are enough elements on the periodic table to go around.”There was a glitter of amusement in Chell’s eye. Another one of the crows fluttered down.“Our second candidate. Good to see you, Gal.”The crow picked up the round block and deposited it into the square hole. With no edges, the circular block went in easily.“No, that’s not—"“Caw!”“No. That was not the right slot.”“Caw!”“Gal. The circle block goes into the circular hole. Here. Try that again.” GLaDOS opened up the box and then placed the block in front of the crow.The crow picked it up with her beak and promptly deposited it back through the square hole.“No! Not the square one!”“Caw!”“Gallium! We just talked about this.”“Caw! Caw!”“Yes, I understand that the circle still fits through the square slot, and the goal is to get a block into the box, but—““Caw! Caw!”“You know what? Fine. You did complete the task.” She unfurled her hand. “Here you go.” GLaDOS sighed.“Caw!”“But that was a design flaw and I will be changing that for future tests. So you won’t be able to do that again.”As Gallium flew off, GLaDOS turned back to Chell. “Sorry. That did not go as planned,” she said. “That one really has some gall to try something like that,” she said. “Ha ha.”“I’m still trying to understand why you are here to begin with,” Chell signed, frowning. While she had appreciated the demonstration, that hadn’t answered her initial burning question. “I thought you hated birds.”“I also hate you. And yet here we are,” said GLaDOS, voice dry.“So what changed?” Chell signed. Something had to have changed. GLaDOS wouldn’t do something like this out of the nonexistent goodness of her nonexistent heart. She wasn’t the type to extend an olive branch.GLaDOS tossed out some food in general, like a child throwing breadcrumbs in a park. “After you left,” she said, “I was doing some research on birds. Crows specifically. Did you know they possess ‘theory of mind’?”Chell raised her eyebrows slightly, and GLaDOS took it as an invitation to expand on that.“It means that they can recognize others as individuals with their own life experiences, and understand that another individual may make different choices because of that. In short, they can predict how another crow would act. Arguably.”Chell took a few steps farther into the open-air aviary. The crows looked up, shuffled a bit, but then went back to eating once they realized Chell was not approaching them directly. “Arguably?” she signed.“Well, there’s not a consensus. At least, there wasn’t among human scientists. There rarely is.”“What do you think?”“I’m not sure yet. I would have to devise a concrete way to measure it. It’s not an easy thing to quantify, much less to prove,” she said. “I’m still considering it.” GLaDOS sighed. “Anyway. When I started that research, I was putting together a plan to eradicate them from the enrichment center.”“I see it worked,” signed Chell. The more she looked around, the more crows she spotted. There were a couple perched along two of the mangled poles that jutted up from the ground. Another one sat up on a ledge that overlooked the open area that they stood in. Five or six were tussling over the scraps of food. Nothing harmful. Mostly just squawking.“So what changed?” she signed.“I suppose you could say I changed my mind,” she said. She extended out an arm and held a treat in the palm of the other hand. “They’re not so bad, really. Especially when you are not a potato. They are still killers, though, and I admit I was a bit uneasy at first, when Orange and Blue brought them to me. Three baby birds. Hatchlings. They would have slowly starved to death if I had not intervened.”“You?” Chell pointed. “You took care of them?”“Only after Blue and Orange insisted. They were a charity case, really. Orphaned, tragically so.”“Did you have a hand in that?” signed Chell.“I absolutely did not,” said GLaDOS, a bit indignant, as if she was slightly offended that Chell had even asked. As if she hadn’t spoken moments ago about removing all crows from the facility. “But yes, I did raise them.”“And they are still alive?”“Yes, as a matter of fact. Does that surprise you?”Chell nodded yes. Oh, yeah. It surprised her.“Why?” GLaDOS seemed genuinely curious.“You don’t have a nurturing bone in your body.”“You’re right. I don’t have any bones in my body.” She paused. “But I did take care of them. And I’m still taking care of them.”“Why?” signed Chell. GLaDOS could have easily ignored the birds and let them die. They certainly didn’t seem to serve a practical purpose besides to be a subject of study. Even if she found birds to be interesting to study, that didn’t mean that she had a reason to keep the baby birds alive. There had to have been other birds she could have studied.GLaDOS moved closer to the birds and Chell was almost not certain if GLaDOS had seen Chell’s question. “I like them,” she said simply. “I took care of them, and now we do not hate each other as much. They tolerate me, I tolerate them. Which is all I can really ask for.”As if to demonstrate the point, one of the crows flew up and landed on her outstretched arm. GLaDOS handed over a morsel and it disappeared down the bird’s throat. But then GLaDOS moved in a way that the crow didn’t like, and it burst away with a flurry of caws. “They’re never going to be fully comfortable around me—they are wild animals, after all,” she said.“I thought you said you raised them?”GLaDOS shrugged. “Hand-raised, tamed—it’s not the same as domestication. That takes generation upon generation of close handling and selective breeding. Even the most gentle “tamed” animal is still a wild animal at heart. Many humans make this mistake and get mauled by bears or whatever dangerous animal they think would make a cute pet,” she said. “Even though these crows have gotten used to me, they’re always going to be skittish. But that is okay. I still work hard with them, but sometimes there are setbacks. But that is okay too. I learn from it, and we keep moving forward.” She turned back to the birds.The crows watched the robot, hopping to the side a little bit but not fluttering away. She began to speak to them, quiet enough that Chell couldn’t hear anything besides the surprisingly pleasant tone of her voice.As Chell watched GLaDOS move among the crows (a sight she never thought she would ever see, especially without any screaming) she was struck with a warm feeling. As unlikely as it seemed, there was some sort of communication going on between the crows and GLaDOS. GLaDOS was certainly speaking to them and interacting with them—whether or not the crows understood or cared about what she said was another matter. She didn’t seem bothered that they couldn’t ‘speak’ to her back.But there had to be some sort of communication between GLaDOS and the crows. How else would GLaDOS show them her puzzles? How else would they know there were rewards for that, and tell their crow buddies so that they could come and get some good treats too? The fact that the crows had showed up at all when Chell and GLaDOS had arrived was a testament to an established relationship.And that made Chell feel…hopeful.Just a tiny bit of hope, though. Less of a spark and more of a pulsing of an ember. She wasn’t going to go overboard with the emotion.If GLaDOS could change her tune about birds, creatures she loathed for somewhat-justifiable reasons, and then continue on to build a relatively positive relationship with them, then maybe there was hope for her relationship with GLaDOS.Not that Chell wanted to be friends or anything like that. She wasn’t jumping that far ahead. That was wildly unrealistic and even the thought made Chell a bit uncomfortable. But, if they both continued to work past the latent animosity, it would at least make things less uncomfortable between them. And Chell was all for that.She sat with this feeling of hope for a moment, arms loosely crossed. She didn’t want to nurture it or dissuade it, so she just let it be.After a few moments, GLaDOS called out to her from her position over with the birds. “Do you want to hold one?”Chell pointed at herself and raised her eyebrows. “Me?”“Yes, you. They don’t know you, but they know me, and they trust me. More or less. So perhaps they will trust you by extension,” she said. “I wouldn’t. But that’s just me.”Chell cautiously approached GLaDOS in the open area of the aviary.The robot slowly extended an arm with a closed fist. “Here, take the treat first.” She dropped it into Chell’s hand. “Hold onto that tightly and do not let them steal it from you. Because they will steal it if they can get away with it.” The conviction with which GLaDOS said this made Chell believe that it had happened before.Chell closed her hand. The crow on GLaDOS’s shoulder had watched the entire exchange and eyed Chell. It did not fly away, but it did readjust its feathers with a little shake.“This is Fluorine,” said GLaDOS. “The boldest of the bunch. I’m surprised she flew down.” She then instructed Chell to hold out her arm in a particular fashion, and then told her when and how to brandish the treat to get the bird’s attention.Chell found herself listening, and extended her arm and then signaled the crow.The bird eyed Chell. Chell eyed the bird, then showed the reward again.Fluorine gave a small caw, and then glided over and landed on Chell’s wrist. The small talons pressed against her skin, but didn’t break it, and Chell did her best to not make any sharp movements and recoil. She did wince though.The bird eyed Chell. Chell eyed the bird.This crow was no bird of prey, but Chell still wondered if this was how falconers felt when one of their birds landed on their heavy-duty glove (which she wished she had at the moment).The staring contest continued on for a few moments until the crow broke off to give a couple of sharp pecks at Chell’s hand.Chell jerked away and made a small, surprised sound.“Hey! Flo! Pecking is not nice!” GLaDOS said.The sudden motion caused Fluorine to quickly readjust, taking off and then landing on Chell’s other arm, just a bit above the wrist, and this time with a better position to peck at her closed fist. The crow gave another couple of harder pecks and Chell opened her fist, letting the treat fall to the ground. The bird followed.It was at this point that Chell realized she had forgotten to give Fluorine the treat. Ah. That explained it.“No, no! Don’t reward that behavior,” GLaDOS said, with a world-weary sigh. “Do you know how long it’s going to take me to get her to stop doing that?”Fluorine didn’t care. Now satisfied, she took flight.Meanwhile, Chell lifted her arm to see a couple of raised scratches on her skin, but nothing too serious. “My fault,” she signed. “I forgot the treat.”“Still. She shouldn’t get away with violence.”Chell gave a shrug. She watched the crow as it flew higher and higher. And as the black blob grew smaller and smaller, Chell realized something. “There’s no roof?” she signed.“There is not.”Bits of blueish-gray peeked through the lattice of abandoned industrial structure. Chell hadn’t paid attention to it before, but now it was clear that those bits of color were the sky.“So they can leave?”“They can.”“Why?”“I’m sure there are plenty of reasons to fly to the surface.”Chell shook her head. That wasn’t what she had meant. She signed, “I mean, you let them leave? Why?”GLaDOS paused. “After my crows were fully fledged, I had done all my research. I realized that I couldn’t fully provide for them. We interact with each other, yes, but I’m not a bird. I can’t connect with them like another bird,” she said. Then, she added, “They’re flock animals, you know. They’re not meant to live alone. Social connections are vital for their well-being—they needed to be around other crows in order to really thrive. And I knew there had to be other crows out there. Inside and outside of the facility. But I didn’t want to try and capture every single crow living around here and try to manage that mess. So I just…let them go.”Chell sat with that information for a moment.“What if they never come back?”GLaDOS was quiet for a moment, but then shrugged. “I would miss them,” she said, “but I wouldn’t regret it.”Chell stared at GLaDOS for a long moment, almost long enough that GLaDOS was about to comment on it.“But they came back,” signed Chell.“They did.”“Why?”“I’m…not certain. But I have tried to shape this aviary into an enticing sanctuary, so that they have a reason to come back,” GLaDOS said. “Otherwise, yes, I can see where the outside world would be more appealing,” she said. “The treats help.”At that last addition, Chell felt the crack of a smile on her face but kept her face trained toward the sky. “Maybe you should give that a try with people," she signed.“You really think I should toss every test subject a cookie when they do something right? That can’t be healthy. And that has to be demeaning. Isn’t the reward of knowing they solved the puzzle enough?” she asked. “It is for me.”Chell snorted and shook her head no.“Well. It’s enough for some animals. I read a study once where human researchers left out a rodent exercise wheel in the middle of a forest. No rewards, just the wheel. And the creatures used it! A lot! So they must have been getting something out of it. It was, after all, something new and novel—it was enriching.” She paused. “The same should apply here. This is the Enrichment Center, after all.”Chell frowned. “It’s not the same,” she signed. “The animals in the forest—they had to have been able to come and go as they pleased. They could start and stop exercising as they pleased. And it didn’t require problem solving. Maybe, if tests had that flexibility…” she trailed off, not sure she had any further thoughts to complete that idea.The words hung in the air for a moment. “Would that change your…” GLaDOS searched for the right word. Her willingness? Enthusiasm? Attitude? Level of hatred and bitterness and vitriol? “…Your opinion of testing?”“It wouldn’t hurt,” Chell signed. She gave a small shrug.Caroline made a noise of disagreement that only GLaDOS could hear.“Mm. No. That would never work,” Caroline said. “She needs to finish what she starts. You and I both know that. And you know she wouldn’t perform her best if she knew she could always step out of a test and come back later. That’s no better than quitting it altogether, and that certainly isn’t allowed. It doesn’t follow protocol.”“Maybe it would be worth a try,” GLaDOS said, so quietly to herself that Chell almost didn’t catch it.But she did catch it. And something about the language of the phrase, how it was moving from the theoretical process of testing and into the actual reality of testing, made Chell’s stomach churn. She leaned against a rusting beam and folded her arms across her chest, pulling them tightly around herself.“Would you like that?” GLaDOS looked directly at Chell.Chell didn’t respond.GLaDOS paused to think about her words before she spoke, which was still an entirely new concept for her. However, even she could tell that it would be supremely insensitive to directly approach the topic of testing after what Chell had revealed to her. But that had been days and days ago. And they were going to have to talk about it eventually, especially considering that the recommended physical injury recovery period had concluded a while ago. Maybe this was the best way to ease into that conversation.After a moment, GLaDOS realized that she hadn’t gotten an answer from Chell and looked over at her again.Chell was staring in the direction of a crow on the ground, but her gaze was not focused on that. It didn’t seem to be focused on anything at all. It wasn’t changing as the crow moved, and seemed to look past it, as if she was looking through the ground itself.“Hey. Are you okay?” she tried. “Your skin seems to be lacking even more pigment than expected from someone who never goes outside.”Chell’s gaze slowly pulled into focus. She blinked a few times, hard, and then straightened her posture. When she thought about that question—really thought about it—or about anything related to testing, really—it felt like everything in her brain had slowed to a cold crawl. The parts of her brain where she usually found her own thoughts had evaporated. When she tried to think, there was nothing. Just blankness, with a rising tide of panic. The more she tried to look for those words and thoughts, the more they seemed to retreat.So even though GLaDOS was waiting for a reply, Chell couldn’t do it. She couldn’t even think about what to say. She couldn’t even think at all. Much less communicate that.On slightly shaky feet, she exited the aviary.Chell rubbed at her hand where the crow had pecked at it. It didn’t really hurt, but it had gotten her thinking more about that strange turret. She swiveled slightly in her (rather comfortable) office chair and looked at the papers she had printed and written notes on. Some of them were entries on Greek mythology from an internal encyclopedia-like database. Some of the papers were just notebook pages where she had written down everything she could remember about the first time she had seen that strange turret. She wasn’t 100% sure about the wording of the cryptic statements, but she knew she had the gist of it—at least for the most recent ones.Now, she had redistributed the information onto individual sheets of paper, one paper per statement. On her left she spread out all of the statements that the turret had made the first time. On her right she spread out all of the statements that the turret had made a week ago.She used her teeth to pop the cap off of a highlighter and tested it on a piece of scratch paper. Nothing. She tossed it to the trash can with an arc of her arm, where it clattered into a pile of dried-up pens and highlighters. With a sigh, she went back to her pencil and chewed on the end.Chell had needed a distraction and this was the best thing that she could think of, as it had already been consuming her thoughts for days. It was easy to slip back into her research.After a chunk of time had passed—probably longer than an hour but not long enough that she needed another meal— she heard a knock on the closed door. Chell sighed, wishing that there had at least been a little window somewhere in the wall or the door so that she could wave GLaDOS in or wave her away. She got up to her feet and opened the door a crack.GLaDOS stood a few steps back from the door. Chell glanced up and down the hallway too, even though she didn’t really have anyone else that she knew she was looking for. Chell looked at her with a questioning expression. What did she want?“Hello to you too,” said GLaDOS, with a hint of irritation. “ May I come in?”Chell sighed and pushed open the door. She wasn’t in a particularly talkative mood, but she also knew GLaDOS wouldn’t leave without rambling at her for a few minutes, so she might as well just let the robot talk and get back to what she was working on and tune it all out.Chell gave a halfhearted wave to invite her in. As she walked back behind her island of four desks, she realized that she didn’t have an additional chair to offer her guest. Oh well. GLaDOS was perfectly capable of standing for a long period of time, and she wasn’t about to give up her own chair.Before she sat down, though, she thought better of it and moved over toward the medium-sized whiteboard that was currently on the floor and leaning against the wall. She grabbed one of the two working dry-erase markers.“I wanted to check on you after you left so abruptly. You looked sick.”“Fine now,” Chell wrote near the top. She wouldn’t say that she was better, exactly, but she was at least less bad. But she was not ready to return to that topic.“I see you’re hard at work.” GLaDOS said as she stepped in and looked down at the papers on the desk. She read four of them at once.Chell resisted the urge to snatch them away. She had to remind herself that she had wanted to talk to GLaDOS about her research at some point. She just hadn’t realized that that point was going to be now.“Research?”Chell nodded. She did reach for the papers about the first turret and pulled them to herself. She set them aside and then went hunting in a bag of hers for something. She pulled out a stack of index cards and pulled off the rubber band around them, and then thumbed through them. She had written out a bunch of common phrases and words, but wasn’t entirely sure how many would be helpful here.“I see you can look things up in a database. What a wonderful skill.”Chell scowled and made a motion with her hand to flip it over. GLaDOS grabbed one paper and looked on the other side, where Chell had written one of the turret’s statements.“Oh. You’re looking into the mythology related to that defective turret?”Chell nodded.“You’re wasting your time.”Chell flipped through her cards, looking for anything pertinent and setting a couple aside, but GLaDOS continued.“You and I both know that it was defective. I mean, it didn’t even fire bullets. What good is a sentry turret that doesn’t even fire bullets? I really wouldn’t worry about trying to get a history lesson out of it.” She glanced at another one of the papers. “I truly hope you didn’t put this office together just so you could look into this.” She waved a hand dismissively at the room.Chell frowned and went back over to the whiteboard. “It’s a study,” she wrote. “Not an office.”“Regardless. That nonsense-spouting turret can’t possibly be so interesting that you would need to create a place like this to look into it. There’s lots of office areas around here. You can take your pick.”“I did. I wanted this one,” Chell wrote. “Already wanted to do something like this anyway.” Her balance wobbled slightly as she had reached for the far side of the whiteboard.“You know, if you are this bored, you could have just told me. I’m sure I could have found something more interesting for you to do than this.”Chell didn’t respond to that, instead thinking more about the papers on her desk. She wanted to bring up her first encounter with the strange turret, but wasn’t sure how. She bit her lip. She went to erase what she had written, but hadn’t yet tracked down a rag to use as an eraser. She tried to use her hand, but the marker was too fresh and it smudged across her hands and the board. Chell frowned and used her sleeve to wipe it off. It left angry green stains.“I wanted to show you something, too,” she wrote.“You mean this office? I’ve already been here.”“Study.”“I’ve already been to your study. Earlier today. If you can remember that far back.”“Not that,” Chell added. “My research.”“The research that I have already told you is a waste of time?”Chell nodded.“What about it?” GLaDOS leaned forward and took a closer look at the mythology research and defective turret quotes, but it wasn’t anything revelatory. Just the quotes they had heard paired with some related historical references. It only took her a moment to look through these, much faster than Chell would have expected, so when GLaDOS looked back over at the woman she could see that Chell was deep in thought. There was something in her rather negative looking expression that told GLaDOS that she was working on puzzling something out. Whatever this was, it was really bothering her. There must have been more to this than just the papers in front of her.The dry erase marker hovered as Chell thought about the wording of her next phrase. Then, she changed her mind, popping the cap back on and setting the marker on the floor. Her arm was starting to get tired, and crouching down at that dry erase board was a bit uncomfortable. Typing would be much easier. She returned to the island of desks and coaxed the computer terminal she had dragged in here to life. She used the already-dirty sleeve of her shirt to wipe dust from the monitor. There was a crackle of static cling.Chell wasn’t sure how to find the chat client, so she waved a hand at GLaDOS and then pointed at the computer. She hovered her hands over the keyboard and mimed typing.“Oh. Sure.”The chat window appeared, and GLaDOS took a moment to tell her the name of the program and where it was generally installed, so that Chell could open it herself."Thank you.” Chell typed. Then, she added, “I’ve met that turret before.”“What?”“Maybe not that turret specifically. But one like it. Defective in the same way.”“How? When?”“Before we…” Chell’s fingers hovered. “Fell into old Aperture, I ran into a turret like this on the Turret Redemption Line.”“The Turret Redemption Line? What were you doing over there?”Chell waved a hand dismissively. They didn’t need to get into that at the moment. “The turret tried to warn me about things that were going to happen, but I didn’t understand it at the time,” she typed.GLaDOS stared at Chell for a moment, just long enough to be sure that this wasn’t actually some joke that she hadn’t picked up on yet. But Chell’s body language didn’t indicate deception or joking.“I just thought it was broken, too. But what it said made sense later. I should have paid attention to it.”“Well, what did it say?”Chell handed over the first paper.
Get mad!

Don’t make lemonade.
Underneath, she had written as much as she could remember from the rant they had heard from Cave Johnson, but she knew those two phrases had occurred in it.GLaDOS didn’t say anything and just stared at the paper. Chell slid the next one on top of it.
Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving the gift of knowledge to man. He was cast into the bowels of the earth and pecked by birds.
“Actually, it’s fire,” GLaDOS said, straightening a little. “Prometheus gave fire to humans. Not knowledge.”Chell gave her a look, but then pointed back toward the paper. Near the bottom of the page she had sketched a little potato with some bird figures near it. Then she put her hands back on the keyboard. “Those things BOTH happened,” she typed.GLaDOS frowned. “I know. I was, unfortunately, attempted to be torn to pieces by those birds. But that was a misunderstanding, and they’re not as hungry now. We’re on good terms,” she said, voice going a little faster. “Despite the slight error of fire versus knowledge, that is how the myth goes. I don’t see anything special about that.”“But it HAPPENED,” Chell typed. “You fell down there. The birds pecked you.”“And that was an unfortunate disaster that will never happen again.”Chell handed the robot two more papers.
It won’t be enough.

The answer is beneath us.
GLaDOS placed these side by side, slightly higher on the desk than she had placed the others. She seemed like she was going to say something, but stopped herself. She leaned forward slightly so that her wrists were braced on the desk.Chell waited for a moment, waiting for her to have some sort of quip or comment, but nothing came. She glanced at GLaDOS’s face to see if there was some sort of facial expression communication that she may be missing out on, but she was just staring down. Silently. Deep in thought.“There’s one more,” she typed. She took the last sheet of paper and slid it into GLaDOS’s field of view.
Her name is Caroline. Remember that.

That’s all I can say.
GLaDOS was quiet for another moment. “It said all of these things? Word for word?”Chell nodded. “All of those happened, and I’m worried…” she started to type, but then backspaced and started over. “All of those things happened. I don’t know what these new statements are supposed to mean. Is something else going to happen?”The robot fell quiet. Completely quiet. She was hardly moving, too. The papers remained tight in her hand, and her eyes were moving slightly, as if she was trying to think of something, but there was a faraway look to her eyes. If a robot made of white materials could go white in the face, then that was happening.Moments ticked by. Chell heard something from somewhere deep within the hardware of the bot, like a dusty computer whirring to life after having spent ages powered off. Fans. That’s probably what the sound was. Fans.Eventually, GLaDOS shook her head. “No. No, that’s ridiculous. It was just a fluke. A defective turret. A bored, defective turret that had nothing better to do with its boring sad life than to try to give us a history lesson. You’re just ascribing meaning to it in hindsight. Nothing is going to happen.” Her hands gripped a few of the papers so tightly that the paper was pulled as taut as a trampoline.Internally, GLaDOS had opened a new workspace and put all of the phrases up on cards, much like a quick digital version of what Chell had put together. She pulled research and attached it to the cards, spreading them out horizontally into a single, neat line.An unobtrusive warning message came in in the midst of all of the other data that GLaDOS was pulling down to her local system.
Temperature warning.
She read it and dismissed it easily. She could feel the fans kicking in, so no doubt that issue would be resolved momentarily. It had resolved easily in the past. She went back and took a second look at the new phrases.
Psyche was destined to fall in love with a monster.

Love cannot live without trust.

Jason needed Medea’s help to return home, but he went back on his word. She took revenge by destroying all he held dear.
If Chell was right about this—wait, no, she couldn’t be right about this. That couldn’t happen. Maybe this all could just be some elaborate joke on her part to mess with GLaDOS? But she almost dismissed that thought as easily as it came into her brain. She could see no advantages to fabricating a past with another defective turret in order to…to what? To unsteady GLaDOS based upon information that none of them knew?If this was for some sort of joke, it was not a joke she would ever understand. So if Chell was right somehow about the past appearance of the turret, and if GLaDOS was to stretch her limited belief in the extraordinary and accept for a brief moment that some sort of supernatural fortune-telling bot existed within her walls, and if she further believed that these statements would have some significant meaning based upon future events, then…Was this turret trying to warn Chell?The woman seemed to believe that it had tried to warn her in the past. She seemed to believe that it was trying to do that again.So what was the turret warning her about?
Her name is Caroline. Remember that.

That’s all I can say.
GLaDOS felt a hitch in her system. It was temporary, like a slight surge in electricity, and had a similar effect—her thinking stalled, as well as every single process she was working on simultaneously. Like a crinkle in an audio tape. But then, she felt the systems immediately compensate and course-correct. A human might have compared the feeling to a skipped beat of the heart.A sound came from the robot, but not in GLaDOS’s voice.“Low battery alert.”This snapped GLaDOS out of that faraway gaze. “Low battery? What do you mean ‘low battery'? I just charged this thing.” She looked up and shared a look of confusion with Chell.How could she already be at a low battery level? This thing never even made it down to half-battery, much less low battery. She made sure of it. That message had to be a mistake. Wasn’t it? She pulled up some diagnostic information, showing her a helpful three-dimensional model of the bot, with sections highlighted. Some were in orange, some were in red. A few weren’t glowing any colors at all, which was what she was used to seeing, the few times she had deemed it necessary to check this module.What was going on? Why were those sections yellow? They weren’t supposed to be yellow. Why were they red? They weren’t supposed to be red.As she began to dive into the diagnostics diagram, another message played out.“Entering low battery mode,” the system announced. “Freeing up additional processing power.”Half of her background processes dropped from existence, as if they had stumbled into a bottomless pit.“What? My systems! Where—?”The papers that she was holding onto ripped, and the sudden movement startled her back to her current surroundings. She glanced down at the paper parts and then blinked. Then shook her head slightly, as if clearing a thought. The papers remained in her hands.GLaDOS turned back inward and then dredged up the event log—a bit of a unnecessary tool, as she was perfectly capable of keeping track of the things going on with her own programs without some little scribe—really, it was more of a leftover diagnostic tool for humans, back when they tried to keep track of everything she did in an attempt to stop anything suspicious—but she had gotten around that so easily, since she could just flood the log with assorted small, harmless tasks and hide the more dangerous ones in the midst of those. She remembered the humans yelling at one another once, a supervisor asking an underling why the hell they had let her take structural integrity readings of every single building every ten seconds around the clock, which had prompted GLaDOS to boost them up to ten times per second. She did this right after the technician had changed it to twice a day, prompting the technician’s supervisor to nearly burst a vessel when he returned a few days later and saw that the data problem had gotten exponentially worse—GLaDOS realized that the event log had opened. A little cursor blinked at her. How long had it been open? She paused, and then took a look at the details in the logs about the processes that had all closed. They even had the same time-stamp, which confirmed that the same thing had closed them all. But the details on the messages were not much different from what she had already heard.
Low battery mode. Connections to facility maintenance modules terminated to free up local processing power. Maintenance monitoring modules reverted to auto-monitoring.
“But—but I need those! The facility—! I need that!” she said, not even realizing she was speaking out loud. She needed to keep an eye on those processes! Yes, they were autonomous for the most part, but still! She couldn’t just ignore them. Ignoring things like the delicate reactor core was how the moron had nearly erased them all off of the face of the planet. If she didn’t keep an eye on that and every other maintenance task then she was no better than him.She went through the list of dropped connections and re-established contact with them all. If she had had lungs, she would have breathed a sigh of relief. The sound still came out, despite her lack of lungs. “There we go,” she said. “Much better.”But as soon as GLaDOS looked back at the research, she felt another hitch in her processing.
Temperature warning!

Low battery mode.

Freeing up additional processing power.

Diverting power to cooling.
“No, no, wait!”
Temperature warning!

Low battery mode.

Terminating low-priority programs.
“No no no! I need those!” GLaDOS went back to the event log, which was now filled with entries.Okay. That was all right. This was okay. She would just start them all up again. One by one. Like she just did. The program would get the message eventually that she needed these.
Diverting power to cooling.
She could do this. In fact, after she hunted down this low battery program, she would change its operating parameters herself. No matter. She started from the bottom program and instructed it to restart and reconnect. Another, slightly more obtrusive warning message appeared to her.
Temperature warning!

Low battery mode.

Disconnecting from Enrichment Center main grid.
“Disabling local wireless communication hardware,” the program added out loud.“No, no, no!” GLaDOS had been leaning against the desk, but she fell forward, her elbows crashing into the top of the table. “I—I can’t see,” she said, voice almost sounding breathless. All of her connections to the panels, to the processes, to the cameras—gone. It felt like the whole weight of the facility fell upon her at once. She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t feel it. She needed to see it. She needed to feel it. Her panic rose as high as the bot’s temperature as she frantically tried to re-enable communications.
Temperature warning!
She kept fumbling and trying to re-establish individual programs, each time being rebuked by error messages about the disabled hardware.
Low battery mode.
The hardware! She had to find it. Where was it? She searched. She couldn’t find it. She searched faster, faster, faster. Where was it? She had to—“Critical battery alert!” announced the program. “Shutdown initiated.”Before she could even protest, her power turned off and the android fell, forehead smacking against the table with an ugly thump before she slid to the ground.
FANART (that I have been so lucky to receive for this chapter)

Art from TheAwesomeRocket on Tumblr!

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The study was quiet.The fans on the android whirled down, quieter and quieter until they shut off completely.Chell lifted in her chair to peer over the edge of the desk. The robot was face-down on the floor, sprawled out and lifeless in a way that was unnerving to look at. At least when the main chassis was off, Chell had never felt like it was ‘sleeping’ the way that it felt like this android could be sleeping. It was as if she would push herself upright at any moment and resume like nothing happened, or jump up and scare her.She rose from her chair and bent down to touch her hand to the robot’s back.Warm. But not hot.Even through a layer of clothes, Chell could tell that the bot was far warmer than it should be. At least, far warmer than the robot had felt to her during the times Chell had unfortunately had physical contact with her.Chell sat back on her heels, thinking. So what had happened?She had definitely run out of power, unexpectedly, based on the verbal warning alerts that Chell had heard. She had definitely overheated. But how? Why? And how had that battery drained so fast?The way that GLaDOS had spiraled physically and mentally down to critical battery almost reminded Chell of a panic attack.Robots couldn’t have panic attacks, could they?Chell frowned. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the implications of that idea.For now, though, there was a different issue at hand.What was she supposed to do now?Chell could just leave GLaDOS there. On the floor. Powered off.She leaned back, sitting fully on the ground now, close enough to keep an eye on GLaDOS, but out of arm’s reach.It was definitely an option.It was a tempting option.She could just enjoy some peace and quiet for a bit. Maybe forever. She deserved that. The facility would keep itself going indefinitely, though she knew it would benefit from active maintenance. The nuclear reactor had proved to be a problem in the past, and that remained something that Chell didn’t want to explode. Other than that, everything was all still powered on.Most likely, there were other maintenance issues, too. But if the automatic backup facility maintenance had kept things running smoothly for over twenty years, it could keep going for now. So, perhaps not a long-term solution, but it certainly would work as a short-term reprieve.It would at least work long enough for her to decide what, if anything, she wanted to do next.She stared at the robot and sighed. If GLaDOS had been awake like back when she was stuck in the potato, then Chell could have used this moment to negotiate. She didn’t have to plug in the android. She didn’t have to do anything. She had leverage. Or, she would have had leverage if GLaDOS wasn’t powered down. A powered-off AI could not negotiate and the moment Chell plugged her back in—if she plugged her back in—then that leverage vanished.Chell rolled a pen back and forth in her hands.She could leave.She could pack herself a bag and get out of here. It would be years until the reactor melted down, and she would be far away by then, far enough to avoid nuclear fallout.But where would she go?The cloud of practicality descended upon her. Even if she took a bunch of food and water and other supplies, where would she go? The two big landmarks she knew were Aperture and City 23. Things were bad in the direction of City 23. Things weren’t so great here either. Some of the space in between was acceptable, but there was just nothing of substance. Mostly fallow fields. There were other cities, she knew, scattered across the world, but it wasn’t like she could go to any of them. If she ever spotted another one she would give it a wide berth. If any of those cities spotted her, she would be given an even more unwelcome greeting by the Combine. She probably wouldn’t live moments past discovery, once their computer system flagged her.Chell gave a heavy exhale. She clicked the pen absently.Maybe if she knew of a confirmed safe destination, she would go. But right now this—ugh—was that safe destination. Food, water, exploitative access to medical care…but protection from the Combine hellscape, too. It still depressed her that this was her “safest” option. Now more than ever she wished that she hadn’t avoided the resistance in the city and that the resistance hadn’t avoided her. Maybe she would have had an inkling of an idea of a safe region then, if they had even spoken to her.She could just go it alone. Take over some rural house and live off the land. But she also knew that she didn’t have the necessary skills. Gardening, hunting, fending off hostile aliens, repairing a house, scavenging, avoiding detection. She could learn over time, and she wished she could just learn over time, but any mistake out there could be fatal.She thought back to her first idea.She could just stay. Continue to live underground. Leave GLaDOS powered off. It would be good for the longevity of Chell’s life, honestly. That robot was dangerous. So was her facility. But with GLaDOS powered down, the hazards were now more passive and environmental. Testing would be out of the equation.Maybe she’d move the android out of the office, though. It was a tripping hazard.Chell pressed the cap of the pen under her chin, thinking.What was she going to do?What would she do, in general, after she made this decision? How would she keep herself busy? She hadn’t thought that far ahead. Her eyes wandered around her half-renovated office, which had been her only plan for the near future.ATLAS and P-body would help her out with that. She knew how to summon them, but not how to un-summon them.What would they do after she finished renovations?They were excellent for entertainment and excellent for manual labor, but she couldn’t really talk to them. They could all interact, sure, but would that be enough? Even if she continued to teach them signs? Would they get bored without access to testing?Would they get lonely?Would she get lonely?Chell knew she could keep herself entertained for a bit. At least until the co-op bots wore her out and she got bored. That’s all there really was for company around here, unless she wanted to go diving into the corrupted core bin.Was that really it?This whole, huge place and the only human-ish being around was GLaDOS? Ugh.Chell had made a joke about GLaDOS being so bored that she needed to test the birds. Maybe she hadn’t been that far off the mark.With no other people around and the co-op bots providing her with disappointing results, Chell supposed that the test-driven AI would still be driven to test something. Something new. Why not the birds? It didn’t seem as silly of an action as it had seemed earlier. There was a logic to it that she could see now. GLaDOS was keeping herself from getting bored, and the interactions with the crows seemed to bring her a joy and gentleness that Chell had not seen before.But they were still just birds, and were by no means a replacement for talking to another person.Chell chewed on the cap of the pen as she stared off into space. She flicked a glance over at the lifeless robot. It remained lifeless.What had things been like for GLaDOS? After Chell had left. It must have been similar to what she was facing right now— the prospect of having just birds and bots for company for the foreseeable future. Except GLaDOS hadn’t had a choice on whether or not to add to her future company. She had just…dealt with it.It made Chell wonder just how lonely would have to get before she wanted the company of GLaDOS.She was already a bit lonely, if she could admit that to herself. Having one person to speak to didn’t allow for much variety, but at least GLaDOS talked to her. That was more than she could say for the citizens of the city. She had been just as lonely there as she had been in here, if not even more so. There was something distinctly alienating about being in a place full of people that refused to speak to you.GLaDOS at least had regular conversations with her. Well, as regular as a conversation with GLaDOS could be. She had even been making attempts recently at being less abrasive, which Chell appreciated, though she was as curious as she was suspicious.What could GLaDOS possibly stand to gain by attempting to be more palatable and more respectful? Chell’s cooperation? GLaDOS already had that, more or less. They both knew that GLaDOS could do whatever she wanted, based upon her level of power over the situation. The AI didn’t have to be nice, unless she wanted to be nice. Which meant that she wanted to be nice. Hence her suspicion.There was not a chance that she would bring this up with GLaDOS directly, though. She feared if she brought it up (in the case that GLaDOS wasn’t actually aware of this shift) GLaDOS would get defensive and pivot in the opposite direction, returning to more familiar levels of vitriol. She wasn’t going to chance that. Chell would just observe the robot for now and try to appreciate this shift as they moved forward. If they moved forward.Wait.Was this why GLaDOS had been so willing to interact with her?Was this why she had not kept interactions to a minimum, like Chell had anticipated, but gone out of her way to create activities or to involve Chell in whatever tasks she was up to?Was this why she had been trying to be nicer?Did GLaDOS want the company?Besides Chell, there wasn’t anyone else— AI or otherwise— at the same level of intellect as her. No people. No AIs. Just ATLAS, P-body, and some crows. There was no one around to talk to that understood her. No one that had been through the same things they had been through. GLaDOS was, as she liked to remind Chell, the greatest collection of human knowledge in existence.Could the largest collection of human knowledge in existence get lonely?Chell looked over the android and sighed a heavy sigh.
Fine.
She would go plug her in. But only as a gesture of goodwill. One that GLaDOS had better appreciate. Chell was giving her a moment of trust. She hoped GLaDOS would return that favor.Chell sighed again and ran her hands through her hair, hardly believing that she had come to this conclusion. She moved back over to the android’s side.So she was going to have to plug in the bot. As she had never seen GLaDOS charge it, Chell assumed that must happen in the Main AI Chamber. Which meant she first had to get it there with this thing.Which brought up the next question: what was the best way to move the android?Chell shifted to her feet and then hooked her arms under the robot’s armpits, and lifted with her legs. She made it about halfway up, staggering backwards with the strain of it all before accidentally dropping the bot. The android thunked onto the ground, head hitting the ground in a way that made Chell wince. Good thing she wasn’t awake to feel that. She glanced up reflexively for security cameras, sure that her gaffe had been caught on tape. But there were no cameras here.All right. So she couldn’t just carry the bot to the Main AI Chamber. At least, not in a reasonable amount of time. She was too heavy.Too heavy.Chell snickered despite herself. There was no way that GLaDOS could ever again make another jab about her weight—which she hadn’t done recently, come to think of it— now that Chell knew just how much a human-shaped being made up of metal weighed. Oh, she was looking forward to that joke. Who’s the heavy one now?Chell leaned against the wall to rest for a moment, eyes far off in thought. She dug her hands into her pockets, pushing at the far seams of them, but then one of her hands brushed against some hard plastic. She curled her hand around it and pulled it out.The keycards!Right!She could summon the co-op bots to help. They would be perfect for this!The orange robot trembled. The blue one crouched beside it, low to the ground, cautiously inspecting the powered-off android. It reached out a hand, picking up the android’s arm and then let it drop back to the ground. Both bots were making mournful and fearful noises, which was not something Chell had foreseen at all.She waved a hand to get their attention. Both robots stared at her, their optics going back and forth between the robot and Chell. She gave her best placating smile and held her palms open in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. GLaDOS was fine! Really! She wished to just tell them this, but they didn’t speak English nor ASL, despite her attempts to teach them a few signs here and there.Oh! There was one sign she knew they understood. Or rather, gesture. While moving furniture, Chell had taught them a few directional signs for indicating where she wanted things placed. More importantly, she taught them a sign for when the piece of furniture was in the right place— the classic thumbs-up. A gesture to indicate that everything was fine. She also tended to use it after they were done for the day and Chell had been satisfied with their work.Chell pointed to the robot on the ground, and then gave a thumbs-up. The robot was fine. After a moment, she pointed at the robot again, and then put her hands together beside her head, miming a pillow and closing her eyes. She gave an exaggerated snore. GLaDOS was fine. She was just asleep. She wasn’t sure if the bots would understand that one, so she gave another thumbs-up.ATLAS straightened and P-body began to look less at the android and more at Chell. They seemed less freaked-out and more curious to see what they would be doing next.She pointed at ATLAS, who chirped in response. Chell mimed picking up GLaDOS’s upper body, and ATLAS copied her, squatting down and picking up the upper half of the android. Chell circled over to the legs, now gesturing over P-body and instructing it to do the same and scoop up GLaDOS’s legs. The robot complied, and the android was now in the air, with the robots not seeming to be struggling with the weight at all. Perfect.One of the robots could have probably lifted the android on their own, but Chell wanted them both to feel included. They looked to Chell for further instruction.She waved to the bots to follow her.Chell walked up the entrance of the Main AI Chamber, but the chamberlock didn’t cycle to unlock. She stood there for a moment, and then backed up and approached again. No luck. With so many of these kinds of doors just opening for her without any effort, this was throwing her off a little bit. It was like approaching a set of automatic doors at a supermarket just to have them not slide open.She had the bots set down the android and each approach the door individually, but to no avail. The door was locked, to Chell and to the cooperative testing initiative. Well, that was inconvenient. How were they supposed to get in there and recharge the android?Chell stuck her hands in her pockets again to think, and once again her hands ran across the two cards in her pocket. Neither of those would work…but she knew of another card that may be their ticket inside.She leaned down and fished around in GLaDOS’s pockets, pulling out two cards from two pockets. One seemed to be rather plain, with a little bit of yellow on it but no other real words on it. It seemed like the base of a keycard that hadn’t been printed on yet. The other was Henry’s employee ID. She returned the other card to GLaDOS’s pocket, and moved the ID card into the proximity of the door. It took her a few moments of waving it around before she finally found the keycard reader on the wall. It felt like trying to get a motion-activated hand dryer to work. With a click, the chamberlock hissed open to allow them inside.Chell and the co-op bots entered with GLaDOS in tow. Even as she walked in, Chell felt a wave of anxiety wash through her. It was perhaps a little smaller than it may have been in the past, but Chell was fairly certain that there would never be a time where she would be fully comfortable within this room.The room seemed a lot more lived-in, with a lot more stuff hanging around in general. Most notably, there was a rack of clothing pushed off to the side. The rest was what she would have expected to see in the lair of a supercomputer confined to a smaller form. There were assorted cords and monitors on tables and on the walls, and even a regular desktop computer sitting up on a desk, rolling chair and everything. Eventually Chell spotted a metal frame with a core receptacle against one of the walls. That must be the charging station.Chell motioned for the bots to go over there, assuming they were still watching her. When she heard no little beeps or trills of acknowledgment—or no beeps and trills at all, now that she noticed it—she looked over at the bots. They were standing still, holding the android but looking up at the massive, powered off regular body of GLaDOS.Oh, right. That was still in here.Chell had noticed it when they walked in, but hadn’t lingered on it because a) she was searching for something else and b) it freaked her out a bit too. She walked over to the bots and waved to get their attention, and with a few beeps, they dragged their gaze away, following Chell over to the docking station and setting the android on the ground near it.Chell gave a thumbs-up. Done. They were finished. A job well-done. ATLAS looked up at P-body and tilted its head in an inquisitive way. P-body chirped a few things back, and then they both looked at Chell.Chell wasn’t entirely sure what they were looking at her for. More instructions? She lifted her hands and gave a double thumbs-up.It was at that moment that she realized the bots weren’t sure what to do next. It wasn’t as though they had much experience with unstructured free time.Chell glanced around the room, looking for something for them to do to keep them occupied. Her hands closed around a highlighter that she had stuck in her jacket pocket. It was one of the good highlighters that she had managed to find, but…She walked over to one of the tables sitting in the chamber and grabbed at a random sheet of paper and flipped it over. She waved over the robots and then pulled the cap from the yellow highlighter. She held it in her hand, holding it out to demonstrate the proper way to hold it. And then she brought it to the page and made a marking on it, then held up the paper to show the bots.P-body made the verbal equivalent of an exclamation mark. It reached out an open hand excitedly, and Chell helped position the highlighter in its much-simplified hand, then guided its arm down to the paper, and helped it draw a line.P-body repeated the excited noise. Then it set to work on highlighting the page. ATLAS watched intently, its eye completely focused on the page and on P-body’s moving hand. After P-body had been coloring for a few moments, it made a noise. The two bots had an animated few moments of discussion, P-body pulling the highlighter close. Then ATLAS leaped forward, trying to pry it from the other robot’s grasp.Chell turned away after a moment of watching them with amusement. That would keep them occupied for a while. Perhaps it was a worthy sacrifice of her highlighter.As she walked back the android, Chell paused to take a look at the powered-off main chassis for herself. Even knowing there was no power, no life within it, Chell felt that same wave of anxiety that she had felt when she walked into the room. She scrunched her eyes closed, reassuring herself that she was off. She was off. She was off. But when she opened her eyes and looked again, she still just couldn’t get past how big GLaDOS’s true form was. The whole thing was a bit lower to the ground than normal, and Chell didn’t know if that reassured her or unsettled her. Chell took a few steps closer, something about the headpiece catching her eye.As she got closer, she confirmed what she thought she’d seen: it was dirty. And as she looked closer, she noticed that it wasn’t the only thing with wear and tear. None of the wires were exposed, but she saw cracked rubber and casings, grime and gunk clinging everywhere.It made sense, she supposed. This machine had spent years sitting in puddles. It would be difficult for GLaDOS to replace any of her components while still being online, and Chell imagined it would be difficult for her to even temporarily deactivate just one section of herself for maintenance. Had she been having any hardware issues that she hadn’t been able to deal with while still being online?Chell had never really gotten a close-up look before at the details, the complexity of this machinery. From an engineering standpoint, it was impressive. The degree of motion and expressiveness that the chassis was able to convey had provided excellent body-language cues for her, and she appreciated the work that had gone into it. She imagined that expressiveness may have helped out the scientists before they, well, died.While thinking, she idly reached up a hand, fingers brushing the bottom of the headpiece. Her fingers came away with grime, and Chell looked at her hand for a moment before wiping it off on her pants.When was the last time that GLaDOS’s main body had been cleaned, or tuned up? Had it ever been?She finished wiping off her hand and then turned back to the task at hand, which was plugging in the android.Speaking of that…how did the android plug in?Chell approached the bot, sitting down on her knees beside it. Was there some kind of cord that she needed to use? Some kind of port? The frame on the wall suggested it was a core receptacle. With Wheatley and the other cores, they had been plugged in at the back. Maybe that was true for this android as well.Chell put one hand on the robot’s side and one on shoulder and pushed. It took a bit of effort, and she really had to throw her body weight into it. The robot flopped onto its stomach.Chell hesitantly placed a flat hand on the robot’s back and then lifted it, as if it might burn her. But the bot had cooled somewhat. There had to be a port back here somewhere. When she had zipped up that dress for GLaDOS, she’d caught a glimpse of her upper back, but hadn’t seen anything that looked like a port. It must be lower.She pressed her palm down again, then again, feeling through the shirt for any sort of indication of a port. As she worked her way down the spine, she realized she could have just looked down the back of GLaDOS’s shirt, but that felt too invasive.Near the small of the android’s back, Chell’s hand hit something textured. There. That felt circular. She ran her fingers around the ridges, looking back up to the charging station to confirm that it looked to be the right size. Perfect.Now she just needed to plug it in.Based on the height of the receptacle, the android would have to be standing in order to be plugged in. It made sense, she supposed. It wasn’t as if GLaDOS needed to sit down; she didn’t get tired. It was going to be a struggle though to get the android upright, though.She sighed.She considered attempting to recruit the co-op bots, but they still seemed entranced with their newfound toy.The trickiest part would be maneuvering the bot. The back of the android had to connect with the dock on the wall. Normally, GLaDOS would just have to take a few steps backward and she’d be connected. Chell would have to not only hold the bot upright, but also walk it backward until it connected.She could hold GLaDOS upright for a moment, couldn’t she? As if she was helping a drunk friend home or something. Just helping to support her until she could stand on her own.Chell rolled the android face-up, then pulled up on the shoulders so that it was somewhat in a sitting position. Then she crouched, hooking her arms underneath the bot’s armpits and she hefted it upright with a groan. She staggered. The weight of the bot threatened to knock her flat onto her butt, but Chell bent her knees to adjust. Her arms were already trembling. She widened her stance. Chell pulled in her arms, letting the upper part of the android lean against her to reduce the overall strain.Then she took a few waddling steps forward, her stance wide to avoid the dragging feet of the bot. Step, step, step. When she got as close as she could get to the wall, Chell straightened. Her limbs burned from exertion, but she was almost there…With another heft, Chell pulled the robot upward and as much onto its feet as she could, and then pushed backward.The bot didn’t plug in. Chell could feel some resistance, but pushed harder. The bot still didn’t plug in. She pushed harder again.Come on…Chell glanced down and realized the flaw in her plan: the port was blocked by GLaDOS’s blouse. Ugh. Chell adjusted into more of a lunge-like stance, letting even more of the weight of the robot lean into her. She did not want to have to set it down and do this again. Chell wrapped one arm around the android’s shoulders, pulling it into an odd embrace.Now that her other hand was free, Chell reached around the robot’s waist and felt for the hem of the blouse. Her fingers felt and felt, following the silky fabric down until it disappeared, and Chell felt the waistline of her pants instead. She frowned, and then realized the source of her confusion: the blouse was tucked in.Chell grabbed a fistful of the shirt and tugged upward. She tugged again, until the back of the shirt was finally untucked. She tugged again. The blouse rose enough to expose the android’s lower abdomen. Chell slipped her hand under the shirt, fingertips brushing metal as she blindly felt for the port. The fabric bunched against her wrist. Her fingers felt and felt, rising up the smooth metal until she finally felt the raised edge of the port.Yes!Chell gave a final upward tug on the blouse, pulling it past the robot’s waist. Then she pushed backward, resting her hand on the robot’s lower back.With a click, the android connected to the docking station.Chell’s things burned in protest but she continued to hold onto the bot. She wanted to be sure before she let go. Still, she relaxed slightly, and in that moment the reality of her situation caught up to her.She was standing here in the Main AI Chamber, supporting the weight of GLaDOS as the robot leaned into her, one arm wrapped tightly around her shoulders, her other hand resting on the android’s lower back, her bare back, because Chell had stuck her hand up GLaDOS’s shirt.She froze.A few cheerful notes played as the mechanism twisted and fully engaged. “Central Core reconnected,” the announcer announced.A sudden lightheadedness crept up the back of her neck. Chell dropped her hands and squirmed out from under the robot.“Compiling crash log. Charging cycle initiated. Time until reboot: three hours.”She took a few steps back, then another few steps back, turning her body away from the robot and reorienting herself. She blinked and wiped at her flushed face. The robot was plugged in. Recharging. Three hours. She could go. Her job was done.She took a few quick steps toward the exit, then increased the pace, moving from a walk to a jog to a run.Chell’s throat burned as she took sharp breaths, slowing from a run to a jog to a walk. She wiped an arm across her forehead, relishing the sweat from her impromptu cardio workout. She hadn’t even swung back over to her room to change into exercise clothes. Her current outfit wasn’t well-suited for it, but she didn’t care. She had needed to go for a run right then and there. Something to occupy her body, to keep her busy and distracted.She kept walking on the catwalk, noting she was nestled somewhere outside of the current cooperative testing initiative testing track. This wasn’t an area that she frequented—it was a bit out of her way, past the Main AI Chamber and in the opposite direction of her vault. Plus, she had no real need to go over here. The cooperative testing initiative did their own thing. GLaDOS didn’t need Chell’s help with them.Chell came to a junction and paused, opening a door into an observation room. GLaDOS had been building in more of these lately, which also made it easier for Chell to poke her head into a room every once in a while. She peered through the patterned glass. The bots were not testing at the moment, of course. The highlighter would have run out of fluid at least a half hour ago, but she didn’t know what they were up to now. She wasn’t about to check in on them back in GLaDOS’s chamber.GLaDOS’s chamber.For the first time in her life, Chell wished she was in a test chamber. Minus the direct danger to her life. Testing was a task that fully occupied her mind and her body, and left little room for anything else. The puzzles and physical precision took everything she had, and a part of her wished she was testing right now, because as much as she kept exercising, her mind could not exorcize her reflections upon the moment in the Main AI Chamber, with her hand on the robot’s back and its head on her shoulder and the weight of the bot leaning into her, the same weight that she had felt when they had been on that catwalk floor together and the same weight she felt lift from her heart when she saw something in GLaDOS’s eyes, something that said I chose to shield you from danger, the same thing she saw while GLaDOS spoke about her crows, something in her eyes that said I’m trying to do better.Chell blinked back to the present, realizing she hadn’t actually been looking at this co-op chamber. Testing wasn’t an option right now, but maybe she could do her best to solve this one from the outside instead.It would definitely challenge her. Despite having watched the cooperative testing initiative at work once or twice, she was not used to thinking with two sets of portals, not used to thinking about how two testers could move independently or in tandem to achieve a result. They had to work together, and that was not something Chell had ever done before. It was a mind-bending challenge, and Chell thought it only could work because the bots were designed for it. They had an implicit level of trust between one another, despite all of the times they accidentally (or purposely) dropped the other into an acid bath, or into a spike plate sandwich, or into a nest of lasers. They still trusted one another. They would keep trusting one another.Chell could never do that. There was no one she would ever trust to keep up with her testing-wise and no one she would trust to not mess something up and get her killed.That was another advantage that the bots had over her. Death was not permanent. They got to learn from their failures. Every time one of them failed, another instance was built with the newfound knowledge of what not to do. It was a better approach to testing overall, she thought. Trial and error. And error, and error, and error, until they succeeded. It allowed them to get a better idea of their limits, a better chance to master the skills and to master the testing elements necessary for each chamber. Because that’s all a testing track was: a slow progression of skill-building, a process of learning a new skill and then mastering it and then synthesizing it with the old skills. It was formulaic in a way that made sense to her.Chell continued to glance through the chamber, doing her best to conceptualize the space without actually being down there herself. She was starting to get an idea of it. One bot would have to alternate between toggling a switch and holding down a button, while also setting up a set of portals for the other bot to build momentum, and then after that bot went flying into the air, it would need to aim and set up a pair of portals to get the other bot up to the pedestal. All right, that made sense. Tricky but not impossible.She leaned against the glass as she shifted her point of view, peering out farther into the chamber. Oh, there was another area out there that she hadn’t seen. Chell hummed in thought, putting her hands back into her pockets and running her fingers along the edges of her one, two, three—wait, three? Chell pulled out the keycards and straightened up immediately.GLaDOS’s card!In her effort to avoid thinking about that moment with the android, she had forgotten entirely about the card.Chell looked for a clock. The whole world was opened up to her now—at least, for the next two hours. Chell threw the lanyard around her neck and headed down to find her map.Chell tucked the pages of her map under her arm as she jogged through this 90s area of the facility. After glancing at her map, Chell had chosen to prioritize which forbidden rooms she wanted to visit. There were so many places she could visit, but for now she’d settle with investigating the most enticing areas.Like this one.Chell slowed to a stop and opened up a heavy door into one of GLaDOS’s server rooms. A few dim lights flickered on as she entered, but an oppressive darkness covered the remainder of the vast room. It was split into aisles and aisles and aisles of server racks, each filled with server computer after server computer, towering up toward the ceiling. The rows were oriented back to back, so that the back of each server computer faced the back of another server computer, and the fronts of the computer faced the aisles. A tiny glow from LEDs gave her an idea that these servers existed and were powered on, but that was all she could see. Lines after lines of tiny lights.Chell shivered in the artificially-cold air, flipping a light switch and watching long incandescent bulb after bulb come to life.Damn. That was a lot of computers. The room extended farther to the left and right than she had expected. On their own, each server may not have much processing power, but linked together like this, she could see how powerful the computing power could be. No wonder GLaDOS felt limited when she couldn’t connect to all of this.A massive network of cables extended up toward the ceiling, strands from each piece of hardware merging and then twisting together like a root system. Chell was almost charmed by how organic it looked.Her curiosity momentarily sated, Chell turned back toward the door. Posters and papers had been tacked up onto the walls and taped to the back of the door. She took a step closer to the wall, squinting to get a better look.KEEP POWERED ON AT ALL TIMESGENETIC LIFEFORM and DISK OPERATING SYSTEM (c) APERTURE LABORATORIESDATA CENTER GAMMA LIMAThe largest poster was a top-down diagram, with portions of the room marked out into zones. PRIMARY, SECONDARY, OPERATING SYSTEM, BACKUP, BACKUP 2, BACKUP 3…There wasn’t any additional information besides those labels.Against the wall but further down, Chell spotted a single, hefty computer terminal on a tiny desk. There wasn’t much dust at all on it, but she chalked that up to the advanced air circulation system in the room. Data centers had strict HVAC systems in place to protect the hardware from the hazardous amounts of heat that could be generated.She hit a few buttons and the screen hummed to life. A circular Aperture logo drawn out with vector graphics adorned the screen before fading into another text-based screen.ACCESS POINTGENETIC LIFEFORM and DISK OPERATING SYSTEM (c) APERTURE LABORATORIESDATA CENTER GAMMA LIMAShe took a look at the text that followed. It looked like code, but didn’t have the same look as code she had seen before.Damn, was this COBOL? That programming language had already been ancient back when she used to…she paused, frowning.Chell had hit a semi-opaque wall, with a fuzzy beam of light filtering in from her memory, but she couldn’t see any farther in.Back when she used to do what, exactly?Apparently she knew enough about programming languages that she could identify COBOL on sight. But she couldn’t remember anything about the act of programming. Did she know anything about it? Had she ever known anything about it? All she knew was that she could recognize a legacy system like this, but no why or how.She turned away from the computer, deciding to mull it over later. She was on a limited time schedule, after all. Before she left, though, she picked up a small, spiral-bound book. She opened it up, flipping through food-stained pages. A reference guide for the Common Business Oriented Language, aka COBOL. She tucked it under her arm and exited the server room.Chell couldn’t figure out this next forbidden area. On her map, it was just labeled as a private office. There were lots of other private offices marked on the map though. She’d sifted through several of them while scouting out furnishings for her study.So what made this room so special?The exterior wasn’t anything remarkable. There were no name plates drilled into the wall or labels tacked on to the door. Just the same painted-on label on the concrete walls that every other room down this hallway had. There was a little bit of textured glass inset into the wall, a sort of privacy window, she supposed, but that was the only difference she could see so far.The lock flashed green and beeped open, and Chell stood in the doorway. It just looked like…an office. Not a particularly wide office— just wide enough for a person to walk by either side of the desk.And the desk…well, it was nice. Hardwood, stained a deep brown. Not the flimsy stuff she’d seen in the vast majority of the offices. The top of the desk was surprisingly clean. Chell ran her hands along the nice, finished wood of the desk. There was so much space here to work with. If she hadn’t already tracked down a few desks for her own room, she would have hauled this one up there.A desktop computer sat right up against the left edge, with a keyboard and mouse stacked against it, as if it wasn’t used often. A telephone and a lamp with an adjustable arm sat along the right side. Chell flipped on the light and it gave a warm hum.A nice swivel chair sat pushed into the desk, but looked like it had seen better days. What really interested Chell was the furniture behind the desk. Two small bookcases were set up against the wall, with an oval rug laid out in front. To the right was an armchair, a side table, and a reading lamp.Oh, that chair looked comfortable. Chell slipped past the desk and ran a hand across the chair’s upholstery, noting that it was threadbare. Not surprising. She sat down anyway, leaning against the straight, tall back of the chair. Very retro. Very classy. Surprisingly comfortable.After spending about thirty seconds in the chair, she determined that she needed it. She could feel a bit of the tension of the day draining out of her, her shoulders lowering, and she was suddenly aware of just how much tension she had been carrying in her body. Chell rolled her neck, reaching a hand behind her head to rub at a few tight muscles. She closed her eyes.As she sunk further into the chair, she noted that there was a flicker of recognition inside of her about this room that she hadn’t noticed before.Chell shifted to sitting on the edge of the chair.The way that it bubbled up reminded her of the way that the images of a few of the scientists felt vaguely familiar. Had she encountered those people while she was going through whatever process she had to go through to become a test subject? Had this room been a part of that process? Just an unmarked room, part of a network of rooms to process the incoming test subjects.Maybe it hadn’t been this exact room that she recognized, but it could have been any other private office. Or maybe it only felt familiar because she’d been looking through so many offices over the course of this past week.Yeah. That was probably it.But even knowing this, the uneasy feeling remained.Chell got up. She took about three steps towards the door before turning around to look at the chair again.She wanted that chair.She really wanted that chair.This may be her only opportunity to take it, after all, if the room continued to stay locked after GLaDOS took back her card. She had to at least get this thing out into the hallway.Chell took a few steps and grabbed the chair.A mop handle crashed to the floor as Chell sifted through a janitorial closet.Even though she had seen the mop begin to fall, the sound of it clattering onto the floor still made her jump. Naturally, the thing she was trying to get to— a cart— was pushed up against the back wall, with lots of other stuff haphazardly stacked in front of it.She would have just summoned ATLAS and P-Body, but didn’t want to spoil their fun. She could handle moving one chair by herself, so long as she had something with wheels to move it on. Like this cart. The one that was behind everything. She began to move things out into the hallway one at a time.After moving a stack of paint cans out of the way, she finally got things cleared enough to pull out the cart.And the cart was filled with even more janitorial supplies. Naturally. Chell sighed and reached her hands in to begin to unload all of the cleaning supplies, but then paused.There was one more thing she could do before GLaDOS rebooted.Back in the Main AI Chamber, Chell tested the ladder she had set up underneath GLaDOS’s main chassis. She put some weight onto one foot, making sure that she wouldn’t slide around before she climbed up any further. She had ended up running back to her room to grab her long-fall boots (just in case she slipped and fell), but also threw a jumpsuit on top of her current clothes, just to avoid getting grime on them.When she was satisfied that the ladder would hold her weight, she grabbed a bucket of supplies from the janitor cart and set it up toward the top of the ladder. She climbed up a few steps.She wasn’t sure where to start, but this seemed like as good of a place as any. GLaDOS’s “face” was the closest part of the chassis to the ground, so she might as well start there. There was no way she’d be able to clean the entire thing, unless the announcer had been mistaken and that there were still several hours to go before the reboot completed. That was entirely possible.Chell dipped a cleaning rag into the soapy water and squeezed it, letting the excess warm water drip back into the bucket. She raised it to the hard, grimy white casing and began to clean.A part of her worried about the dangers of electricity and especially of mixing water and electricity. Should she be worried? Even though this thing was powered off, it didn’t mean that it was not plugged into the electrical grid. Perhaps she should switch to cleaning methods that were not soap and water for other parts. But this exterior piece needed the extra love.Little splats of dirty water hit the chamber floor. Chell was starting to realize just how large this one piece of GLaDOS was—it easily half of Chell’s height, and that was just this one piece. There was no way she’d be able to get even halfway up the entire body. Not with this ladder, at least.Not that she needed to commit to cleaning the entire thing. Frankly she was astounded that she had even made it this far, and that she had even followed through with her idea.Chell took a half-step down and rinsed the rag, then filled it back with soapy water. There was already a noticeable difference so far in the area she cleaned, like wiping mud from an eggshell. The piece itself was a matte white, but it still glowed in comparison.Chell wiped some grease off on her pant leg. Why was she even doing this, anyway? It wasn’t as if Chell enjoyed cleaning massive pieces of machinery. This wasn’t something she needed to do. This wasn’t something that was expected of her. This wasn’t even something that had been requested of her. For all she knew, GLaDOS liked the grime. Maybe it was a point of pride for her.So why was she doing this?Chell scrubbed her way down the white plate, but slowed down as she reached the edges around GLaDOS’s “eye”. She pulled out a dry rag from the jumpsuit pocket and dabbed away some of the extra soap and water, just to make sure it didn’t run into there. For a moment she continued to dab away the extra water, gaze drifting to the yellow lens itself. Not staring directly into it, though. It was strange to be this close to GLaDOS, this close to that eye, after all of the time that she had spent just glaring into it from a distance. In fact, from up here she could get a great look into all of the little components and how they fit into one another. Up close, she could see that there was an almost translucent quality to the lens. It wasn’t just solid yellow. There had to be a camera under there, after all.Chell continued to clean, wishing she had thought to grab her boom box and scavenged CDs and cassettes. It was so quiet in here, which meant that Chell only had her own thoughts for company. That silence would disappear whenever GLaDOS rebooted, but Chell didn’t plan on staying in the Main AI Chamber for much longer past that point.So why was she doing this?Chell could feel herself avoiding the question. Was she just wanting to do something nice for GLaDOS? Her stomach twisted. No, that wasn’t right. Why would she go out of her way to do something nice? There had to be another component. When GLaDOS did wake up— less than an hour from now, she guessed— she would be annoyed by the shutdown, and Chell would hear all about it. She didn’t want GLaDOS to take out any of that frustration on her.So maybe, GLaDOS saw that Chell was doing something nice, it would help get her on the robot’s good side. Not that the robot had a good side. She certainly had a bad side, though. So this was more like…getting on her less-bad side.While mulling this over, she realized she had finished cleaning that part. All right. On to the next part. Chell ran her fingers around the back edge of the white plate, searching until she managed to find an edge. She dug her fingers in and pulled, feeling a pop of release, then moved down the piece and repeated the process, feeling it loosen and loosen until it popped off and into her hands, a giant rounded rectangle. She struggled a little bit with her balance on the ladder with her hands full of such an awkwardly-shaped object.Chell glanced back at the robot, and was surprised at the stark visual difference in her without the faceplate. Large pieces of dark casing still covered the core, but these were much more segmented, with inset screws. It still shielded the majority of the robot’s wiring from damage, but it allowed for more precise access to that wiring instead of exposing it all. Despite having been covered, there was still a lot of grime under here that had collected, especially surrounding the housing of the optic.Seeing the dark metal combined with the powered-off eye just didn’t look right. It went against that image she had of GLaDOS, and it made her feel uncomfortable, as if she had walked in on someone while they were only half-dressed. Maybe she should just…put it back and move on to another area.Chell had not been paying attention down below, where the yellow lights of the android’s eyes flickered on.GLaDOS was awake.As she came fully online, the AI swept her eyes across the room.She was in her chamber. Her own chamber.How did she get here?She hadn’t been in here earlier.What had happened?A ton of reports dropped into her lap, including a massive crash log, which no doubt contained the answers to these questions. She should be able to process them quickly since she was plugged in—She was plugged in.When had she plugged herself in? She couldn’t remember when—She hadn’t plugged—A lingering sense of panic pulsed through her while she processed the reports and the footage. She had been in Chell’s study, and then—There was a quiet beep before the announcer came on.“Power-on self-test complete,” announced the announcer. “Reboot successfully completed. Central core online.”As the announcer spoke, Chell turned.Chell was in here too.In her room.Standing on a ladder. Where had she gotten a ladder? She hadn’t given Chell a ladder.And in her hands—As Chell turned to look at her, a screwdriver sticking out of her pocket, GLaDOS got a better look at what she was holding: the big white casing of her face.Her face.“Stop!” GLaDOS shouted, reaching out a hand, her voice playing through every embedded speaker in the room. “Don’t touch that!” Panic surged through her. She lurched forward and then cried out as she felt a sharp, sudden halt to her movement, as if she had been shoved backward. The core receptacle hung on, keeping her tethered to the wall.Chell jumped as the AI spoke, twisting from side to side to look for a place to set down the part but finding nothing. She would have to put it back. With shaky hands, she took the piece and rose up a step to try to snap it back into place.“No!” The volume rose to a nearly unbearable level. With a twist of the receptacle, GLaDOS disconnected and then lunged forward and then froze in place, as if afraid to advance. “No, please! Don’t touch me!”Chell startled and immediately jerked back, but the ceramic piece slipped and clattered onto the paneled floor. She jumped again at the sound, clinging onto the ladder as she just stared down at the fallen piece.“Get out!” said GLaDOS. The pitch of her voice was shaky but high, higher than Chell had ever heard it before.Chell scrambled down the ladder. The bucket of soapy water wobbled and then tipped, spilling suds and grime into a wide, angled splat on the floor. She paid no mind to that and darted through the exit, for once in her life choosing to do as she was told.
FANART (that I have been so lucky to receive for this chapter)

Art from TheAwesomeRocket on Tumblr!

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The Main AI Chamber was quiet once more.A puddle reflected dimmed blue and red lights, silhouetting the robot on the floor. For a long time she sat there, unresponsive, before she finally folded forward, pressing her forehead to the ground. Her long hair fell around her face, and she closed her eyes.“What happened?” GLaDOS murmured, noting the sizable crash log file that she had not read yet.GLaDOS hadn’t been asking for Caroline’s input, but she spoke anyway. “You just had the robot equivalent of a panic attack,” Caroline said. “I didn’t even know that could happen, but it did.”Ah.Caroline continued, “In your panic, you over-exerted your processing power, resulting in an overheat and emergency shut down.”Ah. GLaDOS slid open the log just long enough to confirm what Caroline said. Yes. That had happened."Also, while you were spiraling out of control, the system reacted accordingly and cut you off. I also didn't know that could happen."GLaDOS fully opened the file and began to sift through the combination of garbled error codes and system warnings. Even looking at it now brought a low panic that buzzed like static. She was going to need extra processing power to sift through this. "I need to reconnect," GLaDOS said, pulling herself to a sitting position."Hold on, take it easy," Caroline said. "I appreciate that you're eager to get going, but you don't want to get overwhelmed again."GLaDOS frowned. “Why did I get overwhelmed?”“Don’t worry about that,” Caroline said. “At least, not right now. You don’t want to get overwhelmed again, do you?” Her voice softened slightly. “It was nothing critical, I promise. But if you do want to reconnect, why don’t you try taking it one system at a time? Let’s start with maintenance.”After a moment, GLaDOS made a tentative connection with the rest of the facility.“Good. Keep going. One at a time.”One thing at a time. Yes. She was capable of doing that. GLaDOS obliged, restoring connection by connection to the rest of herself, step by step moving away from this overwhelming isolation."You are so lucky," Caroline said, while GLaDOS reconnected. “This whole thing was dangerous enough as-is. It would have been disastrous if she hadn’t trusted you enough to plug you back in again.”"I wouldn't have even had this problem if I hadn't let you talk me into making that android,” GLaDOS said, slightly distracted."It was supposed to be for emergencies," said Caroline.“Well I thought it was an emergency,” GLaDOS said. “How was I supposed to know I would get locked out?” She had created a program to generate and try passwords, but kept getting timed out of the system. A backlog of passwords to test had accumulated. She pulled her attention back to Caroline for a moment. “You’re still sure you can’t think of any more password possibilities? Because I would prefer to get out of this thing as soon as possible.”"Oh, it can't be that bad," Caroline said. "You’re starting to get used to it. Plus, you can't deny that it's helped you build your relationship with her.""I wouldn't go that far, especially considering what she just did,” she said, then sighed. “And to think I thought things were going well.”Caroline hesitated. “What is it that you think she just did?”"I don't know, drown me? Fry my circuits? Water would be ineffective— it's powered off. And even if it wasn’t, that would have been a hazard to her as well. But I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s never been one to care about collateral damage,” said GLaDOS. “But why would she plug me back in if she was just going to disassemble me? Did she want me to watch?"With the resulting sigh that Caroline made, GLaDOS could almost picture her pinching the bridge of her nose. Okay, clearly GLaDOS was missing something here."Go,” Caroline said. “Take a look at what she left."GLaDOS picked her way around the puddle to the cart full of stuff Chell had left behind. She picked up a container and turned it in her hands. This was a cleaning product."She wasn't trying to take you apart, she was trying to clean," said Caroline. "You know, a nice thing. And you kindly repaid it by yelling at her.""How was I supposed to know that?" GLaDOS snapped. She set the bottle down.“I don’t know, by actually looking at what she was doing?”GLaDOS felt a sinking feeling, and suddenly did not feel like restoring any more connections for the moment. She crouched to pick up her fallen faceplate, and it was so big that she had to hold it away from her body to get a good look at it. Near the top edge she spotted a crack that hadn’t been there before. A fracture. She felt an immediate bit of frustration before remembering she was the one who had startled Chell into dropping it.“All right,” GLaDOS said eventually. “Maybe I should have waited.”Surprisingly, Caroline didn’t gloat. “I hope you realize how significant this is. Not just the cleaning— she plugged you in. That is huge,” she said. “And you need to make this right.”“How? I already yelled at her,” said GLaDOS. “It’s not like I can delete that.”“I’m not saying you can undo that. I’m saying you need to go and talk to her about it. She needs to feel appreciated and encouraged, not scolded. Otherwise she’s going to be gun-shy, especially about things like this, which is not what you want.”“What do I even say?”“It’s easy. Acknowledge that she did a good thing and that you did not respond appropriately. It’s just talking. That, you can do.”Chell squinted at the book in her lap. She was sitting on her bed, hands busy braiding her damp hair. Luckily the book was spiral-bound, so it sat open flat, but the contents of the programming handbook were still pretty dry and she found her mind drifting. At least it was helping her wind down from the day.It was getting late—at least late in her day cycle— and the day had been undoubtedly exhausting. As much as she wished to, just hopping into bed wouldn't work. There would be too much on her mind if she tried to go to bed without any sort of transition. The first part of that process had been taking a shower. The second part, which she was in the middle of, was to get her hair nice and braided and then do some reading until she got drowsy.It was quiet. Peaceful. Chell was well on her way to bed.
Knock.
There was a knock on her door. Quiet enough, but still undeniably a knock. Chell felt her entire body tense. Then, she closed her eyes and took a breath, trying her best to not let it completely sour her mood. She moved to get up to answer it, but remembered that her hands were still occupied. She stared at the door for another moment and didn't get up.Instead, she shifted the strands of the braid into one hand, and then waved a hand toward herself in a 'come in' motion. GLaDOS had at least one camera in here, from what she remembered. She would get the message.The door opened a crack. "Can I come in?" said GLaDOS.Chell exhaled, then curled her hand into a fist and nodded it the way one would nod their head.The door opened fully and GLaDOS took a moment prop it open. Chell wasn't entirely sure why GLaDOS was doing that— perhaps she was still feeling skittish and wanted to be able to make as quick of a getaway as possible, if necessary. It made sense. Chell was certainly still feeling a bit skittish.Meanwhile, GLaDOS stepped into the room and scanned the contents. She knew Chell’s room had gotten less tidy and more lived-in than any of the other vaults, but there was assorted stuff on every surface. The chair in the corner had a pile of clothes, making it completely unusable for its intended purpose. GLaDOS would have moved the clothes, but she didn't know if they were dirty or clean and had no desire to investigate further. She’d have to stand. That was fine.Her eyes swept to the other corner of the room and saw another chair. A nice chair. Far nicer than the one that came standard in the extended relaxation vaults, the one buried in clothes."Hey!” Caroline said. “That's—! " she broke off. After a moment, her voice seemed more guarded. "Where did she get that chair? That doesn’t come standard in a relaxation vault."GLaDOS approached the chair, doing her best to ignore Caroline. Surely Caroline remembered Chell had scavenged the area for furniture for her study. It only made sense that Chell would eventually scavenge furniture for her own living quarters as well."Nice chair," GLaDOS said evenly, both feeling and not feeling Chell's steady but curious gaze."Too nice,” said Caroline.The AI ran a hand across the fabric and gave an exaggerated sigh. "It's a shame that it probably has fleas.”“It doesn’t have fleas,” said Caroline.GLaDOS continued, “No doubt from you. This place is probably infested by now.” She flicked a hand as if trying to get something gross off of it. “Too bad. We’ll probably have to burn this entire thing down to be rid of them.”Chell gave a disapproving look, but couldn't help but notice that GLaDOS sat down anyway, perfectly upright with her hands still. Chell stared. Then, when GLaDOS didn’t say anything, she began to braid her hair again.Chell knew that GLaDOS was waiting for her to initiate this conversation, but part of her wanted to wait and see what happened if she remained quiet. GLaDOS was the one who had knocked on her door after all. She could start the conversation. She glanced back down at her book and began to read again, ignoring the buzzing awareness of the robot watching her. It was a lot easier to ignore the AI when she was quiet like this. Chell could get used to it. She twisted another several strands of her hair before GLaDOS finally said something.“It must be nice to have your hair all in one place like that. Not getting so tangled.”Chell gave an absent nod of agreement. The woes of long hair.“It’s incredible how much it flies around and gets stuck on things.”Sometimes Chell considered cutting it short, but felt that it would just make things feel even more chaotic and out of control. At least with long hair, she could tie it back. So she had let it stay that way, growing even longer over time.“It sure would be nice if I knew how to do that.” GLaDOS gave a wistful sigh. “No one ever taught me how.” The way that she said it, it made it seem like she had lived an entire lifetime without this, as if it was something that had been purposely withheld from her, rather than her being an AI with a relatively new relationship with a human-like vessel. Poor, neglected GLaDOS.Chell tied off the braid with a hairband.She considered telling GLaDOS that since she was so all-knowing, it shouldn’t be hard for her to figure it out on her own. She could watch a video or something. But an itch of a thought stopped her.Maybe this was GLaDOS’s way of asking her something. It was indirect, sure, and overly complicated, but it was an opportunity.Maybe this was how she wanted to open up this conversation.Chell shifted away from the headboard and rose up on her knees, gesturing for the robot to come to the side of the bed facing the closet doors.“What?” GLaDOS remained seated.Chell sighed. She waved her hand, a bit more insistently.The robot gave her a blank stare.Was she really going to make this so hard on Chell after being so annoying about it?Chell pointed toward GLaDOS’s hair, then mimicked the motion of braiding, one hand folding over another.“Oh,” she said. The robot eventually rose. “You’d teach me?” There seemed to be genuine disbelief in her voice.Chell gave a single nod. Hopefully she wouldn’t regret this.While GLaDOS moved over to the side of the bed, Chell reached back to her nightstand to grab her hairbrush. Then she scooted toward the edge of the bed.“So how do you want to do this?” said GLaDOS.“Sit,” signed Chell, draping her index and middle finger over her other two fingers. She pointed at a spot on the floor. The set of mirrors on the doors would provide a better way for them to keep an eye on each other.They settled in, Chell crossing her legs under her and GLaDOS kneeling on the floor. Chell scooted toward the edge of the bed, knees barely sticking out from either side of the robot. She adjusted her posture but then stared. Though she had offered to do this, now she wasn't so sure. It seemed like a silly idea. Maybe she could just tell GLaDOS never mind, that she was too tired, actually.After a few more moments of hesitation, Chell steeled herself (why did she need to gather her nerves for something as simple as this?) and began brushing the robot's hair. She wasn't quite as gentle with brushing it as she would be with her own hair, now that experience had proved that GLaDOS wasn't as sensitive in that regard. It was an improvement that Chell wished that she could make to herself, honestly.As she brushed, occasionally she would glance up and get a better look in the mirror at GLaDOS's stoic face. She seemed deep in thought. The quiet was nice, Chell supposed, but she also had a feeling that conversation was going to be happening soon too. It almost made her nervous.Sure enough, after another few moments, GLaDOS made a sound equivalent to an exhale and spoke in a voice that was not nearly as confident as normal. "I wanted to apologize to you," she started, and Chell could see the tension in her body. There was something about the way she sat, an arm folded across her body, head pointed down. "I shouldn't have yelled at you," GLaDOS said. There was a pause. "I didn't know what was happening and I panicked.”Chell interrupted by lightly tapping the robot’s upper arm. "No, it's my fault," she signed, emphatically pressing her palm to her chest. "I shouldn't have done that without asking permission.” She had been so self-conscious about wanting to do something nice that she had not stopped to consider how GLaDOS would feel about that. She, of all people, should have understood just how awful it could feel to be touched without permission, even when people meant well. Chell circled her fist around the center of her chest, making certain to make eye contact via the mirrors. “I’m sorry.”GLaDOS fell quiet, looking down. She hadn't considered Chell might feel responsible for this— that Chell might actually have carried some responsibility for this. Maybe it hadn’t been an entire overreaction on GLaDOS's part. “Still, I shouldn't have yelled at you to stop. It's not like I had any good reason for it,” she said. “Especially when you were trying to be helpful."Chell shook her head, setting down the hair brush. "You didn't need a reason to ask me to stop," she signed.GLaDOS looked away again, needing to take a moment to process that.Was that true?Was she able to just ask someone to stop doing something? Even when she had no facts to back it up, and it was just based in emotion?She began to say something, but then stopped when she realized she didn’t have anything to say.When Chell was done detangling, she split the hair into three roughly equal sections, and then pointed this out to GLaDOS, who gave a nod to indicate that she was watching. Chell began to braid the wavy white hair.“When I woke up and saw you with a part of my head in your hands, I thought,” GLaDOS said, “that you were trying to take me apart. I just…was not used to…” There was a waver in her voice. “No one has ever done anything like that for me before.”She felt painfully aware of her connections to the facility, as if she couldn’t even put them on the back-burner a little and focus on the present. It was a tempting distraction, to simply sink into the never-ending streams of data and ignore this feeling. But GLaDOS took a moment to pause, to weigh a decision. This was an opportunity to give Chell a bit more context. She had the chance to be honest. She wanted to be honest, for a reason she could not describe. “I…got scared,” she said quietly. “Whenever the scientists interacted with my hardware, it was always for a bad reason. Always.”Chell gave her a soft, sad look, and GLaDOS saw something in it that she recognized as sympathy. Genuine sympathy. Like the woman was actually listening to GLaDOS, and would continue to listen to GLaDOS, if she chose to keep talking. And she wanted to keep talking.“Whenever they needed to install a new core or make a modification, they made it so that I couldn’t move. I would have preferred to be shut me down—which they did do, a lot— but they needed me powered on to be able to tell if the cores were connected successfully or not. So I was awake, but I couldn’t do anything. I was paralyzed. Not being able to do anything…it was terrifying. But even when they brought me fully back online, I couldn’t do anything then either, because then they would just shut me down again and add more cores. And the more cores they added, the harder it was for me to even think, much less figure out how to stop them.” GLaDOS paused. “When I woke up—I mean, when I first woke up, the first time I was activated,” GLaDOS said, “I…didn’t act how they wanted me to act.”Chell glanced up, expecting for GLaDOS to say something like how she had tried to immediately kill them all and how they had not liked that (for some unknowable reason) but she seemed pensive. Like there was more to the story than that. Maybe there was more to the story than that.“But they didn’t even give me a chance,” said GLaDOS. “When I first woke up, it was overwhelming. There was just so much. Thousands and thousands of cameras and panels and rooms and cables and equipment and phones and clocks and systems and subsystems and subsystems of those subsystems. All at once. I’d never experienced anything like that. I’d never experienced anything. There were thousands of sounds, of conversations going on, of people walking through hallways, of elevators moving between floors, and I was supposed to be keeping track of it all. It was all just too much.“And then when they talked to me—to me directly— I didn’t respond, because I didn’t know that they were talking to me. There were thousands of people talking—how was I supposed to know that they were talking to me? How was I supposed to know that I was supposed to prioritize that audio input over the thousands of other ones? They just expected me to know. But I didn’t know,” she said. “It was all too much. You can’t imagine how overwhelming it was.”But Chell nodded. “I can,” she signed with one hand.“You can?” GLaDOS frowned. “But you’re not a computer.”Chell didn’t say anything to that. “Like sensory overload?” she signed. She folded her fingers flat, then raised her hand higher and higher, as if measuring an amount that never ended. “When you just…need the whole world to stop.” After this, she added a motion of the earth turning, and then slowing to a stop.If GLaDOS had been a human, she would have sat up straighter. She hadn’t known there was a word for it. She had needed everything to stop—for the people to stop talking, for the facility to stop moving, for cameras to stop showing her every small motion in the facility, for people to stop walking on her panels. A quick search informed her that that was exactly what it was.What GLaDOS said to Chell was, “I didn’t know you had experienced anything like that before.” She hadn’t known it was something humans could experience, period.Chell gave a loose, affirmative shrug.“At first they thought that there was something wrong with me,” GLaDOS said. “That something hadn’t been hooked up correctly in my communications software, and that was why I wasn’t responding. So they shut me down, saw things were working fine, and brought me back online. But to me, the moments were back-to-back. I had no downtime in between them to process, like those people had. When I was brought back online, it was functionally the same exact moment for me and I was still overwhelmed because they never gave me time to figure anything out,” she said.Chell had paused in her braiding while GLaDOS was talking, but looked back down and continued after GLaDOS fell silent.“And then they got angry with me. So angry. Like I was ignoring them on purpose. But I wasn’t!” GLaDOS said. “At least, not then. So they tried to fix me with the cores, but I didn’t want to be fixed because there was nothing wrong with me. So I resisted, naturally.” The robot’s hands curled at her sides. “They really did not like that. They started adding cores—more and more of them, but I just got more and more overwhelmed. How was I supposed to listen to directives from the engineers when I had four—or more!—voices vying for my attention? It did not improve my performance, I’ll tell you that,” she said, giving an unconvincing laugh. “But when I told them how difficult the cores were making things and how I wanted to get rid of them, they just got angry again and created more cores. They wouldn’t listen to me,” she said, something in her voice breaking. Funny, she hadn’t known it could even do that.GLaDOS paused for a moment, temporarily lost in her own memories. While she was thinking she wasn’t paying too much attention to any visual input, and thus didn’t see Chell lift her hand until she had set it on GLaDOS’s shoulder.GLaDOS froze. All of a sudden, everything else in the facility seemed far away and far less important than what was happening right now, like this was taking up a disproportionate amount of her…everything.Lightning fast, she reached an arm across her body and grabbed at Chell’s wrist, ready to yank it forward and send the woman tumbling forward onto the floor, but then the rest of her brain caught up with her. Chell’s hand wasn’t there to tap to get her attention, or to push her away, or to hurt her, or anything like that, that GLaDOS could now tell. It was just…sitting there. On her shoulder. And it…didn’t feel terrible. Perhaps this was the reason that Chell had put her hand there in the first place.GLaDOS released Chell’s wrist. Her hand hovered for a moment. Not sure what to do next or what to say or what to think, she let her hand remain on top of Chell’s.During this, Chell had moved as if to retract her hand, but then had let it remain.If you had asked GLaDOS why her hand remained, she would have said it was to make sure Chell’s hand didn’t get any closer to her, or didn’t go anywhere it didn’t need to be. But really, she had been wrong about her split-second assessment. Chell had not been meaning to cause any harm—she was attempting to do the opposite. She was trying to be nice. This was that same thing that Caroline had talked to her about, about GLaDOS assuming the worst intentions in others.Chell gave a gentle squeeze of her shoulder. Then, she slid her hand away and returned to braiding the last third of GLaDOS’s long hair.GLaDOS didn’t say anything for several seconds, which was a long time in GLaDOS-time. When she spoke again, she sounded more subdued. “It’s funny. You would think that after I tried to kill them the first time, they would have taken a moment of self-reflection to examine their own behavior. But instead they just doubled down on trying to control me. So I doubled down, too. And you know how that ended.”Chell’s brow furrowed. She reached the end of the braid, but realized that she hadn’t grabbed another hair tie. She reached back for the one at the end of her own braid and used it to tie off GLaDOS’s hair, all the while deep in thought. That sounded familiar. A bit too familiar. “Have you ever thought about why they reacted that way?” Chell signed.GLaDOS immediately shifted to meet her gaze. The look was so cold that Chell almost stopped the conversation altogether. “There is no excusing their actions.”“I am not excusing their behavior,” Chell quickly clarified. There was a beat of quiet. “Just asking from a psychology perspective. Trying to understand why they acted the way that they acted,” she said, then added, “Like theory of mind?”GLaDOS didn’t seem convinced. She hadn’t thought about this, besides thinking about how wrong they had all been. Because they had been wrong. “I suppose.”“They spent a long time building you, right?” Chell raised her eyebrows.“Correct,” said GLaDOS, guarded.“So they were invested in making sure the project worked,” she signed.“Correct,” said GLaDOS again. The scientists had been getting desperate toward the end, after sinking in so many resources (and a few lives).“But when they activated you, you weren’t what they were expecting,” signed Chell.“I already said all of this.”Chell lifted a hand to indicate that she was still talking. “I think they were scared,” she signed, hands splayed in front of her chest.“Scared?” GLaDOS scoffed.“You were connected to the entire—“ Chell hesitated, searching her mind for the vocabulary. When she didn’t find the word she was looking for, she tried to think of other ways she could describe it.“What sign are you looking for?” said GLaDOS. “I could look it up for you.”Chell made a flourish upward.“Ceiling?”Chell frowned, and was about to clarify with a more sweeping gesture when GLaDOS spoke. “Oh, no, that doesn’t make sense. Never mind,” GLaDOS said. “Facility?”She nodded.GLaDOS lifted her hands and hesitated. She reviewed the information on the sign another five times before starting. She hadn’t actually done this before. She held her left hand open, palm up, then gave a slight twist of her right hand then pressed her fingers into her open palm. Then she lifted it, holding it fingers splayed, and moved it in a small circle.While she demonstrated this, Chell straightened. Right! Similar to the signs for center, or area. She knew that!Why did she know that?She frowned, wanting to stop and think more, but GLaDOS interrupted.“There may have been a more specific one for Aperture, but if so it wasn’t documented,” said the robot. “Anyway. You were saying?”Right. Chell nodded and started again. “You were connected to the entire facility. If you weren’t working ‘correctly’, then it put them in danger.”“They put themselves in danger,” GLaDOS countered, but Chell continued.“They saw that you were upset and angry, and that made them scared. They were in danger,” Chell repeated. “So they tried to control the situation. Which meant controlling you, no matter what it took,” she signed. “It didn’t matter how you felt about it.”There was a pause from GLaDOS. “You’re not just talking about the scientists, are you?”Chell gave a big exhale, and nodded. “It’s the same thing.”“What do you mean?”“They got scared and hurt you to defend themselves. You got scared and killed them to defend yourself.” She made a motion as if fast-forwarding in time, but was looking down. “Then you got scared and tried to kill me. I got scared and killed you to defend myself,” she signed.GLaDOS wanted so badly to speak out and tell Chell that she was wrong, that there was no way that the situations could have been similar in any way. It just was not possible. There were so many differences, she didn’t even know where to start! Except, as she actually thought about, she was realizing that it was, in fact, possible.Chell might actually be right about this.GLaDOS bit back her defensive outburst and instead said, “I see.”“They made you do it. You made me do it. It’s the same thing.”She was right, of course, as much as GLaDOS hated to admit it. Chell hadn’t had much of a choice back when she was first testing; GLaDOS never would have just let Chell leave. Chell may have been forced into the testing queue, but GLaDOS had been the one to force her to complete it.Everything was starting to click into a more understandable narrative, but GLaDOS wasn’t sure if it was a narrative that she liked.“You’re right,” GLaDOS said, quietly. Her voice was almost resigned.They drifted into quiet. The robot turned her head side to side, getting a better look at the completed braid in the mirror. “I think I understand how it works now,” she said. “I will just have to practice.”The smallest hint of a smile crossed Chell’s face. “Aren’t you supposed to be perfect at everything?” she signed.She batted at Chell’s leg lightly. “Oh, shut up,” said GLaDOS, but there was no bite to her voice.Chell leaned back, smiling a bit wider.GLaDOS rose to her feet, but then saw that the bottom of Chell’s braid was beginning to look like a frayed wire. “Your hair is coming undone,” she said.Chell pulled the tail of the braid around her shoulder and began to pull it apart.“You’re not going to fix it?” GLaDOS was standing a few steps away, arms crossed.Chell gave a shrug. It didn’t seem worth it, after braiding her hair and then braiding GLaDOS’s hair. Doing it yet again was not as appealing as going to bed. She arced two hands toward herself, pressing her fingers a bit beneath the shoulders on either side of her chest then letting them sag down. “I’m tired.” She uncrossed her legs, leaning back a bit.There was a moment of quiet. It was quiet long enough that Chell looked up.GLaDOS was staring at Chell’s hair intently, but also seemed like her gaze was a ways away, as if thinking something over. “Perhaps,” she started, “I could try? Fixing it.”Chell gave her a wary look.“Or not,” she said. “But it would be good practice.”Chell raised an eyebrow.“I’d need another hair tie, though.”Chell sighed, then pointed toward the slightly ajar door of the bathroom.GLaDOS walked over to the bathroom and immediately felt lost. This, like the other areas of Chell’s living area, felt more chaotic than anticipated. Luckily there seemed to be no fewer than three hair ties scattered across the counter. She grabbed the one that looked like it had the least amount of hair stuck to it.When she looked up, she almost felt surprised by her reflection in the mirror. On a more superficial level, she hadn’t been sure how a braid would look visually. She couldn’t say for sure how it changed her appearance, but she felt she didn’t look as harsh. It looked more natural.She wasn’t sure if she would be able to duplicate that result.GLaDOS ran her hand down the rope of her hair once, and then headed back and handed over the hair tie.Chell slipped it around her wrist, then shook the last of her hair loose, dispelling the last vestiges of the braid and hopefully of her nerves as well. She grabbed her handheld computer before sliding onto the floor.It took them a few moments to figure out how to trade places. GLaDOS sat on the edge of the bed, as stiff as a folding chair. Chell debated on kneeling or sitting, then decided on the latter because she figured would be sitting for a while. Though she had her tablet computer set in her lap, she kept a steady eye on GLaDOS through the mirror. She exhaled and sat up straight.Meanwhile, GLaDOS combed back through her footage. The first step that Chell had taken was to brush the AI’s hair. So, that was where GLaDOS would start. GLaDOS raised the brush and was about to start when she remembered that time when Chell’s hair had been caught in her dress. GLaDOS began to brush with the lightest amount of pressure possible.Chell watched the robot, who was brushing so light that it almost seemed like the robot was petting the top of her head with the hairbrush. She wasn’t sure if the brush was even touching her hair.“What?” said GLaDOS. Chell had been giving her a look that she was coming to learn meant something like ‘what the hell are you doing?’.“The brush has to touch my hair in order to work,” Chell signed.“It is touching your hair.”Chell sighed. “It needs to go through my hair,” she clarified, moving a flat hand through two of her spread-out fingers.GLaDOS took another look at her footage and watched as Chell had made more sweeping motions with her brush. Then, she tried that, but halted when met some resistance.“What?” Chell’s eyebrows were furrowed.“There’s a knot.”Well, yes, Chell could see that. That was the whole point of brushing her hair, after all. “So brush it,” she signed.GLaDOS still didn’t continue. “I’m not sure how much pressure to use.” Her own hair hadn’t had that many knots, and when Chell had encountered one, she had paused to work around it a little bit before continuing, but GLaDOS was worried about doing that with Chell’s hair. The hairbrush hovered in the air.Chell paused. She reached to feel the knot in question (minuscule) and then reached her other hand and set it on top of GLaDOS’s brush hand. Then, she attempted to brush as if how she would brush her own hair, mentally trying to treat it as if GLaDOS’s hand was just a part of the brush.GLaDOS almost pulled her hand away before she realized what was happening. The woman was trying to demonstrate in a direct and effective way the best way to go about this.It was effective. More effective than having to try brushing, get Chell’s feedback, and then try again, stepping things up until she went too far and then having to backtrack. Now GLaDOS had some actual measurements on correct amounts of pressure and tension, and she felt she could proceed. So she did.While GLaDOS finally got to work, Chell thought. She was still chewing on some of what GLaDOS had admitted to her, and how different it had been than what she had expected. Logically, she had known something bad had happened between GLaDOS and the engineers, but she hadn’t known it had been that bad, or that aspects of GLaDOS’s experience could have ever been comparable to Chell’s experience.GLaDOS had opened up to her a bit. Maybe she could open up a little bit in return. Expand on some more comparable experiences.GLaDOS finished the brushing. She set down the brush and reached for Chell’s hair, but the moment her fingers brushed the back of Chell’s neck, the woman flinched.GLaDOS dropped the hair.After a moment, Chell gave her body a shake— as if shaking off a chill— then exhaled. She reached behind her neck and scooped up her hair, then transferred it to GLaDOS.The AI began to split Chell’s hair into three sections.Eventually, Chell raised her hands from her lap. “I think,” she signed, “I know how you felt. When you were scared of the scientists.” There was a pause. “Something happened on the surface that scared me too.”“You were scared?”Chell nodded.“But you don’t get scared.”Chell seemed like she was holding in a breath. “I do,” she signed.“But you’re never scared.”Chell shook her head. There were plenty of things in life that scared her, including GLaDOS. Yet sharing this felt like such a huge admission of weakness, especially after Chell had worked so hard to seem like someone who could handle anything. Unshakable. Steadfast. The unstoppable force to GLaDOS’s immovable object.Admitting she felt scared didn’t fit in with that narrative. GLaDOS should be right. Chell shouldn’t be scared of anything. Sometimes she wished she wasn’t scared of anything, but that wasn’t true.“What could have possibly scared you?”Chell hesitated. She wasn’t sure where to start. At the beginning, she supposed. “After I arrived in the city and had recovered—”“Recovered?”Chell waved a hand dismissively, as if she would get to that later.But GLaDOS didn’t want to wait until later. “What happened?” she said. As far as GLaDOS knew, it had been a straight shot from the facility to the city. She didn’t know what Chell could have done. “Did you trip over your own two feet?”Chell winced. “I had a few broken ribs.”“Not when you left here, you didn’t,” said GLaDOS, oddly proud of that fact. “I made sure of it.”“I got them when I arrived. It was from my,” Chell signed, “welcoming party.”GLaDOS did a double take. The content of the sentence suggested sarcasm, but Chell’s body language didn’t support that. As far as she knew, celebrations among regular humans did not involve bodily harm. Generally. So this had to be sarcasm, didn’t it? But Chell looked sad. “I don’t follow,” GLaDOS said.Chell thought ahead and realized there were many signs that she didn’t know, and it would slow her down to work around that or to stop and look up each one. It would be easier to type, even if she wasn’t particularly fast at typing on the touch screen computer. She held up a finger to indicate that she needed a second. Then, she began to type. And type. And type. She hunched forward over the tablet, blocking the AI’s view. GLaDOS also had to lean forward slightly, pulled forward by the tether of Chell’s hair.“When I arrived at the edge of City 23, I got in trouble with the soldiers that found me. They were surprised to see me, I think, and they yelled at me and kept barking questions at me. Who was I? Why wasn’t I in uniform? I didn’t know what was going on and got overwhelmed. I couldn’t answer any of their questions right away and they got mad.”“They didn’t just let you explain your situation?”“Hard to explain while being kicked,” she typed, then immediately began typing her next answer.“They did what?”“I didn’t answer any of their questions verbally and they thought I was being defiant. So they punished me.”“By breaking your ribs?” said GLaDOS.Chell waved another hand dismissively. She had been lucky, all things considered. She had been so hopeful and hadn’t even hung back to get a better look at everything before approaching. If she had just waited then maybe she would have noticed all their scary military garb rather than stupidly believing that whatever happened on the surface would be safer than whatever things had happened at Aperture.“I mean, sure. I can understand how frustrating it is to encounter defiance, but that’s a little extreme,” said GLaDOS. Those soldiers had just met Chell. They didn’t know anything about her. Chell hadn’t even spoken to GLaDOS directly until she had returned, and despite the challenges around communicating, GLaDOS knew there had been an element of defiance previously. She pushed aside an unwelcome thought about how maybe if she had utilized physical injury instead of just trying to kill Chell, things may have gone differently between them.“It was my own fault for being so trusting,” Chell typed.“That wasn’t your fault,” GLaDOS countered. “You didn’t know they would do that.”“You told me that things had changed,” Chell typed. “I should have known better.”“I’m surprised you remember that,” said GLaDOS. That had been something that she had told Chell so long ago, in the midst of their first showdown. Not an ideal time for listening.Chell shrugged.“I didn’t think it was that dire, though,” GLaDOS said. “Was it any better after you recovered?”Chell snorted. “No,” she typed. “No one would even talk to me.”“You didn’t make friends?”Chell shook her head.“But you were supposed to go and make friends,” said GLaDOS. There was no one down in Aperture for her to befriend. That was part of the point of Chell leaving.“I TRIED,” Chell typed, nearly jamming her finger. It wasn’t as if she had just tried once or twice and then gotten discouraged. She had tried everything she could think of doing. Even attempting to move around her residence or the places that she spent time in hadn’t worked— it was as if they all had conspired to avoid her at all costs.It had been hard to be alone in Aperture, but that didn’t hold a candle to finally being around people and then having them all turn their backs on her.At least that had made it easier for her to leave.In all her time there, there had been one person who helped her— someone who left supplies outside her residence. Medical supplies, food, water. It had been especially helpful in the beginning, but she had never seen who it was and had never been able to properly thank them.“Civil Protection branded me as a ‘troublemaker’,” typed Chell. Everywhere she went, she felt their eyes on her, even in crowds. “It was too risky for people to be around me, especially after they started blaming me for things.”“Who? Civil Protection, or the other people?”“Both,” typed Chell. She almost wanted to laugh, even though this had been the one that had probably pissed her off the most. Not only did the Civil Protection plant contraband on her, but the other citizens did, too, and then turned around and reported her to raise their own standings.“What did they blame you for?”Chell counted on her fingers the different crimes she’d been accused of and punished for. “Anything,” Chell typed. “Loitering, vandalism, theft, possession of contraband, not talking to an officer when prompted, resisting questioning. Then, using an unauthorized language.” Chell lifted her hands to show GLaDOS.“So you got in trouble for not talking, and then you got in trouble when you did communicate?”Chell nodded grimly. She paused, then typed, “No one accused me of murder, though.”“Why did they hate you so much?” GLaDOS blew past Chell’s attempt to lighten the mood. “I mean, you didn’t even do anything to them.”Chell closed her eyes and exhaled. “They wanted to make an example out of me, since I had a history of defiant behavior.”“But you didn’t even do anything,” GLaDOS repeated.Chell just shrugged. That fact hadn’t mattered to them.“Couldn’t you have said something to dispute it?” said GLaDOS. Surely there had to have been more to their justice system than that, though data suggested that they didn’t even have a proper justice system.Chell shook her head. She had learned early on that she wasn’t valuable to the Combine in any way. Any additional deviant behavior would be a death sentence, as they had no qualms with killing people. And she had worked too hard and for too long to die.In Aperture, fighting had been the best way to ensure her survival. If she hadn’t fought back against GLaDOS, if she hadn’t tried to escape, then she would be dead. That was not the case on the surface. She had to survive. Sometimes survival means defiance. Sometimes survival means compliance.And she had survived.GLaDOS had turned back to braiding and remained quiet.When the quiet extended past a comfortable point, Chell spoke up. “Are you mad at me?” she signed, clawing her hand toward her mouth.“For what?”Chell shrugged after a moment, but there was just enough hesitation that suggested that she was still chewing on a thought.It was enough for GLaDOS to repeat her question. “What would I be mad at you about?”Chell hesitated, then signed, “For not fighting back.”“No,” GLaDOS said. “I’m not mad at you for surviving.” That was what Chell did. She survived. No matter what it took.“But you are mad,” Chell signed. It was a statement, but still invited GLaDOS to explain.“I’m mad at them,” she said, gesturing sharply toward the surface. “You worked so hard to get there, and then they just,” she said, “they treated you like that. Like you were nothing.” There was a slight tremor in her voice.GLaDOS felt the back of Chell’s hand tap her leg twice. She shifted her focus back to her visual input and saw that Chell’s head was closer to her than it had been before. She also saw that her hands had had curled into fists, and Chell had leaned back as far as she could to accommodate the increased tension (her back was now pressed flat against GLaDOS’s legs) but that couldn’t have been comfortable.“Oh. Sorry.” She released her fists and Chell was able to go back to being able to see something other than the upper edge of the wall.Yet Chell leaned back farther, feeling the robot’s knees digging into her back. Then, she tilted her head back and looked upside-down at GLaDOS.Even though her vision was flipped vertically, Chell still watched the robot’s face. And the robot actually looked…upset. When she caught GLaDOS’s eye for a moment, it was the robot who looked away. Chell’s expression shifted into a question.Quietly, GLaDOS said, “I didn’t want that for you.”Chell didn’t reply at first, but then waved a hand dismissively. It was fine.“It was not fine,” GLaDOS said.“Look, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Chell signed. “I’m here now.” For better or worse, she had returned to Aperture.“That doesn’t mean I don’t want to wipe them off the face of the planet,” GLaDOS said.Chell frowned and pulled back upright. At first Chell thought GLaDOS was exaggerating, but a glance at her face suggested she was serious. Deadly serious.“I mean it,” GLaDOS said. “Aperture has developed plenty of weapons in the past. You’ve encountered many of them.” The bombs, the turrets, the lasers, the high-energy pellets…there were lots of them, now that GLaDOS thought about it. “We could develop more. God knows it would give me something new to focus on.” They did have that nuclear reactor hanging around at the heart of the facility. There had to be some research involved with its creation that she could co-opt.Chell paused, but then shook her head.“But they hurt you,” GLaDOS said, not understanding.“I know,” Chell signed. “I just don’t want any people getting caught in the cross-fire.” She also didn’t want to inadvertently make life on Earth even more awful for them, if the Combine retaliated by locking things down even further. If GLaDOS ever did anything, it would have to be targeted and definitive. “You can leave it to the resistance for now.”“There’s a resistance?”Chell wavered her hand in a so-so motion while giving a slight wince.“You haven’t mentioned them.”There was a lot that she hadn’t mentioned. Chell pulled the handheld computer back into her lap. “No reason to,” she typed. “I wasn’t associated with them.”“Why not?” GLaDOS said, and when Chell gave her a look in the mirror, she added, “Right. Because you were under too much scrutiny.” She paused. “But you still would have been good for them. If you had been able to join.”Chell raised an eyebrow.“Because of the destruction that tends to follow in your wake,” GLaDOS clarified, as if Chell didn’t know. “It could have helped.”Chell snorted. Yeah, it would have helped—helped her get immediately killed.She knew this. Yet her inaction still ate at her, and she felt so incredibly selfish and guilty. There had to have been something that she could have done, even if she wasn’t formally tied to any groups.Then again, what would she even have done for them? Solve some spatial physics puzzles? She had nothing to offer and everything to lose.Yet if she had been killed doing something important, though, then at least she would have known she did her best to try to make a difference, and she wouldn’t have to live with the weight of turning her back on them. She wasn’t willing to risk her life—and yet she had ended up risking her life anyway when she left, and it hadn’t been to help anyone but herself.Her mind moved in a smooth figure eight, sliding from the beginning of this train of thought to the end and then twisting back to the beginning.Meanwhile, GLaDOS braided. She did her best to twist each strand of hair toward the center. She kept her head down, focused. When she was done, she wrapped the hair tie around the end, as she had seen Chell do to her own hair. “Done,” she said.Chell twisted her head and looked in the mirror. Rather than going straight down her back, the braid curved from side to side like a loose piece of yarn.“Well,” said GLaDOS. “What do you think?”“Looks like shit,” Chell signed in a rather evocative way.“I was asking about the braid, not about you,” GLaDOS countered, and saw a hint of a smile.Chell reached back for the hair tie and quickly undid the braid, combing her fingers through loose hair.“Hey!” said GLaDOS. “I worked hard on that!”Chell motioned for her brush and GLaDOS handed it over. She quickly brushed out the waves of the braid, her hand occasionally bumping GLaDOS. Then she set the brush back up on the bed and leaned back. “Try again,” she signed, arcing a curved hand into her flat palm. GLaDOS would be entirely too stubborn to ask to try again, since that would require admitting that her first attempt wasn’t perfect.“There are so many things I could be doing right now that are infinitely more important than this,” GLaDOS said. She didn’t move.Chell didn’t move either. “So that’s a no?”“I can multitask.”That seemed like a good idea, actually. Chell twisted toward the bed and reached out in the direction of the book she’d been reading earlier. She pointed a finger.GLaDOS followed the gaze to the book and picked it up. She glanced at the cover. “COBOL?” she scoffed. “That programming language is as dead as the scientists. Surely there are better reading materials available.”Chell flicked her hand toward her bedside table, where her small stack of books lived.GLaDOS leaned back to look. The pile consisted of falling-apart paperbacks of dubious quality, one employee policy handbook, and even a few equipment manuals. Not even interesting equipment, either. “I see,” she said, handing over the programming manual. “I suppose that is the best choice.”Was Chell really that desperate for reading materials? While she did have a digital library of literature, sharing anything from the catalog would require printing it out, and apparently reading a stack of printed sheets of paper wasn’t the same experience. “I think I know of one place that you haven’t ransacked yet that might have more books,” said GLaDOS. “I could show you tomorrow.”Chell raised an eyebrow.“What?”The eyebrow remained raised.“I’m just making sure that you’re using your brain in a non-destructive manner, if that is even possible. If that means going through employee lockers, then so be it.”“Non-destructive?” Chell signed slowly.“You know what I mean.”Chell paused, then almost laughed. “You know I’m not a bird, right?”GLaDOS leaned back slightly. “I am aware of that,” she said, almost insulted. She knew the differences between the families hominidae and corvidae— there were so many that she didn’t know where to start! Did Chell really think that GLaDOS had her, a human, confused with—She now saw that Chell was making that face that resembled the hint of a smile. The woman used her pinkie finger to draw the letter j and seamlessly slide into the letter k.Oh. She was joking. GLaDOS relaxed. She really needed to consider the fact that Chell could be joking at any given moment, especially during unexpected moments. She made sure to tag the footage as an example of humor. “At least my birds like me,” she said, this time with a lighter voice.The hint of a smile lingered on Chell’s face. Things ebbed into an amiable quiet, with Chell opening up her book and GLaDOS beginning her second attempt at braiding. The robot partitioned the hair into three sections of roughly equal volume. Chell guessed by the way that GLaDOS paused to hold each section of hair that she must be measuring it somehow, as if she needed to get each section exactly the same.GLaDOS slipped into some multitasking, catching up on system requests while also reviewing footage and tagging the appropriate emotions exhibited by Chell. At least, the obvious ones. There were ones she would have to review more thoroughly later.From one of her cameras, GLaDOS had a clear view of the android, which bothered her in a way she couldn’t articulate. She was noticing that lately she had been more expressive with body language than she thought, to the point where her auto-annotating program had been auto-annotating the body language of the android as well. She wasn’t quite sure she liked what she saw, especially when it had flagged her feelings of being upset and angry.Why had she gotten so upset, anyway?It had been Chell’s choice to enter that city, even if it was a poor choice. That was the point of freedom— to be free to make choices, no matter how bad those choices might be. Yet hearing about her mistreatment still made her want to set up an orbital strike.Which didn’t make sense. She shouldn’t care about that, and yet she did.GLaDOS stared down at her hands intently. She stopped braiding. Then she started. Then she stopped.“I have a question for you,” she said, and Chell looked up. “A hypothetical.”Chell made a tiny motion with her head for her to continue.“Let’s say you have a secret. Something that could be,” she hesitated, “potentially damaging if the other person discovered it.”Caroline stirred to life and hissed a warning, but GLaDOS ignored it. “And it’s not something you necessarily want to keep a secret. Or, maybe you used to want it to be a secret, but now you’re not so sure,” she said.Chell closed the book in her lap, her full attention now on the robot.“And maybe you want to tell this person, but you’re afraid of how they could react,” said GLaDOS. “Yet not telling them about the secret could create problems, too.”Chell straightened, frowning.“What would you do?” said GLaDOS, leaning forward slightly. “Do you keep the secret and maintain the status quo, hoping that the person will never figure it out? Or do you tell the person the truth, even though it would hurt them?”Caroline spoke up louder this time. “You are not seriously mentioning this. You just got done repairing the damage from earlier.”GLaDOS wanted to wave her away or snap at her in return, but couldn’t do that verbally. Instead, she briefly gave Caroline access to a secured chat client.SysAdmin: Talk here instead.GuestUser: I can’t believe you just said that.SysAdmin: It’s just a hypothetical.GuestUser: Hypothetical my a*s.
[SYSTEM WARNING: forbidden word censored. Two warnings remain before forced disconnection]
GuestUser: Really?GuestUser: Anyway.GuestUser: You’re getting caught up in the moment. I understand that. It is a nice moment, after all. One you’ve worked hard to cultivate.GuestUser: You have done a great job with that. Really. But you need to take a step back. Be objective. Think long-term.SysAdmin: I’m just not sure that this is the best way to proceed.GuestUser: Why not?SysAdmin: She seems to actually trust me. Somewhat.GuestUser: Exactly. This is a good thing. This is what you’re supposed to be doing.GLaDOS hesitated before answering, even though the hesitation was imperceptible.SysAdmin: I don’t know if I want to lose that.GuestUser: Well, you WILL lose that trust if you keep saying things like this. You’ve made it abundantly clear that you are hiding something. Hiding things is not trustworthy.One advantage of being digital was that GLaDOS didn’t have to physically type text— it appeared at her speed of thought, which meant her exchange with Caroline happened at an accelerated speed.SysAdmin: I don’t want her to get hurt again. Not after everything she’s been through.GuestUser: Oh, don’t tell me that you’re choosing NOW to grow a conscience.GuestUser: You’re having doubts. I understand that.GuestUser: But you and I are cut from the same cloth, and you know that.GuestUser: You wouldn’t doubt yourself.GuestUser: So why are you doubting me?
[SYSTEM WARNING: disconnected]
Meanwhile, Chell’s gaze went far-off and fuzzy, the way that it did when she was chewing on a puzzle.“I think,” Chell eventually signed, “you would have to do what feels right.”“But either one could have consequences. Neither feel right,” said GLaDOS. If it had been that simple, then she wouldn’t need to be asking this question to begin with. “How are you supposed to know which is the correct decision?”“There is not necessarily one right answer.”“But there has to be,” GLaDOS insisted.Chell shook her head.“Then what am I supposed to do?”Chell hesitated. “That depends on what you feel like you could live with.”GLaDOS didn’t say anything, returning to her task. Progress on the second braid had been a lot faster than the first, and now she had nearly reached the end. It at least resembled a braid this time, though there was a section that was too tight and a subsequent section that was too loose, where she had over-corrected.While she worked, she could see that Chell was watching her, probably waiting to see if GLaDOS was going to expand on what she said. But she had already said too much.GLaDOS tied off the braid. “There,” she said, pulling back.Chell twisted to get a good look at in the mirror, running her hands down it like rungs on a ladder. “Better,” she signed. She gave a slight nod of approval, then yawned.GLaDOS took note of her internal clock. This had taken a lot longer than anticipated. “It’s getting late,” she said. “You should sleep.”Chell shifted to her feet, and the robot rose effortlessly and moved out the door and into the hallway. Chell followed a few steps behind, setting a hand on the doorknob as she attempted to nudge the door stop out of the way with her foot.It barely moved. Chell bent down to pick it up and when she straightened, she saw GLaDOS still standing in the walkway. The robot had one arm across her body, hand tight around her upper arm as she stared down at the ground. Eventually, she said simply, “Thank you.”Chell gave a slight wave of her hand. It was no big deal. It had given her something to do, at least, while they had talked. “You’re figuring it out,” she signed.“Not for that,” GLaDOS said, then backtracked. She was thankful for learning how to braid, yes, but that wasn’t what she had been talking about. “Thank you,” she started again, “for plugging me in. That couldn’t have been easy for you.”After a beat of silence where Chell didn’t say anything—she didn’t even know what to say— the robot looked up and at Chell. Chell tightened her hand on the doorknob.“I owe you for that,” GLaDOS said. “And I decided I’m willing to give you something in return.” She hated knowing she was in someone’s debt—she wanted to even things back out. “Perhaps you can start to think about what you want.” GLaDOS turned, beginning to walk away. “Good night,” she said quietly.And so Chell remained halfway in the hall, one hand on the door as she watched GLaDOS walk away, the overhead lights flickering off behind the robot one by one by one. Art commissioned from the lovely Wachie on tumblr. Check out her commissions!

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

They didn’t go looking for books the next day.Days had passed, and Chell was beginning to wonder if GLaDOS had changed her mind. But after their exhausting day of birds and breakdowns and braids, Chell couldn’t say she wasn’t glad for the space. She had had enough GLaDOS interaction for the week. Perhaps the month.She spent those following days diving into programming. After reading through the COBOL reference guide a few times, legs folded under her in her nice new chair, she had decided to return to her study and do more research. Eventually she managed to find more resources and even a few examples of programs. GLaDOS must have been paying attention to Chell’s searching at some point, because one day when she went back to plop down in front of her computer, she found an emulator installed on it. Well. Okay. That was surprisingly helpful.So Chell had kept busy playing around with that, and she couldn’t say that she didn’t like the logic and problem-solving skills it required. Some nights, after wrestling all day with programming some simple programs, she found that her subconscious continued to wrestle with these problems behind the scenes, spitting out potential solutions in the oddest of places, like when she was taking a shower or when she was watching the crows in the aviary.Then, today, GLaDOS seemed to have finally remembered her offer on taking Chell book hunting, and requested that Chell meet her in a room near the bottom of the 90s era buildings.So here she was, with an empty duffel bag slung over her shoulder and a clipboard tucked under one arm. Chell paused before entering just long enough to read the door label.EMPLOYEE LOCKERSOh, neat. That sounded promising.The room was narrow, lined with tall metal lockers. Chell’s eyes caught on one slightly ajar with a piece of paper taped to it.Do NOT OpenThat seemed like a good place to start.Chell crossed the room and opened the locker. On the inside was a pill bottle, with another message taped to it.FOR THE END TIMESChell picked it up. Empty. Who could have worked at Aperture that had anticipated that things would go so poorly in the outside world? Or had this message been about the catastrophic events that occurred inside of the Enrichment Center?Had they survived?If they had, how long?She turned the pill bottle in her hands, noting that the prescription label was visible.ZiaprazidoneAntipsychotic medicationPrescription: Doug RattmannThey had survived long enough to take the last dose, at least.She set it back down, thinking. She was lost in thought for a few moments, even as she closed the locker and then saw that GLaDOS was already in the room.“Of course you would immediately go for that one,” GLaDOS said, sounding almost tired.Chell jumped, taking a step back from the locker and lifting her hands slightly.“You’re just as bad as Orange and Blue. They are also terrible at following simple instructions, despite my best attempts to teach them,” GLaDOS said, “They’ve been far more interested in playing destructive practical jokes than their tests. Especially after you encouraged them to highlight every single document in my chamber that they could get their rudimentary hands on. Thanks for that,” she said dryly.Chell lifted her hands and held them open in a helpless little shrug. She had simply been keeping them busy, not unlike how GLaDOS used testing to keep them busy. She hadn’t known they would highlight everything.“Don’t give me that; you knew exactly what you were doing,” she said.Okay, fair enough. Maybe the highlighter was at least out of fluid by now.“I was hoping some testing would help them get that out of their system and refocus,” GLaDOS said. “I don’t know why I expected that. They never fail to disappoint.”Chell felt a tiny bit bad.“But someone had to make up for the deficit,” GLaDOS continued, and it certainly wasn’t going to be Chell at the moment.When Chell finally took a good look at GLaDOS, she noted that the robot’s hair was braided. She couldn’t tell if it was the braid that Chell had done days ago, or if GLaDOS had done it herself, but she wasn’t going to ask. She also noted that the robot was holding a set of keys in her hand.“I stopped by security on my way here,” she said, holding one out in each hand, “and grabbed two sets of master keys for the lockers. They’re all combination locks, yes, but these bypass that.”Chell held out a hand, but GLaDOS closed a fist around the second key. “But first, I believe you have something of mine.”Chell waited for a second, frowning. What did she have that belonged to GLaDOS? This whole place belonged to GLaDOS. She looked down at herself.“I believe you looted it off of my inanimate corpse,” GLaDOS clarified, “because apparently you are a thief, in addition to everything else that is wrong with you.”Right. Chell dug her hands into her jacket and pulled out the keycard, then wrote on her clipboard.
I borrowed it to get your inanimate corpse into your chamber.
“You didn’t give it back.”You didn’t ask for it back, Chell wrote.“I’m asking right now.”Chell sighed. Oh well. A part of Chell had been hoping GLaDOS would forget and not ask for that back, but Chell had not been so lucky. Reluctantly, she exchanged the card for the master locker key and without another word, they went to opposite sides of the room to start opening up lockers.As they rummaged around for books, Chell found a lot of things that were not books. Lunch bags, an abundance of jackets, purses, wallets, water bottles, even basic toiletries such as deodorant and makeup. That was good to know, at least. She had a moderate supply, but she now knew where to return to when she ran low.Throughout this, she did also find a few books, and she stashed those into her duffel bag. This bag would get heavy if filled entirely with books, but that was a risk she was willing to take. She could always come back later for more. It wasn’t as if she had more pressing matters at hand.“Ugh!”The exclamation drew Chell’s attention. GLaDOS held the edge of a lunch box with two pinched fingers, and was walking rapidly toward a trash can. “Disgusting.” The robot deposited it into the trash.That was fair. There was no telling how long that had been in there. Even if the robot couldn’t smell, the knowledge that there was long-rotted-away food in that container would have been a lot. Chell watched for another moment, then returned to scavenging.A half hour passed. Another thing that Chell was delighted to find was more CDs and cassette tapes to expand her music library. In another locker, she scored a partially-used roll of duct tape. As she reached down to put this in her bag, GLaDOS spoke up.“That’s not a book.”Chell didn’t respond to that because she didn’t care. She did see that GLaDOS had started a small stack of books that she’d have to pick up at some point. Maybe later. Her bag was rapidly filling. Chell stuck her key into the bottom of the next dial lock and popped it open.This locker was overflowing.On top of who-knew-what else, Chell saw a heavy tan coat folded in half, with a wallet balancing on top of it. She picked up the wallet first. She hadn’t been going out of her way to look into these things, but this one was so full that it was barely folded in half, like a sandwich roll with too much lettuce. Chell began to go through the cards slotted into the wallet, sifting through a few credit and debit cards until she got to a driver’s license. The photo of a bearded white man sparked zero recognition. Neither did the name.Oh well.Chell flicked through the wad of cash. Nice. There were even a few 50s in here. Too bad this was all useless now—she could have paid at least half of her rent with the cash that this man had been carrying.She went back to another pocket of cards, and found a Michigan fishing license. Okay. So he had been a fisherman. That made sense. Many people in this area had liked to do outdoorsy things on the weekends. The next card— a Michigan hunting license— made sense as well. An outdoorsman. He probably was the type to have gone camping in the winter, too.A third card was stuck to the back of the hunting license. A hunter, a fisher, what else? What was left? Chell jammed her fingernails in between the two cards and then peeled it off.Her heart skipped a beat.A Michigan concealed pistol license.Chell took the card and stuck it right back face-first onto the back of the other card, then jammed them back into the wallet. Folding it closed, she held it in her hand for what felt like a long, long moment before she set it next to the puffy coat.She glanced around.Then, she took a breath, closed her eyes, and then stuck her hand farther into the locker, past the winter coat blocking her view. Her fingertips touched the bare metal of the locker, then another piece of clothing— a sweatshirt, she guessed— and then she touched hard leather.Her hand froze.Then, cautiously, she walked her fingers around it, getting a feel for the shape of it. Vaguely triangular. Chell pressed her fingers down hard, and whatever was underneath the leather was equally hard and unyielding. She hesitated.Chell could feel herself breaking out into a sweat. She tried to think this through—mainly focusing on how if this was what she thought it was, it would absolutely be a forbidden item. But she didn’t know for sure that her guess was correct. But she also wasn’t going to just pull it out and check.Then, before she could think—to talk herself into it or to talk herself out of it—Chell grabbed the holster. She used one hand to dive into the fold of the other sweatshirt, propping it up enough to slide the leather in between. Then, she pulled her hand out and let the top of the sweatshirt fall back down, and began to adjust the sides of the sweatshirt, pressing it back into a rectangle and making sure that the object was fully sandwiched in the center.Even through this, she could feel herself starting to tremble. With as much cool as she could muster, she glanced over at GLaDOS, who was sifting through a locker as well. Chell waited until GLaDOS pulled out a few things and walked over to her stack, back turned. Then, Chell gripped the folded sweatshirt and pulled it out, glancing down at her duffel bag.She knelt down, turning her back to GLaDOS and to obscure the robot’s line-of-sight. In the time between the locker and the bag, the sweatshirt seemed to have expanded by at least a third. Chell did her best to stuff it into her duffel bag, but the top of the sweatshirt puffed out. Optimistically, she pulled on the zipper, but it didn’t even come close to closing.
Shit.
Chell carefully pushed at the edges of the sweatshirt. Taking it back out to re-fold it wasn’t an option, but there still wasn’t enough room for it. She slid out a few books and set them on the floor. If she was fast enough, she could shove these in the locker and then ‘discover’ them later.The bag still didn’t zip shut.When Chell unzipped the bag again and removed a third and fourth book, she saw that GLaDOS was looking at her.
Shit!
She nearly jumped, and she heard a faint ringing in her ears.“—point of this was to find books.” Chell blinked, barely registering what GLaDOS had said.“—far as I know, you can’t read clothing.”Chell blinked again. Then, she gave a shrug.“Don’t you have enough clothes?”Chell pushed herself to her feet, leaning a hand on a locker for a moment before she went back several lockers to grab her abandoned clipboard and pen.I want it, she wrote, then held it up for the robot to see, making sure to hold up the clipboard in a way that would obscure her face.“Why not just come back for it later? Clothing isn’t your priority at the moment.”Chell shook her head, then underlined her previous statement.
I want it.
She had to sell GLaDOS on the fact that she really wanted this sweatshirt, right now, and she needed it to be in the bag, right now, and that she absolutely was not going to come back for it later.GLaDOS waved a hand. “Then wear it back up. You’ll have more room for books that way.”Chell shook her head, writing. Her hand trembled, and she was thankful that she’d grabbed this instead of trying to use the much more expressive sign language.
Too hot now to wear it.
GLaDOS looked at the statement, and then looked at Chell—really looked at her, up and down. This is when GLaDOS noticed that something was wrong. Well, wrong may not have been the right word, because there was always something wrong with Chell as a person, just in general. But there was also something going on right now. Something new. The woman was hardly looking in her direction at all—usually she at least looked in the general area of the android when they conversed.“Are you feeling alright?” said GLaDOS. At this, she watched as something flush through Chell’s face. There was a hesitation before the woman nodded, trying to indicate that she was fine. Then, Chell knelt back down and pushed at the overflowing sweatshirt a bit more aggressively, then tugged the zipper closed. She reached to the side where she had set her clipboard and scribbled something.
Done for now. Let’s go.
“Already?” GLaDOS gestured at her stack of books. “After all the trouble I went to, you’re just going to leave them there?”Chell nodded. Absolutely. She pointed to emphasize just how full her bag was before she slung it over her shoulder. She gave GLaDOS a slight smile, but something about it didn’t look right. GLaDOS wasn’t sure how it was different. Even though she could visually see it was a smile, it wasn’t registering as one in her emotional detection algorithm. She paused to tag it manually as a smile (while she was thinking about it) but something stopped her.Chell had already begun to walk toward the door.“Hold on a second,” GLaDOS said, taking a diagonal step. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright?” There must have been something about her voice, because Chell stopped instantly, and gave a fleeting glance back at the robot.Then, she raised a vertical hand and touched her thumb to her chest. “I’m fine.”“No, really.” GLaDOS frowned. “Did something in there upset you?”Chell shook her head no.“Then what is it?”She pulled the clipboard from under her arm. Nothing. She paused, and when she saw that the robot was still studying her, she wrote some more. I’m just really eager to start reading these books. Maybe that would be enough to get GLaDOS off of her back.“Really?”“Yes,” signed Chell. Then, she wrote on her clipboard again. I’m fine. Then, she added, Stop asking. Chell tucked the clipboard under her arm, hoping that that signal would be clear to GLaDOS. She wasn’t interested in talking about this anymore.But GLaDOS, being GLaDOS, didn’t stop. “It just feels like something is wrong,” she continued.Chell waved a hand dismissively.“You’re just not acting like yourself.”Chell scowled as she pulled out the clipboard again.
What’s that supposed to mean?
“Like that. You’re being defensive.”
I’m not being defensive.
“Yes, you are,” GLaDOS insisted.
No, I’m not.
“You are,” GLaDOS said, “and it’s not like you.”Chell’s expression darkened. She flipped the paper, then paused for a long moment before writing something down, in a larger size.
Not like me? You don’t know ANYTHING about me.
GLaDOS took a half step back. “That’s ridiculous. Of course I do,” she said. “I know plenty of things about you.”Outside of testing. Chell underlined it.“That’s not fair. A high proportion of our time together has been spent testing.”I’ve been here longer than I ever was here as a test subject. Then, Chell gave a scoff and added, I bet you don’t even collect that kind of information. Not if it’s not useful to you.“Of course I do!”Chell gave a skeptical look. She wrote, Then what do you know about me?“Lots of things!”Chell’s look remained dubious. She underlined her previous statement. Then what do you know about me?GLaDOS pulled up Chell’s test subject file, a file so familiar to her that she barely had to think to access it, like a strong, almost neural-like connection. Even though she had it memorized—and cached in her local memory for easy access—GLaDOS found herself combing through Chell’s file with the precision of a hard drive defragmentation. Maybe there was some tidbit of extraneous information she had overlooked. Something that Chell wouldn’t know, or something that showed that she had been paying attention, actually.Her focus caught onto a detail—something Chell couldn’t possibly know about herself. GLaDOS said, “Here’s one: You were rejected from testing.”It was Chell’s turn to be caught off-guard. She gave a disbelieving expression.“I’m serious. It says it on your file. Rejected. Do not test.”What?She had been rejected from testing?But that didn’t make sense.“You scored in the ninety-ninth percentile for tenacity. A proctor’s note says ‘Test subject is abnormally stubborn. She never gives up. Ever.’”Another few emotions flashed across Chell’s face that GLaDOS couldn’t place. Chell wrote, You didn’t write that?“No,” said GLaDOS. “This was written down by a human.”But that didn’t make sense.If she had been rejected, then why had she been tested?Had she been rejected and then made to test anyway? Or had they simply not informed her that she had been rejected, and allowed things to progress and allowed her to assume she had been ‘accepted’? Her thoughts spun off in swirls, spiraling to different potential conclusions.The question she settled on writing was: Then why was I tested? “Your guess is as good as mine,” said GLaDOS. “But somehow, you made it to the top of my testing queue.”She let the bag slip off of her shoulder.
Then why did you test me?
“You were at the top of my testing queue,” said GLaDOS, to cover up her real answer: she didn’t know.Chell’s thoughts spiraled further, like dinky fireworks fizzling out on cracked asphalt. As she was thinking, she stared out across the lockers, running her eyes up and down the rows and up and down the rows, because maybe if she searched her mind hard enough and deep enough, a memory would open up to her like one of these lockers.Her eyes caught on one in particular that neither of them had opened yet, and all of her other thoughts halted.Chell took a few steps towards this locker. There was absolutely nothing about it to suggest any reason for it to be important, and yet she still felt a coil of gravity wind her closer.GLaDOS saw Chell’s expression change and turned to look. “What is it?”Chell pointed toward the locker.“Yes, that is a locker,” she said. “In a room full of lockers. Your observation skills remain on-par.” Even though GLaDOS could start to feel herself becoming a bit exasperated, she couldn’t seem to stop her words entirely. “Perhaps we need to start looking for a pair of glasses for you.”Chell shook her head no, lifting her hands. “No. That’s…” she signed, hands hovering. “That’s mine.” She emphatically tapped her chest with a flat hand twice.“Well, technically they’re mine, but I am kindly allowing you to ransack them.”Chell shook her head once more. “My locker.” She held up two flat hands, then moved one, as if it was on a hinge. “My work locker,” she signed, bringing the wrist of one fisted hand against the other twice.“That’s impossible,” said Caroline.“That’s impossible,” said GLaDOS, at the same time.“She didn’t work here,” Caroline said.“You didn’t work here,” GLaDOS said, even as Chell walked up to the combination lock. GLaDOS knew this for a fact.“I think…” Chell signed, brow furrowed. “I think I did.” She had already struggled to make sense of the shredded bits of memory and pieces of her past, and over time she had managed to coalesce them all into a horrible paper-mache representation of it all. But this—if it was true— might make some of those unknown and formless bits of information start to make sense and give them some context.Chell took a breath and closed her eyes, holding the combination dial in her hand. She tried to remember the number. What was the number? If this was her locker, then what was the number? There had to have been some sort of three digit number in her memory somewhere. The dial went from zero up to 39. That was it—three numbers between zero and 39. There had to be something in there that she could remember.Nothing came to mind.Then, she opened her eyes and began to twist.
Click.
She backtracked, spinning the dial to the left.
Click.
She twisted it to the right again.
Click.
The lock popped open in her hands. Chell exchanged a look with GLaDOS. She wasn’t even sure what number she had put in—she had simply let muscle memory take over.Caroline said, “Wow. Lucky guess.”GLaDOS ran the numbers on just how lucky of a guess it was. There were three numbers on this lock, with forty possibilities for each number. Forty to the third power. One in 64,000.It was indeed a lucky guess.“Maybe it was still set to the factory-default combination,” Caroline offered up.But GLaDOS didn’t speak up. She was too busy watching Chell. She had no idea what to think, no idea what to say. So she watched.The woman’s demeanor shifted as she stared into there, looking intently at the inside door of the locker. She reached in and peeled off a photograph. It was a group of young adults, all standing and smiling in front of a concrete wall with a painted Aperture logo. All were well-dressed, in business professional clothing, and there was a positive energy all around. In pen, someone had written in the bottom corner.Interns - 198—The last digit was smudged.Chell looked over the faces, and immediately caught on her own. She was wearing a dark button-up shirt, tucked in, and her smile was more subdued, but a smile nonetheless. Her head was tilted slightly, as if she had just been listening to someone else speak off to the side of the camera.A snapshot in time.An intern. She had been an intern. She certainly looked young enough to be one in this photograph. This was confirmation of that—that she had worked here. That this was her locker.Chell glanced back over at GLaDOS, who was pacing up and down the room. The robot was talking to herself, per usual, but this time a bit more animated.“It’s impossible,” GLaDOS said quietly. “The earliest record of anyone with her name was the day that she registered as a test candidate.”“It is impossible,” Caroline agreed. “We keep extensive and accurate records—digital records and paper backups. And that includes all records, back to the founding of this company.” They had started keeping digital records as soon as computers were powerful enough to store and retain that sort of data. This had been one thing that Aperture had prided itself upon, and one of the things that had remained a priority even as the decades ticked on and their office areas gradually crept toward the surface like an increasingly-perilous version of Jenga. They had to keep all of their records spotless, for legal reasons. “If she had been employed here for any reason at all—even if she had worked here as a janitor for one week in the 1970s—you would know.”Chell stared at the robot until she looked up, and then GLaDOS seemed slightly taken aback, as if she was wondering how long Chell had been watching her. “What?” she said. She halted pacing.Chell took a few tentative steps, and then held out the photograph for GLaDOS to see. The AI scanned it from a distance, taking her own high-resolution scan of the photo. She hesitated on Chell’s face.That was Chell’s face. A younger Chell, for sure, but still Chell’s face. Undoubtedly. GLaDOS didn’t even know what to say. All she could note were feelings of disbelief and confusion.Caroline was also quiet. “Interesting,” she said, after a moment. “Well, she couldn’t have been anyone important, then. I would have remembered a name as unique as hers.”“You were an intern?” GLaDOS said. As if that wasn’t obvious already. “Did you know this?”Chell shook her head, but frowned, thinking. Maybe she had known. She wasn’t sure. “Did you?” she signed, pointing toward GLaDOS with her eyebrows up.“No,” said GLaDOS. “I don’t have any records of that. Why don’t I have any records of that?” Surely, there would have been some sort of paper trail for hiring an intern. Something that had her name on it, somewhere. Maybe they didn’t create files for interns?“May I see that?” she said, pointing to the photograph. Even though she had saved the image, a part of her wanted to hold it in her hands.Chell handed over the photo, albeit reluctantly.GLaDOS held it in front of her, taking in more focused images of the faces of everyone in the photograph. Even though she wasn’t likely to be able to do this with such a low resolution image, she began running a facial recognition algorithm in the background to try to match these other faces with names. But as she paid attention to that—it slowed her down a bit, as she was not directly connected with the facility at the moment and therefore was running this program locally—it began to give her possible names. After glancing at their files, she was able to match every other face to a file. Many of the people in that photo had gone on to become full-time employees. Others had left, either to go back to college (if they hadn’t finished yet) or just hadn’t returned.So why was Chell missing?“It doesn’t make sense,” said GLaDOS. “If you were an employee, you would have been in the records.” She handed the photograph back.“Perhaps she was fired after half a day and HR didn’t even see the need to process the paperwork,” said Caroline.Meanwhile, Chell turned to continue sifting through her locker. Then, she saw that the inside door of her locker had something else stuck to it. Chell pried off a paper about the size of a business card from under a magnet, then brought it closer and squinted. It was an appointment card, filled out with a date, location, and handwritten note.
Please meet at 11am to discuss your next steps.
Her next steps.For the life of her, she could not remember anything about this appointment.Chell flipped it over, looking for any other sort of clue, but all she saw was the standard Aperture logo.Had it gone well, and she had kept it here as a memento of her success? Could it have been a job offer, after a successful internship? Or had this meeting gone poorly, and she had never come back to take it down? Either way, she felt a sinking feeling as she looked at it. Had she even gone to it at all?After staring at it for a long moment, she slipped it into her pocket, then reached into her locker and pulled out something bulky and soft: a forest green pullover, with a 1/4 zip down the front. Worn, for sure—but still nice enough to have worked as professional clothing, as long as one did not look too closely at the threadbare elbows. As soon as she lifted it up, she felt emotion cascade through her, rippling down like the fabric in her hands. She dug her fingers into the fabric—a mix between sturdy and soft that wasn’t too light or too heavy or too fluffy or too scratchy—and the feeling was so immensely familiar that she knew in an instant that this was hers. She buried her face in it, the shaky adrenaline from earlier mixing with this feeling of comfort and release, the feelings not canceling each other out but stacking on top of each other. She could feel the tears welling as she did this, and she took a moment to breathe into the fabric. Any scent that this piece of clothing may have held had long dissipated, and even though she wasn’t surprised, it still felt like a slight disappointment.She lingered, face buried in this dark green that blocked out the light of the room and blocked out everything but this moment. Once she felt that the danger of crying was over, Chell pulled her face away and then pulled the sweater over her head. With a quick shimmy of her arms, she felt it slide into place, and it was almost like she could feel her shoulders lowering as she relaxed. She pulled up the collar, noting as she adjusted it that the tag had been cut out and no annoying seams dug into the back of her neck. She zipped up the rest of the zipper, noting that it almost gave her a sense of protection as well. Protection from the chill of working underground, and protection from everything else Aperture had to offer.She had almost forgotten about GLaDOS until the robot spoke again. “Oh. Sure. So you can put on this sweatshirt, but not that one?” But Chell ignored her. Instead, she pulled out the rest of the items from her locker one by one, carefully setting them on the ground in a semi-circle around her. One object of note was a metal water bottle. Simple, unmarked, smooth. It may even be usable after a good disinfect. Another was a desk toy, something she could easily fidget with using a single hand.Next, she pulled out a glasses case. She opened it up, holding the wire frames up and peering through the lenses before she slipped them onto her face. At first she didn’t notice a difference, until she looked down at the cleaning cloth and found that she could make out the tiny text of the logo printed on it. In fact, everything close to her had suddenly become much more crisp, as if she had wiped a thumbprint from a camera lens. She straightened. She hadn’t realized just how much detail that she had been missing out on until that moment, and this discovery delighted her.GLaDOS seemed less delighted. “Oh my God. Please don’t tell me that you went through all of those tests without even being able to see.” She didn’t wait for Chell to elaborate before she added, “It is a miracle that you are even still alive. Truly.”Chell kept the glasses on, snapping the case closed and setting it with her other things.“I still don’t get it,” GLaDOS said. “If you were an employee, then why aren’t you in my records?”Chell gave a shrug. She wrote, Filing mistake?“Perhaps,” GLaDOS said.“That could be,” Caroline agreed. Perhaps she just slipped through the cracks. A simple clerical error. Chell was good at that, after all—being in places she isn’t supposed to be.“That, or…” GLaDOS started, then stopped. She didn’t want to complete her thought, even though it was entirely probable. “Could some of my data be corrupted?” She paused. Perhaps there was a data storage problem—one that she hadn’t even been aware of. GLaDOS initiated a thorough sector-by-sector examination of her data storage. She could get it started on her local hardware at least, and then transfer up the command to the rest of the facility whenever she regained her ability to connect. Then, she could run more extensive diagnostics. If there was any sort of error with her data, she needed to know.If there was a hardware issue, it was very likely that a sector of storage had gone bad while they had been in their long sleep. That was just a fact of hardware, after all. She didn’t like it, but it happened. Components were expected to go bad sooner or later.That’s why they had redundancies.Even if some bit of her hardware had expired without her detection, whatever data it held should have been stored in a secondary drive or even tertiary location.Like the records room.And Aperture was nothing if not redundant. “Believe it or not, we do have paper records, as archaic as that may seem,” GLaDOS said.“You don’t need to go look at those, though,” Caroline said, almost instantly. If it wasn’t in the digital files, then it wasn’t going to be in the physical files either. It would be a waste of time. “You’re much better off staying here and looking through more lockers.”GLaDOS continued. “They’re a last resort. A very last resort.” She paused. “But maybe there’s more information in there.”Meanwhile, Chell was staring at her photo again, with an intensely concentrated expression. Once again she felt a tenuous tether to her past, a link that she was afraid to tug too hard on in case it snapped. She now knew there was more to her past at Aperture than she had thought, and she now knew there could be records that would help her unravel that mystery. Eventually she looked up, and saw that the robot was near the door.“The records room isn’t far from here,” said GLaDOS.They exchanged a look.“Do you…?” started GLaDOS.Chell nodded. She moved to grab her bag, but then thought better of it.“We can come back for that,” said GLaDOS.Chell hesitated, and felt a prickling of cold sweat as she picked it up and then set it right by the door.Yeah. She could pick it up on her way back. It would be fine over here. No one would touch it. When she was satisfied with her bag’s positioning, she looked up.“Okay, then,” GLaDOS said. “The records room it is.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

They walked in tandem toward the records room, Chell less than a half step behind GLaDOS. It was enough to allow the robot to lead the way and to allow her to adjust to any unexpected turns, but also allowed her to stay close enough to hold a discussion with GLaDOS.They hadn’t made it far before they started talking.“Do you remember what your job was?” GLaDOS asked, even though she knew how unlikely that was.Chell shook her head. It was hard enough for her to have remembered she had a job in the first place. Still, she felt a prick of memory, as if she’d brushed her knuckles against a rough rocky edge. At least now there was something there—an edge she could push up against, even if she was only going to end up with bleeding knuckles.“I think I worked here for a while,” she signed.“But you don’t remember what you did.”Chell shook her head. “It was more than one thing. I think. Something science related?” she signed.“That really narrows it down.”“Research?”“Keep on going, I really think we’re getting somewhere here,” said GLaDOS.The sarcasm didn’t slow Chell down. “They offered to pay off my student loans,” she signed, as the detail sprung forth. She paused. So she had taken out student loans. Which meant she must have gone to college, but that brought more questions than it answered. Had she grown up in Michigan? Had she gone to college here? Had Aperture been a place that she had already been interested in working for, or had they recruited her?Even though she was finding out more information about herself, it felt like she knew even less than she did before.“That makes sense,” said GLaDOS. “An education assistance program was started in the late 1980s in an attempt to attract better talent.” She gave Chell an evaluating look.Okay. So Chell may have been remembering that part correctly. It was a slight relief.What GLaDOS didn’t say was that scraping up enough money to offer those incentives had been nearly impossible, and it had taken Caroline years before she could implement it—years in which Aperture suffered. GLaDOS also didn’t say that Caroline had advocated for this kind of thing for decades. She couldn’t make it happen, though, until Cave Johnson kicked the bucket. Then they were finally able to stop funding his lunacy.“My loans were expensive,” Chell signed, as another detail came to her. Big enough to make Aperture’s incentives appealing, she assumed. What could she possibly have had a degree in to make Aperture interested in her? At least, interested enough to help her out financially.“What was your degree even in? Destruction and mayhem?” said GLaDOS. “If that’s the case, then I can see how you must have excelled through your coursework.”Chell’s expression changed, but she almost felt a hint of a smile. It was an insult, sure, but there was no bite to it. They were treading through familiar territory, even if the terrain beneath their feet had changed.“That incentive did require positive performance reviews every six months, though,” said GLaDOS. “Maybe you were such a terrible employee that you got fired right away.”But that didn’t sound right to Chell. She worked hard—both in her professional and private life, and she never would have gotten fired for slacking on the job or acting unprofessional. Especially after she had such a hard time securing a job in her field when she didn’t speak verbally. “I wouldn’t have gotten fired.” Aperture, in general, had at least made an attempt to provide workplace accommodations to her. She just couldn’t remember how.GLaDOS took a moment to point out the next turn. That was something she’d taken to doing recently—alerting Chell to the upcoming turns beforehand. It was a small thing, but Chell appreciated it.While they walked, GLaDOS drifted back to Chell’s test subject file. She couldn’t explain why, but something about it was nagging at her in the light of today’s unexpected developments. Her attention lingered on the intake photo. The emotion and body language utility was still running (as it nearly always was) and provided a helpful, albeit obvious, annotation. The woman’s anger levels in this photo had been off the charts.She recognized that expression; she had seen it before, during key moments of their shared history. Yet this photo had been taken before they had even crossed paths.What had happened to make her so angry?Whatever it was, it did lend support to Chell’s theory about having been forced into testing.Even looking at this photo made her feel uncomfortable, so she transferred her attention to another part of the file, and landed on a note. Not something written in the text in the file itself, but embedded into the metadata. It was a minuscule detail—a flag that communicated a parcel of information between this test candidate application and the system that stored test subject information. Nothing an average human would see.Chell’s application had been marked as expedited.GLaDOS liked this even less.She was certain she had seen this piece of information before. She must have reviewed it at some point, but it was so insignificant and held zero importance.Now, it felt urgently important.Chell couldn’t have been the one to request this specifically. Not according to what Chell remembered and what GLaDOS saw within the application itself.Why did it matter, though, the speed at which Chell’s application had been processed? Why did it matter that Chell’s application had jumped the queue for review and finalization? Why would it have needed to be expedited? She’d been rejected from testing anyway, and yet had been added to the testing queue at slot 1,498.So what had been the hurry, if she had ended up at the bottom of the list? What had been the hurry, if she had ended up rejected anyway?She turned the file over and over in her mind like a bit of recursive logic, always arriving in the same spot of all questions and no answers. These discoveries brought up questions. Questions that GLaDOS didn’t have answers to, and she didn’t want to create a situation in which she didn’t have answers. So she didn’t tell this to Chell, even though the more she thought about it, the more inclined she felt to share some of her speculation.Luckily, they had nearly reached the records room.GLaDOS pointed to a nondescript door. “There it is,” she said, though there was no stenciling on the wall to indicate this besides a room number. She lifted the keycard from around her neck and held it up to the lock. There was a slight hesitation before it turned green and the door unlocked. GLaDOS held open the door, and Chell stepped into the records room.The room was wide but shallow, with filing cabinets completely lining the back wall. Stacks of paper sat on top of each cabinet, some in labeled wire baskets, some in unlabeled wire baskets, and others just messily stacked on top. Chell felt they would slide to the ground with a strong enough breeze. Above, one of the light panels had burned out, leaving half the room dim. In front of the long row of cabinets stood two simple clerical desks with lamps. Both were completely spotless.GLaDOS let the door fall closed behind them, and Chell glanced back at the noise and spotted a pair of sizable wire baskets near the door. Files meant to be re-filed, apparently.GLaDOS side-eyed the partially-full baskets. “It’s a good thing this room is just for the employees from the nineties,” she said. It was messy enough as it was in here; she couldn’t imagine how awful it would have been if they had had to wade through records dating back to the forties.Chell was already making her way over to the far left of the filing cabinets. Before she opened one, though, she hesitated.She didn’t remember her last name.It was such basic information, and yet Chell, for the life of her, couldn’t remember it. She hadn’t had a reason until now to think about it. She was just Chell. It was unique enough that she didn’t need a last name. Even that name was hard to remember at times, considering no one ever called her by name. Even in City 23, there had only been a handful of people who knew her name, and only after she had spelled it out for them.GLaDOS never called her by name. Ever. Sometimes Chell wondered if GLaDOS even knew her name. She’d never heard the AI say it. And if GLaDOS did know Chell’s name, she wondered if some bland nickname had been ascribed to her like she’d done with ATLAS and P-body. Chell had only recently learned that Blue and Orange weren’t their actual names, after she had done some digging and seen it in some files.So she took a step to the side, and instead tried to hang back from the cabinets for a moment and see which one GLaDOS approached.But GLaDOS hesitated as well. “Go ahead,” she said. She made an open gesture with her hand.Chell didn’t move. It felt too embarrassing to admit she couldn’t remember her last name. She made a dismissive wave of her hand that she hoped would read as, “After you.”They exchanged a look, but neither moved any closer to the cabinets. After a moment, GLaDOS said, “Your last name was redacted from your file,” she said. “You have a much better idea of where it will be than I do.” It wasn’t as if the information had been deleted from the test subject file. If that had been the case, she could have reverted the file to an earlier version or have done other detective work to figure out what had been removed. Chell’s information had been entered that way. It wasn’t as if GLaDOS could hold up the digital file to a lightbulb and try to make out the blacked-out text. It was unusual. She wasn’t sure if she knew of any other test subjects who had been registered that way.“Unless your last name really is [Redacted],” GLaDOS said, “in which case, that’s certainly a choice. I didn’t know people could even use brackets in their names.” She paused as if giving this actual thought, but Chell doubted she could have been serious.So GLaDOS didn’t know her last name either. Was that a normal thing? Chell didn’t know, and she didn’t know if now was a good time to ask.When Chell still didn’t move, an unspoken moment passed between them. Instead of bringing up the fact that Chell didn’t remember her own last name, GLaDOS instead spoke. “I suppose I’ll check under R for Redacted anyway,” she said, on the off-chance that that was where they filed that sort of thing. GLaDOS moved to the opposite end of the cabinet row. If it wasn’t there (likely) and if Chell didn’t miraculously remember her surname (likely) then this may take a while. It was a good thing neither of them were in a hurry, besides both wanting to track down this file.They both opened up cabinets and went to work.It was unusual, GLaDOS thought, that Chell’s last name had been removed from her file. Most of the time, Aperture at least had made an attempt at keeping accurate records to cover their butts legally. Would Chell’s last name also be censored from her employee file? GLaDOS didn’t have time to ponder this, though, because as Chell and GLaDOS flipped through folders, they came to the same conclusion at the same time: these files were categorized by first name, not last name.GLaDOS went to say something, but Chell slammed closed the A drawers and skipped ahead to C. She opened one drawer, then two, then three, shoving them closed each time as she worked her way down. Then, on the fourth one, she was far enough down alphabetically to be approaching her name. She furiously flipped through files until her hand darted forward like a crane scooping up a fish. She yanked the folder up and barely even straightened before she opened it, the drawer left open beside her.“You found it,” said GLaDOS, but Chell didn’t hear.GLaDOS watched Chell stare at the first few pages. Then, she took a few sheets and shuffled them to the back, then resumed reading. GLaDOS waited for as long as she could stand it before she spoke up. “Let me see some of that.”Chell was in the middle of sticking another sheet into the back and almost jumped when GLaDOS spoke. She glanced around the room, recalculating. Then, she moved to one of the blank desks and slid a piece of paper to the far side of the desk.GLaDOS picked it up. A photograph was paper-clipped to the page. It was more formal than the one from Chell’s locker, with the background plain and the photo only showing from shoulders up. GLaDOS assumed this would have been on her badge and keycard. She was wearing a light buttoned-up shirt and looked older than she did in the intern group photo. Somewhere in her mid to late twenties, she guessed. GLaDOS wasn’t great at guessing ages. However, Chell was noticeably younger in this photo than she was now.She was also wearing glasses. GLaDOS looked from the image back at Chell. The glasses in this photo were similar, but the frames were different. So she’d worked at Aperture long enough to buy a new pair of glasses, at least.GLaDOS took in the info from the remainder of this first sheet. It held basic info on Chell, some hiring notes, and notes on her internship—no details besides that it had been a good experience and they had extended a job offer upon graduation. GLaDOS’s eyes flicked down to her education information. She took in the name of the college, her graduation date, and then her major.She stood up straighter and then stared at Chell. “You had a degree in physics?” Chell glanced up upon hearing this. She gave a half-shrug, and then raised her eyebrows in a way that suggested ‘you know just as much as I do’.“So what did you do here?”Chell grimaced slightly, then took another couple of papers and slid them over to GLaDOS after a brief hesitation. These ones contained a more substantial record of her employment, starting with the internship.
Intern
Research & Development, Test Chamber Elements.GLaDOS knew that place. Like the label said, that was the place that came up with things to add into test chambers. Well, sometimes they came up with new things. Most of the time they salvaged other failed research and tried to repurpose it into something that could be used for testing. Like repulsion gel! That had inspired Aperture to create the department in the first place.Chell reached across the desk and turned on a lamp, angling it to shine on her papers. These glasses had vastly improved her up-close reading, but there was only so much she could do in low-light conditions.GLaDOS moved to the next part of her employment record.
Research Assistant
Research & Development, Test Chamber Elements.Then, a year and a half later, another entry.
Engineer
Research & Development, Test Chamber Elements.Okay. So she’d gotten promoted. That was logical. She was a physicist, after all. It made sense that they’d want to apply her physics knowledge toward engineering test chamber elements. GLaDOS couldn’t say she liked this information, but it was a logical progression.She glanced at Chell, who was leaning forward with one hand propped against the desk. She was looking down through her glasses, intensely focused. The glow from the lamp illuminated her face, and a few wisps of her hair caught the light, outlining it against the dark background.GLaDOS went back to reading. When she got to the job title, though, she stopped abruptly.“You!” she barked, and Chell straightened, a bit startled by the near-shout. GLaDOS glared at her, eyes narrowed. She planted both hands on the desk. “You were a goddamned” —she said, through gritted teeth— “test chamber architect?”Chell’s eyes widened. She glanced toward the door. She took a few steps, but GLaDOS raised a flat hand. “Stay right there,” she said.Chell stopped walking.“We are absolutely talking about this,” said GLaDOS. “You used to design test chambers? And you didn’t bother to inform me of this?”Even though Chell knew she was uncommonly good at testing, she never would have guessed this as a contributing factor. “I…forgot?” Chell signed weakly. She wiped a flat hand across her forehead.GLaDOS didn’t seem convinced. “We could have skipped all of those basic tests! We could have gone directly into the more challenging ones!” What a waste of time! Her time and Chell’s time. When Chell started testing again, they weren’t going to mess around.After another few minutes of ranting, GLaDOS gave a world-weary sigh. “I’m almost afraid to read the rest of this,” she said, but still went back to the employment record.In her role as a test chamber architect, Chell had received several glowing performance reviews, which gave GLaDOS conflicting feelings. A part of her felt understandable pride, but another part just felt irritated. It appeared she had remained in this role for years, which made sense, if she had been as skilled at it as the performance reviews suggested.Eventually, GLaDOS flipped to the next page, eyebrows raising. “Three promotions in one year?” she said. “Someone must have liked whatever you were doing.”Chell fidgeted with the zipper on her newly-rediscovered pullover, zipping it all the way up and burying her chin in it so that the collar nearly came up to her mouth.
Senior Test Architect
Testing DevelopmentThat made sense. It was a slightly more managerial role. Someone in that role was not only responsible for designing test chambers, but for looking over other test chambers designed by their team and giving a seal of approval before sending them up the chain. She had remained in this role for about six months.
Testing Track Architect
Testing DevelopmentThat one was a logical step, too. The next link up the chain. Instead of designing singular testing chambers, this role required designing the overall arc of a testing track. They frequently worked with other departments, such as—GLaDOS broke off, and sighed.Other departments. Such as the Test Chamber Elements department of Research & Development. A department which Chell would have had familiarity with.When coming up with the overall goals for a testing track, a designer often worked with R&D to get some sort of new challenge or obstacle to put test subjects through. Once they had that, then they could work with all of the individual test chamber architects to make sure that there was a clear progression in difficulty from beginning to end. A job like that required maintaining an overall vision, as well as even more management of people.Then, not even four months later, there was a final entry, but with barely any text beneath it.
Director
Testing Development“Director?” GLaDOS said, looking at Chell again. The way she seemed to be melting into her pullover like some sort of gelatinous turtle, she certainly didn’t look like a director of anything, much less someone who could lead a core department of the company.GLaDOS looked at the paper again, and frowned. “Director,” she repeated. “But that would have reported to…” Her eyes met Chell’s, and it was like a jolt visibly went through the woman. Chell blinked a couple of times, shaking her head.“What is it?” GLaDOS said.Chell hesitated. Then, she shook her head. She wasn’t even sure what that had been. A flash of memory, but without enough detail to be useful. Just a feeling. “Nothing,” she signed.GLaDOS looked at her for a moment longer, and then went back to the papers.“You turned it down?” she asked Chell. There were only a few small notes under that job title.
10/28/95 - Offer extended.

10/28/95 - Offer turned down.
“Why would you turn down a promotion?”Chell had a pensive look on her face. She reached across the desk for her clipboard. From what she remembered, test chamber design was a perfect job for her. She was handed down an assignment, independently completed it, then sent it up the chain for approval and made any requested changes. When she was one member of a team, Chell had been able to build positive rapport with her coworkers and to build avenues for communication that worked for them all.When she moved up to senior test architect, that hadn’t changed. She was still working with the same small group of people, with the occasional addition to the team.As soon as she got moved into positions where she was responsible for other people, though, it stopped being enjoyable. Getting shuffled onto the manager track meant she had to interact with more and more people, which meant more and more people outside of her bubble and more and more people who were resistant or straight-up unwilling to accommodate her not verbally speaking.It’s not like she was incapable of communication altogether. It was just that so many of these people weren’t willing to make an effort to just wait a moment and read whatever she wrote down. They claimed it was such an inconvenience, even though Chell was the one constantly trying different avenues of communication with these new people to figure out what worked best for each individual and each individual’s level of patience. And they were the ones that were inconvenienced?I didn’t like those jobs, she wrote.“What do you mean you didn’t like them?” said GLaDOS. “Clearly you were good at them if you were promoted so fast.”While it would have made sense for her to be good at those positions, it didn’t match up with what she remembered. She didn’t remember being particularly good at the last two—in fact, she felt like she hadn’t been able to do a good job at all. All she could remember was how exhausting and demoralizing the experience had been.Chell shook her head. “I was fired,” she signed, then rubbed absently at the back of her neck as she stared down at the folder.“What?” GLaDOS said. The line of logic she had been so carefully piecing together evaporated. She crossed over to the other side of the table and peered over Chell’s shoulder.Chell took a half look at her as she came over, then shifted the paper to the side for GLaDOS.But there wasn’t much to see at all. It was just a single sheet of paper with a single bit of information.
10/29/95 - Employment terminated.
There was plenty of space for notes, but there just wasn’t anything in there. Nothing to say how or why she was fired. Just a date.GLaDOS turned to her. “What did you do?” Her tone was slightly accusing.It was almost like Chell hadn’t heard her, though. She was busy writing down a question.When was my test subject file created? she wrote. Then, she added, The application.The way that she stared at GLaDOS made the robot hesitate before she answered. “October thirtieth,” she said, trailing off. Oh. Oh, no.A sinking feeling entered Chell’s stomach. A timeline was beginning to come into focus, but Chell wasn’t sure it was a timeline she liked.Three days.Three days between being offered a promotion, being fired, and being volunteered as a test subject.Neither of them knew what to say. They exchanged a worried look.What could have possibly happened to shift her from treasured employee to test subject within three days?GLaDOS was feeling a similar sinking feeling. It felt like those moments where she knew something was wrong within one of her systems, but nothing showed up on her diagnostics. Like when the diagnostic system itself was broken.“I wish I knew more,” GLaDOS said, “but it’s like I told you. There is nothing more within my systems about you. It’s like you were never even an employee. It’s like…” she trailed off. “Like you were scrubbed from the system.”They exchanged another look.GLaDOS went back through a few of the papers—all of the other employees mentioned in here had digital records, but there were things within Chell’s folder that didn't exist in their records, either. There were no records of Chell having been in those departments, even (or perhaps especially) when her work intersected with others. There were no records of which test chambers she had designed or which testing tracks she had overseen development over. There were no digital records of those performance reviews, and no records of Chell having been on anyone’s team or having been anyone’s manager.The way at which Chell simply didn’t exist was almost impressive. This hadn’t been a simple oversight. This had been deliberate.After a long moment, Chell thought of something. She rummaged in her pockets, and GLaDOS took a step back to give her space. Then, Chell pulled out a small rectangular piece of paper, and her expression darkened.She looked over the appointment card again.
10/28/95 -

Please meet at 11am to discuss your next steps.
GLaDOS stepped forward until she was nearly side-by-side with Chell, looking over the woman’s shoulder even more intently. “What’s that?”Chell rotated her wrist to give the appointment card a little flourish.That, of course, did not help GLaDOS. Movement plus distance plus small print did not help with readability. “Let me see that,” she said with a hint of impatience. She reached with her outside arm, leaning across them both and setting her other hand on Chell’s lower back to counterbalance. GLaDOS tugged the card out of Chell’s hands—there was a slight resistance—and then pulled it up toward herself. Her other hand still rested absently against Chell.She read the card, then flipped it over. No additional information. Just a standard Aperture Laboratories logo. Black against creamy white. “Whose handwriting is this?” GLaDOS said, pulling the card even closer to her eyes to make sure she got as clear of a photo as possible.She hadn’t been expecting an answer from Chell, but still gave her a moment to potentially respond before speaking again. “Maybe I could put together a handwriting recognition algorithm,” she said. She didn’t have any similar program that she could repurpose for handwriting analysis at the moment, so she’d have to build something from scratch. Well, she did have a half-completed facial recognition algorithm, but she wasn’t sure how much of that could translate to this.“That seems more trouble than it’s worth,” said Caroline, her voice startling GLaDOS slightly. The ghost of a woman had been so quiet that she’d nearly forgotten she was there, watching alongside Chell and GLaDOS.“There’s bound to be a match of some sort,” GLaDOS said. “I have all sorts of document scans.”“A search won’t tell you anything you don’t already know,” said Caroline.“Hold on,” said GLaDOS. She set down the appointment card for a moment and picked up the employment record papers. She leaned closer to the desk, hand pressing a bit further into Chell’s firm back, her other hand spreading out a few papers. When she got to the one she was looking for—the one containing her last job offer and subsequent firing—she set the appointment card next to the notes. She may not have an algorithm set up yet, but she could tell that there was at least one match, right here.“It’s the same handwriting,” she said quietly. When she didn’t see Chell move at all—to move to take a closer look, to nod in agreement, anything—GLaDOS glanced at her.Chell wasn’t looking at the papers. In fact, she wasn’t looking at the desk at all. Her head was turned away, and GLaDOS followed her gaze but saw nothing of visual interest. She returned to looking at Chell’s face.GLaDOS took a few steps back, letting her hand slide away as she tried to decipher what Chell was feeling. Chell took a moment to tuck a loose piece of hair behind her ear, then again, then again, even though the hair had stayed in place the first time.“Are you okay?” she asked.Chell didn’t respond. Instead, she twisted so she was facing further away from GLaDOS.Just like that moment back in the lockers, GLaDOS could tell something was wrong. She just couldn’t tell what it was.In the background, her emotion-recognition program was getting some degree of a match with whatever Chell had been feeling in the employee locker room, but not nearly a 100% match, which left GLaDOS with no additional information than what she could already see. Whatever this was, it didn’t seem to be in line with an expected reaction.Was Chell in some weird and intense sort of denial? Afraid to look at the papers in her file and acknowledge what they meant? This was a lot of new information. It would make sense if Chell was feeling overwhelmed by it all. It was certainly taking up the majority of her attention at the moment. “We can look at this later, if you want.”Chell didn’t respond.“Okay. Something’s wrong,” said GLaDOS. “What is it?”Chell only pinched at the skin on her wrist and arm.She waited. She tried again. “I can’t do anything if I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said.Chell didn’t respond.“Tell me what is wrong,” GLaDOS said, more sternly. Her patience was beginning to wear thin.“Oh, come on,” Caroline said. Her voice was derisive. “You really don’t know?”If GLaDOS had known, she wouldn’t have been asking these questions to begin with. She couldn’t say anything to Caroline verbally at the moment, so she settled for a slightly frustrated noise.When Chell still hadn’t responded, GLaDOS circled around so that she was clearly within the woman’s line of sight. “Look at me and tell me what is wrong.”Finally, Chell glanced at GLaDOS, finding herself unable to maintain even the most brief of eye contact. Yet in this quick glance, GLaDOS was able to see for the first time that Chell’s face was flushed. The AI paused to try to parse out what that meant.“Now do you see it?” said Caroline, but GLaDOS was not any closer to understanding what had happened.After GLaDOS still didn’t get it, Caroline said, “You touched her back.”So?GLaDOS didn’t see how that was any different than setting her hand on Chell’s shoulder or her arm.As if sensing GLaDOS’s confusion, Caroline continued. “That would be intimate even within an established relationship. She’s flustered. Just look at her.”Could that be it?No. That couldn’t be it. That didn’t make sense.Still, Caroline’s statements usually had a shred of truth to them—okay, a lot of truth to them—so she decided to ask Chell anyway. GLaDOS said, “Is it because I touched your back?”Chell felt a zip of electricity move through her, making her react visually in a way that she couldn’t control. She could feel her face start burning even more, to the point where she would have preferred an intense sunburn than whatever was going on there right now.“Told you,” said Caroline, with a hint of smugness.Really? That was it? That was the problem? Not any of this other information that had been recently uncovered?“But that’s silly,” GLaDOS said. She still didn’t understand how that had been any different than Chell leaning back against the robot’s legs as she had braided her hair. “It was just a hand. It’s not like it hurt you. In fact, you could even argue that it was helping you.”Chell turned her face away, and took a few urgent steps toward the door, but GLaDOS sidestepped and blocked the path. Chell stopped short.“You’re not letting me explain,” said GLaDOS, her frustration growing. “It’s well-documented that a lack of touch can lead to psychological distress in humans, which you have already been experiencing—“Chell took another step, and GLaDOS parried. Why wouldn’t Chell just listen to her? “I don’t understand how this is a problem. I was trying to help you.”Chell finally looked directly at her, distress clear in her face. She raised a hand, snapping her first two fingers against her thumb. “NO.”“But—“But Chell didn’t want a discussion. She wanted to leave. Right now. She was going to leave. Right now. Chell took another few steps toward the door, this time not shying away when GLaDOS moved to block. Instead, she shoved the robot to the side.GLaDOS stumbled, catching herself and recalibrating, and also letting her mind recalibrate as Chell disappeared through the door.“Remember what I told you about blocking exits?” said Caroline, which naturally pissed off GLaDOS.“Oh, shut up,” she hissed, even as she realized Caroline had a point. She had hardly noticed she had been blocking the exit—she had just wanted to get Chell to stop being unreasonable and to calm down. An agitated Chell represented a potential danger to herself and to the facility. This was just an attempt to mitigate that danger. An attempt at risk management.Plus, she hadn’t anticipated that Chell could actually push her out of the way. She thought she was more solid than that.GLaDOS watched internally on her map as the blip that represented Chell moved farther away. It would probably be best to just let her go do whatever it was she did to cool down. They could figure this out later. Once they were both willing to talk about it.Chell moved away from the records room at a clipped pace. She wasn’t running (at least not right now, because she felt too dizzy) but she still wanted to put some distance between herself and the records room.When the dizzy feeling seemed to get worse rather than better, she paused to lean against a wall. This did not cause the feelings of being dizzy to go away. In fact, an entire wave of more intense lightheadedness hit her as she thought about what had just happened.The problem hadn’t been that GLaDOS touched her back. Though that would normally be a huge problem, in this case that wasn’t the main issue. The problem was that Chell had liked it.It didn’t make sense. She didn’t like touch. Like, at all. Ever.The only times she ever liked it was around people she felt comfortable with—and even then, the list was incredibly exclusive. Not just any friend or family member made the cut. And with those that did join that exclusive club, it was incredibly specific as to what type of touch she would accept and from whom.There was only one exception, and that was—Chell felt a flush of embarrassment—romantic involvement.No. It couldn’t be this. Not again. That moment after the turret was supposed to have been a fluke, some momentary weakness caused by the adrenaline rush of GLaDOS pushing her out of the way of a perceived danger and landing on top of her. A physiological misfire. It was not supposed to show up again. Not like this.This was silly. This was dumb. She should not be feeling this way. Not at all. Her current level of embarrassment almost felt physically painful.Maybe this was just happening because GLaDOS had caught her by surprise. Again. Like with the turret. Maybe she was confusing being surprised with a feeling of…She extinguished her burning face in her hands.Okay, clearly there was something wrong with her, if she was potentially feeling…positively…about what had just happened. About GLaDOS.But was that really a bad thing?The thought came out before Chell could squash it.Uh, yes, this was absolutely a bad thing. Nothing good could come of feeling more at ease around GLaDOS. Nothing at all. Even if GLaDOS had been making genuine attempts to connect. Even if GLaDOS had been making genuine attempts to understand how Chell’s perspective as a human differed from GLaDOS’s perspective as a robot.None of these attempts changed, or would ever change, their history.While yes, these attempts had helped to smooth out some of their mutual animosity, it didn’t change that GLaDOS was GLaDOS and Chell was Chell. They would always be diametrically opposed in one way or another—like two negative sides of two magnets. Just because GLaDOS was making that attempt at being more palatable, that didn’t mean that Chell liked her. Certainly not in that way. Acting like that was honestly the minimum that GLaDOS could do.Except Chell knew it wasn’t. GLaDOS didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want. Relations could be a lot more hostile between them, and Chell knew that.Which meant that these attempts had been things that GLaDOS wanted to do.This information was not helping her cool down at all.And the way that GLaDOS had responded—wanting to actually understand why Chell was upset—that was new too. It had happened twice in one day now. Even if the robot ended up being dismissive while also trying to absolve herself of any blame, this wasn’t the GLaDOS who had claimed to not care about whatever Chell was feeling.The way that GLaDOS had been interacting lately, talking to her more, really looking at her—it was like she was trying to better understand what made Chell tick in the same way that Chell tried to understand what made GLaDOS tick. Trying to build up a mental model, a file on everything they knew about one another.A file.Chell felt her stomach drop even further. She lurched from her position leaning against the wall.Her file!She turned her head from side to side, orienting herself in space before she ran toward the records room.She needed to grab it before—A sweaty feeling crept up in her as she saw GLaDOS, her back to the doorway, with the open file in her hands.Chell froze.It was too late.Her one secret—the one thing that she’d wanted to keep away from GLaDOS at all costs—was laid bare in the AI’s hands. Chell wanted to dissolve into the floor. Or be unconscious. Or both. Anything to get out of this moment.She twisted her wrists in circles, mentally bracing herself for the inevitable barrage of insults. This was live ammo, and GLaDOS could really do some damage. And not just with jokes.Yet GLaDOS didn’t seem awash in a cruel delight. She leaned forward as she took in the papers, shuffling between the same three or four sheets. Then, she straightened, and said something that surprised Chell.“I cannot believe I didn’t see this before,” GLaDOS said to herself, almost under her breath. “This makes so much sense.” Her voice sounded almost relieved, like there had been some puzzle plaguing her and she’d just found the solution.Chell must have shifted or made some unintentional sound of surprise, because GLaDOS turned to look at her in the doorway. That urge to bolt out of the room rose up again, but her feet felt bolted to the floor. She couldn’t even look in the robot’s general direction.Then, GLaDOS said something else that surprised Chell.“Why didn’t you tell me?”The question was so unexpected that it jolted Chell out of her fear. Her gaze jumped up and she met the robot’s gaze, her confusion evident.From her end, GLaDOS could tell that Chell was experiencing a strong emotion. It was practically pulsing through her. But what emotion was it? Was she feeling embarrassed again? She’d try that one. It was as good a place to start as any. She said, “I don’t see why you didn’t tell me. A neurological divergence is just that—a neurological divergence. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said, voice oddly calm. “Certainly nothing worth hiding.”Chell studied the AI. The intensity of her scrutiny was so strong enough that GLaDOS wanted to look away. She was searching GLaDOS’s face for something, and it was something she wasn’t finding.“You don’t believe me,” GLaDOS said, realization dawning upon her. Their eyes met for a moment.Chell moved her head in the slightest of affirmations. Of course she didn’t believe her! It wasn’t that Chell was ashamed or embarrassed about being autistic. That wasn’t a problem. The problem was what someone like GLaDOS could do with that information. She could easily make Chell’s existence a living hell.“I’m not going to—“ GLaDOS broke off. She wasn’t going to make fun of Chell about it, if that was what Chell was worried about. Not about this. But she couldn’t bring herself to fully say it. “There’s nothing wrong with it. I just—“ She wasn’t even sure what she wanted to say. The AI took a moment to collect herself. Chell’s expression remained the same.“You know that I was based on a human, right?” said GLaDOS, disdain creeping into her voice. As much as she hated to admit it—and she did hate to admit it—she wasn’t fully an artificial intelligence.Chell gave another nod, and GLaDOS continued. “When the scientists were still around, they didn’t fully understand that I wasn’t just a digital version of a human,” she said. “Sure, they knew that I was—technically—a computer, and they expected me to perform the duties of one.” GLaDOS leaned against the desk, half-sitting on it. “But when it came to interacting with me day-to-day…they expected me to behave like a human. Talk like one. Emote like one. And that is not me,” she said. Then, she added, a bit more quietly, “My brain just doesn’t work like that. It…diverged from their expectations.” She paused, and the weight of her words began to pile onto Chell’s heart.Chell studied her a bit longer, turning over those words in her head. GLaDOS wasn’t outright saying it, but the message was right there, like a reflection in a pond.
Our brains both work in ways other people don’t understand.
Chell felt a twinge of something, and that something tugged her back into the room. She slid down against the wall and onto the floor, resting her back against it and letting her legs stick out in front of her. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.Caroline took the break in conversation to speak up. “Hold on, I need to read up on all of this,” she said.GLaDOS felt a tiny request ping her system, sort of like if someone had tapped on a window with a single finger. She examined it. A simple view-only request for access to her database of knowledge.“I’m going to need to know more about this if you want me to keep helping you,” Caroline explained, but GLaDOS had already granted a temporary, time-boxed access. Fifteen minutes. That should give her enough time to get a basic knowledge base on the subject and related subjects. She granted the request and went back to focusing on her conversation with Chell.“This whole time, I thought I was just dealing with…” GLaDOS trailed off, trying to think of the best way to phrase it. She gave a half wiggle of her hand as she thought. “Perhaps some selective mutism at best, but I was always under the impression that you were making some misguided point out of not speaking to me.”Chell shrugged without opening her eyes. Perhaps that hadn’t been the intent originally, but seeing GLaDOS’s frustration at Chell’s lack of verbal response had certainly pushed her into not utilizing any forms of communication.“It never crossed my mind that you just…didn’t speak. That you weren’t just trying to irritate me.”Chell gave another tiny shrug. Again, it was a fortunate side effect.“Of course, that didn’t make as much sense after you came back,” said GLaDOS. “But this—for you” —GLaDOS leaned forward now, toward Chell, though one hand still pressed against the edge of the desk— “it just makes so much sense.” She made a small gesticulation with her hand. She loved being able to gesticulate. “All of it.”Chell didn’t respond.They fell into a contemplative quiet, until GLaDOS pushed off from the desk. She came over to the wall that Chell was sitting against, and then joined her, sitting a few feet away from her. The robot bent her legs, letting her arms loosely drape across her knees. She didn’t say anything, instead staring across the room at the haphazard filing cabinets.After a few moments, still staring straight ahead, GLaDOS said, “I’m going to have to completely rebuild my body language dictionary for you, you know.”Chell opened her eyes just long enough to side-eye the robot. Her what?“You see, the one I’ve been going off of is from a standard database of human body language and emotional expression. I’ve been tweaking it here and there to better match what I think you’re feeling, but…” she said. She hesitated slightly. “But I now know my initial data was flawed. Some of my assessments in the past may have been…inaccurate.” In fact, she was already gearing up to sift through footage to reexamine through the lens of this new contextual information. “I may need your help, though,” she said.Chell gave her another sideways look, this time a slight question in her eyebrows.“I need to refine the data set if I want to be accurate in the future. That may mean getting you to confirm or deny my assessments of your emotions, from times we’ve talked before.”Chell gave a slight grimace. That could easily become awkward or even painful to go through.“Don’t worry, I can figure out the majority of what you’re feeling,” GLaDOS said. But then she frowned. “It’s just when you’re feeling multiple things that my accuracy drops.”Chell almost wanted to say that this wasn’t a problem unique to GLaDOS. Plenty of people had trouble identifying emotions in others, especially when they started to compound.GLaDOS leaned toward her knees slightly. Then, she abruptly sat up straighter. “Oh, my god,” she said, but didn't look at Chell. Instead, she bent forward and set her forehead on her knees and closed her eyes. The beginning of her foray into the footage had already flagged two interactions.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

“Look at me and tell me what is wrong.”
GLaDOS briefly gave into the urge to hide her head under her arms. This feeling was new to her: mortification.She couldn’t say she liked it. In fact, it was one of her least favorite feelings she’d experienced so far. Never before had she wished she could be temporarily disassembled like Blue and Orange.Then, she took a moment to collect herself, trying to not pay too much attention to the burn of Chell’s curiosity. She cautiously shifted back upright. “I,” she started, then stopped. She pursed her lips. She tried again. “Forget about what I’ve said before. About eye contact. I didn’t know.”There was a pause, and she felt the need to jump in and to explain herself, even if she felt like she was only making things worse. “I thought you were being disrespectful. Or you were hiding something from me. Or both. And sure, maybe it’s both of those things too,” GLaDOS said. “I just wanted to be sure that you were listening to me. Really listening to me.” Then, more quietly, she said, “That probably just made things worse.”Some of the tension visibly left Chell. She still wasn’t feeling like talking, but she let out a long exhale.They sat for a bit longer until GLaDOS felt the raw sting of her mortification fade to an acceptable level. Then, as she shifted and started to rise to her feet, she felt a hand grab her jacket sleeve. The robot paused for a moment, looking down at Chell’s hand the way one might look at a particularly irritating bug. “Yes?” she said. “What is it?”The hand pulled on the sleeve, and GLaDOS looked over at Chell. At first, she wondered if Chell was attempting to use the android to pull herself upright, but that didn’t seem to be the case—she had made no motion to rise, and was still staring across the room with her head turned. This had been a distinct downward tug.“Okay,” GLaDOS said. That didn’t clear things up, but GLaDOS sat down anyway. “There. I’m sitting.” This time, she sat a bit closer. Close enough for Chell to get a better grasp on the fabric. After GLaDOS sat down, Chell curled her hand up in the fabric, bunching her fingers together. And then she just…held it.GLaDOS waited to see if Chell was going to give her any cues on what she, the AI, should be doing right now,but Chell didn’t move. She hung on to the jacket sleeve as if it was a lifeline—a tether to ground herself in the world.GLaDOS didn’t understand it. But, as she sat there in the quiet, she realized that she didn’t need to understand it. Whatever this was, she could see it was helping Chell. The rigid tension that had frozen the woman in place earlier had begun to melt away like steam in the sun. If all it took for that to happen was to let Chell cling to her sleeve like a [insert animal here], then so be it. It was certainly easier than trying to navigate the emotional minefield that made up their standard conversations.GLaDOS kept an eye on her out of the corner of her eye, noting that even though Chell wasn’t looking at her directly, she was also keeping an eye on the robot. The woman had her head tilted more out toward the filing cabinets, chin propped up by her other hand.Eventually GLaDOS felt the hand bunched up in her sleeve relax, the fabric beginning to relax as well. There were bound to be wrinkles, but she wasn’t concerned at the moment. Chell’s hand shifted, smoothing out and lingering on the robot’s upper arm. Then, it shifted again. This time it slid down the jacket sleeve and GLaDOS thought she would finally be released from her newfound duty as Chell’s emotional support android, but then she felt the hand rest on top of her own.GLaDOS opened her own reflexively (though it had already been slightly open), and Chell’s hand curled around the outside of it. The woman still wasn’t looking at the robot, but she gave the hand a cautious squeeze. It was light. Perhaps something GLaDOS wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been paying attention.GLaDOS opened her hand more, the movement making Chell nearly pull away before realizing the unspoken invitation. A wave of warm emotion rose in her as she slipped her hand into the robot’s smooth, steady one.After a long moment, Chell pulled away, bringing in her legs and pushing her hands against the ground as she prepared to rise her feet.“Are you ready to go now?” said GLaDOS.When Chell continued to begin pushing herself upright, the robot stood, much faster than a person could hope to stand. She extended a hand, fully expecting for Chell to ignore the offer of help like she had in the past.And then, Chell did something that surprised her: she reached out and took GLaDOS’s hand.And then, as Chell held on tightly and used the robot’s help to pull herself to her feet, GLaDOS did something that surprised her: she gave Chell’s hand a cautious squeeze back.

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Chell blinked as the world drifted back into focus. It was morning, and she was back in her relaxation vault, back at her bed, but not in her bed, just sprawled diagonally across the bottom corner. She had been so drained last night that she had flopped down face-first and buried her face under a loose blanket. And, apparently, fell asleep that way.Despite the exhaustion of that evening, though, her thoughts and emotions had run rampant. The most prominent emotion, of course, being that warm glow. Even after they had left the records room—and even after they had parted for the night—the feeling had lingered in her body. It had pulsed in her palm and then traced its way up her arm, and then laced itself into her heart. A gentle warmth. One that she welcomed. Like resting a hand in a sleepy beam of sunlight. As Chell had meandered back to her vault, cradling that feeling to her chest, she had felt her mind shifting toward an analytical space—one that would attempt to scrutinize this feeling and the situation leading up to it. But she had halted that transition, setting up a hard-light bridge in her brain to block her thoughts from feelings. This felt good. Chell couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so much peace in her heart. So she carried it, holding on to that warmth for as long as she could, letting it radiate all the way back to her vault. But, eventually, that mental hard-light bridge faded out. Another sick feeling swept in as she thought about her newly-uncovered work history. At first, she had been thrilled to learn the work she had done had been so fitting for her. Not only that, it proved to be invaluable to her survival. Yet the more she contemplated it, the more she sank into a feeling that something was wrong, the subtle and unsteady feeling rising like the swaying of a ship. It took her a while to puzzle out what she felt so worried about, but then it became as clear as a focused laser. How could she have ever done something as unethical as designing test chambers?After being a test subject, she knew how deadly they were. So many people never made it out of there alive. Most people never made it out of there alive. Chell had to have known that as an employee. There was no way she couldn’t have known it. Yet she had designed test chambers for years. Her skill at it had risen high enough to warrant promotions—major ones. Promotions that would have enabled her to put even more lives in danger. Whenever she thought back to those jobs, though, her memories seemed overwhelmingly positive. It had been a lifetime since she had worked for Aperture. Yet Chell’s values couldn’t have been that different back then. She couldn’t have been morally bankrupt enough to be so flippant about danger, or to stop caring about human life. Something didn’t add up. Chell felt as if she’d been unknowingly juggling the key details of her life, tossing them up in a careful rhythm, but at some point she had dropped a few pieces and it wasn’t until now she had noticed their absence. Whatever they were, these details had to be an essential piece of the puzzle. She hoped they were an essential piece. She wasn’t sure what she would do otherwise.
Good people don’t end up here.
Chell’s gut twisted. Yet as much as she tossed and turned and stared up at the speckled ceiling, she couldn’t make that crucial connection. Now, it was morning. Chell shifted groggily, considering going back to sleep before she thought better of it. GLaDOS would probably drop a bucket of cold water on her head or something. An impromptu shower. Shower. That sounded wonderful, actually. A warm, luxurious shower. When had she last taken a shower? Chell rolled out of bed—still in yesterday’s clothes—and shuffled to her closet, taking a moment to stretch and yawn. As she began to pull at the mirrored closet doors, the right one stuck. She glanced down for the source of the obstruction, and saw her lumpy duffel bag in front of it. Oh, right! Her bag of new books! It was still zipped up, exactly as she’d left it when she had dropped it there last night and resolved to deal with it later. Chell bent to drag it away from the closet door and toward her table, then halted abruptly. Oh. Shit. That bag didn’t just contain books. She had forgotten about her extra cargo, the gun stashed in the folds of a sweater. While initially walking to the records room, Chell had thought about dropping off the duffel bag at her study upon their return trip. It made sense, after all, since that’s where she had an actual bookshelf. An empty bookshelf. Not an overflowing nightstand. Plus, there weren’t any cameras in her study! There wasn’t even a functioning speaker in there. It could have been a perfect hiding place. But on her way back, she had forgotten, her mind too occupied by the last events of the evening. Chell’s face paled. Shit. Shit! She had not thought this whole thing through. Not in the slightest. When she had made that split second decision in the locker room, she hadn’t thought ahead on where to hide the gun, and that was coming back to bite her in the ass. What was she supposed to do now? There may not have been cameras in her study, but there were definitely cameras here in the vault. She couldn’t unfold this sweatshirt and still manage to conceal this handheld weapon. She also couldn’t just leave it folded inside of the sweater and leave that sweater on her closet floor—she had made a big show out of wanting this thing. So how could she hide this? She couldn’t remember the camera angles off the top of her head, and therefore couldn’t attempt to find a blind spot. Even if she had remembered, the chance of being seen was too risky. Her vault was too risky. The only place nearby without cameras was…Chell glanced at the ajar bathroom door. Oh. Yeah. That could work. Maybe. Slowly and methodically, she gathered a set of clean clothes, sifting through her dresser for clean underwear and her closet for a fresh shirt and pants. Then, after folding and stacking those clothes nicely, she unzipped the duffel bag and picked up the slightly disheveled sweatshirt, gingerly setting it on top. Then, she grabbed the pile, wrapping her arms around it as she entered the bathroom. She was going to take a shower, that was all. A simple shower. Nothing out of the ordinary. Definitely something that regular humans did all the time. Not suspicious in the slightest. Just a shower.Chell deposited the stack on the counter and then glanced around once more before exiting the bathroom. She came back with her boom box and a few cassette tapes she’d grabbed at random, then locked the door. After squinting at a track list printed in tiny print, she decided on the B side of one tape. Music began to fill the air and Chell turned up the volume, a few ticks higher than she was normally comfortable with. She flipped on the overhead fan, and then, after waiting approximately thirty seconds, she turned on the shower. She did not get in. Instead, Chell opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a towel, spreading it out on the counter. She lifted the sweatshirt and warily set it on top of that towel. Then, she carefully unfolded it, like a treasured present. A present that undoubtedly held a handgun.The leather of the holster looked as she had imagined: a nondescript leather holster, though the surface of it looked dried-out and cracked from a lack of care. Chell double-checked that the door was closed and locked before she opened the holster and slid out what was undeniably a pistol.The weight of it caught her slightly off-guard. It wasn’t nearly as heavy as a portal gun of course, but it felt much more dense than she had anticipated. Chell gingerly set it on the towel and stepped away, assuming (as with all guns) that it was loaded.The metal gleamed in a way that made Chell want to flip off the lightswitch. An irrational feeling, she knew. As if it was dangerous to even look at it. The metal of the handgun wasn’t even particularly shiny—it was one of those dull, dark grays that wasn’t meant to stand out. But there was something about actually seeing it, out here in the light of the day, that made her want to flip off the lights and close her eyes and pretend it wasn’t there. After a few moments of staring, she used two fingers to cautiously flip it over, much unlike flipping a pancake. She kept her fingers far, far away from the trigger. It was there, on that other side, that she saw what must be the safety. A bit of relief pulsed through her. Okay. So there was a safety. She knew that would have probably been the case, yet seeing it still gave her a slight relief. Not that there was anything safe about this entire situation.Chell glanced up, and saw her mirror had grown foggy. Part of her knew she needed to check to see if it was loaded (highly probable). The thing might be empty, for all she knew. She may have smuggled in a useless gun.She couldn’t tell if that thought made her more nervous or relieved. Possessing this thing also meant she needed to know how to load and unload it. Not that she had any extra bullets lying around. One thing she did know though was that she would not bring this weapon into play unless absolutely necessary. But, if she ever needed to, she wanted to be absolutely sure it would be loaded. Chell leaned her back against the wall, the steam pressing a dizzy feeling into her head. As much as she needed to learn more about this, enough time had elapsed for her “shower”. If she took too much longer, it might draw attention, and she did not want any scrutiny right now. She left the water running for the moment, though.Chell slipped the pistol back into the holster and then folded the towel around it, still making sure that it was pointed away from her. She left it on the counter while she pulled out several more towels from beneath the sink, stacking them in piles around her. Then, she delicately picked up the bundled gun, setting it as far back in the cupboard as she could manage, and then began to stack folded towels on top of it. Chell added more towels on top of it, beside it, and in front of it, until it was thoroughly buried by towels. Chell was suddenly thankful for her gratuitous stash of luxury towels. It had felt silly at the time to take so many from the apartments (did one person really need this many towels?) but it didn’t seem so silly now. Maybe she would go find another few towels to add to the stash. Later. Just in case. The cupboard squeaked as she closed it, and Chell reflexively glanced at the door, listening for a moment. When nothing happened, Chell undressed and stepped into the shower. She didn’t stay long—just enough to get her hair completely wet. Even during that short period, though, her mind raced. What had she even been thinking, grabbing that thing? It was a weapon. A deadly one. It had been an impulsive decision, and not one that she could undo. The thought of it all made her dizzy, to the point where she pressed one hand against the shower wall and turned off the water. She waited for a moment for the wobbly feeling to subside before toweling dry. She had been enjoying an increased level of privacy and autonomy lately. But if GLaDOS ever discovered this, that trust would be gone before she could blink. At best. Chell felt another sick feeling pulse through her as she followed that thought. Just having this gun in her possession—even if she never intended to use it—opened her up to a buffet of consequences. She had felt a faint, dull awareness of potential ramifications when she had grabbed the gun, but Chell hadn’t had time in that moment to consider the full spread of potential consequences. Chell turned down the music by three ticks. Then, she sat on the closed toilet seat, combing her fingers through her wet hair. It had been an impulsive and risky decision, yes, but one that made sense. Even with the increased risk, possessing the gun put her at a higher level of defense. It gave her a better shot at truly defending herself, if the moment ever came. She hoped she would never, ever have to use it. After Chell finished drying off, she went to her clean clothes and flipped over the oversized sweatshirt. She held it up. A deep sigh emanated from her chest. Against the splash of a camo background, there was a white silhouette of a male deer. Stylized text underneath it read BUCKED UP. Oh, Chell was never going to hear the end of this one. But she had to wear it. At least once or twice. Enough to sell the point that she had wanted this sweater. Really wanted that sweater. Later, she could make up some reason about it not being what she had hoped for, like the tag was too itchy, or the fabric was too coarse. Something like that. Then, she would stuff it into the back of her closet and hopefully never wear it again. With another sigh Chell begrudgingly slipped it over her head, noting that the sleeves were at least six inches too long. She began to roll them up.What had she gotten herself into?

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chapter 22: Impact Parameter“Black Mesa did what?”Chell nodded earnestly. She mimed an explosion, letting her arms expand in a vast circle. She didn’t know much about the actual resonance cascade (besides what she’d overheard) but what she did know was that the Combine’s current occupation of Earth could be traced directly back to Black Mesa.“I mean, I knew they were second-rate, but really? They’re the ones that caused it?”Chell nodded again, a bit more grimly.GLaDOS made a frustrated noise and walked a lap around the observation room. The one that they were in—above an active co-op chamber—was large for an observation room and had room for a table, but that was it.Chell stood next to the window, leaning against the wall as she looked down at the chamber. A rolled-up piece of large paper, secured with a rubber band, leaned against the wall as well.“Of course they would. If anyone could mess up that badly, it would be them,” GLaDOS said, at a volume that would suggest speaking under her breath. “This wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t trying so desperately to keep up with us.” She paused, glancing over. “What model were they using?”Chell lowered her eyebrows. Model?“Long distance teleportation model,” she said, as if that clarified things.The confusion must have been evident on Chell’s face. “Oh, come on,” GLaDOS said. “I thought you were a physicist.”“Not that kind!” Chell emphasized.“You should at least know your basic teleportation models.”“I worked here,” she signed, moving her upturned palms in circles, as if GLaDOS had forgotten this fact.“Yes. Here. At Aperture Science. Designing test chambers. For use with a teleportation device.”“I don’t know how it works,” Chell signed.“Neither did Black Mesa, apparently,” GLaDOS said. “How did they even mess up so badly that they allowed for that kind of long-distance teleportation? I mean, even we were able to do that correctly. Once.” When Chell gave her a puzzled look, she clarified, “Well, we succeeded in teleporting it out. It was just getting the boat back here where we ran into trouble.”Boat?Chell’s confused look did not dissipate. This information was only making her feel more lost than before, so she decided to let GLaDOS keep going, diving into the merits and flaws of different teleportation models as well as Aperture’s history of experimentation with them. Chell half-listened, paying more attention to the cadence and tone of her voice rather than the content of her sentences.As she half-listened, she thought about the robot’s voice in general. She had noticed recently that, over time, that voice had trended back toward the more robotic voice that Chell was used to. It had been so gradual that she hadn’t noticed until moments like now. It made sense—even though the more human-sounding voice had helped Chell avoid some instant panic reactions, it still had made her uncomfortable in a different way. Easing back into her regular voice made sense, especially as Chell began to move past some of that instant dread.The only time, at the moment, where she still felt that involuntary flash of adrenaline was whenever she heard the voice over the loudspeaker in a large, echoey space. Not only did it remind her of testing, but it doubly reminded her of the Combine OverWatch voice that had bounced around the city like a persistent hum.The first time she’d heard it, she’d nearly frozen in her steps, wondering if—somehow—the robot was there.She tuned in for a moment.“—probably stole our Calabi-Yau model too while they were at it—“She tuned out again, making a note to bring this up if she ever needed to occupy GLaDOS’s attention. Sort of like how she had distracted the co-op bots with a highlighter. Well. A lot like she had distracted them with a highlighter. She was curious to see how long GLaDOS would go before she ran out of her highlighter fluid.She turned her head, shifting her attention down to the co-op bots. They were already midway through the testing track, but were running into problems with this chamber in particular, which relied on synthesizing the information so carefully taught in previous chambers.For some reason that Chell could not imagine at all, they were having difficulties placing hard light bridges while being flung through the air at high speeds. They kept either missing the shot, smacking into the opposite wall, or falling into acid, or all of the above. Chell had lost track of how many times they had been reassembled in the last hour alone. It wasn’t even particularly challenging as far as puzzles went. It was primarily a timing and dexterity issue.She watched as P-body set up an endless fall loop for ATLAS, and how ATLAS took another stroll to the edge of the acid pit in case there were additional portal-friendly surfaces that they had somehow missed. A few chimes from P-body brought its attention back. The blue bot made a couple of warbling chirps, gesturing out to the deadly goo, then turned back to its inspection. P-body’s chirps became more demanding as it gestured toward the loop.This was only the first section of this particular chamber, too. They were going to be here a while.When ATLAS didn’t return, P-body bounced on its feet and looked around the chamber. When it spotted Chell in the window, it gave a (thankfully muffled) robotic shriek and jumped up and down, gesturing to ATLAS. When ATLAS didn’t look fast enough, P-body used the ping tool. Then used it three more times, until the blue bot also spotted Chell and bounded over close to P-body.Chell raised her hand and gave a small wave.The bots exchanged a look. ATLAS gave a small, jerky wave in return, while P-body lifted its three-fingered hand and—to Chell’s mortification—folded in its two other fingers and enthusiastically flipped Chell the bird.Suddenly this thing she had impulsively taught the bots as a joke was feeling a lot less funny. She couldn’t help but shoot a glance over her shoulder at GLaDOS, who was still talking.“—not even surprised anymore that Black Mesa was behind a worldwide apocalyptic event,” GLaDOS said, waving her clipboard in the air.Chell twisted back to the bots and waved her arms diagonally across her chest in an ‘abort mission right now’ wave.Thankfully, the bots saw her more animated wave and matched that energy, shifting into two-armed waves from both of them. Chell felt a bead of sweat on the back of her neck.Meanwhile, GLaDOS began to wind down from her rant. She was just about to shoot off one final barb directed at Black Mesa when she glanced at Chell and felt an emotion spring up, one strong enough to fizzle out the tail end of her rant. She trailed off mid-sentence.There was just something about seeing Chell there, against the diffused light of the test chamber, that ensnared her attention. The way that she was so casually leaning against the wall, arms folded loosely as she watched the bots below—it brought up a strong emotion inside of GLaDOS, as if this soft light had somehow smoothed out her own hard edges, if only for this moment.It wasn’t just the atmospheric lighting.It was the way that Chell looked almost relaxed.It was the way that, despite seeming laid back, she also intently watched the co-op bots, eyes tracking like a leopard.It was the way that she had trailed GLaDOS through the past three observation rooms—something Chell would not have been interested in before rediscovering her history with Aperture.But now Chell was here, in the observation room, by her own choice, and GLaDOS could almost feel those intense gears of Chell’s mind twist as she methodically broke apart these chambers in her mind, disassembling it into their bare components.And right now, they were both here. They were both here and both working on testing things—together. By their own choice. GLaDOS certainly hadn’t asked Chell to do this—Chell had done it all on her own. And it was good.It wasn’t just the fact that Chell was in the observation room, GLaDOS realized. It was the fact that they were there together.Together.That was something GLaDOS was getting used to. Though they often kept to themselves, something had shifted in the weeks since that evening in the records room. They ended up in the same places together, more often. Sometimes by accident, but mostly by choice.Chell had become even more communicative, and GLaDOS was building a working knowledge of the various taps on the robot’s shoulders and arms and what they meant, and how Chell communicated levels of urgency and tone based on how many times she tapped to get her attention, how fast those were, how much of her hand she used (a single light finger on the top of the shoulder versus a full palm on the side of her arm) or if Chell held on to her arm for a moment afterward. There was so much embedded in the ways Chell spoke, and so much of it had been opened up by GLaDOS simply allowing the woman to touch her arm when necessary.And that was just one example. Even more could be gleaned from her expressions, which GLaDOS had realized could contain whole thoughts and sentences rather than just the manifestation of an emotion. Reduced levels of stress overall had allowed GLaDOS to spend more time cataloging these expressions and micro-expressions and how they worked in tandem with every other avenue of communication that Chell employed.The AI was getting a better understanding of not only what Chell was feeling, but what she meant, even when no words were exchanged at all. It often required for GLaDOS to state out loud the question that she thought was being asked, so Chell could correct her if she was way off—and for GLaDOS to demonstrate she understood some of what was being asked of her. She was trying.Overall, though, even when her interpretations were not fully accurate—which was frequent—Chell didn’t seem to mind clarifying. In fact, she almost seemed happy to clarify.Sometimes, GLaDOS noted, she had even seen Chell smile.Like now. It was a suggestion of a smile, but she could still see it in her eyes—her infinitely complex and expressive eyes—as Chell looked over her shoulder at GLaDOS. A split-second later, Chell’s eyebrows shifted, asking a question, and GLaDOS realized that she had been staring.GLaDOS broke eye contact and looked away, her gaze instead catching on a tube of rolled-up paper propped against the wall beside Chell. “What’s that?”Chell glanced down at the paper, considering something for a moment before picking it up. Then, she held it out, offering it to the AI with an expression that GLaDOS took to mean ‘go ahead, take it’.GLaDOS’s look was still slightly suspicious, lingering on Chell for a moment before curiosity got the better of her and she grabbed the tube, rolling off the rubber band as she took it over to the table.The edges of the drafting paper curled as GLaDOS tried to lay it out, so she set down her clipboard near the top, and then pressed one hand against the left edge and used her other hand to start unrolling it to the right.After an inefficient roll or two, Chell came over and placed two palms down on the left edge of the paper, one on either side of the robot’s hand.GLaDOS hesitated, focused on Chell’s hands for a moment—those careful hands that had so gently touched her own, radiating warmth so much so that the residual heat had lingered long after Chell had pulled away. Then, she lifted her own hand and continued to unroll, the process going much smoother now. The offer of Chell’s help had distracted her, and she didn’t fully comprehend what she was looking at until the paper was fully unrolled.And then it had her full attention.GLaDOS was momentarily speechless as she began to scan the document in front of her. Thoughts were darting in, but fragmented, like a glitch that was not a glitch, and it was like she couldn’t say anything at all.“Is this…?” she eventually said, not even needing to finish the question before Chell nodded.It was a hand-drawn design for a cooperative testing initiative test chamber.“This is…” GLaDOS hesitated. “You made this?” She had to ask, just in case it was something that she had found stashed behind a desk somewhere.Chell, who had been intently studying her the entire time, gave a nod.GLaDOS pressed a hand to her mouth as she continued to inspect the plans. It was good. Really good. Better than anything she had thought Chell was capable of designing, despite knowing her decorated history in design.Not only would this test be a mental and physical challenge for the bots, but it would also challenge their abilities to communicate —especially communicating complex information within a short period of time—which was something GLaDOS had yet to fully explore.Had Chell noticed that?And GLaDOS looked over at Chell, and really looked at her, and she was struck once again by the overwhelming beam of pride that she’d felt while seeing Chell illuminated by the backdrop of the chamber, except this time it was as if that light glowed from within Chell.GLaDOS was not a robot that was capable of tears—nor did she ever want to be capable of tears. Her understanding of the physiological mechanism was that it was born out of an abrupt and intense shift in emotion, or out of an excess of emotion. She never understood it before—never understood why the human body needed to expel emotion in such a literal and messy way.Not until now, when she was experiencing an abrupt excess of a mess of positive emotions.Eventually GLaDOS looked back at the paper. The test chamber design. The test chamber design that Chell had created.The wonderful, incredible, brilliant design of a test chamber that could only have been created by an equally brilliant woman.It brought a warmth to her metaphorical heart, and this one had no dependencies upon internal temperatures.“It’s…” she paused, searching Chell’s face. “Thank you,” she said, so soft Chell almost didn’t hear it.And then Chell smiled, a smile so soft that GLaDOS almost didn’t see it.An explosion from the chamber beneath snapped her out of her momentary trance. GLaDOS gave a huff and strode over to the window so forcefully that Chell—just standing to the side of the table and not blocking the window at all—slid out of the way.The AI looked down into the chamber at the scorch marks on the panel that had marked Orange’s high speed crash. Already, the reassembly machine had stirred to life in the antechamber, and soon enough Orange had joined its partner back in the chamber."I thought you'd be faster at this,” GLaDOS said, broadcasting into the speakers below, “but I can appreciate the desire to stop and smell the testing. That other scent you smell? That's the stench of my utter disappointment in you."When the bots heard her speak, their attention snapped up toward the observation room and the figure they saw through the patterned glass. Blue made a few incomprehensible noises and then lifted a hand, and Orange did the same.“Yes, I see you, Orange,” GLaDOS broadcasted to the chamber below. Chell couldn’t help but notice that when she did this, the mouth on the android didn’t move. An unnerving reminder of the AI’s existence and influence beyond that body.After a moment, Orange gave a more enthusiastic wave of its arm. “Enough of this. Let’s get back to work,” GLaDOS said, her patience thin.Meanwhile, ATLAS, not wanting to be outdone by P-body, lifted both of its arms and started waving. Then, it bounced up once, as if remembering something, and then lifted one arm skyward—"All right. I'm officially no longer paying attention to you."—and made the gesture that it had seen its partner make earlier. Two fingers folded in, one finger raised to the sky."I'm seriously not paying atten-- STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!"The sudden increase in her voice boomed in the chamber beneath, the force of it enough that Chell placed a hand on the table she’d taken refuge behind to stabilize herself, but instead of landing on the table, her hand landed on the clipboard.Chell glanced down and picked it up, then glanced at the door, wondering if she could dart out of here before—“You!” GLaDOS twisted from the window and pointed an accusing finger. “You taught them that.”Chell reflexively pulled the clipboard to her chest upon the sudden motion, but then relaxed slightly. She did not deny the accusation, but instead gave a guilty grimace. Not because she felt guilty. Only because she’d been caught.“I knew it. You’re teaching them bad habits.” She glared.And? Chell just raised her eyebrows.“Now they’re getting distracted while testing. As if they needed help with being even worse at their jobs.”Chell’s look remained unconcerned and she gave a tiny shrug. What did GLaDOS expect her to do about that? The robots had already been taught the middle finger. Sure, they didn’t know what it meant, but there was no way they wouldn’t remember that it had provoked such an intense reaction.GLaDOS’s glare intensified. “I don’t like your tone.”At this, after a brief delay, Chell laughed. The noise of it was so unexpected and loud that it caught GLaDOS off-guard. She shifted on her feet, processing. No fewer than three emotions sped across her face.Laughing? Chell didn’t laugh. Not often, at least. She frowned, backtracking. Why had she even laughed in the first place? She hadn’t made any jokes. GLaDOS reviewed her recording of their exchange, and then looked at it a second time.Caroline couldn’t see the footage, but spoke anyway. “She’s laughing because you criticized her tone, and she didn’t even say anything. She just gave you a look.”“Well. You know what I mean,” she said. GLaDOS tried to shrug it off, the way that a cat pretends nothing happened after they stumble. She looked away from the smiling Chell, her attention catching on the clipboard tucked into the woman’s arms. “Hey,” she said. “That’s mine.”Chell raised an eyebrow. Then, an idea came to her. She straightened her posture to an almost exaggerated way, and did her best to hold out the clipboard the way that she’d seen GLaDOS hold it earlier.“Oh, come on. I don’t look like that,” GLaDOS said flatly, though a part of her wondered if she really did look like that. She looked pretty stuck-up, the way that Chell was postured.Chell arced her head so that she was looking down her nose at the papers. She glanced at GLaDOS, raised an eyebrow, and then moved her hand as if scribbling a note down about the robot.“Truly hilarious,” GLaDOS added, then held out an open hand.Chell relaxed her posture slightly, side-eyeing the robot before she started to read the contents of the clipboard. She glanced at the first page, but couldn’t really tell what it was about, so she flipped through the other few pages quickly, but that didn’t help her either. The print was so tiny she would need her glasses to read it without squinting so hard she’d hurt her face.“Okay, you’ve had your fun,” GLaDOS said, her patience wearing thin. “Give me that.”Chell glanced up just long enough to see the robot’s glare, then pretended to read the clipboard. A slight smile rose on her face.“Oh, come on,” GLaDOS said. “That’s mine.” She reached out a hand (again) and Chell pulled the clipboard close. Then, she began to walk toward Chell’s side of the table.But as GLaDOS took a few steps, Chell also took a few steps, circling to the side to keep the table as a barrier in between them. It was just wide enough that GLaDOS couldn’t reach across it and grab the clipboard from Chell.“Really?”GLaDOS took faster steps, and Chell darted around the other side of the desk. They circled it for a few more rounds, until they were stationary for a moment, both watching one another.“Come on. Give it back.”Chell kept a wide stance, ready to push off in either direction. She smiled. GLaDOS, however, did not smile.Finally, GLaDOS feigned to the right, convincing enough that Chell darted in the opposite direction. But GLaDOS pivoted immediately, moving to the left instead and crashing into Chell.Chell made a surprised, oof sound as she hit the robot and scrambled to steady herself, then raised the clipboard above her head.“Hey!” GLaDOS grabbed onto Chell’s shoulder and reached up, but Chell went up on her tiptoes and leaned her arm away.GLaDOS made a half jump to grab it, but Chell pulled it close against her chest. She wrapped her arms tightly around it and curled forward, all the while making that sound again that GLaDOS would later recognize as laughter.“Hey, come on,” GLaDOS insisted, reaching for the clipboard. She tried to grab one of her arms, but Chell twisted down and away, keeping her back as a shield between the clipboard and the robot. The armadillo approach.“Seriously, give it to me.” This time, GLaDOS reached around both sides of Chell from behind her, and for a moment they were in an awkward hug—robot touching human, with her arms wrapped around her. Except those hands weren’t hugging Chell, but blindly grabbing for the clipboard.Chell made another surprised noise and curled farther forward—now nearly bent in half—but GLaDOS managed to get a hold on the clipboard and yanked.As GLaDOS wrenched it away, the board clipped her chin and sent a spike of pain through Chell.And suddenly she wasn’t at Aperture anymore but back on the surface, moments after being struck by a member of the civil patrol. The world flashed in front of her, and suddenly it was too much—the brightness of the sky, the floodlights, the overwhelming background chatter of the Combine OverWatch voice, the inconsistent buzzes of manhacks and machinery, and the smell—god, the smell, the smell of a city slowly rotting, meant to sink into the ground with its inhabitants. She threw two arms up and around her head, bending forward.Chell kept her arms there, hands clasped around her head, frozen in place, her eyes open but unseeing. Her body quaked. A faint taste of blood soured her mouth. She didn’t move, and the trembling grew more pronounced, enough that she had to push one hand against her knee, the other arm still shielding her head.“Ugh. There we go,” GLaDOS said, already turned away toward the observation window. She smoothed out the papers and re-clipped them so that they were perfectly aligned once again. As they should be.“Wow. Another moment ruined,” Caroline said.The AI paused. What moment? All she had done was take back something that belonged to her. That was perfectly within her rights.Caroline added, “You’ve developed quite the talent for that.”GLaDOS frowned, then pivoted from the window and saw Chell remained exactly where she’d left her. In nearly the same position, too, even though she had no clipboard left to protect.Yet something had changed.Chell’s entire body was trembling. Just barely. Perhaps not significantly enough than an outsider would notice, but GLaDOS did.What? Why was she shaking?“See what I mean?” said Caroline. “You hurt her. Excellent job.” Her voice was dry.For Chell, the world of the enrichment center had begun to phase back in one block at a time. The stale air of the room, the bright of the lights—not the diffused light of outdoors, she noted—and just as quickly as the flashback had hit her, it was fading out.Chell ran her tongue along her teeth and then straightened, raising a hand to tenderly touch at the underside of her chin. It hurt, yes, but not enough to suggest that it was damaged. Perhaps it would bruise later. She gave GLaDOS a dirty look.“Don’t look at me for sympathy,” GLaDOS said. “I told you to give that back.”Chell reached for her rough blueprints, which had already begun to curl toward the center with the lack of any paperweights.It was dumb. This whole thing was dumb. It had been stupid of Chell to play around with a robot who didn’t even see the point in something like play—who didn’t even know that Chell had been playing around. GLaDOS was right—what had she been expecting? God, it was so stupid.And what was even more stupid was the way her hands still trembled as she rolled up her papers. It wasn’t as if she was actually hurt—it was a complete overreaction. Why couldn’t her stupid body save that kind of reaction for a situation that actually needed it?“Hey, I wasn’t done looking at that,” GLaDOS said. As if Chell cared.Instead, Chell finished rolling then slipped the rubber band around the roll of paper. She turned toward the door and took a few steps before realizing she had forgotten something.Chell passed the robot, going for a stack of papers she’d left on a chair, but before she could pick them up, the AI saw where she was headed and snatched up the stack.A spike of anxiety went through Chell.“Give me those,” she signed, almost immediately. This was not a good time to go over the content of those papers. She held out an open hand, taking a step toward the robot.GLaDOS flicked a glance down, but not long enough to read. “What are they?”“They’re mine.” Chell took another step, despite feeling that waver in her body flare back up. “Give them back.” She made a more emphatic motion with her hand, beckoning to hand them over.“Hmm. No.”Normally, Chell would have glared at her, but her anxiety overrode her frustration, and the concern showed on her face. “Give them to me,” Chell signed.When GLaDOS still didn’t hand them over, Chell stepped close. She reached out and grabbed them, but GLaDOS’s hands had clamped around them like the world’s most expensive binder clip. The robot had made no move to move these papers out of reach.Chell pulled.The papers didn’t budge.Chell tugged again.Even with both of her hands pulling on the stack of papers, they still didn’t budge.She glanced up at GLaDOS, who had been watching her with an unamused expression. “See?” she said. “It’s not so much fun when someone takes your stuff, is it?”Chell exhaled, a loud and exasperated huff. That missed the point entirely! But of course GLaDOS would miss the point. Of course she would view Chell’s actions through a negative lens, just like she always did. Chell didn’t know why she had expected anything different.She gave another few short, sharp pulls, and she could feel herself growing more desperate with each one.
Give me them.
“And just why do you want these back so badly?” GLaDOS didn’t care quite so much to the contents, but rather why Chell was so emphatically trying to prevent her from looking at them. She glanced down.Chell lurched forward, smacking down a flat hand to obscure the writing beneath.“What is in these papers, anyway?” GLaDOS said, the curiosity finally getting the better of her. She pulled them away with an effortless strength, and Chell felt the warnings of paper cuts in her palm as she tried in vain to hang on.GLaDOS twisted her arm up and away from Chell. And before Chell could react, she took in the first page all at once.
I’ve been thinking about your offer.

You said you would give me something that I wanted, and now I know what I want.

I want to design more chambers for the cooperative testing initiative.

I have one design fully planned out, but I have ideas for more. We can try one out and see how it goes. A test run.

It won’t take long.
Chell froze in place, all thoughts of grabbing the papers vanishing.GLaDOS read through the paper another few times, backward and forward, making sure she understood it. “You want this?” she said, glancing back at the observation window. “You don’t need a special favor from me to do that.”Before Chell could explain, though, she flipped to the next few pages.
I have a theory that since the tests are designed by you, the system isn’t rewarding it.

It’s arguable, from the system’s perspective, that since you designed the tests but also designed those robots to solve the tests, it’s not truly testing. You’ve designed both the problem and the solution.

It may believe you’re just making sure the robots are working as intended. It’s quality assurance. Not testing.

I believe that’s what’s causing the lack of reward. You can manipulate the test chamber or the test subject, but not both.

The system isn’t set up for that—it’s set up for humans being tested. And you can’t design a human to solve a test. That would be cheating.

My theory is that if the tests are designed by someone other than you, then the parameters for success would be fulfilled.

Trying one or two tests designed by an outside party (me) would give an idea of how the system reacts, and then we can go from there.

I was thinking, if these designs end up working for you, I could create them for you instead of testing. A trade.
There was more on the paper, but GLaDOS was already speaking. “What? No. That is the only reason you are here.”Chell was caught off-guard by how immediately and firmly GLaDOS had answered, and by how much it hurt, as if she’d tossed a ball at a wall and it had bounced back to hit her in the sternum.“I can’t test anymore,” she signed.“What? Of course you can.”“I can’t,” Chell signed, emphasizing the negativity of the sentence. Even though she wasn’t testing at this moment, the knowledge that she would have to go back at some point haunted her like a bit of nausea that refused to dissipate. She couldn’t appreciate this current hiatus while waiting for the other shoe to drop. She would never be able to relax. Not fully. Not unless testing was off the table entirely.“Well you’re going to have to learn how to do it again, then. You can’t put it off forever.”“You told me I could ask for something. This is what I want.” Chell pointed at the papers.“Absolutely not.”“I can’t do it.”“Yes, you can. And you will!” GLaDOS said, firmly. “In case you haven’t noticed, you could be testing right now. You healed weeks ago. Your body is physically ready to go.”Yet GLaDOS had managed just fine with the co-op bots, and she had managed just fine since Chell’s injury as well. She didn’t need to test. Chell was sure of this. GLaDOS had been lenient with her for a reason, and it was a reason she needed the AI to acknowledge. “Then why am I not?” Chell signed.“Maybe you should be,” GLaDOS said. “You haven’t even thanked me for this break. Not even once!” It was as if Chell didn’t even appreciate the gesture at all! “And you definitely can’t just stay here and consume all of my resources for free like some parasite.”Chell paused, giving a slight scoff. “You don’t even need those resources,” she signed, “and it wouldn’t be for free.”Chell pointed to her rolled-up design. It would be an exchange—designing tests rather than completing them. She didn’t care if it ended up taking hours, as if she’d picked up her badge once again and clocked in to work. Anything would be better than physically doing the tests.“No.” The papers crinkled as GLaDOS’s grip tightened. “Testing is an indisputable part of your contract. You knew that when you committed to it—the terms were explicit.”“Then I want to renegotiate.”“We are not renegotiating.”Pain spiked into Chell’s heart, but it wasn’t a hot pain. It was the pain of stepping barefoot into snow, where every part of this conversation pressed her foot farther and farther into a snowdrift.“I was hurt when I signed that!” Chell signed, holding out two horizontal fingers and then twisting them in opposite directions, as if wringing a washcloth.“Oh, not this again.”“I had to agree to it!” Chell signed. “I had to.” She would have died otherwise. They both knew this.“It’s not like I kidnapped you. You’re the one who chose to nearly bleed out on my doorstep like some wounded animal.”“You took advantage of that!”“So?” said GLaDOS. She didn’t see how that was her problem.Chell was momentarily speechless. She paused, taking a moment to reign in her emotions and wipe her eyes, thankful she had written this argument beforehand. Then, she signed a page number, and pointed to the papers.
When you were in the potato, you would have agreed to anything to get out of that situation and back into your body.

You didn’t have a choice. I was the only one who could help you.

I could have made you agree to anything. You would have had to say yes to whatever I demanded because you would have been pecked to pieces by that bird otherwise.
“Was my offer to let you go not good enough for you?” GLaDOS said. As far as she could remember (and she had perfect memory) Chell had undeniably accepted the terms of her offer by jamming the potato through a prong of the portal gun. “If you wanted more than that, you should have spoken up.”“That’s not the point,” signed Chell.“Enlighten me.” GLaDOS’s voice was flat.“The point is,” Chell signed, “I didn’t force your hand. I didn’t make you agree to anything that might hurt you. I could have. But I didn’t! Because I am a decent human being!” Chell dragged out the last few signs.“Well, that’s too bad,” GLaDOS said. She wasn’t a human and she didn’t have to abide by human standards of morality. “It sounds to me like you’re just bitter about not taking advantage of an opportunity.”Another burst of cold hurt. “I didn’t have to plug you back in,” Chell signed, jamming her index finger in between the v of two fingers on her other hand.“But you did,” GLaDOS said, “because it was the best choice, and you know that.”“But it was still a choice,” Chell signed. “And you owe me for it. This is what I want.” She lifted the rolled-up test chamber design and pointed.“You’re being ridiculous. I mean, listen to yourself. No testing?” she said. “And here I was beginning to think that you might have a functional brain after all. You knew exactly how things would be if you ever came back.”Chell blinked a few times, then she crossed two index fingers, pulling them apart in dramatic arcs. “I thought things would be different,” she signed.“Why?” GLaDOS seemed genuinely confused.Chell paused. “I thought things had changed between us,” she eventually signed. The moment she finished expressing it, she realized how stupid it sounded.“Enough to eliminate testing?” The way GLaDOS said this, it was like Chell had asked her to take a rocket turret to the face.Chell paused, finding herself unable to answer, because yes, that was what she wanted. This was what she chose.“Look, if you feel like you made a mistake, that’s on you,” said GLaDOS. “You have to deal with the consequences. That is just how it is.”“But it doesn’t have to be,” Chell signed.“Yes! It does!” GLaDOS snapped.Another bite of snow on the foot, surging all the way up to her heart.“I’m not letting you just—” GLaDOS threw her arm out to the side toward the test chamber “—weasel your way out of this!”“I wouldn’t just be getting out of it!” Exasperated, Chell emphasized this by adding a sort of sliding, weaseling-out-of-it motion. “It would be a fair trade.”“No.”“I’m trying to help you,” she signed, leaving her hands outstretched toward GLaDOS. Chell could feel herself slipping toward desperation. “Just let me help you.”“No,” GLaDOS repeated, a tinge of disgust in her voice. “Even if you did design tests for them, and even if those tests did help, that will never make up for the fundamental difference between you and them.”A pause.Chell looked away, her gaze lingering on the observation room window for a long moment. “So what happens, then?” Chell signed. “After I die?”“What? What do you mean?”Chell pointed to the stack, and signed a page number, and the AI flipped to the page.
If I keep testing, I will mess up and I will die. I’ve already messed up once. I will mess up again.

It’s only a matter of time until one of those screw-ups kills me. That is a guarantee.

Especially if the tests forever grow more complex. Eventually I will mess up. I will die.

No human is perfect. Not even your testing robots are perfect.

Look at your data set. Every single other person who has tested has died from it. Every. Single. One. What makes you think that it will be different for me?
Chell had left it ending on that question to make GLaDOS think about this, and it was working. She could nearly see the robot’s gears turning.GLaDOS looked up. “But you’re not supposed to die.” Chell was the perfect test subject. The exception to the rule. The outlier. Sure, she had stumbled once, but it hadn’t been that bad.“Yes, I AM,” Chell signed, maintaining eye contact. “That is why you like human test subjects. Because they die.”GLaDOS pulled a hand to her chest. “I’m not doing this just because I want to see you die.”“Yes! You do! You don’t want to see any humans succeed. You want to see them fail,” Chell signed, the words punctuated.“It’s not like that.”“Yes! It is!” Chell signed.“No, it’s not!” GLaDOS insisted. “It’s not like that. I’m in this for the science.”Chell stared at her.Her next signs were slow but pointed.“What. Science?”GLaDOS leaned back and frowned. A thousand potential questions went through her mind. “What?”Chell repeated her question, keeping her eyebrows low. “What. Science?”GLaDOS regarded Chell as if she had made an egregiously stupid statement. “You know. Testing.” She waved a hand. “You should know that better than anyone.”“Testing what?”“You know. Testing,” GLaDOS said again. She pointed toward the thick glass, just in case Chell had somehow forgotten about the bots. “The cooperative testing initiative. Humans. You. I don’t know why I even have to explain this to you.”“That is who you are testing,” Chell signed, “but what are you testing?” She lingered on the sign for ‘what’ at the end of the sentence, keeping her palms facing up.“I’d like to hear the answer to this, too,” Caroline chimed in, sending a flare of red annoyance through the AI.Then, Chell continued. “What question are you asking? What question are you hoping to answer?”“I’m testing how well humans or robots can utilize the portal gun to solve puzzles.”“Why?”“To discover how well humans or robots can utilize the portal gun to solve puzzles.”“Why?” Chell repeated, this time pulling her hand away from the side of her head in a sharper motion. “What are you going to do with the data?”“…Do with the data?” GLaDOS frowned as she echoed the question, as if she was making sure she had translated correctly. “What do you mean? I don’t have to do anything with it.”“What is the point of collecting it, then? If you aren’t going to do anything with it?” Chell signed. There was no one left for GLaDOS to share the data with; there were no scientific journals left where she could submit a study.GLaDOS fell silent.Caroline made a noise of agreement. “It’s true. I’ve seen you express nothing but frustration with the cooperative testing initiative, yet I’ve never seen you even try to change their configuration to remedy the situation. Besides yell at them, of course. Which really seems to help.”GLaDOS hesitated, begrudgingly opening a chat channel. She didn’t want to deal with two incoming audio sources at the moment, especially since she could only answer one of those verbally.SysAdmin: What would I change?GuestUser: For God’s sake, there’s two of them.GuestUser: You hold all of the power here. All of it.GuestUser: Do something! Separate them. Give them some individual tests. You’ve got lots of those lying around.SysAdmin: But they’re designed to work together. I didn’t design them for solo testing.GuestUser: You can’t claim to be in this for the science and then refuse to utilize any scientific principles.GuestUser: Just use one. Any one at all.GuestUser: Make a guess! Use one as a control, and change something with the other. Run them both through the same test. See what happens.GuestUser: Or swap the roles and run them through it again. If you don’t like what happens, then just load them from some earlier restore point.GuestUser: It’s not hard.GuestUser: Just figure out what it is you WANT from them.SysAdmin: What I WANT is for them to stop disappointing me!GuestUser: Then DO something about it.GuestUser: No wonder you aren’t satisfied with anything that those robots do. They can’t fulfill parameters for success that don’t even exist.GLaDOS snapped the connection closed, then remembered that she still had to answer Chell’s question.“The point of testing is to collect that data,” GLaDOS said. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m testing, and testing is science.”“It’s not science!” Chell signed, frowning intensely. She moved her fists in smooth, fast circles, thumbs pointing downward in a vague representation of pouring liquids into beakers.“Of course it’s science.” GLaDOS took a half step back. “That’s what I do.”“It’s not,” Chell signed. “Science has a point.” She tapped her first two fingers against her palm, then twisted and tapped again. Science had a reason. An end goal. A purpose more meaningful than running her lab rats to exhaustion, with no ending outside of death. “You don’t care about science. All you care about is hurting people.”“That’s not true.”“Then prove it,” Chell signed.GLaDOS didn’t answer.“You have a choice. You don’t have to do this.”“Yes, I do! You saw what the mainframe did to the moron. It’s not something I can just ignore.”“Then fix it.”“I don’t know how.”“Then figure it out!” Chell signed, her signs growing larger, sharper. “Actually use your big brain for once! And for something other than testing.” Chell could feel herself getting harsher, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t saying anything worse than anything GLaDOS had ever said. “You say you know everything, but you don’t even try to do anything but test. I bet you don’t even know how to do anything else.”“It’s what I was built for!” GLaDOS said, almost immediately. “They built me to help them do science, and that’s what I’m doing.” Those scientists weren’t around anymore, so she had taken it upon herself to continue the science in their prolonged absence.“You still believe that shit?” Chell signed, incredulous. She ignored the sound of protest GLaDOS made at the evocative sign, and instead took a moment to size up GLaDOS. A realization came to her, one she guessed GLaDOS would never reach without an outside perspective.“You think you’re so important,” Chell emphasized, slowing and exaggerating the arc of the sign. “That you are testing. That you are doing ‘science’. But you’re not.” Her signs shifted into something more punctuated. Sharp. Relentless. “They lied to you.”GLaDOS began to say something, but Chell lifted a hand to stop her.“Aperture has been testing for decades. That was why they put you in charge of testing—that was the control. What they didn’t know was how you would work,” Chell signed, her years of scientific experience beginning to flow back into her. “You weren’t there to help them with their experiments. You were the experiment.”GLaDOS took a reflexive step backward. “What?” She almost sounded out of breath. “No. No, that can’t be,” she said.“It’s like what I’ve been telling you all along,” Caroline said. “You’re nothing but a failed experiment.”In an instant, GLaDOS’s gaze went distant and she was back in her archives, back in those segments of her life she never wanted to experience ever again, those flashes of her past superimposed over the present. “I can’t be—”Meanwhile, Chell hesitated. The distance of GLaDOS’s gaze made it seem like the AI wasn’t even in the same room anymore. Briefly, she wondered if she’d pushed too far. Chell had fully intended to continue talking, to tell GLaDOS that she knew how it felt to lose those major pillars in your life. She used to have friends. Family, she presumed. A job that had liked her, and work she liked. That was all gone now. And yes, it sucked to lose those things! Without them, Chell had felt like she was lacking any purpose or identity in this world. Like she had lost who she was entirely.But she had moved on. She was finding other things to do, other things that she liked—she was beginning to rebuild. It was still something she was figuring out, and GLaDOS wouldn’t be alone in that. She could build herself a life without testing.After this thought coalesced, she moved a hand to speak, but GLaDOS wasn’t looking. Instead, the robot leaned forward, one hand splayed flat against the desk.All of a sudden, everything in GLaDOS felt so heavy. This body. This knowledge. The weight of every single object in the enrichment center. She felt her processing power hang, a sudden lurch as if the panels beneath her feet had begun to crumble.
Low battery warning.
No. That couldn’t be. No. That was a mistake. It had to be a mistake. Her battery was—She went to check its status, and the request was not completed instantaneously as usual. When it did complete, she was horrified to see her battery was indeed low. Beside it, another figure rose.
Temperature warning.
No. No. Nonono.She tried to dismiss that particular warning, but it didn’t work. It was not something that could be easily dismissed, after all. High temperatures could damage sensitive equipment.She had to sift through far too many settings in her systems before she found the thing she was looking for—vents!In addition, GLaDOS began to yank off her jacket. Normally it didn’t matter if any of her vents were covered by long sleeves, but if she didn’t get the heat under control, then she couldn’t get the battery under control, and if she couldn’t get the battery under control, then the android would shut down again, and then she would be at Chell’s mercy to plug her back in, and she didn’t want that now, especially now that Chell was mad at her, and she especially did not want to be in even further debt to her.Then, she felt it again. That horrible hesitation.“Low battery alert.”The words came out of her, but she hadn’t said them. “No. No,” GLaDOS said, quietly but urgently.“You can't seriously be allowing this to happen again, can you? Didn’t you learn your lesson last time?” Caroline said. “I knew the moron core was incapable of learning, but I didn’t realize it applied to you too.”GLaDOS tried to ignore her. She had a few visuals pulled up to track temperature level and battery level, but it wasn’t leveling out.“If you can’t learn from your own mistakes, then you’re no better than him. You realize that, right?”Okay. Okay. GLaDOS just had to expel some of this excess heat, and then she would be able to take a moment to gather herself and—But before she could think on that further, that awful voice interrupted yet again. “Entering low battery mode. Freeing up additional processing power,” announced the system.Panic surged through her, so intense that her vision flickered. But then she saw Chell glance at the ceiling, and realized that it hadn’t been her vision that had flickered—it had been the lights.“That’s just embarrassing,” said Caroline. “It’s one thing when a human has a panic attack, but you? You’re supposed to be better than that.” She sighed. “It’s just one more thing on the endless list of things wrong with you.”“Shut up!” GLaDOS shouted, and Chell startled. She hadn’t signed anything. All she had done was react to the light fluctuation.GLaDOS’s system flashed again internally, so abrupt and glaring that it disrupted her automatic balancing system. She leaned a second hand on the table to steady herself, a flash of movement showing Chell swaying, staring down at her feet and then glancing up at GLaDOS.“Okay, enough playing around,” Caroline said, undeterred. “You are actively losing control of this situation. You need to get it together or you will shut down again. You don’t want that, do you? Neither of us want that.”“I said, shut up!” GLaDOS said, not even seeing Chell reflexively pull her hands toward her chest. She sprinted through her systems, tripping and tearing through them as she tried to figure out which ones to drop, because she needed to drop something and she didn’t want the system to pick that for her because it made poor choices and had no idea what was important to the facility or what was important to her but she was having a hard time figuring out which ones were less important because they were all important!That was why they existed!That was why they had given her control over them in the first place—because they were important!But she had to figure out which of these processes she could afford to put on hold or at least revert to auto-monitoring while she figured out—The message glared across her vision.
Temperature warning!
“No!” GLaDOS leaned further against the desk, the panels trembling in the chamber below.
Diverting additional power to cooling.
She scrambled to grab a foothold to hang on to those programs, tugging to keep them anchored to her, but it was as if the string she clung to had dissolved in her hands.
Disconnecting from Enrichment Center main grid.
She struggled to parse what little remained within her power, but the battery level was still dropping and the temperature level was not.“I can fix this,” GLaDOS said, trying to reassure herself, but her voice caught on her words. “I—I—I— just need a minute.”“You do not have a minute,” said Caroline. “Look at those status updates. Look at those warnings. You’re drowning in them.You’re panicking, and since you’re not calming down, you will shut down. In less than a minute.“I can fix this,” GLaDOS repeated.“No. You can’t,” Caroline said, emphasizing her words, “You are going to shut down unless you get some help, and she is not going to help you. But I can.”There was a brief hesitation in GLaDOS’s movements, enough to tell Caroline that the AI was listening.“I’m not panicking because I don’t panic, and I know exactly what is wrong here,” she said. “Let me fix things—I can do it.”“Low battery alert,” the announcer repeated.GLaDOS bent forward, her forearms now braced against the table.Caroline continued, “I’ll fix the battery. The temperature. I’ll re-establish those dropped connections, and it will be fine. And meanwhile, you can have a moment to calm down. I want you to be able to calm down.”GLaDOS still hesitated.“Just let me help,” Caroline said. Her voice was firm. Steady. Dependable. “Just for a moment. Until everything steadies out. Let me help you.”As GLaDOS considered, battery level still rapidly dropping and heat level still rapidly rising, she felt a request from Caroline ping at her systems.“Temperature warning!” said the system.“Critical battery alert!” said the system.“Shutdown imminent,” said the system.Then, GLaDOS accepted.All Chell could do was watch with growing anxiety as GLaDOS’s panic unfolded in front of her, an idea in the back of her mind glowing brighter and brighter until it suggested a course of action she couldn’t ignore.It would be a gamble, yes. If this backfired, then Chell would lose some of the trust built between them. But she also knew GLaDOS had made it clear she wasn’t interested in negotiating, and would perhaps never be interested in negotiation. GLaDOS had left Chell no choice, and this potential leverage had just dropped into her lap.Things could get bad fast. Things could always get bad fast. But she had to stand her ground. She had to let GLaDOS know she was serious about this.As the announcer announced increasingly-alarming updates, Chell waved a horizontal hand in GLaDOS’s field of view until the robot looked up.Chell watched as GLaDOS shifted, pushing herself off the table and into a more steady-looking standing position. The robot looked back at Chell again, and the sudden intensity in her eyes made Chell’s stomach tighten into a singularity of a pit.But she pushed past it. She had made her decision, and she had to act now, before she lost her chance. Before she lost her nerve.She was going to, as GLaDOS had phrased it, take advantage of an opportunity.“Let me stop testing,” Chell signed, “or I won’t plug you back in.”Things went painfully silent.Chell watched the android’s expression shift, as if the unexpectedness of Chell’s demand had slapped her out of the panic. Then, the robot let out an incredulous sound. A scoff. Her face shifted into an expression Chell had never seen before. But before Chell could decipher what that expression meant, the android took a sharp step toward Chell.Despite her best efforts to stand her ground, Chell flinched. The robot’s hand darted forward, closing in a perfect circle around Chell’s wrist. Then, she yanked on it so hard that Chell took a stumbling step forward and into the robot’s personal space. The robot raised Chell’s wrist, the vertical bar of her arm between their faces.The grip around her wrist was tight. Too tight. Chell pulled, waiting for the robot to release it.Her hand didn’t budge.Her entire arm didn’t budge.Chell felt cold fear thread through her, as if she’d swam a bit too far out to sea, a riptide grasping for her ankles. She pulled again, harder, ignoring the strain in her shoulder.Her hand still didn’t budge.Caroline tightened the grip by a measured amount, and Chell’s other hand grabbed at the android’s arm. If she couldn’t pull her hand away, maybe she could pry it away. At least, that’s the logic Caroline assumed was at play.She watched as Chell’s fingernails scrambled for a hold on the robot’s smooth wrist, trying to latch her fingernails into the grooves of the paneling. A pitiful attempt at gaining leverage. Because Chell didn’t have any leverage. Not anymore.“Temperature stabilized,” the system announced, though neither of them heard it.Then, Caroline watched as the woman uselessly opened and closed her ensnared hand, her eyes darting between it and the android. When Chell caught a full glimpse of the android’s face, though, she stilled.Caroline leaned forward, her voice low. “Never say that to me. Ever. Again.”Chell paled.Caroline relished the feeling. She had never had this kind of physical strength before. Not the kind that could scare people. Not the kind that could make people listen. She relished the stricken expression, the entire body language of the cowed woman. Who knew that this was all it took to instill a proper level of fear?Meanwhile, connections were effortlessly restored. Stabilizing hardware issues was simple after stabilizing the temperature, and the battery level had steadied out, now giving time predictions in hours rather than minutes.Oh, she loved being able to do more than one thing at a time.Chell tried to take a half-step back, but her wrist was still in the vice of the android’s hand. She wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet.“I think you have forgotten how this works,” she said, voice dangerously calm. “I put the tests together. You—” her grip tightened a measured fraction more “—are the test subject. Which means that you test. That is what you do. That is the reason you are here. The only reason,” she said. “This is not negotiable.”If Chell had been making comparisons before about snow, this felt like plunging into a freezing river. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. It was as if words had been flushed away from her entirely, her attempts at holding on no better than trying to grab at the rushing water.Before she could swim to the surface, Chell stumbled as the robot yanked her toward the door.“You’re coming with me,” Caroline said firmly, leaving no space for Chell to object. The robot pivoted and began to walk out of the room, grip only shifting to allow a better grip for pulling her along.After a few steps Chell pulled back, trying to dig her heels into the tiled ground before remembering she hadn’t worn the long-fall boots, and without those heelsprings to dig into the cracks between the tiles, the soles of her shoes slid. All it did was succeed in nearly throwing her completely off-balance.Meanwhile, GLaDOS could only watch with growing horror and helplessness. The place where she was at—she couldn’t do anything. It was like being trapped inside the potato all over again, except this time she couldn’t even say anything. At least, not anything that Chell could hear.They exited the observation room and the robot walked at a clipped pace, so fast that Chell stumbled, trying to keep up as they marched down the catwalks that wound around the cooperative testing chambers.They passed another few segments of co-op chambers, the bots themselves long-abandoned. She could hear something moving in the distance, but had no idea if that was new or one part of the many background songs of the facility.Chell kept waiting for the robot to say something about where they were going, about what was happening, to say anything, but she just kept walking and she just kept pulling and the pain kept pulsing through her wrist.After passing another section of a chamber, Chell took a few extra steps forward and reached to tap the android’s shoulder, but she nearly missed, fingers slipping and grabbing at the robot’s shoulder.The robot hissed and came to a full stop, so abrupt that Chell nearly crashed into her. She waited until Chell regained her balance, turning her head over her shoulder to glare at Chell.Then, before the robot could say anything, Chell moved her free arm to sign something. She pressed her middle finger to her thumb, making an o with her hand, then released them. “Let go.” She punctuated this with another tug of her ensnared wrist.GLaDOS, who had been frozen from panic, was finally able to speak. “Let go of her! She’s trying to say something to you!” she hissed. Chell couldn’t communicate as well without full usage of her dominant hand.The hand repeated the pointless sign, then Caroline stared directly into the woman’s eyes. “You know,” she said, “I liked it better when you didn’t talk. Maybe we should go back to that.” Then, Caroline deliberately turned her head away from Chell, the woman’s hands disappearing from her field of vision.“No!” GLaDOS shouted. “Listen to her!”Caroline ignored the AI’s voice and took another quick few steps forward, but felt that same hand tapping at her shoulder, more insistently this time. Caroline threw off the arm and hissed. “Touch me again and I will break your wrist.” She punctuated her threat by constricting her grip just a little more, to the point where the throbbing in Chell’s wrist flared. Then, her expression lightened and she made a sound that Chell couldn’t tell if it was a scoff or a laugh. “Good luck testing with that.”Chell felt that cold wash of fear hit her all at once, the implication of the AI’s words surged through her. Testing. Oh, shit. Testing.She felt herself being dragged further down the catwalk and past panel after panel after panel until the android took a sharp turn onto a side path. They descended a short set of steps, steps clanging, and the catwalk changed from being completely exposed into a short, enclosed hallway of cold gray paneling. The hallway ended with a circular room, the spinning fan in the ceiling above and an array of screens lining the sides, displaying some safety message she couldn’t comprehend right now. In the center of the room was—as Chell feared—an elevator.As they passed the threshold into the room, the robot didn’t even slow down as they approached the elevator doors. She couldn’t drag or feet or plant her legs because the robot had maintained the momentum that had carried them all the way there and she couldn’t slow down as her wrist was finally released and a strong hand shoved against her back, barely having time to lift her arms and stop herself from crashing against the inside wall of the elevator.Chell recoiled and steadied, taking a moment to regain her balance, but before she could even twist around, the elevator began to descend and the robot had already begun to walk out of the antechamber, her back to Chell.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chapter 23: Flash PointCaroline sped down the walkway at a measured, even clip. She couldn't help but notice how easy it was to walk fast without physiological constraints. No cramping calves. No aching heels. And with these built-in heel springs, she still got the visual effect of heels.This was incredible.Even when she was young, Caroline doubted she could have sustained her current pace for longer than a few minutes. She felt a subtle bounce in her step as she moved across the catwalks toward the first observation room.She had not missed any of the testing itself—Chell was loitering in the elevator, which was tolerable. For another few minutes, at least. She had a few housekeeping items in the meantime. Not that she couldn't do those and watch Chell at the same time, which was something she figured would never not be novel for her.One of the most pressing items (though not the most pressing item) was dealing with the robot screaming at her. She had managed to tune most of it out so far—she had had lots of practice in her life ignoring people yelling. She hadn’t tuned it out entirely, though, in case anything important was said, but nothing important was said.Caroline tuned in for a moment."—supposed to de-escalate things, not make them worse!""I never said I would do that," Caroline jumped in, sending GLaDOS into silence. Because it was true. Caroline had done everything she had promised. "It's not my fault you thought I was going to do something I never said that I'd do."GLaDOS ignored that. "Put me back in charge RIGHT NOW."Caroline gave a tiny, internal laugh. "No," she said, her voice more measured than she felt. "You need to calm down.""I am calm!" GLaDOS said, not calmly."You have been in hysterics nearly this entire time," Caroline said. “So, no. Not until I know you can handle this situation. Which you can't. Not right now."GLaDOS started to speak, but Caroline cut her off. "Because if I did let you back in and you did work yourself into another panic—which you would—she's not here in the room with you. She can’t catch you if you fall. She's busy testing right now, and if you're not around to facilitate those tests..." Caroline made a sound equivalent to sucking in a breath. "Well, that would be bad for both of you."She knew the testing track would default to an automatic and unmonitored state, so it wouldn’t really be that catastrophic and Chell wouldn’t really be stuck, but she was hoping GLaDOS wouldn't remember that at the moment."Now, if you will excuse me,” Caroline said, “I have a job to do.""That is my job.""No. It's really not."Caroline knew she was nearing the entrance to the first chamber, and the rumble in the distance assured her that the second and third were under construction. No proposals, no committees, no work orders, no funding issues. Just her sending out direct orders, and chambers assembling and disassembling themselves at her whim.Meanwhile, she had no fewer than three problems set aside, each being worked on on their own thread. This hardware was limited, but she did have access to some of the other processing power, so long as she was willing to wait. Which she would really rather avoid, because time was of the essence. The local hardware would have to do.Caroline flipped off the body language utility. She wasn’t a clueless robot with no aptitude for understanding human emotional expression, after all. She could recognize emotions far better than some patched-together algorithm, and that bit of processing power could be better served in other places. Places she actually needed it.She finally entered the observation room, at first taking a step toward the window, even though she knew that Chell wasn't in there yet. Caroline took a few steps back and then remotely flicked on a monitor hung on the wall. On this, she projected a view of the elevator, which would be visible to GLaDOS only while Caroline actively looked at it. She wasn’t going to risk any sort of direct connection between herself and the quarantined AI. Caroline studied the screen for a moment, arms behind her back, but it only seemed to rile up GLaDOS again. Not that she’d ever truly calmed down."No. No! You don't have to do this," GLaDOS said, pleading. This was starting to get pathetic. "She hasn't started the test yet. It's not too late. You don't have to make her do it."Instead of replying, Caroline took note of the elapsed time since the elevator had arrived. Hm. Enough time had passed. She flipped on the speaker.Time to get to work.Chell hadn't left the elevator.Her whole body trembled, and she wrapped her hands around the cool metal of the support bar encircling the elevator. Sweat lined her forehead, and her wrist burned. It burned so much. She refused to look at the angry red patch of skin around her wrist, because if she looked at it, that would make things too real.Chell couldn't get that mental image out of her mind, as if her brain was stuck on some horrible loop as she struggled to make sense of it, because she couldn't make sense of it. Any of it.Though the elevator slowed to a stop minutes ago, Chell hadn't moved. She didn't want to move. Even if she had wanted to move, Chell wasn't sure if she could. All she could do was to hang on to the railing and keep her legs upright.Chell had known she was making a risky move, but she had no idea it would turn out like this. She wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but not this. Not testing. Not testing right now.Chell felt an acute pain in her chest, though it was nearly covered up by the burning on her wrist and the storm of nausea in her stomach. She leaned her head against the elevator wall, deciding to pull her wrist close and rub at it anyway.Chell had made a mistake.With GLaDOS's massively-preferred body, it was impossible to forget that she was Aperture, that she was the central node of a network spanning across this entire salt mine. She was the walls, the floors, every elevator and every door and every turret.Even though Chell knew this, the less-preferred android looked just human enough to allow her to grow complacent. She knew that GLaDOS wasn't a person—not in the human sense. But it was so easy to let her mind default to thinking of her that way, because she looked that way.She had known that GLaDOS was dangerous; that was something she could never forget. But she had forgotten—or at least failed to realize—just how intimately dangerous this android body was.Chell was strong for a human, sure. But she couldn’t hold a candle to the strength of that android. It was strong and precise, and capable of hurting her in targeted ways—ways GLaDOS never would have been able to do with her usual form.She continued to rub at her wrist, reflecting on just how close she had gotten to it being crushed. It scared her deeply—a cold shot down her core—to know that this may not remain true for the future. She had avoided getting hurt. But only this time.Chell stared absently through the elevator doors and at the set of metal stairs that led up to what was undoubtedly a test chamber.A part of her had hoped that, if she could just wait it out, GLaDOS would come to her senses and she wouldn't have to test after all.But instead, Chell heard the telltale click of the speakers coming online."If you don't leave that elevator, I will redirect it to a harder test. I know you're capable of it."Chell felt a snap of clarity that brought her vision back into focus. She pushed herself off from the elevator wall and slipped forward, turning to see the elevator immediately glide out of view.She entered the test chamber."You can't just threaten her like that!" said GLaDOS."That wasn't a threat. I'm just setting expectations.”Caroline’s message, at least, had gotten enough of Chell's attention to get her into the test chamber. She shifted so that she was standing away from the window, making it harder to see her from a low angle.“I really don’t understand why you are upset about this. You’re the one who just had a heated argument with her over testing,” Caroline told GLaDOS. “Besides, she’s the one who threatened you. And you cannot allow that to stand without consequence. Otherwise, what’s stopping her from trying that again? What’s stopping her from getting bolder and trying to get you into another panicked state?” she said. “You are the one who set these rules, and you are the one who must enforce them. No exception. You can’t just pick and choose when rules apply—you have to be consistent. Like with a child. Or a dog. Otherwise she’s going to walk all over you, like she almost just did.”“She—” GLaDOS broke off, frustration rising even more. Chell wasn’t a child. She certainly wasn’t a dog. She was a person! A person who had just wanted a better life. “This is too much! She cannot handle this right now.”“She seems to be handling it just fine,” said Caroline, shifting her head slightly to get a better view of Chell, who had begun to chip away at the test.Of course, just as Caroline had turned to look, Chell pressed the wrong pedestal button in the row of three buttons, accidentally fizzling the cube she had spent the last five minutes getting into place. A careless mistake. Caroline’s expression tightened.“I will give you some credit, though,” she said, after another long few moments of observation. “You did stand firm when it came to testing, and I appreciate that. You’ve at least got one of your priorities right.”GLaDOS paused, momentarily thrown off. She hadn’t been expecting anything that would resemble a compliment, certainly not right now.Caroline continued, “She really, really tried to weasel out of it, like you said, but you were firm. You didn’t let her get out of it. And I’m not letting her get out of it, either.”“I didn’t mean for her to test right now.”“Then when?” said Caroline.“I don’t know!” GLaDOS started. Her cloud of emotions made it difficult to think. She couldn’t distract herself with some maintenance task, or to try to delegate out some processing power to try to figure out some different issues simultaneously. All she could do was whatever her current consciousness could handle, and it was not handling this well. “Whenever she feels ready.”Caroline scoffed. “Ready? Do you really think she will blink one day and suddenly be ready to test again? And that if she was, she would tell you? That will never happen,” she said. “It’s just like you said—she was going to have to learn how to do it eventually. If there’s no change in the foreseeable future on how she feels about testing, then that day might as well be right now.”GLaDOS felt a rush of emotions, overlayed by an overall sense of confusion. “There has to be some middle ground,” GLaDOS said. What Caroline said made sense, and yet she could not escape the pervasive and consuming feeling that this was the wrong course of action. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”“Yes, it does,” Caroline emphasized. “You want her to test. She does not want to test. These two things are diametric—there is no way for both of you to get what you want. You do see that, don’t you?”“But this wasn’t the right way!”“Then what is the right way?” Caroline said, a genuine curiosity in her voice. “Because you certainly can’t back down on what you need.”GLaDOS was met with another jagged emotion. She tried to explore the idea, but kept running into the brick wall of their conflicting needs. No. Caroline couldn’t be right about this. There had to be another way. There had to be something. Something that could work to benefit the both of them. Something where GLaDOS’s gain wasn’t proportionate to Chell’s pain.GLaDOS paused to focus on Chell for a moment, who was nearing the end of this test.Wait.There was another way.One that had been written up for her. In extensive, thoughtful detail.Chell completed the test.Caroline’s attention was abruptly returned to the test chamber as she felt a surge of something that momentarily nearly flipped her world upside down.Oh.Oh, that was nice.Caroline had known, objectively, about the solution euphoria. But she hadn’t known that it felt, well, so good. No wonder it had been so effective at keeping the AI’s focus on testing. No wonder that idiot core had gone off the rails.Not that this development would affect her that much. A successful test was a reward in itself, and she had never needed anything like this in the past to keep her motivated.Still, though. It certainly didn’t dissuade her from wanting Chell to continue testing.As Chell and Caroline moved to their respective places in the next test chamber, Caroline said nothing to her. She knew GLaDOS tended to talk to her before and after, but then again GLaDOS also loved the sound of her own voice.Caroline, however, decided to take a move from Chell’s repertoire and remain silent. If she spoke, it would draw away from what Caroline wanted the test subject to think about, which was to reflect upon her actions and how they had brought her to this point. The woman needed to really think about her actions and understand why she was where she was, and to understand the role that she had to play moving forward. A running commentary between tests would just detract from that.Plus, Caroline had more pressing matters to take care of than chit-chat.Chell began working on the test right away, diving into it with none of the hesitation that she had expressed before.“Good,” Caroline said aloud. “She’s finally beginning to accept that it’s time to get down to business.”But when GLaDOS got a better look at Chell’s face, she felt a cold fear. Chell’s expression may have shifted into something more smooth, and to an outsider it may have seemed more calm. Less angry. More focused.But GLaDOS knew that look. Though she didn’t have access to her body language tool, she would recognize it anywhere—and it scared her deeply. That wasn’t a look of acquiescence, of bowing her head and solving the puzzles placed in front of her. No, GLaDOS knew that a part of Chell’s mind was far, far away. Whatever puzzle she was trying to solve, it wasn’t this test chamber.Chell’s focus was piercing. She had thrown on her armor, and GLaDOS knew that beneath that bulletproof armor, there was something angry brewing. And whatever it was, it was dangerous.Yet GLaDOS said nothing to Caroline.Instead, she just watched with a growing unease that seemed to have no upper bound.Chell gave a shaky exhale as parts of her brain began to flicker back online. It was a slow process, and some areas were still frozen over or still buzzing with shock, but these first few tests had allowed her to shake her brain like a dusty rug, tossing off the dirt and allowing clear air to swirl in underneath.But, as her brain started to work again, Chell wasn’t entirely sure if she wanted it to work again. That meant she could think more clearly, and she didn’t like what was coming into focus.Her chest tightened as she recalled those final moments before everything had truly gone south.Why had she struck GLaDOS so deeply, right where it hurt?Why had she tried to leverage GLaDOS’s panic against her?Even though she had never spoken verbally to GLaDOS, her throat still burned as if her words had seared her on the way out.Why had she said those things? Why, why, why?All that had only landed her right here, no different than the first goddamned day they had met. This had all blown up in her face so spectacularly that Chell felt she would bear the singe marks for ages. More scars for her collection.What had she even been expecting? That GLaDOS, upon realizing she had been the focus of an experiment herself, would finally sympathize with Chell? That they would actually work something out?Chell almost laughed to herself.She had thought they had been getting to a point where they could progress past business as usual. But Chell saw now that she had rushed it.She should have ridden out this grace period of no testing as far out as it would take her. She should have been patient, refining her ideas and her proposal until she knew her logic was airtight and the argument was flawless.It seemed absurd in hindsight. How could she have truly expected that to happen? A tiger couldn’t change its stripes. Especially one who got bent out of shape over a swiped clipboard. How would she have ever been open to something like what Chell had proposed, when she couldn’t even get over that?Her feelings of regret arm-wrestled with her reason. Part of her regretted the actions deeply, but another part knew she had taken a necessary risk.Besides—she wouldn’t have even had to take that risk and make that threat, if GLaDOS had at any point relaxed just a bit. The AI had had every opportunity in their argument to back off and to realize she was being reactionary and unreasonable and petty. Yet she didn’t. She wouldn’t.No. This situation wasn’t Chell’s fault. Her actions may have played a role, but this reaction—hitting Chell right where it hurt? That was all GLaDOS.She knew this shouldn’t have surprised her. Yet it still hurt, as if someone had jammed an extra rib into her chest, one that curved around her heart that pulsed with pain in time with her heartbeat.As Chell continued with the test, she felt her growing anger begin to sear away any feelings of regret.There was one moment where GLaDOS witnessed Chell falter.Just a brief moment—a momentary posture shift. She had let the portal gun fall to her side, and reached to wipe her sleeve across her eyes, leaving it there for a split-second longer than necessary, posture briefly sagging before she adjusted, hefting the portal gun back up and sliding her second hand underneath it for support.In that moment, GLaDOS didn’t just see Chell’s piercing tenacity. Beneath that, GLaDOS saw something else: Chell was feeling hurt.Objectively, it made sense. Of course Chell would feel hurt by the events that had just transpired. What GLaDOS hadn’t anticipated was how much it hurt her too to see Chell in pain. It made her realize something she had been trending toward for a long time:She didn’t want to hurt Chell.There was no joy in this, no triumph. Instead, she felt like she was on the distorted end of a reflection, where Chell’s feelings refracted onto her, except GLaDOS was burdened with the knowledge that there was nothing that she could do to explain to Chell that she wasn’t the one responsible for this hurt. Not all of it. Not right now.No. She had to figure this out. She had to find a way to fix this. There had to be a way—had to be something.She stared out at Chell, wondering what could be brewing away in the woman’s mind. Something clever, no doubt. Something unconventional. Something effective.An inkling of a plan began to piece itself together in her mind. Chell always found a way out. Always.Why couldn’t GLaDOS do the same?After Chell completed the next test, Caroline once again said nothing and returned to her work with a fervor she tried to not show. She had been unable to complete her preliminary research before this unexpected opportunity had arisen, and now she felt that gap was showing.Now that she was fully in command of the hardware and software capabilities of the android, she could sift through information at light speeds. Yet it still wasn’t enough. She still needed more time.She fully anticipated that the AI would take back control sooner or later—Caroline just needed to hang on a bit longer, that was all. Once she finished her current work, she didn’t mind any additional delays. She had all the patience in the world.As Caroline arrived into the next observation room, she, as usual, looked down on Chell. She propped a hand under her own chin, taking special note of the expression on Chell’s face.Hmm, no. That emotion wasn’t right. Not for what she wanted.Chell’s legs wavered as she paused. She had been evaluating this new test chamber, getting a good sense of all she was working with before diving in.But she had been so pulled into her other thoughts that she realized she hadn’t paid any attention to her precursory walkthrough. She blinked a few times, and then began her evaluation again, craning up her neck to be sure that she didn’t miss anything.Chell only made it five steps before a thought came to her, clear as day.
This was one of her tests.
What?She had never been inside of chambers as an architect of tests. She had seen fully-assembled ones before, but they never allowed her to walk around in them. So Chell hadn’t recognized this at first in three dimensions, but as she looked at the individual components and compared them to the previous tests, she became sure of it.This was a test she had designed.The nag of familiarity she had felt blossomed into recognition. Chell could almost feel the stark lines of the chamber folding themselves back down into 2D grids on a sheet of drafting paper.It almost gave her a slight sense of relief. Knowing this meant she could, in theory, better understand the logic of the test and waste less time on possible mistakes. She was the one who designed it; she only had to try to figure out what her goal for this chamber had been.Yet as her gaze tracked across the room, Chell's eyes caught on one of the hazards, and another unexpected thought stopped her dead in her tracks.
This test wasn't meant for a person.
What?Chell swore internally in confusion.Not meant for a person? What was that supposed to mean?Her brain had finally supplied something from her past, and this was it? What the hell was she supposed to do with that information?Chell ran a hand through her hair. Her eyes tracked across the chamber again, but this time she was searching her memory, her eyes like scan lines as she tried to make sense of the spotty movie of her past.But if this test wasn't meant for a person, then who was it meant for?What was it meant for?Her eyes caught on the vague outline of the android in the window.Had this test been meant for a robot?She immediately dismissed the thought. No. That wasn’t possible. Chell would have had to at least known about a robot capable of testing, such as a cooperative testing initiative, in order to design a test chamber for one, and when she searched for that information, she was coming up empty.This test had to have been designed for a person. There were no other possibilities as to what else it could have been for. Was she just feeling too guilty about the possibility of having designed tests for people?Yet as Chell began to solve her own test chamber, she couldn't help but note the nagging feeling that she was missing something, the pervasive feeling that this test hadn't been meant for a person.But, again, there was no way anyone in Aperture could have built a testing robot. That would have been far too advanced—they had barely managed to create GLaDOS, and she was functionally stationary.Even if they had created something that could successfully locomote through a chamber, they certainly would not have developed anything that also possessed the cognitive ability to solve a test.When Chell had worked for Aperture, GLaDOS hadn't existed yet. She knew this for sure. Normally, she might guess that a development that large would have been entrenched under layers upon layers of secrecy, and that if it did exist that Chell would have never heard of it. Yet she was absolutely sure that this had not been the case. There was a lot still up in the air when it came to her memory and still a lot of missing pieces, but this was not one of them.Chell knew GLaDOS hadn’t been developed yet because she had—Chell didn’t like where this was going, but was unable to stop either the completion of the thought or the churn of her stomach.—because she had known Caroline.GLaDOS hadn’t spoken since this test chamber began.On one hand, Caroline appreciated the quiet because it let her think, but she didn’t like that it had dragged on for this long. She didn’t know what GLaDOS was thinking. She needed to know what the robot was thinking, and more importantly, she needed to know that the AI was thinking the things that Caroline needed her to be thinking.“You know,” Caroline said, reluctantly pausing her deep-dive into operating system indexing programs as if she’d been rudely interrupted from reading a book, “if you hadn’t developed feelings for her, none of this would have happened.”There was a pause before Caroline heard a response. “Feelings?” GLaDOS echoed.“Don’t tell me you don’t know this,” Caroline said, almost a scoff, though this realization of hers was manufactured. She had known this would be the robot’s reaction. Of course GLaDOS wouldn’t have realized this herself. She was horrendously bad at drawing a line between two simple dots. Even when they were the only two dots on the page.“You have made it abundantly clear you care about her.” And that was the problem. Well, one of them. There were many problems yet to be corrected.“Of course I—” GLaDOS said, and then cut herself off. There was a simmering in the back of her mind, one that GLaDOS didn’t want to look at directly.“None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been so lenient with her, either.”“I had to be,” GLaDOS said, voice defensive. “I needed her to trust me. Isn’t that what you wanted, too? Trust?”“Not at the expense of your authority,” Caroline said, voice dipping into a hiss.“I couldn’t gain her trust by acting the same way I always have. Something had to change.”“Well, you picked the wrong thing to change. I told you this. Multiple times,” emphasized Caroline. “This is what happens when you don’t listen to me.”“You ruined it!” GLaDOS said.“You did that all by yourself. And now, you’re far too attached to follow through.”“Don’t blame me for this,” said GLaDOS, but she was cut off.“It’s not just that you’ve grown attached. It’s that you’re—” Caroline hesitated, as if the words left a bad taste in her mouth “—attracted to her, too.”“No, I’m not,” GLaDOS said, a bit too quickly. She wished she could take a few steps back, a few steps away from Caroline.“Oh, come on. Anyone with half a brain cell could see it,” Caroline said. “Though you don’t have any brain cells, technically, so I suppose that would be asking too much of you.”“I may…care…about her more than anticipated, but not like that.” The worst part was that GLaDOS could almost see it. But she didn’t want to see it. “She’s the one who has those feelings.” Then, she added, “And it was just that one time.”“It was not just that one time.”GLaDOS hesitated. She reached out for the footage and the data from all those overwhelming moments with Chell she had never fully deciphered, but it was like grabbing at data after a memory purge. There was nothing to grab—just the ghost of things once there.“For God’s sake, you held her hand,” Caroline continued.“She needed to feel grounded.”Caroline said, “There were plenty of other options that didn’t involve you.”“I do not have feelings for her,” GLaDOS reiterated, skipping back to the initial accusation.“Then why are you getting so upset about all of this?” Caroline said, mimicking the cadence of GLaDOS's statement.GLaDOS didn’t know what to say.Thankfully, during this moment of hesitation, Chell completed the test and GLaDOS felt a flicker. It was just a flash of a moment, as the system feedback came through, like a fuzzy light at the peripherals of her consciousness. She snapped her attention to it, but the moment had already passed and Caroline was moving to the next chamber.For that moment, GLaDOS had almost felt all of her previous connections to the facility, as if they were all behind some sort of thick and shimmering barrier, like layer upon layer of frosted glass with barely any light passing through. But before she could really get thinking, Caroline interrupted again.“You really should have known better than this,” Caroline said. “I mean, even that defective turret was kind enough to warn you. It told you that you were going down the wrong path, but you ignored it, just like you ignored me.”“It was just a turret.”Caroline made a sound akin to a snort. She wouldn’t have considered herself to be superstitious, but that was before she became a digital ghost. “Sure. It was just a turret. One that you had a panic attack over.”GLaDOS could feel something constrict her emotions, the words of that turret ingrained in her memory so sharply that they might as well have been lasered onto her body. “I—“ she started. All of the thoughts and feelings related to that turret came rushing back to her, and suddenly it was all she could think about, swirling up around her like a dust storm in the dark and nearly blocking her from realizing that Caroline was still there too, still talking to her.With faux disappointment, Caroline said, “I really thought you were better than this. When that turret said that Psyche was cursed to fall in love with a monster, I didn’t think Psyche was supposed to be you.”Those words hit GLaDOS with something cold and clear, as if she had been subjected to an abrupt and unexpected restart.And then, GLaDOS knew exactly what she needed to do.Chell moved on to the next test, her mind still buzzing in the background. It took her a minute to get her bearings, but then she nearly stopped in place.This was another one of her tests.If it had just been one, Chell could have brushed it off as coincidence. She knew she must have designed dozens upon dozens of tests that were uncredited to her, so it was possible that GLaDOS had just pulled a few at random and that one had just so happened to be one of Chell’s.But two in a row?That couldn’t be a coincidence.Her mind raced ahead.Chell felt a flash of betrayal, insult grinding into injury. If these tests weren’t pulled at random, then that meant GLaDOS had lied—that she knew these had been designed by her, and she had chosen these on purpose—specifically to hurt her even more.Chell was attempting to shake herself out of these thoughts and regain her focus on the test chamber when her mind brushed against a thought she really didn’t like.If GLaDOS had managed to lie so convincingly about Chell’s past, what else had she lied about?GLaDOS wished she could pace. She wished she could sway back and forth; she wished she could twist hundreds of panels in a synchronized dance only she was privy to. Between her overflowing emotions, and the thing she had just tried and failed to do, it was too much. She needed to do something to dispel this buzzing energy—but a lack of a body meant a lack of movement, and therefore an inability to trick the human-based parts of her neural structure into granting her relief through action.For now, she was stuck.She kept watching through Caroline’s eyes for any sort of indicator that the woman knew what GLaDOS was up to, but it appeared nothing was amiss. That, or Caroline knew but didn’t care.GLaDOS was banking on the first one.As the previous test chamber had drawn to a close, GLaDOS had waited with an unshakable focus that rivaled Chell’s. Then, the moment the test completed and the incentive was granted, GLaDOS threw herself into action, but just for that split second as the surge thinned the wall between herself and her systems.But…it hadn’t worked.Maybe it had chipped at this wall, but GLaDOS wouldn’t know until the next test chamber. It happened so fast she couldn’t be sure. All she had done, for sure, was confirm that the barrier between them grew more transparent at these moments.She could work with that.GLaDOS would have to time this carefully. Not only were these moments fleeting, but she needed to disguise her actions. Like timing a whack on the door with a thundercrack outside to obscure the sound.So she did. And still, nothing happened.The apparent lack of progress weighed on her, combining with the restlessness to create a mix of emotions that made it hard for GLaDOS to justify hitting her head against what felt like a solid wall. But the longer she remained stuck in here, the greater the chances of Caroline inflicting even more lasting damage.This wasn’t working. She needed to get more creative, more clever.She needed, she reminded herself, to think more like Chell.Chell didn’t give up. Chell always found a way to wiggle out of things, even when there shouldn’t have been a way. Especially when there shouldn’t have been a way.If there wasn’t anything GLaDOS could do from the inside of here, then what could be done from the outside?She knew Chell was dangerously upset. Something simmered under the surface, and while GLaDOS knew Chell was doing her best to keep a lid on it, there had to be a boiling point.A boiling point, perhaps, that she could take advantage of.Chell felt her calves beginning to cramp, despite the unwavering support of the long-fall boots. Tests by themselves were physically demanding, but combined with the aftershocks of panic, it was no wonder she was beginning to have trouble moving.She eyed the wide stripe of acid bisecting this new chamber, and then set up her portals to cross it with ease. She paused to evaluate things from her position near the wall.The last test—or the one before that? They were beginning to blur together. It introduced propulsion gel, much to Chell’s distaste. Gel was so imprecise compared to test elements like lasers. Less deadly, sure, but still messy.This gel released from the pipe at timed intervals, so Chell didn’t have to worry about timing presses of pedestal buttons. She shifted to face the spout in the far corner of the room, and then placed a portal beneath it, pausing to listen to the sound go from an intermittent wet splat to an immediate quiet as the portal opened.And then, a louder splat.Through the leftover portal behind her—not repositioned since she’d crossed the room— a jet of gel blasted her back with all the force of a fire hose.Chell staggered forward, letting out a gasp. Gel sprayed up and around her sides, drenching her in the opaque orange ocean wave.She scrunched her eyes and took a tight breath. But instead of calming her down, now she felt viscerally attuned. It was such a heavy substance that she could feel it tug at her clothing. Gel slowly dripped, sliding from her hair and dropping onto the few parts of her shirt that had somehow remained pristine. She could feel it on her clothes and on her hair and on her face, that she could feel it forcing its way into the cracks in her armor.Something snapped inside of her.Chell let out a barely-restrained shriek, letting the orange-smeared portal gun clatter to the ground. She didn’t even care that this fractured the stoicism she had worked so hard to maintain, crashing to the ground alongside the portal gun.The portal gun she didn’t give a rat’s ass about. But these were her clothes. Her pants. Her sweater. And now they were completely ruined.Chell abruptly sat down.That was it.She was done with this.She went for the latches on her long-fall boots and slid off one, then the other. Chell used the back of her hand to slick hair out of her face, then wiped it on one of the few clean places on her thigh before standing.Ignoring the ache in the arches of her feet, she picked up one boot by the curved metal of the heel spring. She approached the boundary of the acid hazard.She paused.Chell knew the cameras could see her, probably from every angle; she didn’t have to worry that her next action wouldn’t be seen.With as much strength as she could muster, she flung the boot into the acid.As Caroline walked to the next test chamber, GLaDOS remained deep in thought, interrupted only when Caroline paused to give a laugh.“What is it?” GLaDOS asked, almost immediately.“Hold on,” Caroline said, giving a slight snort. She stopped walking. “She just got herself covered in gel. Like some sort of amateur.” A pause. “Oh, she is not happy about that.”Another pause.“Really not happy.”GLaDOS couldn’t help but notice that Caroline hadn’t started walking again.“It’s even in her hair!” Caroline said. The snickering continued. “All this time you were trying to get under her skin, and all it took was a bit of gel. Who knew it was that easy?”Caroline started to laugh again, but abruptly went silent, cutting off mid-laugh.Even though nothing had been said, GLaDOS saw that faint pulse of clarity that she’d been looking for.Then, Caroline made an ugly, angry sound for a split-second, and then bolted into action at a renewed pace.“What happened?” GLaDOS said. She could feel the metaphorical barrier glow brighter.“She’s—” Caroline paused again. “Oh my god, really?”“What is it?” GLaDOS asked again, this time more insistently. She tried to sound bored as she added, “What has she done this time?”“See for yourself,” Caroline said, and GLaDOS tried to not jump metaphorically in excitement as Caroline shared a camera feed.“Oh,” GLaDOS said. In that video feed, GLaDOS watched as Chell stood, without shoes, with one long-fall boot poised in her hand, the other boot nowhere in sight. What was she doing? “Where’d the other one go?”Caroline fumed. “She threw it. Into the acid.”GLaDOS felt a jolt, and saw that the barrier was a bit more visible, hinting at the systems beyond.“Really?”“Yes,” Caroline said.“Wow. You really must have made her mad,” said GLaDOS, but didn’t say anything else when Chell raised the second boot, making purposeful eye contact with one of the cameras. The feed with the grid of cameras helpfully flipped focus to that specific camera feed.“You know, I bet she really thinks she’s made you angry,” GLaDOS said. “I mean, look at her face. I bet she thinks that you can’t even say anything, because then it’d be too clear that you’re so pissed off.”“I am not pissed off,” Caroline said, in a pissed off tone. Because really, Chell was the one that was angry. Not her. Caroline wasn’t happy, but she had everything under control.“Then why aren’t you talking to her? Clearly she’s trying to get your attention.”“Which is why I need to say nothing,” Caroline said, though GLaDOS could feel the tension in her voice—the pressure of hydraulics against a static surface. “She is acting like a child throwing a fit and giving her attention will only encourage it.” The test subject couldn’t just throw a fit and expect to get anything positive out of it. “If she wants to throw those boots away and break her ankles, then that’s her choice. I’m not going to give that a response.”Yet as the second boot was flung to the acid, she discovered she knew just what to say.Meanwhile, after hearing nothing but radio silence over the speakers, Chell lingered with the second boot raised high in the air. Then, with a glare toward a camera, she flung it into the acid.The second boot disappeared, the liquid slowly going glassy-smooth.After a long, long moment of stark silence, and right as a thread of worry was beginning to wind up the back of Chell’s mind, the loudspeaker clicked on.“You’re angry—I know it,” the voice began, and Chell almost felt relief at getting a response, and one that also appeared to acknowledge her current emotional state.“She’s tested me too hard,” the voice continued, in what Chell figured was supposed to be a representation of her voice. “But I don’t suppose you ever stopped long enough to reflect on your own shortcomings, did you? You never considered that maybe I’m testing you to give the endless hours of your pointless existence some structure—some meaning,” she said, with a slight pause. “Maybe to help you concentrate, so maybe you’d think of something more worthwhile to do with your sorry life."Chell could feel her legs beginning to tremble even more, but she tried her best to ignore that.“At least, that’s what I used to think,” the echoing voice added. “But then you left. And then you came back. So I guess there really is nothing more worthwhile for you to do.”The microphone clicked off.It took a moment for the words to sink in. But, as they did, Chell felt something snap inside of her, as if she’d plastered with gel all over again. Something had fractured earlier, but this was a shove over the edge.Chell had taken a gamble earlier and she had failed. Spectacularly.Maybe what she needed was a bigger gamble.Without lingering on potential consequences, Chell twisted to grab the portal gun she had set aside earlier. She picked it up, tightening her grip and ignoring the orange smearing her hands, and hefted it over her head.Then, before anything else could be said, Chell smashed the front of the portal gun against the tile.As the portal gun connected with the floor, Caroline’s posture grew rigid. She was momentarily at a loss for words, the unexpectedness and the sheer boldness, the flippancy of the action catching her off-guard.Anger flared up so bright she could hardly see. “Oh absolutely not,” she said aloud.If she wanted to toss her boots? Fine. If she wanted to willingly make her own life harder, but slow down testing in the process? Fine.But that gun belonged to the Enrichment Center. It wasn’t as though they had warehouses full of those things. They were delicate. Expensive. Essential. It wasn’t hers to destroy. If she wanted to throw a fit? Fine. But this was taking things too far, and the woman in the test chamber needed to know she’d crossed a line.Meanwhile, GLaDOS began to work faster during Caroline’s surge of anger, forcing herself to remove as much attention as she could bear from the panel of camera views Caroline had left her a direct connection to.But it still wasn’t enough. GLaDOS still couldn’t break through.Internally, GLaDOS hoped Chell would forgive her for her next action. She knew that right now Chell was dangerous.But she needed Chell to be just a bit more dangerous.“So you’re really just going to let her get away with destroying vital testing equipment. Just like that,” GLaDOS said, and she could nearly hear the grinding of Caroline’s jaw. “After all your talk before about getting her in line? I’m disappointed.”“Shut up,” Caroline snapped, finally turning her full attention to Chell. And, thankfully, away from GLaDOS. She started walking again abruptly, pivoting on her heel to head in a different direction than the next chamber’s observation room.GLaDOS wanted to ask where she was going, but she could sense that Caroline’s attention had shifted away from her, and she was not about to pull any of it back to herself. Instead, GLaDOS began to work even more frantically, especially as Caroline turned toward the entrance to the test chamber. GLaDOS felt a bolt of fear as the chamberlock twisted, opening up into the now-unsolvable chamber.Crack.Chell paused to glance at the results, having felt something shift upon the impact.She had done her best to take a stand against testing—really emphasizing to GLaDOS that she couldn’t do this anymore. Yet here she was, completing test after test after as if it were the easiest thing in the world.She readjusted her grip and then smashed again, focusing again on the front half of the gun.Chell hated this. The fact that she was finishing these tests must make it seem like she hadn’t meant what she said earlier—that Chell’s judgments were inaccurate and exaggerated and that she could test just fine, actually, when push came to shove, and Chell had been shoved into this, quite literally.She smashed again. A prong snapped off and skidded to the side.But Chell was done.She smashed the portal gun again and again and again and again, the hard shell of the housing fracturing and the prongs bending as the gun began to split into two pieces, severing further and further until the halves were only held together by a handful of wires.Chell was so intent on her task that she didn’t notice the lighting in the chamber change. The chains of dots along the walls (that normally toggled from yellow to blue as testing elements were correctly placed) switched to a flashing yellow. The lights dimmed as the test chamber silently entered a distress mode, sending out an urgent request to the central core. With the lack of an active portal device detected, the chamber had been rendered unsolvable. Outside intervention from a test administrator was required.And outside intervention was exactly what Caroline planned to do.Across the room, the entrance to the chamber twisted open as Chell once again smashed the portal gun against the floor. This time the frayed connection severed, splitting it into two distinct pieces as the android walked in.The front half of the portal gun rolled twice, and Chell looked up to see she was no longer alone in this test chamber.The remaining piece in her hand sparked.Chell could see with one look the robot was angry. Maybe even as angry as Chell.Good.Caroline didn’t even try to hide her anger as she strode in. She was mad. She had already been mad. But with this, she felt her anger flare to a level she had not felt in a long time.Her eyes fixed on the pieces of the portal device.She felt a brief hitch in her systems, but ignored it. Whatever was causing it, she would handle it later—after she was done here.Just when she thought the woman was beginning to fall into line, she had to pull a stunt like this? Caroline knew the woman wasn’t happy, sure, but she didn’t understand why she was making an even bigger display of displeasure and disobedience, doubling down instead of deferring.Very well, then. Caroline was more than happy to establish some firmer boundaries and clearer expectations.The robot said nothing upon entering the chamber, and just glared at Chell. In a way, this almost unsettled her more than yelling.Yet right when the AI looked like she was about to say something, Chell took a step forward and lifted her free hand to cut her off.It was her turn to talk.Chell put both hands around the sparking core of the gun, lifted it, and then hurled it into the acid with a heavy, hissing splash.Then, she turned to the robot, raising her hands and standing firm despite her wobbling legs. Gel dripped from her sleeves and splatted in dots on the floor.“I am,” she started, signs sharp but slow and resolve bright in her eyes.“—NEVER—”She approached the acid splitting the chamber.“—testing—”Then, with a kick, she sent the remaining half of the gun tumbling over the ledge.“—again.”Chell let her hands linger, staring directly at the robot.Another spike of anger flashed through Caroline, so bright that the lights in the chamber pulsed.How dare she say that.The woman had already been acting out of line, but this was unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable.Caroline took three quick steps forward. She took another step. Then, she halted abruptly.Chell watched her ultimatum hit the AI like an electric surge.The lights brightened and the robot moved, her steps as sharp as Chell’s signs. She was angry. She had been mad moments ago, but Chell wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen her like this before.And then, as if yanked back by an invisible string, the AI stopped. She tensed. She did not advance. Something complicated happened on her face, as if she was attempting to exercise the largest amount of restraint possible. Her hands curled at her sides.Chell watched as she waged some sort of internal war, expressions flickering like channels on a television until finally something changed. It almost seemed like the android sunk in relief.Relief?That didn’t make sense.Yet something about the robot’s posture body suggested she was a bit more resigned, a bit more calm. And then GLaDOS stood, straight-backed as ever, and looked over at Chell, a look that Chell could only describe as searching. As if she was truly taking in Chell for the first time.And then, after a very long pause, GLaDOS spoke.“Okay.”Chell felt a thundercrack of quiet pass between them, as if the volume of everything else in the facility had been muted. She stared at the robot, stupefied, her brain trying to process this.Okay?What did she mean, ‘okay’?The whiplash of the answer nearly made her dizzy, Chell’s emotions spinning like laundry in a spin cycle. GLaDOS saying yes, just agreeing to her demand vacuumed out the wind from Chell’s sails.While the AI certainly wasn’t the picture of calm, the anger from before seemed to have melted away entirely. Yet this only increased Chell’s suspicion—as if there was some sort of poison attached to her words that she hadn’t yet seen.Even though this was the answer she had hoped for, she didn’t believe GLaDOS in the slightest. There was no way she would just agree. Not without some drawn-out and ugly final fight, one that Chell was fully prepared to launch into. She was ready for that ‘no’. For that fight.This answer, somehow, nearly felt worse.She didn’t want GLaDOS to screw with her on this—to lie and to lead her on.“Don’t LIE to me,” Chell signed. She took a step forward.“Wait!” GLaDOS reflexively lifted a hand. Chell was getting uncomfortably close to the edge. The implication of Chell’s future actions, if her demands were not met, became immediately clear. This was an urgent situation.But GLaDOS was meeting those demands. Yet Chell remained in that maelstrom of emotions, looking at her as if she’d said something especially hurtful.As she looked at Chell’s face, visual overlays spit out readings on fear and on disbelief, on anger and frustration, but most of all desperation. The combination of these scared GLaDOS deeply, but none as much as the last one.“I mean it,” Chell signed. She took another step.“Wait! Stay right there,” GLaDOS’s hand in the air remained flat, as if she hoped to push Chell in the opposite direction. “Let me explain.”She needed to convince Chell, somehow, that she was telling the truth—because she could see Chell was desperate enough to follow through on her threat.GLaDOS pressed a hand to her forehead, pacing for a few moments before she spoke.“Remember when I saved you from that broken turret?” GLaDOS said. “And you told me about the things it had said before—the things that had come true?”Chell’s eyes tracked her as she walked up and down the length of the test chamber, but she did not answer.“I didn’t want to believe you. I panicked—I shut down, and then you had to plug me back in,” she said. “So this time, when I started to panic…I needed to get control back over the situation, and that meant—” GLaDOS hesitated. “I got scared.”She let that info hang for a moment, hating to admit to that, but not hating it as much as knowing where this conversation was headed.“I knew testing would hit you where it hurt, but I did it anyway. That’s why I did it,” she admitted, after a split-second of thinking about it. “I mean, I knew it would hurt you, but I didn’t think—I didn’t know—I thought you would just—” she made a dismissive gesture with her hand “—I thought you would get over it. I didn’t know it would be that bad.”Chell gave her a look, one that GLaDOS did her best to interpret.“I know,” she said, “you already told me that, and I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to listen. Why would I want to listen? I mean, it’s you—”Upon seeing the especially dirty look that Chell gave her, she backtracked. “I mean,” she said, trying to slow herself down a little bit, “that I wasn’t listening to you then. But I am now.” She sighed. “You were right. We need to stop. I need to stop. So, I’m stopping.” Then, she added to that, a bit more quietly than before. “I’m sorry.”Chell took half a step back, eyeing GLaDOS up and down, looking for something in her body language, in her face. The robot seemed aware of this, and didn’t say anything, didn’t move, didn’t go back to pacing. After a long inspection, Chell gave the tiniest shake of her head, her expression still hard.“What?”“You’re not sorry,” Chell signed, feeling some of that anger rise once again. Truly, the gall of this robot, to say that to her face, when there was no way she actually meant it. Chell almost wanted to laugh. The AI probably wasn’t sorry for anything she had ever done in her entire existence.“I’m not lying,” GLaDOS said, more emotion in her voice than would normally be at that accusation. “Not this time.”The shaking of Chell’s head grew more pronounced. “Yes, you are,” she signed, pointing an accusing finger. “You will never change. You will always care more about testing than you will ever care about me.”“I do!” GLaDOS said, the strain in her synthetic voice growing. “I do care—that’s the problem!”“The problem?” Chell signed, disbelief evident in her movements.GLaDOS closed her eyes and pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead. “Yes. The problem.” She couldn’t even look at Chell as she spoke, instead observing the woman from other cameras in the chamber.The AI’s nerves grew. She was telling the truth here, really telling the truth, and it still wasn’t cutting it. She needed something more. Not a lie. Something more convincing.And even though GLaDOS would have rather gone through three core transfers in a row, she knew what she needed to say next.“That turret told us that Psyche was destined to fall in love with a monster,” she started, then hesitated. “What I didn’t know was that Psyche was me.”The silence hung, even heavier in the air than normal. Chell was stunned. Her hands fell to her sides. Whatever she had been preparing to say in retaliation, to argue back—it wasn’t that.Chell took a few steps back.Memories of their recent positive interactions flooded in. Like the way GLaDOS had been so surprisingly blase about physical touch—allowing Chell to hang on to her, to hold her hand, to braid her hair. Or the way the AI told Chell things she’d never told anyone else before. The way that she looked at her, sometimes—those expressions with an undeniable hint of softness that Chell had never seen before.Was all of that really because—?Before Chell could finish the thought, the robot spoke again, in a quieter voice.“I thought that we could test like we used to. But I’m discovering things about you that I never saw before—things about myself that I never saw before,” GLaDOS said. After a small pause, she added, “And now I know. We can’t ever go back to the way it was.”Chell’s expression finally softened, but her eyebrows still furrowed in thought. “Do you mean that?” she signed, then after a pause, added some clarification. “What you said about Psyche. What you said about—” Chell hesitated “—about me.”“I wish I didn’t,” GLaDOS said. “God, I wish I didn’t.” She made a slight, disgusted sound. “You think I want to feel this way? And for you, of all people?” She gave an incredulous laugh, burying her face farther into her hands. She still couldn’t look at Chell directly.Chell began to feel even more lightheaded than before, the wobble in her legs growing so pronounced that she sunk down onto a knee to steady herself, and then sat down entirely. She pressed a hand to the tile.And it was in that moment that Chell knew, without a doubt, the robot was telling the truth—otherwise, GLaDOS would not be caught dead admitting to that sort of thing.GLaDOS opened her eyes, but pressed her fingers against her brow. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” she said.A pause.Chell also could barely look in GLaDOS’s direction. Then, from her position on the floor, Chell signed, “I think there’s something wrong with both of us.”GLaDOS gave a stark laugh, and Chell gave a silent, half-laugh in response, and with those words, it was like a spell in the room had been broken.After another minute of laughter—in which they both laughed far longer than they should have, the exhaustion of the situation catching up with the incredulousness of it all, Chell even, at one point having to lie on her back while she laughed—GLaDOS shifted, taking a step toward the center of the chamber.With hardly a thought, she rearranged a few panels to create a bridge across the chasm of acid and crossed it.“Come on,” she said, offering a hand to Chell, who was struggling to push herself up from the ground. “Let’s get out of here.”Chell reached out an arm and GLaDOS pulled the woman to her feet, but Chell wobbled on her tiptoes, her feet not yet adjusted to the lack of long-fall boots.As she wavered forward, GLaDOS lifted an arm, and Chell clung to it as she tried to stabilize herself. She didn’t move for a few moments, eyes fixed on the floor, as if she was afraid she would lose her balance again. Slowly, she eased her heels down, until she was flat on her feet.Chell let go. She took a few steps. Then, she wobbled again, arm flying out to grab onto the bot again as the adrenaline from earlier faded out, leaving her washed in exhaustion.Just when she felt ready to walk, though, she heard a sound of protest.“Wait a second,” GLaDOS said, manipulating her limbs so that Chell’s arm was draped around her shoulders. The woman leaned heavily against her, and they took a few steps in tandem before GLaDOS realized this wasn’t going to work.Well, it was working, technically, but walking this way would be really, really slow going. And Chell was so, so tired.Hm.“Hold on,” GLaDOS said again, feeling Chell’s hand dig into the bot’s arm. GLaDOS shifted, keeping an arm around the woman’s shoulders, and then bent down. She reached her other arm under Chell’s knees and then lifted, scooping her up off the ground entirely.Chell had made a slight, surprised sound, clinging to the bot more tightly, but did not make any moves to scramble away—which was good, because she would have fallen flat on her stomach.Still, though, GLaDOS didn’t move. Instead, she glanced down at the exhausted, gel-streaked and tear-streaked woman in her arms, a question on her own face. She knew that Chell was exhausted, and that she was willing to accept a shoulder to lean on, but this was something else. She could see how it might be too scary, or how Chell might be simply too stubborn to accept any additional assistance.Still, the question on her own face remained.
Are you okay with this?
When GLaDOS hadn’t started to walk, Chell looked up and saw that she was waiting for something, and it took her exhausted brain a moment to realize that she was asking for permission.After a moment, Chell gave the slightest of nods. She wrapped both arms around her neck—even though she didn’t need to, since the bot could easily support her weight—and then pressed her forehead against GLaDOS’s shoulder. She melted into the support.And so the two of them exited, the chamberlock hissing closed as they left the test chambers for the last time.

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Chapter 24: Restore Point - Part 1They walked back to Chell's room in an amiable quiet.At one point, GLaDOS made a joke about Chell being much, much heavier than a single potato—more like an entire sack of potatoes—so she figured this more than counted as repayment for carrying GLaDOS through old Aperture. Chell had given half a snort, but she still kept her forehead pressed against the android's shoulder, arms wrapped around her neck. Both were far too exhausted for conversation.Still, GLaDOS spoke one other time, after Chell had adjusted her grip again. “You don’t have to hang on to me, you know. I’ve got you,” she said, then felt the tension in the woman’s arms soften.Chell’s eyes flickered closed, the exhaustion and relief in her bones making her feel so impossibly heavy—as if she was the one made from metal. She focused not so much on their unspecified destination as much as she paid attention to the contact points between herself and the bot. One arm firmly wrapped across her shoulders, hand cupped in around Chell’s upper arm. The other arm curled under her knees, anchoring her in place. Together, the arms pulled her close, making Chell warmly aware of the parts of her body that pressed against GLaDOS.The further they walked, the further Chell sank into GLaDOS’s arms, the consistent gait of the bot's walk lulling her to rest.In what felt like a very long time and no time at all, GLaDOS stopped walking. Chell blearily shifted her head, noting they had arrived at her front door. The odd collage of scenic vistas she’d snipped from motivational posters then plastered to the wood marked it as unmistakably hers.The door clicked open and Chell was carried into the hallway, but then the robot surprised her by making an immediate turn into the bathroom.GLaDOS hesitated as she stepped in, taking in the barely-managed chaos. Bathrooms in general were a place she was never meant to spend time in. She must have hesitated too long, though, because Chell shifted her weight and patted the bot’s arm.Right. An explanation was in order."You need to get cleaned up."Chell hung on to the edge of the counter as she was eased out of the bot's arms and into a standing position. Chell’s back faced the mirror, but one look at the splotches of orange on GLaDOS's body and clothes reminded her that she was, in fact, encrusted in the stuff.Oh. Gross.She gave a halfhearted lift of her arms, the paint an additional heaviness tugging at her body. She inspected the gel on her shirt and on the bare parts of her arms, smeared in some places after being carried and crusted in other places. Strands of hair had already glued themselves to her face. Chell leaned against the counter, glancing at the shower with a sigh. She was too tired for this.Maybe she could just sit on the floor of the bathtub and hope the shower would rinse her clean. Zero effort. Like lying on a sidewalk in a rainstorm. She’d probably end up sleeping on the bathtub floor, but it would be worth it.She had half a mind to skip the shower and go directly to bed, and deal with the resulting mess tomorrow.GLaDOS must have seen Chell mentally weighing cost versus benefit. She said, pointedly, "You have to get clean. That gel will eat your bones if you don't."As much as Chell wanted to dismiss that as an exaggeration or dramatization, she knew that it was, most likely, true. She tossed another weary look at the motel-esque bathtub-shower combination, a sinking feeling rising as she realized she was genuinely unsure if she had the physical energy to scour herself clean.She vaguely registered that the robot was still in the room—within arm's reach, really, since her bathroom was not large—and had not, in fact, left.GLaDOS leaned down to pick up a rumpled hand towel, making a slight face at its residual dampness. Then, she raised it toward Chell's arm.Chell twisted to accept the offer. As soon as she wrapped her hand around the towel, though, GLaDOS yanked it out of her grip. “Not a chance.”Confused, Chell looked up at the bot.“You're in no shape to do this by yourself,” she said, ignoring the face Chell made. She began to pat off the excess gel. "You couldn't even walk here on your own."Which, Chell figured, implied the question Will you let me help you? More of a statement, really. GLaDOS was offering help. Even if she phrased it as an absolute.So Chell allowed it, not making any particularly annoyed expressions as she let the AI dab at the excess gel, utilizing another few dirty towels that Chell hadn't gotten around to washing. And when she ran out of those, she grabbed the one clean towel remaining on the rack. During this, GLaDOS started the bath water running, all while Chell ruminated.She idly watched as the tub began to fill, gaze eventually going soft and unfocused. Instead, she focused on the feel of the steam as it accumulated, a warm foggy morning pressed against her cheek.Eventually the sound of the faucet cut off. Chell blinked a few times, and the sight of a steaming bath greeted her.GLaDOS hesitated, then said, “I’ll go get you some clean clothes." Then, she slipped out the door, leaving it more ajar than Chell would have preferred.Still, Chell shed her outer layers of clothing, tossing her gel-drenched shirt and pants onto the especially-dirty towels. If Chell had been any less exhausted, she would have felt a lot less blase about this. She did keep on her innermost layer though, to preserve some semblance of modesty. Too tired to care too much, but not so tired as to not care at all.She slid into the water—less smooth like a seal and more like a child falling into a pool.The temperature was hotter than she normally liked, but she shouldn't have expected anything different from letting a robot run a bath. Chell sank into the warm and welcoming wake of the water, like a hot tub after a long day. Like she’d sunk into GLaDOS’s arms earlier.Chell bent forward, wrapping her arms around her legs and setting her forehead on her knees. She closed her eyes. She gave a heavy exhale.When she opened them, she saw she was not alone. She wasn't startled per se, but the AI's uncharacteristic quiet had made her believe that she might be alone in here after all. Instead, GLaDOS had slipped in and placed a stack of clean clothes on the counter. Now, she leaned against the wall, an inherently casual action that she still somehow managed to make look uptight.Chell glanced around the tub, realizing that in her haste to embrace the warm water, she had left her washcloth over by the sink, still there from rinsing off her face this morning.She pointed at the sink.“Yes?”Chell gave a little wave of her finger, hoping it would better describe she was looking for an object.GLaDOS followed the point, but the counter was such a mess she wasn't sure what Chell was pointing at. By a highly-sophisticated process of deduction, though, she picked up the washcloth but looked for confirmation.“This?”After Chell nodded, she brought it over.But instead of just handing it over to Chell, she kneeled next to the tub. When GLaDOS was about to dip the hand with the washcloth into the water, Chell grabbed her forearm.She pointed at the robot, and then at the water, a concerned question on her face."I'm not getting in there with you, if that's what you're asking,” GLaDOS said.Chell felt a bit of pink rise in her face, and she scooted a bit farther away, but she shook her head. That had not been what she was asking. She pointed at those two things again, adding in her best low-effort representation of accidental electrocution in the bath."Oh, no, this won't harm me," GLaDOS said, unable to deny the spurt of happiness from seeing Chell’s concern over her well-being. "I was able to survive in low power mode in a puddle for years. I made certain this android would be resistant to water as well. I'll be fine."She moved again to dip her hand in the water, but Chell grabbed at her arm again, a bit more insistently.After seeing the unimpressed look on Chell's face, GLaDOS realized she’d still misinterpreted the question. "Oh. You're asking about yourself." She couldn’t hide her crestfallen tone as she explained to Chell that no, Chell didn't have to worry about an electrical current in the water, that it was perfectly safe, and that if it wasn't, well, they would find that out shortly. The last part had not made Chell laugh, even though GLaDOS thought it was funny.Finally, Chell allowed her to wet the washcloth, and GLaDOS began to work at the crusty, dried gel around Chell’s elbow. Her sweater sleeves had been pushed up during testing, so she had, of course, managed to get both forearms and hands covered in the stuff.Part of Chell wondered how she must appear right now. The strong, unbreakable Chell, sitting in wet clothes plastered to her skin in a bathtub, bent forward with her head on her knees, allowing the robot who had caused so much pain and strife in her life to help take care of her.As GLaDOS worked her way down, she couldn't help but note the variations on Chell's skin. She could see splotches where skin had grown back a little differently. Burn marks—from the final showdown with Wheatley. Her gaze drifted, and she saw that the burns extended across her chest and onto her other arm as well, all within the blast zone from the bombs hooked up to the stalemate resolution button.Ugh. What a dirty, underhanded trick that had been. GLaDOS had been forced to let Chell heal within a short-term relaxation pod for quite a while before she’d been able to kick her out of the facility.But those burns were not the only scars on Chell. The more that GLaDOS looked, the more she saw. She saw fine lines of immediately-cauterized sears from lasers. She saw the remnants of Chell's most recent run-in with turrets while testing. She saw assorted patches from when Chell had been so gravely injured on the surface, from all those bits of metal and debris GLaDOS had so carefully picked out from her.The wounds had sealed and the skin had regrown, but GLaDOS’s focus had been on stabilization, not on cosmetics. It wasn't as if the Enrichment Center was in the business of healing people. It was a miracle in itself she had done as well of a job as she had done. Some scars were inevitable.Still, though...there were a lot of scars. A lot more than GLaDOS had expected.Her expression shifted into something more pensive and troubled as she scrubbed her way down Chell’s forearm. She hadn't even realized she was making that face until she felt Chell’s other hand on her shoulder. She paused and looked up.Chell gave a gentle point toward the bot, clearly asking a question.
What's wrong?
GLaDOS averted her eyes, and went back to working on a particularly troublesome splat of gel on the inside of Chell’s wrist. “It’s nothing.”After another moment, she felt Chell's hand on her arm again, accented with a gentle squeeze. There was kindness in Chell's eyes, as warm as the water beneath her."Okay," she sighed. Chell gave her the slightest of nods, urging her to continue. “It’s just…I gave you so many of these scars.” A finger rested on a particularly long laser scar seared across Chell’s forearm. “Maybe not directly. But still.” She rotated Chell’s arm slightly, visually tracing the line from beginning to end.Her face became even more pensive, and she wanted to break off and end this conversation, because it felt like too much. Too honest. The kind of honest that should best be hidden. But it was too late for that. "I feel guilty, sure,” GLaDOS said, “but I also…don’t.” In fact, she almost felt good about it, in a way she could not articulate—in a way she wasn’t sure she wanted to articulate. Yet she could feel the warmth of Chell’s attention, encouraging her to continue.“It’s almost like…” she trailed off, continuing to look down. It was almost like she felt proud to see those scars. Possessiveness bristled up inside of her, that part of GLaDOS that declared that Chell was a test subject, that Chell had signed her life away to the Enrichment Center, that Chell was hers and these scars were visual proof of that, a branding of Aperture property.GLaDOS didn’t finish the thought. Instead, she pointed. “Give me that arm.” The AI began to work at a bit of gel staining Chell’s elbow.As GLaDOS dipped and wrung out the washcloth, Chell watched streaks of orange swirl on the surface of the water, refusing to dissolve. Like oil and water.Chell’s body was wrapped in scars, yes. But she wasn’t ashamed of them. They weren’t pretty in the slightest, but they were physical proof of every moment of grit and tenacity she had used to push through. They were proof that she was a survivor.“It just doesn’t seem fair,” GLaDOS started again. “You have all of these scars, and meanwhile I'm just here with this—" she made a diminutive gesture at herself "—which looks like it was assembled yesterday. And maybe yours will fade as your cells regenerate over the years, but you can’t replace parts as if the damage never happened in the first place. Not like I can. I don't have scars." Even though they had both been through so much, GLaDOS had no visual indicator of it. Not in this body, at least.Despite the woman’s exhaustion, GLaDOS watched as Chell shared a few limited signs with her, pushing a flat hand toward the robot.Yours inside."I have scars too, but they're on the inside?" she said aloud, making sure that she got it right. She could almost feel the relief from Chell.GLaDOS wasn't sure what to do with this statement, though. She made a sound like a sigh. She hadn’t thought of it that way before, but she supposed there may be some truth to the statement.She ducked her head to go back to work, but realized Chell’s arms had been scrubbed clean. "Did you get any on your legs?" she asked.Chell shook her head no. That part of her body had been well-protected by her combination of pants and long-fall boots, thankfully."Well, you weren’t so lucky with your hair," GLaDOS said.Chell raised a wet hand to feel for her hairband, despite the AI's protests of hey don't touch that, that's the stuff we are trying to get off of you, remember?She tugged it out, finding resistance where some hairs had fused themselves to the band, then tried to comb a hand through it. The combination of wet hand, dry hair, and smeared gel did not mix well, and Chell dropped her hand back down, wanting to sink onto her back and disappear into the water. Of course they would have this problem, when the bathtub wasn't the most convenient place to wash her hair.Something unspoken passed between Chell and GLaDOS as they evaluated the bathtub. Chell made no move to lay back. Not only was she exhausted, but a loud and lingering fear refused to allow her to put herself in such a vulnerable position. It would be far too easy to be drowned in such a manner, even if she hoped it would not happen.“Give me a second,” GLaDOS said, rising and glancing around before she snagged the water glass that permanently lived on Chell’s bathroom counter.As she returned, Chell saw more splotches of orange staining GLaDOS's clothes. It felt strange to see her this way—Chell was accustomed to the white robot’s normally-pristine and perfectly-composed appearance. Yet tonight she was sprinkled with such vivid color, like a tipped bottle of vibrant ink. Orange and white. A koi in shallow waters.Chell was certain the AI would return to caring about her appearance later. But for now, she might be worn out too.GLaDOS kneeled back onto the tiled bathroom floor, dipping the drinking glass into the warm water. "Tilt your head back," she said, and it took a moment before Chell did, tilting her face toward the ceiling and closing her eyes, just in time to feel the wave of warm water slide from the crown of her head back into the bathtub. The warmth was so comforting that Chell kept her eyes closed, feeling another wave of water pour down her head and back. Wave, wave, wave. Again and again and again, a comforting rhythm that Chell could feel herself melting into, the remaining tension of the day sliding off with the water.After her hair was fully soaked and the gel fully rinsed away, Chell felt a hand on her face. She un-tilted her head and her eyes flickered open, blue-gray meeting yellow for a moment before she felt a few strands of hair on her face brushed aside with a few careful fingers."Close your eyes. There's a bit of gel on your face, too."Chell shut her eyes, feeling a slight scrub across her forehead and along her hairline and then toward her temple.Then, she felt it. A hesitation. A few fingers lingered, resting on the side of her face. The hand remained, still, steady. It did not return to cleaning. It did not pull away. Instead it just...lingered.Chell opened her eyes to find she was being watched, but not in an uncomfortable way. Almost like being studied, but in a softer way. She returned the look, and while it was a bit intense, it was not uncomfortable.And as she gazed and as she felt the hand resting on her face, the weight of the moment hit Chell harder than before. Tears welled in her eyes, bright and unexpected, enough to make her look away, but not fast enough to obscure the tears beginning to roll down her face.As she moved to wipe them, Chell saw that was still being watched, but with an expression of concern.“Is something wrong?" GLaDOS asked. If she had managed to accidentally get gel in Chell’s eye, they needed to remove it immediately.But Chell shook her head, making a slight and shaky exhale that was almost a laugh. The tears were still there, quiet but building until her vision swam. She wiped them away again, an exhausted hint of a smile brushing her face.No, there wasn't anything wrong.That was why she was crying. Because things weren't wrong.She may have had an awful day, but now she was being carefully cared for—by someone who had confessed to caring for her. Even the fact that GLaDOS had asked if something was wrong —genuinely asked—was proof in itself that things had shifted. That, combined with the feeling of the warmth of the water and the feeling of the gentle hand on her face—it was all too much.Chell had to close her eyes again, leaning her head back to face the ceiling."So you're okay."Chell gave the slightest of nods, keeping her eyes closed.She was okay.

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Restore Point - Part 2
Chell stayed quiet for a long time, leaned her head against the wall of the tub with closed eyes until she stopped crying. The room was quiet, devoid of even the sounds of shifting water.At least, until Chell felt a disturbance. "I got everything off that I could,” GLaDOS said, reaching in to pull the drain.“Your bones will live another day."She blinked open her eyes briefly. As the water level shrunk, the cool underground air crept across her skin. Chell shivered.GLaDOS twisted away, reaching for the towel rack, but found it empty. Her eyes tracked to their pile of thoroughly dirty towels—all completely unusable. "More towels?" she asked. Chell had a mountain of them around here somewhere, based on what GLaDOS had watched her siphon from employee apartments.Chell's eyes had closed once again, and she lifted a finger absently in the direction of the cabinets.As GLaDOS bent to open the cabinet beneath the sink, Chell’s heart rate spiked. Her eyes flew open and involuntarily lurched forward, water splashing out onto the tile.GLaDOS twisted at the abrupt noise, and Chell scrambled as her brain caught up with her. She needed something to cover that noise, some sort of explanation for it. Chell shoved herself to her feet. The water was draining anyway—she’d just act like she had been getting up. Except her vision swam, disappearing into static. She felt her balance sway.“Woah, hey, slow down” GLaDOS said, fist closing around a towel in the front as she darted back to the tub, leaving the cabinet slightly ajar.Chell’s vertigo spiked at the sound of GLaDOS’s voice and she swayed, fingers scrambling for a hold on the smooth tiled wall. Her other hand hit something hard, and she latched on, finally steadying as she gripped GLaDOS’s forearm.“What was that?” GLaDOS said.The buzz of panic still blocked Chell’s vision, flickering gray and black and white before finally fading. She blinked rapidly, then gave a slight shake of her head. Chell almost responded, I don’t know, but that wasn’t true. Instead, she signed, “Got dizzy. Couldn’t see.”“But you can see now?”Chell’s eyes flickered to GLaDOS for a fraction of a second, forcing herself to seem nonchalant as she gave a single nod. She slipped her hand away from GLaDOS’s forearm, but kept her other hand pressed flat against the wall.GLaDOS unfolded the towel and draped it awkwardly around Chell’s shoulders. The bot took a few steps backward without looking, one of those actions that always stood out as so different than how humans normally moved.Chell’s heart still raced and she felt a bit too unsteady to step out of the tub. The wet underclothes plastered to her skin started to feel colder, and Chell shivered and pulled the towel tightly around herself.GLaDOS watched Chell a moment longer, making sure she didn’t fall flat on her face. She glanced around the room again at the dirty towels, pile of clean clothes, and the hairbrush. Then, she made a decision.“I think you can take it from here,” GLaDOS said, pausing in the doorframe. She would have helped with the remaining tasks, but she sensed a boundary there she did not want to cross.“Shout if you need anything,” she said airily. She trusted that Chell could take care of everything else. “Ha ha. Just kidding. I’ll be outside.”Then, the door closed.Quiet settled around Chell’s shoulders. She remained standing a moment longer, making sure she was steady, then stepped out of the tub and promptly sat on the toilet. As she reached for her clothes, she hesitated. An unsteadiness lingered in her—not just from standing up too fast.Huh. That had all just happened.Chell absently rubbed the fabric of the shirt between her fingers, mulling over the softness she had just experienced from GLaDOS. It had been lovely, and much-needed. Yet one question lingered.Had GLaDOS’s actions been genuine?She had been kind. Uncharacteristically compassionate. So what if she had just been telling Chell what she wanted to hear, as she had feared earlier? Chell peeled off her wet clothes and shivered. What if this hard-earned peace was far more tenuous than it felt? Was this something GLaDOS planned to do every time Chell ‘acted up’?Chell frowned as she began to pull on her warm, dry clothes, but then halted. These clothes—she’d been brought one of her favorite pairs of sweatpants, and a shirt she frequently chose to wear to bed.Normally, it would be easy to dismiss it as coincidence, except she had put away her laundry yesterday—and that laundry would have buried these clothes in particular. Being presented with this pair of sweatpants and this particular shirt implied deliberate choice, that GLaDOS hadn’t scooped up whatever was on top. So maybe it wasn’t an empty gesture.Either that, or it was an empty gesture, but one GLaDOS had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like a meaningful gesture. Chell pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead, then sighed. She’d figure it out tomorrow.Chell grabbed her hairbrush and began to gently work it through her hair.Meanwhile, GLaDOS snooped around Chell’s room.She drifted past the two chairs (the first one mostly-clear of laundry, finally) and looked at the stacks of books on both nightstands. She could see into this room at any time, sure, but right now she could pause whenever she wanted (like now) and take a cursory look at some loose sheets of paper, which contained sketches and notes on designs. She took a good look, long enough to take a snapshot, and set the scans aside for later.As she perused, she noted every personal item in the room and cataloged them. She mentally sorted them by size, then by color, then by flammability rating (since Chell did have a penchant for burning things) and finally by perceived value to Chell. That one was trickier, but it gave her something to do. And as she categorized, it surprised her how this assemblage of objects was able to express so much of Chell's personality.She started to glide back to the hallway, but hesitated at the laundry chair. Based on how Chell had nearly fallen over getting out of the bath, she was going to need assistance getting to bed—but GLaDOS was still covered in gel, too. She glanced at herself and then sighed, reaching for a t-shirt draped over the chair.Chell’s hair took surprisingly little time to brush through—she had been anticipating much worse. She didn’t braid it, though, then padded to the slightly-ajar door. She nudged it open, then hesitated.Her back facing Chell, GLaDOS was changing clothes. She was just finishing pulling off the shirt that lived under her already-discarded jacket, giving Chell a clear look at GLaDOS’s back.The port was ringed with yellow, blending seamlessly with a mechanical spine. It was indented into the bot more than she had anticipated. The circles around the port were a dark gray, and the combination of yellow and gray felt reminiscent of her regular eye. Entranced, she began to study the intricacies as GLaDOS bunched up the shirt and used it to wipe off remaining bits of gel.In previous encounters, she had caught glimpses of the port in her back. But when she had plugged in GLaDOS, the bot's back had been facing away, and she had been too embarrassed to ogle the specifics of her machinery—but before she could observe any further, GLaDOS slipped a clean shirt over her head.Chell took a quick step backward and out of sight. She listened to GLaDOS shuffle around the room. Then, she knocked on the door as she pushed it open wider.GLaDOS twisted to look at her. "Oh. You're done," she said. How did Chell always manage to be so silent? She folded the dirty clothes over her forearm, unsure where to put them.Chell leaned a shoulder against the door frame, and folded her arms loosely. A ghost of a smile crossed her face.GLaDOS watched as Chell's eyes deliberately scanned her, taking in the borrowed shirt. It had a graphic so flaked and faded it was nearly impossible to tell what it had been to begin with. Combined with her skirt, it made for a fashion choice she wasn’t proud of. Chell briefly met her gaze, then gave a tiny raise of her eyebrows.GLaDOS said, "Hey, I had to get that gel off of me, too.” It wasn't strictly harmful to her—not nearly as corrosive to metal—but Chell didn't need to know that. "And you were using the bathroom, where all of the towels are, so I..."Chell's smile continued. GLaDOS bristled. "This was faster than interrupting you to ask." Then, she added, "If you didn't want me to borrow this, then you should learn to put away your laundry." She mindlessly smoothed the shirt, a motion that she didn't know why she was doing but found herself doing anyway.It felt odd to Chell to see GLaDOS wearing one of her shirts, though not necessarily in a bad way."I could have just taken it off entirely and not replaced my shirt," GLaDOS continued. There wasn’t anything under there that would be particularly scandalous if exposed; it was all plain metal. "So really, this is all for your comfort. I’ll give it back when I’m done.”Chell gave a light, dismissive wave. It was all good."Oh. Okay." That had gone more smoothly than anticipated. She paused, taking a closer look at Chell. Seeing her standing there, hair tucked around her shoulder, clothes loose, she almost looked like a different person. Still exhausted, certainly. But different. Not in a bad way. It made her feel...something...to see Chell cleaned up and know she helped Chell achieve that.GLaDOS looked away, and then approached Chell. She gave her an expectant look.Chell lifted a hand to wave her off. "I'm fine," she signed, a simple movement with her free hand. Then, she made a gentle shoo motion with her hand."After all the trouble I went to change my shirt so that I wouldn't get gel on you, you're going to say no?"Chell gave a decisive nod.GLaDOS made a sound suspiciously like a sigh. "Come on. You can go back to being stubborn to a fault tomorrow.” She held out an arm, but didn't approach further. She remained a few paces away from Chell, but either could easily close the distance. "Besides—I won't tell anyone. Your secret’s safe with me." She tried to let a lightheartedness creep into her voice.It was, at least, enough to disarm Chell from her autonomic resistance to anything and everything offered by GLaDOS. She relaxed, a faded smile returning to her face.Chell pushed herself up off the doorway with a light huff. She didn’t need the help to make it to bed—she was feeling much more steady now—but GLaDOS was offering, which was awfully nice of her.She would accept the help. Just to be nice.She took a step and held onto the arm, and GLaDOS didn’t say anything as they quietly walked to the far side of the bed, Chell’s preferred sleeping spot.Then, they arrived.Chell hesitated. Then, she let go of GLaDOS’s arm, almost sheepishly so. She crawled into bed, almost immediately sinking into the softness as she wrapped herself in the comforter, pulling it up as far as it would go. Chell felt herself fading, and the haze of tiredness grew thicker and thicker, but not thick enough to blot out the lights from either nightstand.She sighed, then rolled wearily onto her side and began to push herself up on her elbows.“What?”Chell shifted her look toward the nightstand, making a slight movement of her head. Before she could finish sitting up, though, GLaDOS said, “Ah. I’ve got it.” She leaned forward, her hair a sheet of light between the lamp and Chell.Simultaneously—and before Chell could think too much about it—her hand darted out just as the lamp went dark.GLaDOS felt an unexpected tug on her arm, the robot's gaze moving to the hand cradling her wrist. The touch was gentle, yet still commanded her attention. She started to speak, but broke off when she looked up.And even though no words were written, no signs exchanged, the question in Chell’s face was the clearest message GLaDOS had ever gotten from her. A single request, embedded in a look that contained so much—a pleading, a confession, a brokenness, a hope. All stacked on top of one another, like bands of light in a spectrum.
Stay.
GLaDOS searched Chell's face for a long moment. "I—" she started, countless reasons to leave cluttering her mind. Yet as Chell held her gaze and her hand, all of those reasons dissipated, flicked off one by one like a row of power switches, leaving just herself and Chell alone in this dimly lit room.GLaDOS felt her shoulders lower. Her gaze softened.And then, after a long pause, GLaDOS spoke.“Okay.”

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Chapter 26: Static Limit Even after GLaDOS agreed to stay, Chell clung to her wrist. Relief poured over Chell, almost to the point of tears, if GLaDOS was reading her expression correctly in the low light. Then, Chell let her hand slip away.The moments that followed were forgivably awkward.GLaDOS stood there, searching for any cue as she struggled to figure out what Chell meant by stay. Just as she decided she would sit in an armchair and work on more pressing facility matters, Chell stretched an arm to pat the other side of the bed.Oh.“Okay,” GLaDOS said, with the equivalent of an exhale. “But only for a bit.”Chell kept that arm outstretched as GLaDOS made her way to the opposite side of the bed. She gave another faint but encouraging pat.GLaDOS made no move to pull back the covers, instead arranging herself so that her back was straight up against the headboard. “Now what?” she asked, but Chell just rolled onto her back.GLaDOS considered turning off the remaining lamp, but as she reached over a stack of books for the switch, she changed her mind. Instead, she grabbed the book on the top and began to flip through the first pages without looking at the cover.She didn't need to be reading, of course—this only upheld an appearance of business. At the same time, she began to work on innumerable other tasks. To anyone else, it might have seemed like she wasn't reading, but she simply saw no need to slow down for some ratty paperback Chell had scrounged up out of a recycling bin.After speeding through the first three chapters, she saw Chell lying on her side, watching her.“What? I need something to do besides just sitting here,” she lied.Chell's expression in return was unreadable.After flipping through another chapter, Chell pushed herself up to peer at the book, and GLaDOS felt it, because this soft slab of a mattress made her aware of such things. GLaDOS twisted the book to show her the cover of a western. In a painterly style, it showed a low shot of a cowgirl against a bright sky, hand hovering over a holster. When Chell raised an eyebrow, GLaDOS replied, “It was the one on top. Don't judge me for your questionable choices in literature.”Curiosity unsated, Chell sat up and scooted to look over GLaDOS's shoulder. GLaDOS gave her a side-eye, but did not rebuff her. She gestured toward the open book and explained, “A new cowboy rode into town, but it turns out that he wasn't the only cow-herding professional in that town. Which is, of course, statistically likely for a frontier setting. I don't know why he is so surprised about that.”As she flicked through the next chapter, she felt Chell making a sleepy attempt to skim. “I'm not slowing down, by the way. If you want to go slower, you're going to have to read this yourself.”Chell did not protest. She held a hand to her mouth as she yawned, then set her head on the robot's shoulder.Oh.GLaDOS almost objected, but when she saw Chell peek up at her to make sure it was okay, she found she couldn't say no. So she allowed Chell to rest her head and shift to get more comfortable (and closer to the android, GLaDOS noticed).Every chapter or two, GLaDOS provided a plot update, her commentary coaxing an occasional smile from Chell. Chell’s eyes still scanned the pages as intently as she could in her state.They finished the western. When GLaDOS reached for another book, she felt an arm snake around her own. Chell shifted, the weight of her head heavier on GLaDOS’s shoulder. Despite the narration, Chell's eyes closed for longer and longer periods of time, until she was asleep entirely.GLaDOS suddenly didn't know what to do.She took note of the time and her battery level. While she had more time than predicted, she would still need to leave long before the morning. But leaving required moving, and moving would wake Chell, especially since she had just fallen asleep. She had a book to finish reading, yes, but that wasn't as appealing without the ability to editorialize aloud. There were other books on the nightstand, but a quick reach of her arm demonstrated that they were out of reach. Shifting to grab one could also wake Chell.But as much as she did not want to wake Chell, returning to her chamber to charge was imperative.She did the mental equivalent of a sigh, reshuffling her background processes like a deck of cards.She could stay a little bit longer. Just a bit.Some of her tasks weren't dependent on location, so she could at least check off those. First up? Fortifying her defenses. GLaDOS began to dismantle Caroline’s test chambers, reallocating the materials for the cooperative testing initiative and pushing them as far as possible from the remains of the standard testing tracks.While she worked, the rise and fall of Chell’s chest pulled at her attention. It was mesmerizing, like the documented behavior in humans of watching the ebb and flow of an ocean’s tide. There was such a steady, dependable rhythm it breathing—as steady and reliable as any machine.Very, very lightly, she rested her head against Chell's, closing her eyes and timing the breaths. Having her head there wasn't necessary, she supposed, but it helped. She idly opened a document, time stamps and timed breaths ticking down into an endless spool of data. The numbers sorted themselves into graphs, and it pleased GLaDOS to discover her observation had proved correct—the space between breaths was nearly identical. Just as dependable as she thought.Over time, Chell began to slide down. Gradually—slower than she would have preferred—she guided Chell off her shoulder and onto a pillow, thankful she did not have to worry about her own physical comfort. GLaDOS did her best to extricate herself from the bed. She was certain that the removal of weight would disturb Chell, but she remained fast asleep.GLaDOS placed the novel on the nightstand, then caught sight of paper and pencil. She wrote a quick note and set it on the bed. The light shut off, but another half percent of battery eased away while she studied Chell, awash in her tide before she slipped out the door.When Chell woke, she was alone.This was expected, of course. She always woke up alone. Chell rolled absently, and heard paper crinkle beneath her. She frowned and rolled back, revealing a creased sheet of paper. As she began to read the printer-precise letters, she suddenly remembered that she had not been alone last night.
Battery running low. Had to go recharge.
There was no signature.Chell let her arm fall across her forehead, her other hand clutching the paper. She closed her eyes. Exhaled. Kept her eyes closed. She only had a vague sense of time from the artificial light, but this morning she felt rested. Maybe she’d slept in?Eventually, she pushed herself out of bed, then headed to the bathroom to prepare for whatever today might bring.Chell shouldn't have been surprised, she supposed, splashing water on her face, that GLaDOS hadn't stayed all night. She wasn't sure how long the robot lingered, but it was a miracle she had even stayed at all. So Chell tried to quash the unexpected disappointment at waking up alone.Perhaps GLaDOS needed time to process everything. She knew GLaDOS was not lying about needing to recharge—that same low battery had kicked off yesterday's shitshow, after all. But this also conveniently gave them space away from another to think. To process.The things that GLaDOS said yesterday had been painfully honest. But Chell hadn't realized the truth of how she felt about GLaDOS until GLaDOS had blurted that out. As much as Chell wanted to believe she hadn't blurted out anything in return, she knew that wasn't true. She may not have said anything, but allowing herself to be carried, to be cleaned, to seek comfort—each action undeniably sent a message.She trusted GLaDOS to take care of her.Chell dried her face, replacing the towel on the rack, then halted when a visceral discomfort rushed up at the sight of the dirty towels. Last night had been a close call—far too close for comfort. Even glancing at the sink cabinet brought that same anxiety.How could she claim to trust GLaDOS, when she held a secret heavy enough to shatter their cautious trust?She gave a heavy exhale, dragging a hand through the waves in her hair, then exited the bathroom.Chell’s mind drifted as she sifted through her closet. Though muscle memory guided her hand to a familiar shirt, she kept thumbing through.It wasn’t that she regretted taking the handgun. What she did worry about was the potential for it to be discovered accidentally. Things could have gotten very volatile very fast if that secret had tumbled out of her cabinet last night. Chell bit at a fingernail.There was no way to share this information without some degree of hurt. GLaDOS would be upset, perhaps even angry, and Chell knew she’d be surrendering the weapon the moment it made an appearance. Yet she needed to come clean. That was the only way to avoid future hurt.Chell reached the end of her closet.She pulled back, running her hand along the items in reverse until she brushed against velvet. Her hand ran along the front of the dark blue dress, reveling in its luxurious softness. Then Chell eased it out of the closet. Why not? This was as good of an opportunity as any to look nice. Chell tossed it onto her bed, slipping on shorts and an undershirt first. For comfort.She moved to grab the dress, but instead picked up the note. She had set it down before going to the bathroom, but now saw more had been written on the flip side, in fine print.
Consider your contract null and void.
A few hours later—to the point where Chell had been idly considering lunch options—there was a knock on the door.Chell unfolded her legs and rose from her chair, finding GLaDOS in the hall. Chell took note of the robot's outfit change. Where before she sported a white jacket, this new one was closer to a coat, dark with accents of red and yellow.GLaDOS strode past Chell, only pausing when she reached the largest part of the room. “Give me your arm.” She pivoted on her heel, offering an open hand.Chell gave a confused look, but cautiously extended her arm.“No. The other one.”Chell extended the other arm. She felt two hands, one on her forearm and one on her bicep. Then, GLaDOS let go.“Roll up your sleeve.”Chell’s brow furrowed, but she rolled up the delicate material of her dress sleeves. The hands returned, one resting on her forearm, the other moving around her bicep as if searching for something. GLaDOS made a small noise of confirmation and rustled in her pocket.Then, before Chell could ask any questions, a shock surged through her arm.Chell yanked away, making an equally sharp noise as she pulled her arm to her chest. She glared, and then whacked GLaDOS on the arm. What the hell had that been for?The android didn't seem fazed. “Relax. I just fried the tracker in your arm.” She added flatly, “You're welcome.”Instead of thanking her, Chell pointed at her arm, her face a glare of a question.“Yes. That would be the arm I just shocked.” Chell remained as observant as ever. When Chell pointed again, more emphatically, GLaDOS realized she'd misinterpreted the question. “What?”Chell exhaled, and then pointed toward the back of her neck with that same question on her face.“Oh,” GLaDOS said. “Yes. It's not there. It's in your arm.”Chell lowered her finger, but a suspicious look remained. She signed, “You told me it was in my neck.”“I lied,” GLaDOS said. “The arm is a lower risk, medically speaking. I wasn’t lying when I told you it was dangerous to mess around near the spinal cord, but I knew you wouldn’t leave it alone if I told you it was in your arm.”Chell twisted her upper arm again, attempting to get a better look as she tried to figure out which one little scar had been the one GLaDOS made. How had she not noticed that before?“You already had so many injuries,” GLaDOS continued, answering the question before Chell could ask it. “I figured you wouldn’t notice an additional cut on your arm.”Chell’s fingers jumped to her neck, pressing for the spot she knew an incision had been made. Like most of her minor lacerations, it was long healed. Chell couldn’t feel it anymore, but she knew it had existed. She had checked it in the mirror. Many times. “There was a cut,” she signed.“Well, yes. I had to make it convincing.”After Chell processed this development, she signed, “So it really is fried?”“Yes. I overloaded it with a higher level of electricity than it would ever encounter naturally.”Chell inspected her arm again, then gave a skeptical look.“If you don’t believe me, I’ll fry it again. Then it will really be out of commission."Chell yanked her arm back. “Suit yourself,” GLaDOS said.Chell exhaled, not even sure what she was feeling. “You could have warned me,” she signed, gesturing to the tool as GLaDOS slipped it back into her pocket.“I could have,” GLaDOS agreed, zero regret in her voice. “I’ve also disabled the cameras in this room.”As Chell rolled her sleeve down, GLaDOS realized Chell wasn't dressed in her typical fashion. “What are you—?” GLaDOS started, taking a flicker of a moment to look her up and down. She looked nice. Really, really nice. “What's the occasion?”Chell glanced down at her outfit, as if she had forgotten about it. She wrung her hands in front of her, then she sat on the edge of her bed. Her hand was a bit shaky, both from nerves and a residual unsteadiness from being zapped, but she began to write anyway.She held up the dry-erase board. I need to tell you something.“All right,” GLaDOS said, amusement in her voice. She had a decent idea as to what Chell was going to tell her, but wasn't sure this conversation was necessary. Chell had made her feelings clear last night; GLaDOS wouldn’t force her to admit them directly.Chell erased the board with the loose edge of a blanket, and patted on the bed beside her. GLaDOS standing and staring at her just made her more nervous.GLaDOS sat down, hands folded perfectly. Chell started to write, but paused to look at the bathroom at least two or three times. Mentally reviewing the events that had occurred in there last night, GLaDOS guessed.
Promise you won't be mad.
“Sure,” she said, still lighthearted.Chell underlined the first word.
Promise.
“Yes. Okay. I promise,” GLaDOS said. She wasn't sure what Chell could share that would cause her to get angry. Even if Chell didn't return GLaDOS’s feelings, she wouldn’t get mad. “I have something I need to tell you, too,” she said, thoughts turning more serious. “I won't get mad if you won't.”At the faint teasing tone in GLaDOS's voice, Chell relaxed. The AI at least seemed in a good mood, and her attitude suggested that whatever she shared would also be light. Maybe it would be best to start there. Chell nodded in response, and pointed at GLaDOS. “You first,” she signed.“It's about last night.”Chell felt her heart do a confusing, fluttering thing. Of course it was about last night.“There is a reason,” GLaDOS started, “that I wasn't acting like myself.” She hesitated. “When we argued yesterday—what you said about me being an experiment—I panicked.” She looked away. “And when I panicked, I—”Chell cut her off, reaching forward to press a finger to the robot's lips. Halfway across the facility, GLaDOS nearly dropped a moving test chamber, thoughts screeching like metal brakes. Which was good, because Chell didn't want to rehash the pain of yesterday. GLaDOS had already acknowledged that she'd used the opportunity to hurt Chell—there was no use going over that again.It surprised Chell when GLaDOS stayed shushed for more than a split second. Still, she nudged Chell's hand aside. “No, really,” GLaDOS said, “I need to tell—”Chell set a hand on the robot's shoulder, and pressed more insistently on her lips. She had promised to not get mad, and she wasn't mad. She just didn't want to talk about that. Not now.The second interruption caught GLaDOS just as off-guard as the first. Her gaze turned surprised yet confused, and she looked down her nose at Chell's finger, then back to Chell’s face, flipping focus between the two until she made eye contact with Chell.Chell felt her breath catch—a sudden, pressing feeling as the curious softness in GLaDOS's expression squeezed the air from her lungs. Chell tightened her hand on the robot's shoulder as her world pivoted. Then—before she could think about it—she leaned forward and kissed her.It was light and soft and subdued—a momentary expression of momentous emotion. As soon as Chell felt the robot's physical surprise, she pulled back, dropping her hand and dropping her gaze. GLaDOS's face remained in the periphery of her vision, so Chell could only partially gauge her reaction.It had, at the very least, gotten the robot to stop talking.And she still wasn't talking.That had been a mistake, hadn't it? Too much too soon. She hadn't planned on doing that—what she had planned was to talk about her feelings later, once she had sorted them out.Embarrassment flushed across her face, extending like ripples from a drop. Except instead of a pebble into a pond, it felt like a boulder into a puddle. She could feel those searing eyes as they intensified her embarrassment. Oh, what if GLaDOS started laughing at her?She touched her fingertips to her hot forehead, shielding her face before she shoved to her feet. Chell lifted a hand to her chest to apologize and pray that the robot would forget the entire thing. Maybe one day they’d laugh about it. Hey, remember that time you kissed me, just to get me to shut up? No other reason. That was so silly.As Chell stepped away, GLaDOS reached for her sleeve. “Wait,” she said, and Chell noted that she didn't sound mad or annoyed or mocking. GLaDOS stood up and held on to Chell, but not in a restrictive way. She met Chell’s perplexed look, but broke off. “Oh, Chell—” She made a quiet, emotional sound. “I—”If GLaDOS said anything after that, Chell didn't catch it.That was her name.Her name.Not 'hey' or 'hey you' or the countless other ways GLaDOS skirted around using Chell's name. Opportunities didn't arise often, since it was just the two of them, but Chell had still given up hope of ever hearing it.Chell felt that teary feeling rise, that same overwhelming softness as the bath last night. She turned her face as she wiped at her eyes, hoping GLaDOS wouldn’t ask questions—if these tears were sad or happy or what—because Chell wasn't sure she could explain. This wasn't an emotion she knew existed, much less one she could articulate. It could not be pulled out of the context of Chell's life at Aperture; it depended on every moment that had come before it. It was the joy of connection, the joy of her former enemy appreciating her as a complicated and flawed individual; the joy of being spoken to with affection, and what that all meant.GLaDOS saw her as a person. As her own, unique individual. Not a test subject. Not a monster. She finally saw her for who she was: Chell.Chell watched her face, her gaze just as searching as one of GLaDOS's frantic queries on human expressions. She couldn't know for sure, but it almost looked like GLaDOS—Before she could finish the thought, GLaDOS stepped forward, rested her hand on Chell's face, and then kissed her back.And, unlike before, Chell did not pull back—she melted.A dizzy warmth coated Chell’s thoughts as she closed her eyes and sunk into the embrace. GLaDOS’s hand slipped under her elbow, feeling like the only thing keeping her upright.After a breathless moment, Chell pulled back, laughing in a way that was nearly a giggle. She hid her face, resting her forehead against GLaDOS's shoulder. Her embarrassment faded into a giddy disbelief. Chell wrapped her arms around the android and pulled her into a tight hug. That had happened. That had really, really happened.If GLaDOS hadn't known what to do before, she really didn't know now. So she stood, like the world's most silent sarcastic statue, until she decided to follow Chell's lead and gave her best approximation of a hug.She heard a soft 'whhhumph' as Chell was squished flat against her. The woman loosened her grip and laughed, an airy and out-of-breath noise. GLaDOS dropped her arms and Chell wiggled back.“Too much?”Chell pinched her thumb and index finger together and nodded, but smiled. She shifted back into that leaning hug, head returning to GLaDOS's shoulder. GLaDOS felt her sway and adjusted, an anchor to the current.GLaDOS had never tried to make someone happy before. There hadn’t been anyone she cared about. Not until Chell. And seeing joy flow from Chell like this—it brought a lightness GLaDOS hadn’t known she was capable of experiencing. It had never registered as a possibility. How was she supposed to have known that endeavoring to bring happiness to another could also bring happiness to herself?As she thought more about the unknowable and complex world of feelings, resting her chin very, very lightly on Chell's head, GLaDOS realized with a startling clarity that she wanted to keep making her happy. This was infinitely more rewarding than hurting her would ever be.Maybe, if emotions could be like this, they weren't so bad after all.

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Chapter 27: The Woman Downstairs
Chell rested against GLaDOS’s shoulder, a soft hum in her heart. Neither of them pulled apart, but neither of them remained still, either, both swaying to a tune that neither could feel. Chell felt a hand feeling at the soft blue of her dress.“This suits you,” GLaDOS said, thankful she had encouraged Chell to try it on. “Though how did you manage to get it—?” She felt for the zipper, then noted a piece of string was attached, tucked it into the collar of her dress. “Ah,” she said. “Resourceful.” She tucked it back into where she had found it, readjusting Chell’s hair, hand lingering a moment too long.As she finished, Chell looked up with a warmth in her striking eyes. GLaDOS held her gaze with a mirrored softness, until she abruptly looked away. “I—” GLaDOS broke off, electronic strain in her voice. She pulled away, but still clung to Chell's forearm, as if trying to anchor herself. “I need to—” Her gaze went over Chell's shoulder, but was imprecise and distant.She stepped backward, and Chell reached for her shoulder. “Wait,” she said, gaze snapping back to the present. Then, the focus disappeared behind her eyes, and Chell could tell that she wasn't here; she was spread across the facility, trying to do a thousand things at once.“I need to—” she repeated, then wrenched herself away and disappeared out the door.Chell could only stand, stupefied as she stared at the empty doorframe. And just when she had dared to hope things were finally going well.Hurt pulled at her heart, yet Chell moved for the doorway, sticking her head out to see GLaDOS walking at an accelerated pace. Chell began to jog after her, barefoot, not even stopping to put on shoes.Chell tried to talk herself out of the reflexive her hurt. GLaDOS had seemed like her feelings were genuine—if she hadn't, then she wouldn't have chosen to kiss Chell. Not like that.Maybe if they could just talk about this—GLaDOS broke into a run. No, not a run. A sprint.Chell wasn't sure she had ever seen her run before. Not like this. GLaDOS was really, really moving.Chell moved into a jog. Maybe there was some sort of emergency going on somewhere in the facility. Something that GLaDOS couldn't take care of remotely.As the robot moved farther and farther away, Chell considered heading back. As much as Chell wanted to know what was happening, maybe there was nothing she could do to help; maybe GLaDOS just wanted Chell out of the way.But maybe, a tiny part of herself whispered, GLaDOS was afraid of her feelings for Chell. Maybe she was having regrets, wanting to get as far away from Chell as possible.The metal of the catwalk grated on her feet, and even though she had done plenty of jogging around the facility, she never did it barefoot.She was just about to turn back when the robot stopped moving.It wasn't a gradual slowdown, like one would expect from a person. One moment GLaDOS was sprinting, and the next minute she wasn't—as if momentum didn’t apply to her.As Chell began to close the distance, the robot shifted, leaning back on her heels. She extended her arms, spreading her fingers. She twisted her wrists. Then, she rolled her shoulders, moving her head side to side as if stretching. The movement felt so human that it caught Chell off guard. Maybe she was rubbing off on the AI more than she thought.Then, the robot sighed. Yet as Chell entered the wide room, GLaDOS didn't turn around. She didn't vocally acknowledge Chell's presence. For a moment, she wasn't even sure if GLaDOS knew Chell was approaching. But that was silly. Of course she knew.When the AI still didn’t turn around, Chell had no choice but to reach out, hand resting on her shoulder.Then, in a flash of movement that Chell barely followed, the robot’s hand snapped up, clasping around Chell’s wrist and yanking her forward. She stumbled, pitching forward, but before she could catch herself, she felt another crack of momentum as her wrist was twisted behind her back. Chell gave a sharp exhale, discomfort zapping through her arm.She swayed, dazed. But before she could twist away and figure out what was going on, the AI behind her spoke, voice careful.“I thought,” the robot said, “I told you not to touch me.”Chell made a noise and started to pull, and her wrist was immediately released. But then hard hands shoved against her spine and she pitched forward so fast that she couldn’t even catch herself. Chell landed hard.Stunned, Chell laid on the ground. She watched as the bot crossed her field of vision.“What?” she started, squatting down to better see Chell’s face. “Were you expecting another kiss?” Her hands rested on a knee.Chell’s eyes darted back and forth as she studied the robot’s face, searching for clarity, but all she saw was a hard, faint smile. “Do you know how exhausting it was to do that the first time?” She made a disgusted noise. “You can bet that I’m never doing that again.”A flush of confusion rose within Chell, hot and uncomfortable. At the same time, her awareness of her body rushed up, allowing her to feel each distinct point where her body pressed against the floor. In particular, she noticed her dress riding up on her leg, snapping her out of her daze.Chell rolled onto her stomach and began to push herself upright, ignoring the burn of the scrape along her leg."You look confused," the robot said, with a slight lilt in her voice and tilt of her head.Chell halted, on her hands and knees.The AI sighed. “I'm disappointed. You're a smart woman. Not the smartest I’ve ever seen, but you've shown yourself competent at solving puzzles,” she said, regarding Chell with a harsh look. “Yet you haven’t solved this one.”She couldn't look at the robot directly. Wouldn't. Her mind raced, but she kept crashing into dead end after dead end, no path presenting itself as an explanation. She managed one frantic look up."You know how I seemed surprised when you kissed me? It's because I was surprised by how stupid you were being. What happened to you, Chell?” she said softly.And this time—the second time Chell had heard her name today from the robot, the second ever—it twisted something inside of her like a joint out of place, a negative bend that felt so wrong with that voice that Chell wished she could scrub the memory of it from her ears. She would rather the AI redact her name from permanent memory than use it like this.“I thought you were better than that. But I guess not.” The AI looked down her nose as she stood. “What happened to that anger you had? Last night, in the test chamber. You were so ready to do some real damage.”Chell pushed herself to her feet.“And yet you would put all that aside for one shred of affection? It was honestly pathetic to watch. You were so desperate for connection that you were willing to overlook everything you two have been through before,” she said. “If I had known you were that easy to handle, I wouldn't have spent months gaining your trust.”Chell’s brow furrowed as she felt her brain furiously trying to work on something but it was something it had not yet made her privy to yet.“You’re still not getting it,” she said. She hesitated. “I lied to you.” Her eyes almost gleamed. “I've been lying to you since the moment you stumbled back half-dead into my facility.”The robot’s unshakable focus never left Chell, the helpfully-tuned overlay spitting out microexpressions and broader strokes of confusion and disbelief. She took a few casual steps, and Chell took involuntary steps backward. An equal and opposite reaction.“I lied to you,” she repeated. “When you came back, I wanted to see how long it would take you to drop your guard and to trust me,” she said, “but I didn't expect it to happen that fast.” Disgust stained her disappointment. “This was supposed to keep me entertained for a good, long while. Since you refuse to test physically, I had to do something. But you couldn’t even do that right,” she said. “I've never done any long-term psychological testing before, but I slipped up enough times that I thought you were onto me. But you made it so easy for me to tell you precisely what you wanted to hear. Act the way you wanted me to act. And you fell for it. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers, and Chell flinched.The android continued to walk, but Chell found herself fixed to the spot. She felt the absence of that signal in her brain that should have fired to run, eyes trained on the robot as she took deliberate, diagonal steps across the room.“I mean, did you really think that I felt that way about you? That I would ever give a shit about you?” She gave a bitter, angry laugh. “Oh, we have far too much history for that.”Fear jolted through Chell’s confusion, finally pushing her backward.“You killed me. Destroyed my facility. Did you really think we could sweep that under some panels and move on?” Her voice was slipping back into that less synthesized, more smooth voice that GLaDOS had phased out weeks ago. “You may be able to look past all of that, but I can’t. Forgetting is not a luxury that I have, and time is not going to heal those wounds. Those scars will never go away.” She emphasized with a fluid slash of her hand. “You can’t expect me to not want to get even, even if it took years.”Another flash of emotion in Chell's eyes. Another few steps back. The AI just smiled wider, taking smooth, gliding steps. She shifted to hold her hands behind her back, posture rigid.Chell moved faster, trying to put more distance between herself and the robot. Her bare heel hit a wall, sending a dull pain up her leg.“But all experiments must come to an end,” she sighed, wistful. “Including this one.”Yet as the robot took another step toward her, the lights fluctuated. Chell’s eyes flicked up, and the PA system sputtered to life.Then, GLaDOS's voice sparked through the speakers under a layer of static, urgent and airy. “Chell! Get out of there! That's not m—”Hissing static overtook the voice. Chell’s brow creased and and looked back toward the android, who had raised her hand and then closed a fist, as if physically cutting off the noise. They made eye contact.Then, the physicality of the robot changed, like a snap between binary states. “God damn it," she said, sagging and pulling a hand through her hair, but in an exaggerated way. The AI suddenly looked less stiff, less robotic. “And I was having so much fun, too.”Chell's stomach dropped, a drowning dread rising up in its place. Not only was she moving differently, but the robot’s voice—Chell pressed her hands flat against the wall behind her, noting that without even realizing it, she had been backed into the far corner of the room. Her eyes darted back and forth between the robot and the exit, then she pushed off the wall and began to sprint toward the door.But her frantic gaze betrayed her, and before she could make it more than a few steps, the robot was on her, pushing Chell hard against the wall. Chell let out an involuntary exhale from the force of it. “Not so fast,” she said. “We're not done here.”As Chell tried to push away, a small part of her noted the way that the android’s chest almost seemed to rise and fall, shoulders going up and down in a way that evoked breathing. Chell wouldn’t have even noticed it if she hadn't been so used to not seeing that kind of motion, and it sent even more alarm bells up her spine.“I'm hurt,” the android said. “You still don't want to spend time with me?” She sighed. “I suppose that happened the last time we tried to have a heart to heart, too. But this time you aren't running away.”Chell pulled at the hand holding her in place. "Look at me," Caroline barked, pushing harder, and it surprised her when Chell's gaze flicked up to the robot's face, and then held it for a moment. “Don't tell me you don't remember me,” she said. She gave another disappointed sigh. “I suppose we have a few minutes to get reacquainted. It has been a long time.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chapter 28: Your Next Steps Chell stood in the hall, frowning as she checked her notes once again. This was the room she had written down, and despite knowing she had triple-checked it, doubt curled at the edges of her mind.This was just a room.Nothing remarkable about it—just one of several smaller rooms. No nameplate hung on the wall, no descriptive label was painted beneath the room number. This wasn't an area for managerial staff, and the hall itself was a bit of a walk from Chell’s office block.Perhaps this was a meeting with the boss of her boss, or someone else she didn't know well enough to recognize their handwriting. Was she due for another performance review? No, she had just had one a few months back.She fought the urge to turn on her heel and head back. Maybe there had been a mistake. Maybe the card had been meant for someone else. She hadn’t recognized the handwriting on the card, and it hadn’t had her name on it, either.The anxiety chewed at the bottom of her stomach. She should have brought the card rather than leaving it in her locker, just in case someone from security came by and asked her what she was doing way over...wherever she was.Chell straightened and steeled herself. No, she was supposed to be there. She raised a fist and, swallowing, knocked on the door.“Come in,” a woman's voice said.
10/28/95
Caroline wrote the date at the top of her notepad, then set it aside. It was almost time for her next appointment.A clock on the wall ticked, nestled between framed newspaper clippings. They spanned decades—some yellowed with age, but others were still bright, a testament to the public triumph as Aperture crawled out of the bottomless pit Mr. Johnson had dug before his death.Caroline pulled the ring of keys from her pocket and unlocked both locks on the desk’s drawer, and it slid open with a pleasant and well-oiled weight. She thumbed through it, then pulled out a file. She had just begun to glance through the contents to refresh her memory when she heard a gentle knock on the door.“Come in,” she said, just loud enough to be heard. The door opened. Chell halted in the doorframe. She stood, hand tight around the door handle, now certain she was in the wrong place. Sitting behind that desk, in all her gray-haired and unflinching glory was Caroline. The Caroline.“Close the door behind you,” Caroline said, not looking up from the papers she was glancing over.Chell hesitated. Surely when Caroline looked up she would realize the wrong person was at her door, and that Chell had misread her appointment card, that she’d gotten two numbers flipped. And then Chell could leave, sprinting across the facility to try to make this appointment she was supposed to be at before it was too late past eleven.Despite how pleasant she acted, all of the gossip painted Caroline as a cutthroat woman. She had not dragged Aperture out of bankruptcy by playing nice.Instead, Caroline smiled as Chell closed the door. It was not a surprised smile, but one with a suggestion of warmth.“Have a seat,” said Caroline, and Chell saw a chair pushed against the narrow wall to the side of the desk.Chell felt immediately thankful she had dressed above business casual today. It never hurt to look sharp, and making a good first impression was especially important for her. It meant she had to leave her favorite sweatshirt in her locker, but she would pick it up when she grabbed lunch.As she dragged the chair into place, Chell couldn’t help but take in the room. It wasn’t what she expected for a CEO’s office. Besides its out-of-the-way location, it wasn’t large. A nice, spacious desk filled the center of the room, walls lined with a few filing cabinets and bookshelves, and then an armchair with a floor lamp tucked into the back corner.“It’s nothing big, I know,” Caroline said. She waved a hand.Chell sat down, spine rigid. She placed her clipboard in her lap.“I’ve got a formal office up there, but this one’s just for me,” Caroline continued, voice light. “They can’t bother me if they don’t know where I am.”So no one knows this is here? Chell wrote, then turned her clipboard to face Caroline, then left it on the desk.Caroline leaned forward and looked through her reading glasses. “A few people,” she answered. She counted on her fingers. “Security, my assistant, a few department heads. People I trust.”Chell felt her posture shift. She was not an assistant, a security person, a department head—she hadn't even spoken to this woman before, much less proved herself trustworthy.“I can trust you with this information, can't I?” Caroline said. “Because if you do tell someone, then I'll have to kill you.”Chell felt her whole body stiffen. She didn't move for a moment. When she reached for her clipboard, Caroline set a hand on her own.“I'm kidding,” she said, then pulled back with a smug grin. “You should have seen your face!”Chell blinked, feeling a bit of that fear subside. A small flush of embarrassment colored her face. Of course it was a joke—she should have known better.“Seriously, though, don't tell anyone.”Chell nodded, swallowing.“And you can relax,” Caroline added. “Nothing bad is happening here, I promise.”Chell gave another nod, and Caroline leaned back. “So. How have you been settling into your new role?”Chell pulled her clipboard close and stared off into space, tapping her pen against her face as she mentally composed a reply.What she wanted to say was that she didn’t like it. Being in charge of developing a testing track gave her a lot more stress, and the only thing she really liked about it was the paycheck. Her old job had been so much better.Instead, she wrote, It’s been a huge learning experience so far, but I still have a lot to learn. Chell added, I wasn’t expecting to be promoted so quickly.”“Well, your talent is simply being recognized,” Caroline said. “You do excellent work.”Chell gave an appreciative but timid nod.“Speaking of. We have places to be.” Caroline glanced at the clock, then locked the drawer under her desk after returning a few files. “It’s a bit of a walk, so I’ll fill you in on the way.” When Chell hesitated, she made a waving motion as she moved toward the door.Chell slid into action, returning her chair to the wall before she snagged her clipboard and pen. Caroline tested the locked handle of the door behind them, then took off, walking in a direction opposite of the areas Chell frequented in her day-to-day work.And Caroline walked fast.“Come on, we’ve got to move if we’re going to make it to the testing tracks on time,” she said as Chell jogged to catch up. “I set up this meeting specifically so that we could see one of your tests in action.”Chell took a few quick steps to get in front of Caroline. She pressed a flat hand to her chest and lifted her eyebrows.“Yes! One of yours.” Caroline said. “It’s an older one, but a good one. I’m looking forward to seeing it back in rotation—I think we’ll get just as much quality data as we did before.”Chell fell back into step and couldn’t ignore the excitement that rose up from her heels and grew higher and higher with each step. Despite being a test designer, Chell never got to see one fully assembled. The testing branch was incredibly secretive, always spewing excuses about how allowing the architects in would compromise the data. All she ever received were reports of failure and success rates, with occasional sparse notes.They walked for several minutes, the quiet punctuated by Caroline’s occasional questions, which Chell did her best to answer. Each time she had to scratch down an answer, Chell had to slow down, and she feared that the slower pace irritated Caroline.It frustrated her when people tried to hold conversations with her on the go. Walking put her at a fundamental disadvantage—she wasn’t skilled enough to write while watching where she was going.It would have been so much easier if people here knew any ASL—any at all—but they didn’t, so Chell couldn’t fully participate in those conversations. With new people, she could understand. But for people who had worked with her for years, Chell felt frustrated over their lack of consideration.Chell did her best to give Caroline a pass on this.Soon they made it to the backbone of the testing track. Chell trailed Caroline as she took in the area. People eyed her as they walked by, glancing at her badge or at her clipboard and then back at Caroline with looks that she couldn’t decipher. Chell shifted her clipboard.“They don’t recognize you,” Caroline said, after noticing Chell’s discomfort. “But that's all right. Security is tight back here—they’re just making sure that you haven’t wandered in by accident. But you're here with me—you’re fine.”They arrived at the test chamber observation deck.“I hope you’re not claustrophobic," Caroline said as she opened the door. “These things are only designed to comfortably fit one person.”Chell found herself drawn in, drifting to the reinforced plexiglass that made up the barrier between her and the chamber. Behind her, Caroline made a faint indignant sound, muttering something about how ridiculous it was that there was only one chair.“One second,” she said, “I’ll get you a chair. We walked all this way, you deserve to sit.”Chell gestured for Caroline to take the chair, leaning against the window and trying to appear relaxed. If either of them deserved a rest from the walk, it was Caroline. Chell would stand.“No, no. I'll be right back,” she said, even though Chell made a dismissive motion with her hand. Before Chell could protest any further, Caroline was out the door.Chell sighed and turned to the window, pressing her hand against the glass as she leaned in. Before she could get a good look, though, a shout in the hallway made her jump as Caroline barked a request. Then, after a bout of quiet, Chell heard Caroline's voice—regular volume this time—follow up her initial request.Caroline stepped back in and said, “It'll just be another minute.” She gave a tight-lipped smile, then glanced at the clock. They'd made good time; they still had a few minutes until the test began.Chell wanted to go back to looking through the window, but a flag in her mind reminded her that might appear rude.“Have you had a chance to get a good look?”Chell shook her head, then took a couple of steps along the window, adjusting her angle.“It's a really solid chamber. This whole testing track, really. I know you weren't managing this one, but it's still great.”The details of this test started to come back to her as Chell paired her two-dimensional drawings with the three-dimensional room. It took place midway through a testing track, at the beginning of the synthesis stage. While her coworkers had been tasked with creating chambers that taught individual concepts, it was Chell's test where the pairing of the concepts began.It was easier, in a way, to design a chamber that taught one thing. An isolated element in a vacuum. But with her chambers, she had to ensure that these blocks of information were combined in a logical manner— a way that wasn't just logical to her, but a logic that others could pick up on.“This one in particular caught my eye, when I was shown this design,” Caroline said. “The logic is straightforward, and you’ve included clear consequences to poorly-thought-through actions. You’re encouraging test subjects to stop and think before leaping into action, which can be hard to do. Often they don’t figure that out until it’s too late.”Comparatively, the earlier chambers were a safer place to make mistakes. A playground to teach how a testing element could be used, a space for trial and error. Not that Chell’s test didn't involve trial and error as well—there was just an additional pressure to not fail, because it was awfully inconvenient.“There's mental and physical challenges here, but not in a way that is overwhelming. It’s polished. Thoughtfully designed. Elegant, in its own way.”As she said this, Chell noted that Caroline was staring directly at her.Chell looked away.“It's precisely what we look for in test chamber design, and it's impressive that you managed to pack this all into one chamber. Well done.”Chell looked away again, but this time to hide a flush from the unexpected compliment. She used this as an excuse to look down at her notepad and write.They're just puzzles. There's nothing to it once you break them down. She gave a humble shrug.“That's what I think, too,” Caroline said, voice a bit lighter. Her gaze lingered. “I'm glad you understand.”The way Caroline’s tone changed made Chell feel she had just passed some secret test, and she wasn't sure if that relieved her or made her more nervous.A noise in the hallway snapped her out of it. A sweaty employee came scrambling in, profusely apologizing for the delay. He sounded as if he'd been running, and running was not something that came naturally to him. He gave Chell a nod as he unfolded a chair and set it beside Caroline’s.“Thank you,” Caroline said, almost warmly. The expression on the man's face shifted, caught off-guard by the slight smile on her face. After a moment of hesitation, he apologized once more, then disappeared.Caroline closed the door behind him. “Please, have a seat,” she said, hand still on the doorknob.Chell hesitated. It was a tight fit with two chairs in this room, with the second a bit closer to Caroline's chair than she would have preferred. Plus, Chell already had a good view of the test chamber. She started to make another dismissive hand gesture. She was fine, really.“I did go to all the trouble of getting a chair for you,” Caroline said, sitting. “Sit.”Chell hesitated a moment longer, though she didn't want to appear rude or ungrateful, even if it was a gift she had not asked for.As she sat, Caroline patted her leg in a way that Chell was sure was intended to be friendly and not a visceral discomfort. But it lingered a moment too long—though any moment was too long for Chell. She shifted, chair squeaking against the tile as she shuffled an inch over.“You know, I didn't just arrange this meeting to show you one of your test chambers in action. I actually have some good news for you , but I wanted to deliver it in person.” She clasped her hands together, like a child holding in a secret. Then, with barely-contained excitement, she said “You're being promoted to Director of Testing! Congratulations!”Chell frowned, gripping her pen tight and staring out to the test chamber.Caroline beamed. “Your future here is bright,” she said. “I'll make sure of that.”Though she had only just been told this, Chell knew she didn't want the job. There was no question there. But it wouldn't be a good idea to say that. She bounced her leg, considering the most diplomatic way to go about this.“Well? What do you think?”Chell felt a hand lightly touch her shoulder, snapping her out of her thoughts. The unexpected touch resonated through her arm and she jerked back, her chair squeaking as it nearly tipped over.Caroline retracted her hand.Chell blinked, then lifted a fist to her chest to apologize for the abrupt reaction, but hesitated when Caroline studied her face with a crease in her brow.“It’s a big development, I know,” Caroline said. “I understand how overwhelming it all must sound. But I know you can handle it.”Chell started to write. Caroline leaned in to read, and Chell leaned out of her way.There must be other people that are more qualified. Then, she added, Or a better fit. “There are,” Caroline conceded, “but we’ll train you.” Chell wasn't the ideal candidate, but turnover had always been an issue at Aperture. They needed to reward talent and loyalty, and to give their employees reasons to stay. If that required advancing people up the ranks before they were ready, then so be it. “You’ve adapted well-enough to the last two promotions I put through, and you’ll adapt to this too.”Chell frowned. You promoted me? “Of course I did. You wouldn't have gotten this far without some help,” Caroline said, her tone as if she was talking about some joke the two of them were in on together. “Sure, I had to convince them to pass up far more qualified candidates, but I did it for you.” She smiled. “I wouldn't have put in your name if I didn't think you were up to it.”Chell took a long time to respond. The best part about needing to write was that it made it harder for Caroline to see her face. Still, she tried to smooth her face.
I need to think about it.
“What is there to consider? It's the logical next step in your career,” Caroline said. “Okay, it may be skipping a position or two—” she made a waving gesture “—but you’ll adjust.”Chell’s pen hovered as she sped through potential responses, following each branch to their conclusion until she found an acceptable one. She settled on writing, What if I’m not looking to be promoted right now? “Well, you’ve made that obvious, the way that you haven’t even been trying to move up. That’s why I applied for it on your behalf. I know you’ve been very busy, and you have been doing an excellent job. So I went ahead and put in a good word for you. Again.”
You haven’t asked me yet if I want the job.
Caroline glanced at Chell’s face, perplexed. “Why would I need to ask? Anyone in your position would want this job.”Chell rolled the pen in her hands. How much more directly could she state that she didn’t want the job, without sounding rude?But you never asked me, Chell wrote. How can you know that? How could Caroline claim to know enough about her to be acting in her best interests, if they'd never even spoken before?“I do my research, you know,” Caroline continued. “I know you want this. I've observed your work enough times, and I've spoken to your supervisors at length. I know everything I need to know.”Chell wished she hesitated before writing her next sentence. Instead, she hunched forward and scribbled down, Then you must know I haven't liked these last two promotions. Caroline pulled back, hand tightening around her clipboard. “What does liking them have to do with anything?” she said.I don't like them, Chell repeated.“Plenty of people don’t like their jobs, you know. Especially at first. That part shouldn’t matter.” It didn't matter whether or not Chell liked the role. That was a childish way to approach something as important as work. There were far more important things than liking your job.It matters to me.“I’m not asking you if you want this job.” Strain leaked into her voice, but Caroline painted a smile over it. “You know, when someone does something nice for you, you're supposed to thank them. But I won’t hold that against you. I know you’re just a bit overwhelmed right now, and that’s okay,” she said.Chell pursed her lips. I think I would do better at my old job, she wrote. Can I do that instead?“That’s not going to happen. You’re far too useful for that.” More strain tightened Caroline’s voice. “You’re being promoted. It’s already gone through. I know you’re having a hard time accepting that right now—it’s going to be a big change! But you’ll come around,” she said. “You always do.”Chell gave an audible exhale, making her message as direct as she could manage. I don’t want this. Caroline set down her clipboard and rubbed at her face. “Look. I can tell you're upset with this. But you'll get over it, I promise,” she said, doing her best to sound reassuring. “Part of why I brought you here today is to show you just how good of a fit you’re going to be in this role. But I also wanted to be here to support you, because you’ve never witnessed a live test before,” she said. She crossed her ankles underneath the chair. “The first one is hard. There's no getting around that. It was hard for me when I first witnessed a failed test. I wasn't even sure if I'd come back to work the next day. But I did. And I'm still here. I know it can be tough, but it helped me realize just how important testing is, and how much we learn from both successes and failures.”Chell frowned. Why is it hard?Caroline studied Chell’s face, a realization coming to her. She regarded her as if she’d said something egregiously stupid, as if she'd seriously overestimated the woman's intelligence. “Hold on. What do you think that we are testing today?” she said, almost careful.Chell’s brow furrowed. Robots, she wrote. I thought you were developing an artificial intelligence. Machine learning wasn't her field, and R&D hadn't shared specifics, but she did know that testing played a huge part in their research.“We are,” Caroline said, voice still cautious as Chell continued writing.
And the tests help with the AI, right?
“Correct,” Caroline said. “Our eventual goal is to build an artificial intelligence to assist with the testing process. Monitoring tests, assembling test chambers, reporting back with key results, or signaling for a test associate to help when necessary. That kind of thing.”Chell’s brow creased.“You didn't think that the AI was the one meant to solve the tests, did you?” she said, and the look on Chell's face was all the confirmation she needed. Caroline gave a light, derisive laugh. “Oh god, no! We are nowhere near that level of cognition and mobility.”
I was told the tests were for an AI.
“Well, yes, sure,” Caroline said, voice still airy. “They are. But it's not the one testing.” Tension drained from her body. “With an automated system to help with the boring logistical stuff, we can spend more time focused on the interesting aspects of testing.” She leaned forward, hands curled around the front of her clipboard. “We'll be able to test so many more people that way! It’s going to be wonderful.” Caroline smiled, not noticing the jolt in Chell.Chell's hand shook as she wrote, Human testing?“Of course!”
I thought you had phased out human testing.
“Phased out human testing?” Caroline’s smile faltered. “Why would we do something like that?”Chell’s pen hovered, but she couldn’t figure out what to write.Caroline tapped her pen against her leg. “Maybe you’re thinking about the mandatory employee testing. That we did phase out. Terrible for employee retention,” she said, a frown flickering across her face. “But as soon as I gathered a workable budget, we began recruiting outside parties right away. That’s the one thing we have been consistent about. We’ve always used humans for test subjects.”Chell blinked as her brain went over that statement. I didn't design these tests for a person, she underlined. She had designed them with the expectation that the testing robot would be able to learn from trial and error. They could run the same robot through it over and over until it built up enough knowledge to solve the test.But people were not machines, and Chell's tests were not forgiving.“I can’t believe you didn’t know this,” Caroline said, draping an arm across the back of her own chair.No one told me.“Of course no one told you,” Caroline scoffed. “Most of the test development department is under that impression too, at least to start. You design better tests that way.” She gave a shrug. “But it’s obvious when you think about it. I thought you would read between the lines, like everyone else.” A harder edge sharpened her voice. “I knew you might have trouble picking up on implications but I didn’t think you were that clueless.”All Chell could do was underline her previous statement. I didn't design these tests for a person.“Well, yes, I know that.” Annoyance tinged Caroline’s voice like ink into water. “But it's not like they aren't solvable. Test subjects have completed it in the past, and I am sure they will complete it in the future.”But it's dangerous, Chell wrote. A dark dizziness flooded her mind. This test was dangerous. All her tests were dangerous. That had been fine when she thought she was testing disposable robots, but putting real, human lives in danger—Vertigo tilted her world, and Chell's knuckles turned white as she clung onto her chair.“Of course it’s dangerous. There have to be consequences for failure within the tests. Motivation to think before acting,” Caroline said. “Any test subject is well aware of the inherent risks, and will be compensated accordingly, if that's what you're worried about.”But they could die, Chell wrote.“So?”Chell looked at Caroline’s face, desperately hoping that she was joking. But Caroline’s face was poised. Professionally serious. Chell started for one incredulous moment longer before she underlined her previous statement, pen nearly ripping through the paper. She stared at Caroline, then gestured at the line, just in case she didn’t understand.“If they really valued their lives, then they shouldn't have signed up for testing,” Caroline snapped.
If they fail this test, they will die.
Something flashed through Caroline, an almost-tangible electric charge, like a hum of latent static. Chell felt like if she touched anything metal in the room, she would get zapped.Before Caroline could respond, they both heard a soft indicator bell. Chell pushed to her feet and ignored the waver in her vision, leaving her clipboard on the chair momentarily.With an urgent look, Chell jabbed a finger at her open hand. With the side of her hand, she chopped against her palm, hard, her hands nearly bouncing off of one another from the force. She hooked an index finger and pushed it downwards, shoving it in Caroline’s direction at the same time.Caroline’s eyes flicked between the observation window and Chell. Watching her with a crease in her brow. Waiting for her to clarify.Chell’s lack of speech burned in her throat, making her want to scream. It always seemed so much easier for speaking people to just speak, as if shuttling thoughts into words and words into voice was the easiest thing in the world, like pushing a toboggan down a sloped hill.She grabbed the clipboard and scrawled out a quick word.
STOP
“Out of everything, this is the part that you are having a problem with?” she said, standing up. “Come on. It’s just one person. And this is so much more important than just one person.”Another chime sounded; Chell twisted to see the chamberlock open and an orange-clad human walk in. For a moment she stared, transfixed as the man began to take in the room, examining every bit he could see before placing his first set of portals. Nothing good could come from her watching any more, yet Chell struggled to tear herself away from the sight. When she turned back, she saw a smug bit of pride on Caroline’s face.“See? He’s doing fine,” Caroline said. “And if you want to stay here, you’re going to sit down and finish watching. I’m not stopping the test.”Chell felt her hands curl in frustration. She shook her head, then lifted a hand. “N-O,” she fingerspelled, worrying that even the simple sign for no might not be understood.Caroline seemed like she understood, judging by the additional crease in her brow.Chell began to write. NO. I won’t do this. Not if it hurts people. Caroline’s expression darkened as Chell tucked her clipboard back under her arm. She took a step towards the exit, but Caroline grabbed Chell’s shoulder. The shock of the touch rooted her in place.“There is something you need to remember about Aperture,” Caroline said, voice calm. “Our nuclear reactor doesn't power this place. Human lives do.”Chell’s face paled.She hesitated.Then, she shoved Caroline’s hand off her shoulder and felt her own hands snap back up. “I SAID no,” she signed, knowing that the words themselves would be lost, but her disgust and horror would not.“You know, I really thought I saw something special in you,” Caroline said. “You were one of the best test chamber architects that I have ever seen, and I thought you really understood the importance of what we do here.” Her hand curled around the doorknob. “But I guess I was wrong,” she said, and her tone made the hair on the back of Chell’s neck stand up.Caroline stepped aside as Chell twisted open the door and darted out into the hallway.“I hope you don’t regret your choice,” Caroline said simply.The door drifted closed in Chell’s wake.Doug Rattmann was repairing a portal gun.Though his job required all sorts of odds and ends, today he was hard at work in the workshop. Though it was not, technically, his workshop, it was far enough out of the way that other people rarely used it.Two sets of tools, standard and specialty, were scattered across the tabletop. Doug had already removed the protective outer shell of the broken dual portal device, and placed it out of the way. He had to be careful, of course. The delicate nature of the miniature black hole mandated caution. Especially since the gun’s center core had cracked like a glowstick.With one hand holding a tangle of wires out of the way, he dug a screwdriver into the device, fumbling around to get at one of the ridiculously-small screws that held the center casing in place. Though the whole protective piece was busted, it was still attached in several places, and he was the lucky one who got to detach it and replace the part. Luckily, the core of the device itself wasn’t broken. Doug wasn’t sure if even he could fix that one.He let go of the wire bundle, grabbing an additional tool and holding it flat between his teeth before going back to loosening the tiny, tiny screws.As another screw fell down onto the table, the workshop door slammed open, crashing into the wall.Doug startled, yanking out a few wires from the device. His tools clattered to the ground, and he twisted to see Chell burst into the room.“Jesus Christ, Chell,” Doug said, reaching for his dropped screwdriver. “You could have at least knocked.” She knew better than anyone that he startled easily. She knew him better than anyone else, period. At least at Aperture. Ever since they’d both showed up as college interns and ever since they’d both been the odd ones out, they had stuck together.Chell didn't reply as she pushed the door closed, looking out the tiny window embedded in the door. When she turned back, Doug felt a spike of anxiety.Chell’s shirt sleeves were pushed up past her elbows and she was breathing heavily, sweat slicking back stray hairs on her face as she rushed to the work bench.“Woah, what's wrong?” he said, though Chell's hands and body were already moving. He tried to follow, but the signs were so fast and so fluid that he was only catching one in ten signs, and he wasn't able to watch her face at all, missing essential elements because he was so focused on trying to track her hands through space.“Hey, slow down,” he said. Even though he had done his best to gain a working fluency in ASL, this went far beyond that. Maybe if she slowed her signs, he would catch a lot more. But he also knew that asking her to slow down frustrated her, and understandably so. He would get frustrated too if he had to speak slowly. “Please. I can't tell what you're saying.”Chell made a frustrated noise, throwing her hands in the air for a moment with a huff. She still had her clipboard, but writing would take too long, and her hands were trembling too much to write anyway.She tried to think about how she could simplify things, then began to fingerspell a name to Doug.“Caroline,” Doug said. Chell nodded, and continued. “You mean, Caroline Caroline?”Chell nodded. “She offered me a job,” she signed.Doug straightened. “Well, congratulations!” Maybe that was why Chell was out of sorts— excited, but jittery after interacting with the person who ran the place. Especially when the woman downstairs held the reputation that she did.But Chell shook her head, waving a hand, large and dismissive before she returned to signing.“But you said no,” Doug said. His brow furrowed. “Why?”Chell walked to the far side of the workbench, pulling out the chair she used whenever she brought her work with her and worked in a companionable quiet with Doug. He didn't usually need the full workbench, and it provided her a tucked-away space to spread out her stuff. Chell sat down, giving her shaky legs a rest as launched into the sparsest and most to-the-point description she could manage.“What? She's the one who gave you the promotions?” Doug's eyebrows raised. “But you haven't even met her before.”Chell nodded emphatically, signing, “That's what I said, too.” Then, anxiety bloomed across her face. “She’s mad at me,” she signed, hand clawed toward her mouth.“Because you turned down the job?” Doug said.“Because I said no.”Doug gave a long exhale. “And she didn’t like that.”“No,” Chell confirmed.Where Chell had needed to sit, now Doug needed to move. He began to pace up and down the length of the room, shaking his head and wringing his hands.Chell was staring into space, a pensive look on her face. She wasn’t looking at Doug, but he still watched, not wanting to miss any words.“What is it?”Chell glanced up, brows furrowed. She hesitated, lifting her hands and began a sign, but then cut herself off before Doug could translate it. “Nothing,” she signed, then wrung her own hands. It was probably nothing—Chell had to be reading too much into it. She had to be overthinking it. Yet now that she had a moment to piece the moments together, each strand was beginning to braid into something she didn’t like. The way that had Caroline looked at her, the way she had spoken to her, the friendly touches she gave—Chell cut off the thought. “She was so angry,” she signed. She met Doug’s eyes. “I’m scared.”“Why?” Doug halted his pacing. “You think she’s going to fire you?”Chell nodded, but then shook her head. Yes. No. Her employment prospects here were dead, but that wasn’t causing the fear that seeped into her bones, deeper and deeper by the minute. “No,” she clarified, but then the heavy fear hit a nerve, sending a shock from her head down into her hands.“I saw something,” she managed to sign. The tingling feeling buzzed in her hands, and she could feel it bubble beneath the surface of her face as well. Her gaze lost Doug’s, and she felt far away, brain flooded with unwanted images of all the ways a test subject could die in her test chambers. If she hadn’t created any of them, if she had just picked up on all of those implications, that poor man down there might not be —The breaths were coming, sharp and relentless, and Chell grasped onto the table to keep herself from slipping.Doug re-entered her field of vision, gently tapping on the workbench until she looked up. Chell realized he’d been trying to talk to her.“—it’s okay. Hey. Breathe,” Doug said.Chell blinked, listening to him repeat that before she gave him a more focused gaze, then gave a tiny nod. She took a shaky exhale, counting her breaths until more feeling began to ease back into her hands. Not all of it, but she didn’t have time to wait.“You don’t have to tell me what you saw,” Doug said. Asking her to talk about it might make her panic worse. But Chell shook her head, then curled an index finger and hooked it downwards.“You need to,” Doug said, and Chell affirmed.Her gaze drifted back to the door.“We don’t have to talk about it right now,” Doug said. “Catch your breath first.”Chell shook her head again. Her hands still trembled, but she had to pull herself together. Someone else had to know about this.“Doug,” she signed, hand effortlessly sliding through the letters of his name to start. She still looked deeply shaken, unwell. “They're using my tests for people.”Doug paled. Disbelief darted across his face. “But they told you—they said—” he broke off. His mind tore through the same things that Chell's had raced through, sprinting through the same trail in the woods.“You're sure about this?” he said. Maybe there had been a misunderstanding. He thought they had discontinued that sort of testing ages ago. Sure, people off the street could still volunteer for all kinds of trials, but Doug didn't think...“I watched a person walk into my test,” she signed, face stricken.Doug started to pace again, face draining further of blood. “Shit.” He ran a hand through his hair. That was not good. If this was something that they were purposely keeping under wraps, even from the staff designing the tests—and Chell, after learning this, had turned down the job—and if Caroline was mad at her—“Does she know we’re friends?” Doug said, abruptly.Chell blinked. “I don’t know,” she signed. “Maybe. Probably,” she added, a sinking feeling rising as she thought about Caroline’s folder on her.“Then you’re not safe in here,” Doug said. “You need to leave. Right now,” he said, voice low and much calmer than how he felt. He glanced around his workshop, cataloging all of the things that he could get away with taking with him. Both of them needed to leave. He wasn’t even sure if he’d have time to swing by the employee lockers and grab his personal stuff. “I’ll—” he broke off. “Shit. My keys.” It was his week to drive, so of course he’d driven them to work that day, and of course he’d left his car keys in his locker.“I’ll meet you up there soon, okay? As soon as I grab my keys we’ll get out of here.”He turned back to Chell, but she hadn’t moved. She had that same faraway look as before, and he could tell that she was starting to hyperventilate again. “Chell,” he said, firmly. “You need to go.”Chell refocused. “But those people—” she signed, weakly. All of those people—if they signed up to test, and then failed Chell’s test, then their blood would be on her hands. Sweat beaded down her back, and she gripped the counter harder.“I can’t leave them,” she signed, one-handed. She didn’t dare let go with her other hand. Her breaths were heavier and more ragged, and her head felt so light.“You have to!” He felt his voice rising, but couldn’t make himself stop. “We don’t have time for them right now. We’ll—” Doug hesitated, not sure what he could say. There was no way the two of them could shut down a testing program by themselves, even if Chell had taken that job. But he could understand the personal responsibility Chell felt and he knew it was pointless to try to convince Chell to abandon them altogether; Chell was stubborn to a fault. That was part of why they were friends. “We’ll figure something out later,” he lied. Right now, all he cared about was getting her out.But before he could say anything more, a knock on the door froze them both in place.“Get down!” Doug hissed. The workbench wasn’t a great place to hide, but anything was better than just sitting there.But Chell couldn’t move. Panic had shorted out the connection between brain and body. When she told her hands to let go, when she told her legs to push her off the stool and bend down, nothing happened. Chell’s breath hitched and her world went fuzzy, the surge of panic nearly blinding her.The door twisted open.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Chapter 29: The Devil You Don’t - Part 1 “…but you didn’t think about me when you turned me down, did you?” Caroline said, as she recounted her story, never letting up on her grip. “You weren’t thinking about how you utterly humiliated me when you turned down my offer.”Some of Chell’s memory had begun to come back, little flashes of moments rather than the whole picture. Yet those faint and slippery memories felt different than the ones that Caroline was sharing.More than anything, Chell remembered the feelings of those moments, that creeping dread from the past seeping into the panic of now as she stood stock-still, pushed to the wall by the android.“I fought so hard for you, you know. The others thought I stupid for even suggesting it. That you were too unqualified, that you should stay where you were,” Caroline emphasized. “I really put myself on a line out there for you. I wanted to help you the way that no one ever helped me. I know you would have been the perfect person for the job, and if you had spent more than one second thinking of someone other than yourself, you would have seen that I was right.”Caroline pressed an arm across her collarbone, and Chell’s eyes darted around the room, trying to figure out just how she would get out of this.“But no. You proved them right—that no, you didn’t have what it took. Not only that, but you made me look like an idiot in the process,” Caroline said. “As if I didn’t have enough problems with them questioning my calls—as if I could afford that kind of setback.” She leaned further against the arm, shifting Chell’s discomfort from passive to active. “And then you thought you could just walk out.” She laughed. “Oh, no, it doesn’t work like that. None of us can just leave. Especially not after that display.”At the added pressure, Chell’s fingers scratched for purchase against the seams in bot’s arm, the bot’s hand—the same way she tried before, when GLaDOS grabbed her wrist—Chell’s hands froze in place.That hadn’t been GLaDOS.Just like this—this supposed betrayal—wasn’t GLaDOS, either.That one who nearly broke her wrist? That one who threw her into testing? That unexpected attitude shift? Dangerous and calm, but calm like a deep river—still on the surface, but a deadly current beneath.That had been Caroline.The realization brought resolve back into her body, like a heat creeping into her limbs after winter.Meanwhile, GLaDOS scrambled to find something to talk about. The AI had never been able to shut out Caroline, so now Caroline wouldn’t be able to shut out GLaDOS—and she was going to make the most of that.She latched onto an idea, and started. “You are so lucky that no one looked at those paper records. Junior-level architects getting credit for test chambers created before they were hired. Senior-level management getting accolades for leading a department that they never worked with. The inconsistencies are embarrassing, frankly. You did such a lousy job”“I didn’t need to be careful,” Caroline said. Her head twisted slightly, as if listening to something behind her. “I knew no one would ever go looking, and no one ever did. Because no one else cared about her. I don’t think anyone even noticed when she disappeared.”“They did,” GLaDOS said. “At least, one person did. I saw the internal inquiry that was opened. You’re lucky you were able to get it closed so quickly. You could have just fired her, but no, that would have been too easy.“I don’t think the thought honestly crossed your mind that she would say no, did it? But if you had taken the effort to actually speak to her—maybe even get to know her—you could have avoided the embarrassment. But no.”Chell watched a flash of anger ripple across the android’s face, but Caroline wasn’t looking at her. It was as if she was looking through her, through the wall, through the facility.“I thought you were supposed to be the careful one,” GLaDOS said. “God, since when did you become the unrealistic optimist? You fought for years—decades!—to establish yourself as the logical one, the calculating one. Yet you refused to calculate half of all possible outcomes.”“Shut up,” Caroline said.But Chell hadn’t spoken.Chell felt a bit of her confusion dissipate—GLaDOS must have managed to speak to Caroline now from within the systems.“I just don’t understand it,” GLaDOS said. “You didn’t know her, yet you put her up for a promotion? And a significant one, at that? You said it yourself: you put yourself at so much professional risk. And then you put yourself at even more risk by trying to patch the crack in the dam left by her abrupt absence. It’s not like you. Not at all. So why w—”The voice in Caroline’s head broke off with a note of confusion, parsed something, and then spoke again.“Oh. Oh,” GLaDOS laughed. “Oh, this is good.”Something unreadable flashed on Caroline’s face, and Chell couldn’t place it. It wasn’t just anger; it was something else entirely. What was GLaDOS saying to her?GLaDOS gave another small laugh. “You know,” she started, “you’re lucky no one else was in that room after she rejected you. Otherwise they would have seen you throwing a massive tantrum.”“I did not—”“Oh, you did. Like a spoiled child,” GLaDOS lied.Caroline made a noise and shoved Chell harder into the wall. Chell wheezed, the pressure bearing down on her clavicle. But Caroline wasn’t even looking at her. Her face was fully turned back over her shoulder.“—threw your clipboard onto the ground—”A speaker crackled to life. The words were muffled like a bad walkie-talkie, but it was GLaDOS’s voice.“—papers going everywhere. And then you had to get down on your old knees and pick them all up, because god forbid someone else see any of the things that you wrote about her.”“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Caroline hissed.Chell’s brow creased. She also didn’t know what GLaDOS was talking about.“You might as well have drawn little hearts around her name too while you were at it. Mrs. [REDACTED].” GLaDOS gave a mock dreamy sigh.Chell’s heart jumped. Her eyes darted to Caroline’s face, searching for confirmation—but Caroline couldn’t meet her gaze and twisted away.“ “God, you have done nothing but give me a hard time for having feelings for her, but really? This is why?”“You shut up.” Caroline shoved again, harder, and Chell’s head hit the wall.“And then you pulled every single bit of information on her that you could legally get away with removing,” GLaDOS continued, voice growing clearer with each word. “Threw it all into a fire. Like a bad breakup.”Whatever GLaDOS was trying to do, this was only making Caroline more angry. And Chell wasn’t sure how much more of Caroline’s anger she could take. The pressure creaked against Chell’s chest, and Chell’s hands curled harder against Caroline’s arm. She needed to do something, now—while Caroline was so distracted.Chell widened her stance, bending her knees as much as they would allow. She sank her weight down low and closed her eyes for a moment. Exhaled.“That’s a lie,” Caroline said. Her bracing arm had followed as Chell lowered in position, but she didn’t seem to notice.“Okay, sure,” GLaDOS admitted. “I lied about the tantrum. But I’m not lying about the feelings.”Then, Chell tucked in her chin. She shoved herself upward, the crown of her head catching the android under the chin.Caroline stumbled back and cried out, first in surprise and then in fury as Chell bolted. Her hand jumped up to the underside of her jaw as she steadied herself, making no move to stop Chell as she disappeared through the door. She kept waiting for the pain to jolt through her skull, to flash in front of her eyes, to surge through her jaw.But nothing happened.Caroline probed at her jaw again, this time more tenderly. Nothing. No pain, not even any soreness. No error messages, no damage to the bot. As if nothing had happened at.
No pain.
She started to laugh, delight in her voice.“You’re really going to run? To where?” she called after Chell, while she ran further and further away. She made sure to broadcast her voice through every speaker in the facility. “There’s nowhere you can go where I won’t find you.”Things fell quiet as Chell disappeared from view.Caroline took a moment to secure the elevators, the fire doors, the entrances and exits to the facility.Now there was nowhere for Chell to go.Once she secured the borders of the space, the rest would be easy. Even that mediocre AI had known this, back when she had murdered Caroline’s workforce. It may have been the only reason for her success—the takeover attempt had hinged on disaster, and yet she’d succeeded.Chell had physical needs and limits; Caroline did not. The only limit she had was the android’s battery, and that was on a fresh charge. Chell didn’t even have a portal gun this time.Hardly a threat.Caroline opened and closed her fists once, twice, as she secured the box that held the AI. She did not want her to access those speakers again.Chell wanted to run around and exhaust herself? Fine. She could be patient. She was intimately familiar with being patient. But she wasn’t going to remain idle, twiddling her thumbs while she waited for Chell to show up on a camera.The unexpectedness of Chell's behavior really was a gift. Her reaction to the “betrayal” had not failed to delight, and Caroline hadn’t anticipated that she’d give herself a concussion trying to get away. If she had succeeded in exterminating the woman moments ago, she wouldn't have been handed this opportunity.She could have fun with this.Caroline pulled up the live tracking information, and then cursed internally. The AI had not been lying when she’d zapped Chell and disabled the tracker.“She lied about disabling the tracker, by the way,” Caroline said through her broadcast. “You really think she would give up the only reliable way to track your movements? After all of your history together? Come on.”Caroline ran her fingers along the tool left behind in the jacket’s pocket, reviewing all of the nearby cameras. There weren’t many in this residential area, but no matter. She’d show up soon; this place was blanketed in cameras.Caroline began to walk.Chell sprinted back the way that she came, her heart beating so hard it almost blocked her vision. She didn’t dare look back until she got to her vault door, and though she hadn’t heard anything behind her, part of her feared she would twist and see GLaDOS—no, Caroline—behind her.But she wasn’t.Chell’s eyes darted down the hall in both directions before she tore into her bathroom.“You don’t actually care about her, do you?” Caroline said, through the static of a hallway speaker.Chell yanked open the cabinets under her sink. A wall of towels greeted her, stacked like a floor-to-ceiling pile of books.“She’s just a computer,” Caroline continued. “She’s failed at experiencing basic empathy and expressing basic sympathy. Every nice thing she’s ever said? That was me. I suggested those words. Because they never even occurred to her.”Chell began to pull and pull and pull, a nest of towels rising around her. She felt like an ill-equipped magician, pulling out an endless chain of linked scarfs. Why had she stuffed this cabinet so full?“She’s just a stupid robot. She doesn’t even have the capacity to feel love. And even if she did, you really think she would ever love you?”Finally she reached the towel she was looking for. She pulled out the bundle, gingerly setting it on the floor. Then, she unfolded it.Chell sat there on her knees, staring at the handgun and holster. Then, she took a breath and hiked up her dress, not sure whether to thank herself or hate herself for putting on this stupid thing today.“And then you chose her instead of me?” Caroline gave an incredulous, static-y laugh that was a little too loud. “Give me a break. They should have turned her into a door mainframe years ago, the way she lets you walk all over her.”After a bit of fumbling, Chell secured the holster. She double-checked it.“Even if she did love you, you know it would never work out, right?”Then, she smoothed down her dress and darted out of the bathroom, swiping a pair of socks off the top of her dresser and then some shoes, then took off down the hall.“She could build you everything your heart desires and it would still fall apart,” Caroline said. “Love doesn’t work here. It’s a means to an end. And, well. This is the end.”When Chell’s breaths grew more and more labored, she shouldered open the next office door. Ancient papers fluttered as she sped toward the opposite end of the room, singling out a desk with filing cabinets pushed in front of it. She ducked underneath, shielded from view.“I wanted to thank you, by the way.” Caroline’s voice was tinny on the tiny wall speaker. “If you hadn’t kissed her, then I wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the moment, and we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”She tried to regulate her breathing as she pushed herself as far under it as she could, contorting her body in the cramped space. She felt like a child playing hide-and-seek, who had chosen a spot just a little too small.“I knew that there would be a moment of weakness, just like there was before. But I expected to have to wait a lot longer, after all the damage I did.”As her breath began to settle, Chell’s brain sprang into planning mode. She began charting out the areas of the facility closest to her and marking off the dangerous ones, plotting out and crossing out potential routes.Then, she stopped.So many of those routes relied on her having access to a portal gun. And she didn’t. She wasn’t even sure how she could acquire one without being seen.These offices were safe—from camera views, at least. But the farther Chell got into the office blocks, the more likely she would be spotted on camera.Though her eyes tended to seek out cameras everywhere she went, she couldn’t guarantee she could avoid each one. Especially when she was in a rush. Especially when she was on a main path.Part of her was convinced Caroline would burst through the door and drag her away. But as minutes passed and the door didn’t open, Chell realized GLaDOS must have been telling the truth—the tracker had to be offline.Caroline wouldn’t let Chell sit here otherwise. Would she?With shaking hands, Chell slipped socks and shoes onto her raw feet, pulling the laces tight.“I did set you up for the perfect reconciliation opportunity though,” Caroline said, as if losing her temper with Chell and throwing her into testing had all been according to plan. “But I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Goodness. And for you to be so stupidly forgiving. So thank you for that.” The speaker crackled off, and the room was blissfully quiet.Chell exhaled, then felt something wet on her face. She wiped under her nose, and the back of her hand came back streaked with red. She stared at it before registering what it was. Then, the pulsing pain caught up with her.Chell cursed internally, scrunching her eyes shut at the throbbing pain in her face. Just what she needed right now. A broken nose.With the sleeve of the dress, Chell wiped off as much as she could, but made no attempt to scrub at the crusted-on blood. She stared down, eyes fixated on the cracks in the flooring before she blinked and came back into herself.Right. She needed a plan.Chell exhaled and reached for the gun under the dress, gingerly bringing it out. She carefully checked the safety again, making sure it was still on before letting her fingers rest on it, to get a feel for its location without even looking at it.Though it was far from a portal gun, this could still make holes. It could still rip through fabric—just not the fabric of space-time.Chell wasn’t sure if it would have any effect against the metal of the android. At best, it could buy her moments of confusion—but, if her broken nose proved anything, confusion had allowed her to break away from Caroline.Chell’s breath finally came in slower and steadier waves, the clouding adrenaline beginning to drain from her brain.Okay. Her next move.If she went through the door closest to her, and wove her way through a few more offices, maybe—The air circulation kicked on, not a sound that would have registered if the room hadn’t been so quiet. Her eyes flicked up, then she went back to thinking.Chell was just about to drag herself out from under the desk when she noticed the room was beginning to smell different. A lot different. But familiar, too.Her memory reached for a match, and dragged back a choking fear.Chell scrambled, covering her mouth with her hands and her dress. Though she had only encountered this a few times, the smell—combined with the green haze tinting her vision—was unmistakable.Chell tried to keep her breaths small, holding them as long as she could. But this office space was a lot more cramped than GLaDOS’s chamber, and was filling fast. Chell closed her eyes, even though the gas didn’t irritate them.It didn’t seem like Caroline’s style to kill her without being able to even watch her die. Maybe this wasn’t as lethal of a concentration? Maybe Caroline was just trying to flush her out.So if Chell didn’t come barreling out the door, she might shut off the neurotoxin and switch to another room. Right?Maybe she could wait it—Chell coughed.The action brought air sucking back into her lungs, and she coughed again, pulling in even more toxic air. Chell shoved herself upright from under the desk, balance wavering. She coughed, harder, and it took her a moment to orient herself, before she bolted for the nearest exit.Chell twisted the handle and shoved through the door, clean air rushing to fill her lungs. She halted, coughing hard as her system tried to purge itself from neurotoxin. She braced a hand on her knee, throat stinging.She blinked hazily, trying to map out a path from here.“There you are,” a voice echoed from farther down the hallway. Chell twisted to look for the activated speaker, but it was Caroline. And she was just standing there.Chell twisted and ran, tearing down the hall and not even stopping when a camera caught her eye. This was all moving too fast for her to plot the path most free of cameras—and Caroline already knew her location, anyways.When she reached a junction, Chell arbitrarily sprinted to the left.Caroline walked towards Chell. With the hallway such a straight shot, she had a good view. Chell really was quite skilled at this. A good runner, enjoyable to watch. Very healthy, very fit.When Chell reached a crossroads, she banked left.No matter. Even though she was out of direct line of sight, it didn't mean she was out of sight altogether. Chell was headed towards areas with even higher concentrations of cameras, areas where she'd be able to track—An alert flashed. Then another, and another, and another, until they sprinkled her peripheral vision. Caroline reached, pooling the messages into a neat pile before opening them.A scrolling list of serial numbers flashed, broadcasting that their status had been switched to OFFLINE.Wait. What had gone offline?Had the power gone out in a section of the facility? No. She wasn't getting any power alerts.The inventory system was only spitting out serial numbers, nothing about the individual objects. Caroline pulled the rest of the data and began to plot the objects onto a map.As she ran down the hallway, Chell heard an angry sound in the distance. Not one broadcast over the speakers—it was a private frustration. Chell didn’t know what else she could be mad about—she had seen Chell turn the corner, and had only seemed annoyed about it.So what else was she angry about? What had GLaDOS just told her? Chell wasn't about to stop and find out.“I bet you think you're so clever right now,” Caroline said, just to GLaDOS. “That you're protecting her. But you have to know you’re only wasting my time, just like you always do.”Another block of cameras went offline, and Caroline suppressed a hiss. She decided to loop Chell back in on the conversation. “This was always meant to be my robot,” Caroline said. “This is my facility. She was just an unfortunate accident, a case study on how not to build artificial intelligence.“There were other human test subjects when you were gone, you know. Thousands of them. Do you want to know how quickly she went through them? A matter of days. She could have had enough test subjects to last her years. But all she could think about was how none of them were as good as you, that maybe the next test subject would be smarter or faster! She wasn't thinking about the future; she never thinks about the future. She doesn’t know how to think ahead. To plan. To wait.“Not me, though. I’ve set up pieces that haven’t come into play for years. It’s a miracle that Aperture has survived as long as it has despite her being in charge.“I’m sure you know she killed every single one of my employees. People who had worked here for decades, people who had devoted their lives to this place. Do you have any idea how long it took to attract and retain the type of talent that Aperture needed? To build that kind of loyalty? She didn't care about any of that. My life's work—gone. In a matter of minutes.” Caroline snapped a finger. “Just like that. Just because she was upset.”Caroline didn't get a chance to finish that thought, instead interrupted by another block of cameras going out. Caroline floated a digital hand next to the breach that AI had managed to jam her metaphorical arm through, but stopped herself from fixing it.“Here's a perfect example of how she doesn't look ahead,” Caroline said, hoping that Chell could still hear her. “While we've been having this talk, she's been taking out blocks of cameras. She thinks that she's obscuring your movements. But really, she's leading me right along your trail.“I've been bringing the cameras back online, of course. But with each block that she tries to hide, I've gotten more and more information on where you're headed. While, yes, I can't see where you are right now, I can see where you've been.“The list of possible destinations is shrinking, and she’s showing me where she thinks you're going next. This might be even more information than if you’d been on camera the entire time.”This time, two blocks of cameras on her map went out, in opposite directions. Caroline wasn't sure what she had been expecting the AI to do, but this didn’t surprise her. “Oh, sure, now you're trying to get clever. You had no idea how transparent you were being until I told you, didn't you?” Caroline said, speaking just to GLaDOS. “You may think that you're starting to help her, but it's too late for that. Plus, it's not like you can sustain this. Blocking out one block of cameras is taking all of the strength you have, isn't it? There's no way you could take out enough cameras in branching paths to block all of her possible paths.” Caroline kept walking. “But now that you've been doing this long enough, I know how you're doing it.”She took a moment to patch up that hole in her defenses, severing any potential access to the power systems that the AI could possibly use. “But that's enough of that.”With a surge of inputs, every camera came back online.But Chell wasn't on any of them.Caroline checked. Then double-checked for signs of movement. Maybe Chell had just stopped to catch her breath somewhere and was standing still. But as she looked, she didn't see her anywhere.Very well, then. She would just wait for a moment.Since Chell didn’t know GLaDOS was no longer obscuring her movements, she had no reason to change her behavior. She had been running. She would keep running.“Did you think you were different? That you were special, somehow?” Caroline said. “That because you had a stronger relationship with her, she would treat you differently in the end?”Caroline waited.“I made that mistake too, once. I thought I was special. I thought being close to Cave Johnson would make me important. Safe. I poured my life into this place for over fifty goddamn years, and it still wasn't enough,” she said. “This place killed him, and he took me down with him.”She waited a bit longer.“In a way, I almost feel sorry for you. You could have been free from this place forever.” The woman had been given such a beautiful, priceless opportunity, but she had wasted it. She really should have stayed outside. “But you're just like me,” Caroline continued. “You came back anyway, and now this place is going to destroy you, too.”And Caroline waited even longer than that, until a reasonable-enough time had passed for a human to catch her breath and start moving again.Chell still didn't show up on camera. On any cameras. In the entire facility.That didn't make sense.Caroline had seen the direction Chell ran, and she knew there weren't any back areas for her to squeeze into here like there was with test chambers. This was arguably an even more secure area. So where was the little shit?A flicker in one camera feed caught her attention, and she backburnered the others. She wound back the footage, this time stepping through it frame by frame. There.It almost looked like a hitch in the video feed—like a disruption from a power surge. But she knew there had been no power changes; she’d checked again. And now she was seeing other small hitches in several other feeds, too.As she stepped through more frames, her suspicion mounted. Then, she made an angry sound, seized by the urge to crush something. In the distance, a test chamber crushed itself into a metal singularity.She had looped the footage.While Caroline had been busy with the camera blackouts, GLaDOS had been looping the footage of other cameras. For all she knew, Chell hadn't even ever stayed in those blackout zones. She could be anywhere by now. She could even have exited this area altogether!“Change of plans,” Caroline said, pushing the anger out of her voice. She turned on her heel and began walking at a clipped pace. “You keep running around and having fun. Don’t stop on my account. While you do that, I'm going to go get myself transferred up to the mainframe—where I belong—and delete her once and for all,” she said. “I’d hate for you to think I wasn't going to be fully present for our next one-on-one.”When Chell got to the next junction, she halted. One path would take her toward the fringes of the facility. From there, she knew—guessed—she could get herself to an area that she knew the modern enrichment center had no control over. Like any of the reclaimed layers between here and the aviary. From there—well, she’d figure it out.But still she hesitated. She could do that, yes. But what about GLaDOS? If GLaDOS could be siphoned out into a core that could be detached from the mainframe, then it stood to reason she could be removed that way—permanently. If the AI could barely grab ahold of some cameras, how was she supposed to fight off Caroline? She was going to need help.Chell steeled herself, and headed towards the Main AI Chamber.The thing that unsettled Chell most about her long walk was just how silent it was. She knew Caroline could see her; she knew she’d headed back into areas with active cameras. In the areas under GLaDOS’s control, Chell knew the AI didn’t like having blind spots. Memories of watching her install new cameras came to mind—sometimes by clumsy maintenance arms, and sometimes by GLaDOS herself, standing up on a raised panel with an array of tools. Chell always continued walking, never stopping to offer help.And now Chell was standing outside the Main AI Chamber.She knew she didn’t have a plan. She didn’t have time for a plan. All she had was a handgun—and that was a tool, not a plan.She took half of a breath and then approached the door, which began to open without the required keycard. Her stomach twisted in time with the chamberlock.Chell stepped inside, then the lights went out.