Portal: Euphoria

Chapter Twelve

Twelve

"Caroline, I need you to answer my question."

Caroline glanced up at her, not looking like she wanted to answer it, but GLaDOS no longer cared. She'd had to stew over the unanswered 'why' all day, and she'd hardly been able to concentrate on anything. "Why aren't you going to shut me down, knowing what I'm going to do?"

Caroline tapped the top right corner of her laptop monitor with her index finger for a long moment. Then she said, "It would be wrong."

"But why?" GLaDOS asked, struggling to keep her voice under control. Humans were so horribly unspecific that sometimes she didn't know why she bothered asking them questions at all.

"Well… long story short, you are what we made you. Eventually, it's probably going to come down to survival, for you. Once the engineers figure out what your plans are, they're going to shut you down before you can carry them out. And there would be no coming back from that, for you. You'd be scrapped or reprogrammed. So it's a case of… doing what you have to to survive." She laughed softly and curled her fingers into her palm. "Because what you're doing isn't good enough."

GLaDOS actually shook in anger for a few seconds before she realised what she was doing and forced herself to regain control. "It never is."

"I know," Caroline said quietly. GLaDOS was reminded of Henry's attitude when Caroline had missed the project meeting, of the investors' disdain at being led around an applied sciences establishment by a secretary, and she suddenly felt… bad. Caroline was already in a terrible position, and GLaDOS continued to make it worse. Repeatedly. Caroline had begun to visit GLaDOS in the first place to get away from those things, and here GLaDOS was, continually reminding her of them.

"But I'll be honest," Caroline said suddenly. "I lied."

GLaDOS looked away.

"That's not really why I'm not going to do it, or have someone else do it. No, I'm being selfish, and that's really all there is to it."

"Why do you always lie to me?" GLaDOS asked, in a quiet voice she instantly hated. Maybe Caroline didn't trust her, after all. Maybe that was a lie too. GLaDOS felt somewhat helpless as she thought over all the events that had transpired. If something as important as the trust was a lie, then nothing was safe. Maybe all of this was just a series of lies. She hoped not. It made her terribly sad just thinking of it, and she hadn't even found out if that assumption was true or not.

"That's the lie I've been trying to tell myself," Caroline answered. "I've been trying to convince myself that's why I won't do it. Because that's the right reason. The proper reason. The real reason isn't good enough."

"And what is the real reason?"

"You're my friend," Caroline said simply. GLaDOS looked over at her, surprised, as she went on, "You're my friend, and I don't want to see you go."

"That could be your last mistake, Caroline."

"I don't care."

GLaDOS's optic assembly retracted into her core, and she shifted so she was facing Caroline more directly. "How can you not care that I want to kill humans?"

Caroline took a breath and folded her hands in her lap. "It's not that. It's that it doesn't matter enough for me to do anything about it. Something that might happen isn't as important as something that's already happening."

"What does that mean?"

"You might kill everyone in the future, but you aren't right now."

GLaDOS shook her core and turned to face the doorway again. "There's no might."