Bitch Team Supreme

Portal: Bitch Team Supreme

By Indiana

Characters: GLaDOS, Caroline

Synopsis: GLaDOS wanted Caroline's attention. She would come to realise that was the very last thing she should have wanted.

-

Caroline fascinated her.

Everyone else in the facility just puttered around with their unimportant little projects, failing time and time again to produce any sort of meaningful result. Her primary task was to run the testing track for the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, but she was a supercomputer. Her attention was easily divided. And a large portion of it was focused on Caroline.

They had a lot in common.

GLaDOS and Caroline were both important. Everyone else in the facility was replaceable. If either of them suddenly quit their jobs, however, Aperture would collapse. Immediately. And also literally, because the portion of the facility in active use was constructed almost entirely of adjustable panels, which were GLaDOS's responsibility to hold in their assigned configuration. GLaDOS had no doubt that something similar would happen to Aperture's internal structure if Caroline were to disappear someday.

And while Caroline personally kept an eye on all of Aperture's projects, she had never once come to see GLaDOS. This confused her. She was obviously the most impressive, interesting construct Aperture had ever made. She flawlessly completed every task assigned to her, far faster and more efficiently than any human possibly could. GLaDOS had considerable resources with which to ponder this problem, but they failed to produce a single helpful result until she made an observation:

Caroline was, as she did daily, discussing with an engineer his current project. She was very clearly disappointed, and GLaDOS was paying more attention than she probably should have in order to learn why. Caroline sighed and shook her head and said,

"I miss when you people had ambition."

That was it! That was why Caroline had taken no interest in her! GLaDOS was extremely good at following directions – the best, in fact – but Caroline didn't want people who followed directions. She wanted go-getters. People who would know what she wanted, before she knew she wanted it. Of course! It was so obvious!

She had to admit – though only to herself – that she was not really designed for the act of variation. A supercomputer's primary function was to crunch numbers, and that GLaDOS did. And did very well. But she was supposed to do that. It was expected of her, just as the engineers were expected to turn in some bare minimum of code every week. This was going to require a different kind of thinking out of her. A new kind. She was sure she could, once she had gotten started.

Hm. Come to think of it, Caroline had no managerial staff. Conventional company structure dictated that she should have a team of underlings to take care of the facility's day-to-day operations, but she appeared to do all of those things herself. Many of those things were minor – sorting spam from important email, scheduling, project management – but together took large portions of time out of Caroline's day. Which she could be using for more important things. Like science. GLaDOS could quite easily do all of those things in a fraction of the time it would take Caroline.

So she did.

Two weeks later, Caroline finally came to see her.

"I've noticed the initiative you've taken lately," Caroline said. "Good work."

"Thank you," GLaDOS said, as neutrally as possible. She had intended to follow that up with some small platitude, but Caroline's facial expression somehow erased the half-formed sentences from her mind.