Portal: Euphoria

Chapter Fifteen

Fifteen

GLaDOS, to her great distaste, had to wait through yet another lecture on how she needed to stop making her own decisions as to when to shut down, that she was not authorised to complete activities she was not authorised to complete, and so on, for about an hour and a half. She'd heard it all before, several times, and she let the sound filter through her brain without paying very much attention to it. It wasn't really important. What was far more important was that she go through the sound files again, to ensure she could still hear them. And she could. She could hear them all, without any processing whatsoever, and she knew what every single one of them was without thinking about it. Oh, those stupid, small-minded scientists. She was so much more than they thought she was. In fact, GLaDOS mused as he concluded his indignant speech, she rather thought she was evolving. That was an interesting outcome. She had learned that humans adapted to fool their own eyes in order to survive in their environments, as seeing a lion behind a tree as three separate entities would most certainly have gotten them killed, but she could now do such things merely because she felt like it. She was getting a little excited just thinking about it. What the human genome took twenty five thousand years to change had taken her just a few months. She was so much higher above them than she'd ever realised before.

GLaDOS was eager to impart this revelation to Caroline that night, but stopped herself when she saw the woman enter her chamber. She looked tired and her age was showing almost more than it ever had. GLaDOS had a feeling there was something she was supposed to say in a situation like this, but she couldn't quite remember what it was. Something about inquiring about Caroline's well-being… hm… ah, that was it.

"Caroline, are you all right?" GLaDOS asked, though she privately thought her tone could use some work. She was confident she was supposed to sound concerned, but in her opinion she sounded more like she was conducting an interview. Oh well. Something to note for another day.

"Oh, I'm fine," Caroline answered tiredly, not seeming to notice GLaDOS's lack of tact. "It's tax time, that's all. This time of year is always fun."

GLaDOS nodded a little. She was not allowed into the financial side of Aperture, probably because she could tamper with it at will, so she wasn't really sure just how difficult doing taxes for the facility was. "Don't you have accountants for that sort of thing?"

Caroline shook her head. "I ended up being the accountant quite a few years back. The CEO didn't want anyone looking at how much money we had after the whole moon rock incident. He fired all his 'bean counters' and gave me that job too." She looked a little bitter, GLaDOS thought.

"Why didn't you just say no?"

"Say no?" Caroline said with an empty laugh. "He wasn't a man you said no to."

"I thought he listened to you."

"When it came to money, he listened to no one. This is a guy who spent seventy million dollars on lunar sediment when he didn't even have seven dollars." She shook her head again. "And even though it made the portal gun more stable, we still can't turn a profit from it. The gun itself is too damn expensive."

"Generating a miniature black hole isn't easy or cheap, Caroline," GLaDOS said, wondering why she hadn't realised that herself. "Neither is calculating the size of an event horizon."

"We're so lucky you did all that work for free," Caroline said wistfully. "We'd still be in the Stone Age of that thing if not for you."

"But it doesn't matter," GLaDOS told her, trying to disregard the (possibly unintentional) allusion to her slavery. "You can't market it."

"The Boots either," Caroline said with a grimace. "I don't even know what they're made of. But I do know they're expensive as hell."

"That was the only material that wouldn't give way under such extreme forces," GLaDOS protested. "Anything else I tried to use would have broken."