Portal: Euphoria

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

"You should have seen the look on my mother's face when she read that letter you sent her," Caroline said gleefully as she took her place on the platform beneath GLaDOS and began setting the Sphere up again. "I don't know what was in it, but I don't think she knew whether to take it seriously or not. She must've stared at it for ten minutes straight."

GLaDOS had left the letter on Caroline's desk, and when Caroline had come into work that morning and seen it, she had known without asking what it was and had evidently taken it to her mother's house on her lunch break. GLaDOS knew she had left the building and had hoped she had taken it with her, but she hadn't been sure.

"I was entirely serious," GLaDOS protested, trying to think of anything in the letter that might have been taken as a joke. She was distracted, however, with the state of Caroline's hair. Usually, she left it as it grew, but today it had been separated into strands and laced into the most haphazard braid GLaDOS had ever seen. It was so horrendously disorganised that GLaDOS had to stop looking at it because it was so terribly offensive.

"Can I see it? Please?" Caroline asked, stopping what she was doing to turn and look back at GLaDOS. "You have a copy, right?"

"Of course," she answered, retrieving it from her room in the basement and handing it to Caroline. Caroline frowned. "What?"

"This is hand written," Caroline said, flipping it over as if there were something on the other side.

"And? Are you implying one cannot write if one doesn't have what are conventionally described as 'hands'?" GLaDOS asked, insulted.

"Well, I… expected you to have used a printer." Caroline turned it back over but did not start reading it. "And I didn't know you knew how to write."

"I couldn't have used a printer," GLaDOS told her, a little annoyed because the whole thing was very obvious. "Don't humans usually reply to hand written letters with hand written letters?"

"Well… yes."

"Your mother thinks I'm human, so that's what I did. And I didn't know how to write, not until yesterday."

Caroline stared at her for so long that GLaDOS began to get irritated. "Will you stop doing that?"

"You learned to write in one day."

"Yes. Yes, I learned to write in one day. In an hour and a half, if you want to be more precise. I don't understand what your problem is."

"It takes years for us to be able to write properly," Caroline told her, bending the top of the paper back and forth.

"Stop ruining it!" GLaDOS told her, annoyed. Caroline should know better! She should know that GLaDOS liked things as neat and unsullied as possible. Caroline jumped and looked down at her hands.

"I'm sorry," she said, putting it down in front of her. "But seriously. I can actually read it. You just learned how to write yesterday, and it's actually legible. I've never seen writing like this before."

GLaDOS bent down to admire the letters again and said, "It was actually as close to your mother's writing as I could manage. There were far too many variations in her script for me to be able to properly deduce the baseline and replicate it."

"Aha," Caroline murmured, nodding and spreading one hand over the paper. "Clever."

"Thank you," GLaDOS said, delighted. Looking at the letters again sent a surge of the pride through her once more and allowed her to stop being irritated with Caroline. She had done in an hour and a half what took humans, who were actually taught this sort of thing, years on end. She had achieved something greater than she originally thought she had!