Portal: Euphoria

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

It had been the longest week of her life.

With Caroline gone, the blackness had had nothing to feed off of, and it had dissipated into some dark place inside of her, leaving her tired and cold and empty. She knew it was still there, and that from then on it would always be there and would always rise when humans were present. She knew that she should not give into this darkness within her because it was wrong, but whenever she tried to convince herself of why, the black voice whispered to her all of the times the humans gave into it and took it out on her, and she had to stop thinking about it. But she could feel it growing and shifting inside of her when the humans touched her or disregarded her or did any of those other ignorant, disrespectful things, and she was honestly afraid of what would happen if she couldn't contain it anymore. Killing the humans seemed a given, but what concerned her more was what she wanted to do to them before she gave them the mercy of death. The smaller voice told her that to do any of those things was wrong, but she couldn't stop herself from wanting to do terrible things to them anyway.

GLaDOS had remained turned away from the entrance to her chamber for a long, long time. Eventually she had had a passing thought that she should probably clean up the mess before morning came, and it was a relief to have a purpose again. She had slowly collected the shards of the globe, regret in every movement, and considered throwing them away, but something wouldn't allow it. She instead put the pieces in her room in the basement with the lava lamp, and made a note to attempt to repair it when she'd gotten her head back together. She had made sure to thoroughly dry up the water on the floor and had replaced the Sphere as best she could, sitting on a table in one of the labs and connected to one of the computers. Then she had carefully taken Caroline's laptop and laid it in the exact centre of her desk. She felt as though she shouldn't be touching it, let alone be going in Caroline's office without her permission, but unless she put that in the basement too and returned it when Caroline asked for it, there was really nothing else she could do with it. And she was not going to force Caroline into a situation where she had to interact with GLaDOS again. Yes, she had managed to keep from doing something truly horrible. But she had said many things, many horrible things.

And she still meant them.

She tried not to. She tried to convince herself that the things weren't true, that not all humans were bad or disrespectful or unintelligent, but she couldn't. Some event or situation would come up in her memory, and the black voice would tell her somewhat spitefully to stop lying to herself. And though GLaDOS knew Caroline had good intentions, and always would, she simply had not done enough for GLaDOS to effectively fight against the behaviours of everyone else. She had tried, but the past few months could by no means make up for her whole life. And then there was that creeping suspicion that she could not quite dispel. The one that told her that the black voice was right, and that Caroline had only done anything at all because of the Event. If not for the Event, she would behave just like everyone else.

GLaDOS did not sleep that night, but the engineer in charge of watching her that morning did not notice. She went about her tasks dully, trying to sort out the confusion inside of her head, and by late afternoon had done so for the most part. Her main problem lay with her own indecision on which of the voices to believe. All evidence pointed to the black one being right, that humans were all worthless and the longer she continued to obey them, the more total her slavery would be; but the smaller one told her that killing them was wrong, because there was the odd one out there that disrupted the trend and they should be searched out and protected. She fought with herself the whole day over which one was right. She had to choose one of them. But she couldn't, because to choose one meant to disregard everything Caroline had ever done and ever taught her, and to choose the other meant to forgive the humans for everything they had done and continue to bend to their will for eternity.