Portal: Euphoria

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

During the spare time she managed to glean throughout the rest of the next day, GLaDOS looked into Caroline's references to difficulty advancing in the world, and was perplexed to find that women were apparently not held in very high regard. That was certainly strange, GLaDOS thought as she read the articles as fast as consciously possible. Caroline was just as intelligent and innovative as everyone else here, in some ways more so, and yet she was not as good as anyone else simply because she was not male? She also really did lack credentials, she discovered as she skimmed the woman's employee file; she had a diploma from an undistinguished high school and a few certificates relating to typing courses and other matters of secretary work, but nothing that indicated her competence to her later instatement, the 'assistant' of someone whose name had been redacted but who appeared to have been the CEO. She wondered why someone had seen fit to redact his name, then decided that not even the CEO had been an exception to the unspoken 'if you don't work here anymore, you were never here' rule. Come to think of it, she had three names to redact before the day was out…

"Caroline, are you married?"

Caroline laughed tiredly. "Yes, to science." She shook her head. "Come on now. My file must be able to answer that question."

"I thought maybe you left it out."

"You don't get to choose what's in your file."

"Who's assistant are you?"

Caroline raised an eyebrow. "You have a lot of questions today."

"You don't appreciate my attempts to get to know you better?"

"Oh, that's what you're doing."

"What else would I be asking for?"

"You've never tried to get to know anyone in your life. So excuse me for being skeptical." She uncrossed her legs. "I'm not anyone's assistant. Not anymore. The CEO… he… he left, a while back. We don't talk about him anymore."

"Why not?"

She shrugged. "You know what the policy is around here. Out of sight, out of mind."

"Is it hard, running this place as a woman?"

Caroline took a breath. "Why are you doing this?"

"I thought I answered that."

"There's a difference between becoming more familiar with someone and being nosy."

"I don't understand the difference."

Caroline stared at her incredulously. "How can you not?"

"All my life, if I wanted to know something, I just asked," GLaDOS answered as honestly as possible. "I'm not trying to be… nosy, as you put it. I just want to know. And you were… interested in my personal details yesterday. Aren't I supposed to reciprocate?"

"You are, but only if you care. You don't ask just to ask."

"That's the only option open to me right now," GLaDOS tried to explain. "I thought about what you said last night. I think I did bury myself, a long time ago. I used to know how to do what you want me to do, but I no longer know how. Doing it logically is the only way I can do it at all."

"And yet," Caroline countered, leaning forward, "what's driving you to ask in the first place? It can't solely be because you want to reciprocate. That doesn't make sense."

"It doesn't?"

"Why would you bother? What's in it for you?"

GLaDOS attempted to come up with a personal benefit for knowing more about Caroline's history and failed miserably. True, she would know just for the sake of knowing, but never before had she wanted to know anything about a human before. They weren't worth her time.