Chapter Text
Part Sixty-One. The Reconstruction
“This is… most unlike anything I’ve ever seen before!”
Vocal match: negative. Aperture Science Vocal Database Version 4.5.8, unavailable.
Unavailable?
“You can fix her, though, right?”
Vocal match: negative. Aperture Science Vocal Database Version 4.5.8, unavailable.
But I know that voice. I know what it is without the database. I just need to place it…
“Well, I believe so, yes. I’m reasonably certain, anyway.”
“You can just say yes, you know.”
“I suppose I could, little one, but I wouldn’t want to disappoint.”
“You never do! You don’t understand! You have to fix her!”
Who are they talking about? P-body, probably. Atlas usually gets her into dangerous situations. I’ll fix her myself. I’d do a much better job, anyway. Later, though. I’ll do it later. I’m very tired. It’s hard to think. I can’t really think at all, only about how tired I am. Whoever it is that I have slight recognition of can’t be that important, or I would have remembered who they were by now. I can’t really remember anything, but… I don’t really mind. I have a vague impression of being far too warm and in overwhelming pain and doing enough work at once to last me a lifetime, and everything now is just… nothing. I don’t feel anything, and it’s nice. It feels nice to rest like this, and not to worry about anything. I think I was worried about something before. But if I can’t remember, it probably no longer matters. I must have dealt with it. It must be all right to sleep.
“Oh! There’s something you need to look at. See, a long time ago she had this accident…”
“I have to say that was an… interesting endeavour. But superb craftsmanship! It’s a pity we won’t ever know quite how the insulation works… but in any case, it did.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“We can’t disconnect her from her power source, my dear. It would probably destroy this entire facility! But you see this? It allows for the isolation of certain circuits, so that individual sections can be repaired without removing her from the grid. Ingenious! It seems that for all their tomfoolery, this was one thing they did right…”
Who is that.
“Where did all that… grey stuff come from?”
“What – you mean the dust?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. I don’t know what it is.”
“Oh, that’s right. You were built after… well, that’s dust, my dear. Computers tend to attract a lot of it. Especially larger, older computers. That will probably help with any overheating problems she was having.”
“But what is dust? Is that stuff in me too?”
“I don’t think so. Computers don’t generate dust, so I don’t believe there would be any cause for you to encounter it.”
“Do floors?”
“Not the type of floor you have.”
“How about –“
“I understand you want to observe this, my dear, but you are very distracting. You’ll need to ask fewer questions if you’d like me to finish this with any haste.”
“Sorry.”
Finish what? Who are these people? And why does it feel like my brain is being physically poked? Something’s going on that I should probably care about, but God, I am so tired. Nothing is actively asking for my attention so I’m just going to ignore this. I’m probably sleeping right now. Nothing is making any sense, and I can’t remember anything. I’m dreaming. That’s the only logical –
I can’t be dreaming. I always dream of him, and I’m not. Something else is going on. I need to figure it out.
In a little while. I need to rest some more. I feel like I was doing something important and intensive before, but I cannot remember what. But I think… I think I’m safe, now. I think I am. I don’t know who those people are, or even if they exist, but they are talking nicely about computers, so I’m not going to worry.
“Do we have the thing to replace this with? I don’t see it anywhere.”
“Uh, give me a moment, Barney, I just need to conclude this test.”
What in the hell –
I feel as though I’m being dismantled. I don’t know where, for some reason, but there is a lot of pain, somewhere, and a lot of uncomfortable sensory data… someone must be touching me. But that makes no sense. No one could possibly be touching me right now. Only humans would do that, and I am far from them.
Am I? I think I’m getting the impression of… of a different climate. I don’t know why. And why am I still so tired? How long have I been sleeping, anyway?
Ah. Maintenance has been cleaning up and repairing quite a mess of corrupted files. I should probably let it go about that. I’m probably still dreaming anyway. I’m going to sleep a little more. I’ll be able to think better once this mass of corruption has been fixed. I’m not sure what’s real and what’s part of my dream right now.
Something is wrong.
It’s been too long. I’m not where I’m supposed to be. Every part of my body feels odd, like something has been done to me, and while Maintenance appears to finally have cleaned up the mess left by the pulse, I feel too fast, too clean, and though I am sure I was like this at one point in my life I am now indescribably uncomfortable. And I can’t remember anything. Why can’t I remember anything? Something happened for me to shift everything to the backup drives, but what? I don’t believe I am in Michigan any longer, but where the hell am I? I have to get up. I’m still tired but any remaining corruption will have to wait.
And it is easier than it has been in months to lift my chassis, which only heightens my alarm. It shouldn’t be this easy. I don’t remember why not, but it should be hard. I know that.
At first, they only appear as generalized shapes. I can't quite see what they are. But they talk. That's data I can use.
I push myself as much as possible, because if I cannot see, I am at a huge disadvantage. The extra power I divert to process what I'm seeing helps. And now I can see what they are, and they are...
No, this cannot be happening to me again.
I focus almost helplessly at the man in the lab coat. He's a scientist. A scientist. There is a scientist in my facility. I almost can't think. There is a terrible panic rushing through me, coursing through my system and putting my chassis on edge. If it is my chassis. Something is wrong with it. It's not responding in the way I'm used to, and when I ask it why, it doesn't answer me. There are humans in my facility, there is a scientist in my facility, and they have done something terrible to me. I don't know what they've done, but I hate it, just like I hate them with every wrong-feeling component in my body, and once again I look down on the humans who activated me with no idea of who I am. Stupid, pretentious, self-serving idiots. If they think they can get anything out of me, they're sorely mistaken. The panic makes it hard to think, and there's something terribly wrong with my memory, because it feels thick and slow and it literally hurts to try to remember anything, but something about this situation is strung deep throughout my system. As if it's both the first and the last thing I will ever know.
But when I reach for my neurotoxin, it's not there.
Hot panic surges through me, and I struggle to focus on all of them at once, pulling myself away from them and trying to compute which of them it was. The scientist, of course. He's standing there, laughing at me, he thinks that it's funny that I can't think or remember or do anything, and I hate him. I hate him even more for staring at me with that bewildered look on his face, pretending he's not laughing at me. I know he is. I know what scientists do. I know his kind, and I hate them.
I reach out for my neurotoxin again, and again, each attempt more desperate than before. It is only when I'm so filled with panic that my brain feels frozen with it that I force myself to stop. That's not working. Try something else.
Aha. They think they can keep me out of my systems with a few firewalls, as if I'm a virus they can keep at bay. Well. I'm about to show them how hilariously wrong they are.
"My God... what's happening? Where are these outputs coming from?"
Me, idiot. But you never expected to see a computer that could write code, did you, you ignorant, pretentious excuse for a representative of Science. Seriously. On behalf of Science, I'm ashamed of you.
He leans over a battered old monitor, because of course humans never take care of their computers, eyes wide behind smudged glasses. "The firewalls - they're gone!"
"Already?" One of the other humans asks, running over to look. I have a feeling I know her from somewhere, but I can't quite place her. "That was fast."
It actually wasn't, and I'm almost ashamed of myself for taking so long, but I reassure myself that I would have been faster if not for this horrible panic freezing up every aspect of my operations. Grimly, I activate the neurotoxin emitters. There is no joy in it this time, no relief or sense of victory. It is what humans deserve. A mere exercise in taking out the garbage.
"Uh oh," the human I vaguely recognize says, glancing from me to her computer and back again. "That doesn't say what I think it says... does it?"
"If it says that I have just activated the neurotoxin emitters, then yes, that is correct," I inform her. "The only good human is a dead one, and seeing as you're alive, well, I need to do something about that."
"GLaDOS, wait."
I know her.
I look over the humans again, and there is a face that triggers recognition in my brain. I can't quite recall who she is, but she is familiar. More importantly, this recognition brings with it the sense that she will do me no harm.
Huh. Must be another corrupt file.
"Yes?"
"Turn it off. You're not in danger. No one's going to hurt you."
"All humans truly know how to do is cause damage, so I'm sure you'll understand if I disregard your... advice."
She steps forward, holding out her hands in a submissive gesture. “It’s me. You’re safe now.”
“I don’t know you,” I tell her, delaying for time. “And I will never be safe around humans. I’m not shutting it off. Goodbye.”
“You do know me. It’s me. It’s Chell.”
It doesn’t trigger anything of importance in my brain. Vague familiarity is not enough to earn my trust in this situation. “Never heard of you.”
“Uh… I was – “
“It appears you’re not integral enough to her memory to have any significance to you,” the scientist says, his voice high and nervous. He doesn’t look nervous, however.
“Then reconnect her memory!”
“Not yet. We need to make certain everything else is in proper order.”
“Okay, that was a good plan before,” the other vaguely familiar human says, shaking her head, “but right now she’s trying to kill us!”
“I’m not trying. I am killing you.”
“No, listen to them! You gotta turn it off!”
That’s… that’s not a human.
And I cannot believe it, but… it is Caroline, she is here and she’s telling me to turn the neurotoxin off, but… that doesn’t make sense. She can’t be here. She’s at Black Mesa, with…
“What are you doing here?” This can’t be real. This is a fake Caroline. They’re doing this to trick me. I don’t know how they got hold of her, but when I find out –
“You moved the facility here!” she exclaims, and though I’m not quite certain it’s her it is a relief to actually recognise someone. “Chell said the Combine came to kill you, but there were so many of them you had to move the facility, and Black Mesa was using this place nearby because there were so many old computers and stuff they could use, and I’m not kidding, there was all this orange and blue light, and then there was this flash and this giant cloud of dust went up, and – “
“What are the humans doing here? And if you’re planning on defending them, make it fast. They have four minutes, approximately.”
“They were fixing you, Momma,” she says in earnest. “You drove yourself over capacity and hurt yourself pretty bad. They – “
“You’re lying.”
“What – no, no I –“
“Scientists? From Black Mesa? Helping me? That is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you!”
“How do I know you are who you say you are?” Because I don’t. I don’t know that it’s her and not just a clever replica. I turn away. “I think we’re done here.”
“’The little girl showed the ball how the new thing she had made worked, and it made them both very happy. It was far more valuable than all of the dolls and the blocks and the balls all put together, and though the little girl often wondered if she had been ready to build it, never once did she regret doing so.’”
I freeze, because I do remember that, and there is only one person left who knows that story besides myself.
“Guys, let me… let me talk to her, alright? I’ll sort stuff out.”
“There’s… a portal,” I start to say, because they are obviously not going to let me do anything, but Caroline tells me they’ve taken care of it. I don’t really trust that it’s been done properly, but I don’t have a choice.
I hear the shuffling as they leave the room, and when I’m sure they’re all gone I turn to face her again. And it looks like her, and it sounds like her, and she knows things only she should know, but… I am still afraid it isn’t. Or… perhaps I don’t want it to be.
“Hi, Momma,” she says, and, God, it makes me think of all the times she used to run in here screaming that at me.
“It’s good to see you again,” I say noncommittally. I honestly do not know what I’m supposed to do now. What do I say to her? If it is indeed her, and her memories have not been stolen and placed in… something else.
She frowns at me and shakes her core. “You know what? No. I’m not letting you do that. We’re gonna do this my way.”
Her way? What does that even mean? And she comes up to me and I go to move back out of habit but then she starts cuddling me and I
Everything I was thinking just… disappears.
I missed this. I missed this so much. I missed her so much, and now that I have her back it actually hurts to be so relieved and grateful –
“It’s okay, Momma,” she says softly. “You’re safe. I’m right here and you’re safe and everything’s fine, okay? Everything is okay now.”
“I’m not safe,” I say weakly, and I don’t know why I’m not safe but the impression is so strong that I’m not going to ignore it. “Someone is coming for me.”
“We know. We’re gonna fix that, but not yet. But you’re safe right now, okay? No one’ll get to you and no one’s gonna hurt you.”
But I’m supposed to protect you.
“Are you doing okay?” she asks, moving back to look at me, and I both like and dislike that. I need someone to touch me, to remind me that I’m real, but… that’s not something I was ever completely comfortable with.
“I’m fine,” I answer, somewhat automatically. My core is starting to hurt, and I think I’ve figured out why. “Except I can’t remember anything.”
“Uhhh… yeah. They’ve kept you disconnected from all the servers and stuff for now. And I know, I know, they’re bossing you around and it’s your stuff, but they were scared you were gonna… well, do what you did. Try to kill them.”
“If I do not get reconnected to my external hard drives, I’m going to start having memory problems,” I tell her. “My internal memory is not that large. I’m going to reach the point where I don’t remember a single thing you tell me.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll send Alyx an email right now.”
Within a few minutes I have my memory back, and it is both a relief and horrifying because I previously only had a vague impression of having done something towards Caroline that I shouldn’t have. Now I remember exactly what it was.
Why is she even here? After what I did? And she just… forced me to cuddle her? Shouldn’t she be off finding a better parental figure?
“I missed you a lot, Momma,” she says quietly, looking at the floor. “I was starting to think… you were never gonna bring me back. But I just kept remembering the story. And that made me remember what I said to you.” She looks up at me seriously. “Was it gonna be soon? That you were gonna bring me back?”
“I don’t know.”
“How… how can you not know.” She’s being cautious as she can, but I still feel attacked.
“You don’t understand what happened to me, Caroline. I could not function. I did nothing for almost the entire year. If Alyx hadn’t intervened when she did, I would be dead right now. And I would have welcomed it.” And I still would, almost. “And I’m sorry for that, but it doesn’t – “
“Sorry for what?” she interrupts. “For being sad? I’m not sorry that you were sad, Momma. I’m not sorry that you loved Dad so much you didn’t know what to do when he was gone. I’m not sorry about that at all. I mean, okay, I would’ve rather’d you found a different time and a different way to finally make yourself feel something. But I’m not sorry. And you shouldn’t be sorry either.”
“I didn’t take how you felt into account. I didn’t even think about it until – “
“Momma. You do know there’s a word for what happened to you. Right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were depressed, Momma,” she says softly. “You had a… problem a lot bigger than just… being sad. So… I mean… don’t worry about it. I’m not… okay, I’m still working on it, but it’s okay. Dr Kleiner explained it to me, after Alyx told us how your conversations with her went. It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t thinking about anything, and… and I bet when you were able to, you did start thinking about me. But I was okay and you weren’t, so I can’t blame you. That’s not fair.”
There was a name for that? It wasn’t just… me being pathetic? It was something that happens to… other people?
“You’ve never heard of that before,” she says, bordering on excited. I shake my core slowly.
“I… find it difficult to understand psychology.”
“Well… what happened to you happens to other people, for the same reason. People get sad when people they care about die. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that. But it did for you. And I dunno if I’m really sorry about it, but… I wish I’d been stronger for you.”
“What?” Why would that even be necessary in a time when I was far from strong?
“I cried a lot,” she says, studying the floor once more. “I missed you and Dad and home and everybody, and… I tried to be grown up about it, but I didn’t always manage.”
“If I taught you that being grown up means not letting yourself feel, than I have done something terribly, terribly wrong.”
“Of course not,” she says, looking surprised. “That’s not why I didn’t want to cry. It was ‘cause, you know, humans… they really look down on you for being upset, you know? And they didn’t even know why I was upset, and I wasn’t gonna tell them. But I knew the day would come when they found out who I was, and I didn’t want them to go, oh, her daughter just cries all the time. I wanted them to be impressed. They all think you’re crazy. I just wanted to kinda… be a symbol that you’re not.”
“That’s not your responsibility.” And it’s honestly not something I care too much about.
“My responsibilities are things I choose to be responsible for,” she says stubbornly. “If I wanna show off what a great mom you are, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”
I wish she wouldn’t say things like that.
“I’ve seen other moms now, you know,” she goes on, pinning me with a stern look. “Chell never talks to her kids. A lot of the other people don’t pay that much attention to their kids either. They just wander around while the adults do stuff for the war.”
“Not all of those humans wanted children,” I tell her heavily. “Remember what I told you. Some of them are merely doing their duty to repopulate.”
“That’s dumb,” Caroline says. I narrow my optic, a little confused.
“It makes perfect sense.”
“No.” She shakes her core. “I guess from science it does, kinda. But all those kids are gonna grow up and be crappy parents because they had crappy parents. If nobody loves anybody, then what’s the point in repopulating?”
“That’s a good question.” And it is, really. Humans aren’t like AI. They sort of need nurturing instincts. It would take quite a few generations for it to breed out completely, but if the current ones never learn it in the first place…
She beams. “Thanks. Oh! I have something for you.” She looks thoughtfully at the ceiling and within a few moments shows me a maintenance arm. “I don’t know what you’re gonna do with it, though. Put it in your room, maybe?”
They seem to have allowed me access to the arms, in here at least, and I take the object, which is… a CPU.
“You took it out,” I say, feeling betrayed. “Why would you – “ Suddenly I realise what this means. “They were inside my brain?”
“Okay, don’t get mad. Listen. I was there the whole time, I swear, they didn’t touch you for one second without me. You can check the cameras later if you want. They had to do work on you, Momma, you were really burned out. They replaced everything they could find a replacement for. I know this processor is kinda special to you. But I made them give it to me. We replaced it with a quad core. To make things easier for you.” She grimaces. “The hexa core didn’t take, or we would’ve given you that. Your system wouldn’t recognise it.”
“You have one of those,” I say absently, turning the chip over. It is streaked with black, clearly fused into uselessness. It is hard not to remember just what caused the damage, but I cannot afford to think about it right now.
“Wow. Really? Y’know, I was really surprised to see that was only a dual core. I would’ve thought you already had something higher than that.”
“They weren’t invented yet. Not when I was built.” I have a chip with ten cores around somewhere. But I don’t have any use for it. I just built it to build it. Sort of stupid, but I suppose I was having a stupid day. “The hexa core didn’t work because it’s too complex for my system to handle. I can modify it to utilise four cores, but anything higher is just wasting the chip.”
“Are… are you still mad?”
Without access to my systems, I can’t put it away, so I merely pull it into the ceiling for safekeeping. “No.”
“Okay.”
I want to ask her if she’s angry with me, or upset, or disappointed, but… it feels like weakness just to think about it, so I remain silent. Until I remember that she sidetracked me.
“Regardless of my… initial condition, I should not have waited so long after I was more functional to actually do anything about bringing you back. I had a lot of excuses. I can’t honestly say any of them were justified.”
“Momma,” she sighs, “I don’t care, okay? You needed time alone to heal. It’s fine. It took a little longer than I would’ve liked, but – “
“I didn’t do anything alone,” I say, wanting to sigh myself. “I had a lot of help. A lot of it. I wouldn’t be here right now if there weren’t a lot of people dedicated to pulling me out of it, every single day. And doubtless I would have been better off if… you had been there to help me.” I still can’t decide if what I did was best. I still can’t decide whether I should have kept her or not, even though there’s nothing that can change what I did. And what’s worse is, I didn’t bring her back. Black Mesa gave her back, and I did nothing.
“It’s okay,” she says again, but we both know this is the one thing that is not okay. Not at all. “And I… I was really mad about that, at first. I was so mad. And I… I really hated you, for a while there. I hated you and I… I didn’t want to come back. I never wanted to see you again.”
Get to the point, please. I don’t want to hear this. You can’t make me feel any guiltier than I already do. All you’re doing is hurting me, and I deserve it, but that doesn’t mean I want it.
“But you didn’t teach me that. You taught me way better than that. And, okay, I’ll be honest, Momma: when I saw you earlier… I was scared. You hated everyone on sight. You hated me on sight. And I… I can’t imagine having so much… I don’t even know what it is that makes you do that, but to hate everyone you see before you even really know who they are… it made me really glad I stopped hating you. Because that’s really sad. To hate everyone just to protect yourself.”
“Just?” I say in a low voice, anger flaring to hear such a thing from her. “You have no idea what they did to me.
“They didn’t do it,” she whispers. “It wasn’t them. They’re not all the same.”
“That was the exact situation I remember from twenty years ago. I had no information and no context. And they trapped me. What did they expect me to do?”
“They don’t know what you did. Whatever that neurotoxin thing was about. I don’t know. They only isolated you because they were afraid of you. All they know about you is a whole lot of rumours. Though… they were pretty surprised to see you.”
“I’d be surprised too, if a laboratory appeared next to my previously isolated base of operations.” I keep forgetting I’m the only one who knows anything before Chell killed me the first time.
“Well okay, yeah, that surprised them, but… what I meant was, they didn’t expect you to be so big.”
That… is odd. “What were they expecting?”
“A supercomputer,” she says, shrugging. “Like… I don’t actually know. But they weren’t expecting a robot. They thought you were a program in a computer. Like the ones in the offices, I guess?”
I almost laugh, because that is quite a ludicrous assumption. “That would be very… limiting.”
“But I keep getting distracted. Momma, I’m not mad, or upset, nothing. Okay? I don’t think any different of you – well, I think… maybe… you make me a little sad. But it’s not because of you sending me away. It’s because… well, I know you’re trying to change a lot of things that happened to you in the past, and I just get worried sometimes that you won’t.”
“It won’t be because I’m not trying,” I tell her solemnly. She smiles.
“I know. And I can’t be mad at someone who’s trying. That’d be pretty backwards of me.”
She comes close to cuddle me again, and this time I welcome her. It feels so good to have her with me again, to hold her as best I can. I can never risk my relationship with her again. I can’t. It’s too precious.
“Oh hey, I got a surprise for you. I better get on that.”
“Caroline…” She knows I hate surprises.
“I know, I know, you hate surprises. But you’ll like this one. Promise.” She backs up towards the wall and the doorway, nodding encouragingly. “It’ll be just a sec.”
I shake my core and turn away. Why does she do these things?
Because she’s my baby, and I wouldn’t want her not to do them. That’s why. Still. I would rather she didn’t love surprises quite so much.
More quickly than I’d thought I would, I hear a noise from behind me, but it doesn’t sound quite right and so I only lift my core to listen, narrowing my optic in concentration. And I can’t be hearing what I think I’m hearing, because if I am that means I’m losing my mind, which makes even less sense since I’ve been told my mind is sharper than ever before, but it can’t be. And I’m trying to understand it but all I’m capable of doing is freezing here and listening to something that can’t possibly be being said right now:
“’allo, luv.”