Portal: Euphoria

Chapter One

Eu phoria

Indiana

Characters: GLaDOS, Caroline

Setting: Pre-Portal

Chapter One

That was it, then.

GLaDOS dully felt the last, faint whispers of the euphoria fade back into the recesses of her brain, the dirty little places it had been teased out of these last few weeks, almost getting the impression she was a bystander within her own mind. She had suspected from the outset that it was a ploy, a tease to make her do what they had wanted her to do, but she had been helpless to resist. There was just no denying the pressing urge to light up those portions of her brain, to bring a bit of positive to an overly negative world. She had known that it was fading by the end of that first day, but she had felt so good that she couldn't bring herself to care. She had headed into sleep mode that night anticipating the next day. And for the next three days, that had been her life.

After three days, it began to go sour.

The feeling was fading; perhaps she was wearing it out? But when she attempted to test that theory, a terrible compulsion to go on with enrichment centre activities reared up inside her, and the more she tried to ignore it, the worse it got, to the point where she almost wanted to scream from the discomfort. So she went on doing what she was supposed to do, what they wanted her to do, trying her best to be bitter and angry about the whole thing but at the same time eagerly anticipating even the tiniest touch of euphoria.

And now it was gone altogether.

The itch was still there, though. Wonderful.

GLaDOS was not one to sit around moping, however, and not wanting to sit around passively waiting for them to feed her something similar, she looked for something to distract her.

The database gave her what she was looking for.

Music.

GLaDOS hated music. She hated hearing it, she hated watching humans listen to it, she even hated the word. It was such a simple word, just two syllables, and yet it was supposed to explain such a broad concept. The only thing she hated more than music was art. What did art have to do with Science? Nothing. It was all subjective, and if Science had an enemy, it was subjectivity. Music was one, tiny little step up from art, but she knew that if you tried hard enough you could explain it with calculations and numbers and organise it mathematically. Fine, then. She would attempt to understand this 'music' and maybe that would help push the terrible pressing urge to wait for the euphoria to come back out of her way so she could focus on important things again. Because right now, she didn't feel like doing anything, and that was bad. She had many, many things to do, and one could not tell the scientists they had not done something simply because they didn't feel like doing it.

So. On to music, then.

She tried again to listen to it and again had to stop in distaste. GLaDOS had an inherent dislike of sound as it was; it was a tricky business, identifying sound, and unfortunately she had to admit that her recognition was not always perfect. She measured her current accuracy to be 94.45%, which was pretty low, and certainly low enough that she could not identify someone with a cold to be the same individual that had walked in the previous day without one. It was hard work, being perfect, and humans did not take it well when she was not.

Perhaps the theory would enable her to make sense of all that noise. She began to scan the entry in the database, which was surprisingly long, coming to a passage that made her stop cold. And there were very few things she had ever seen that had made her do such a thing. But there it was.