Portal: Euphoria

Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen

It began early the next morning.

Two scruffy scientists began loading equipment into her chamber, where they thought she was still in the suspend mode they'd tried to leave her the night before. GLaDOS, however, had made it a priority to prevent being blocked from doing anything and had managed to trick them into believing their commands had worked. She couldn't see them, because she had to remain in the default position in order for her ruse to work, but she was listening carefully. She was doing her damnedest to pick out what was happening, and it was quite exhilarating to know that her ability to listen to music had also translated into an ability to separate sound. She no longer needed to check with her libraries to identify what was what, and when she did do so, it was often because the sound was new. She knew exactly how many humans were in the room, and where they were, and on occasion what they were doing, and it was thrilling. After an hour or so of this extremely clever spying on GLaDOS's part, she got the command to come out of suspension. This almost created a coding conflict, but she caught it in time and cancelled it. After she flicked on her optic and identified the men around her, she saw that it was a very sombre occasion indeed. These were the faces of men who were tired of this project, who had been working on it for too long with too little results, and if they failed here today they would not even care. They had seen too many failures for another one to affect them in the least.

And there was Caroline.

She was studiously not looking at the strangely wired chair that was apparently going to somehow separate her consciousness from her brain and send it into the mainframe. She had the same calm expression she usually wore, but GLaDOS seemed to be the only one to notice the deep grooves beneath her eyes. Or maybe the others did notice, and just didn't care.

GLaDOS wasn't supposed to know what was going on, and could make no comments that may nor may not have been comforting, so all she could do was watch Caroline and will her not to be afraid. GLaDOS had no idea what this whole thing even involved, but she had no intention of harming this woman and would endear to be as helpful as possible. She could see that Caroline was very, very frightened, and if truth be told, she was getting a bit apprehensive herself. If Caroline was that scared, intelligent, determined Caroline, then whatever was going to happen must be quite terrible indeed. But GLaDOS also knew that one of them needed to keep their heads for this, and so it would have to be her.

"I don't want this." Caroline was sitting in the chair now, and one of the scientists was connecting the apparatus to various points on her body. GLaDOS was now surer than ever they didn't know what they were doing. Why did she need to be strapped to the chair? It was obvious she was going to cooperate.

"It's for science," one of the scientists told her gently.

"But she's already alive!" Caroline protested. "What do you expect me to do, displace her from her own mind? Is that even possible?"

"There's nothing there. Any behaviour is programmed. Via some of our other initiatives, we contained the malware and it's ready for you now."

"I'm malware?" GLaDOS asked Caroline in more of a helpless voice than she meant. Actually, she hadn't meant to speak at all, but that had hurt.

"She's not! Look, I've been working with her, and I can prove she's alive. We've unlocked parallel processing; I helped her to see optical illusions. Computers can't do that, but she can. We're working on sound separation, any day now she'll be able to –"

Before GLaDOS could tell Caroline that she already had, one of the engineers leaned in close to her. "We know what happened. You showed her the illusions and now you both think she's actually seeing them. What she's really doing is mimicking what you did. She figured out patterns in relation to what you were doing and 'sees' the illusions based on that. It's similar to a 'breakthrough' in children with autism. But you wouldn't know about that. Would you."