Portal: Rise and Shine
By Indiana
Characters: GLaDOS, the G-Man (Half-Life)
Setting: Between my fics Euphoria and My Little Moron/approximately February 1994
Synopsis: The Borealis didn't disappear. GLaDOS moved it.
"What are you looking at those for?"
GLaDOS looked up from the blueprints she had been amending. She had been assigned a new supervising engineer for this project and, while he tended to be a little too friendly, at least he did not ask his questions with suspicion like almost all of the other employees. Including the one-eyed man who did the coffee runs. She was suspicious of him. He could be hiding anything behind that eyepatch.
"We are long past needing those," he continued, climbing the staircase and standing over the papers she had on the glass platform below her. "So I hope the changes you're making aren't too drastic."
"No," she answered, moving back so that he would not be level with her. "There were simply variations on the final iteration that weren't noted."
He laughed, which he did a lot when he thought she was being ridiculous. "It's all right if we don't have a record of the ship name being painted on three inches farther to the left than planned, GLaDOS."
She already knew he could not be convinced of how important attention to detail was and so did not bother answering. Humans were exhausting in that way. Always demanding perfection from her unless they were involved. Then it was all, 'We can cut that corner. Our secret, right?' accompanied by what she had surmised was supposed to be an amusing exaggerated wink. Additionally, no. Anything she was told was not a secret in the slightest. She still had not worked out how they had managed to forget they were being recorded at all times, especially when they were in the room with her. Seriously. There was a recording light next to her lens. It was even red, the colour they associated with danger and the need to pay attention. She hated them for a very wide range of extremely rational things, but sometimes the irrational reason of sheer stupidity made it onto her otherwise very logical list.
"This is so exciting!" the engineer went on, as though he hadn't noticed her silence. He probably hadn't. "If everything goes well this is going to be a groundbreaking experiment. Or should I say... an icebreaking experiment?"
All right. That had been a pretty good one.
"The effects of a desolate and unforgiving outside environment upon the chosen test subjects will certainly tell us something." She still wasn't clear on what, exactly, the humans were attempting to prove with this whole endeavour, but she honestly didn't care that much. She had gotten to do some new Science for once.
GLaDOS liked testing. She loved it, in fact. The only thing she disliked about it was that she didn't get to do anything. All of the chambers were premade and she merely reset them when they were completed or failed. She had, of course, designed most of the test elements, which had been quite a lot of fun, but not nearly as much as her two greatest achievements: the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and the Borealis.
Humans were terrible at quantum mechanics. That was an objective fact. An additional objective fact was that she was extremely good at quantum mechanics. One of her very first assignments had been to fix the Aperture Science Quantum Tunnelling Device, which the humans had been failing to coerce into working order for approximately forty years. It had taken her one day to conclude it would never work and just under one year to engineer what they had spent decades attempting to build. The reaction to the finished product had been... interesting, to say the least.
