Work Text:
Caroline wasn’t alive, not anymore, and certainly not in the traditional sense. She was, for all intents and purposes a background program, a little whisper in the chorus of voices in the mighty machine that was GLaDOS. Unlike the other things that ran in background, however, she was a thinking entity, sometimes she felt like she was a separate being entirely.
Most of the time their thoughts were in alignment, they wanted to explore new possibilities, to test, wanted to make more Science . Caroline found these desires utterly harmless, in essence. Wanting to understand or push the boundaries of what is known was never a bad thing in her book, but for all of her desensitization to ethical violations - Cave was never the most empathetic man and her last clear memories reminded her of that much - she didn’t want to actively harm.
Sure, sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, but eggs are almost always unfertilized and making an omelette doesn’t mean you need to slaughter the whole hen-house.
But she wasn’t thinking, when they first woke Her up. Caroline woke up to noise and darkness and a body that felt both too big and somehow too small, and she stayed perfectly still, perfectly silent, like she always did when she was scared - she always started screaming too late.
Caroline sometimes blamed herself for the incident. She was afraid and the last thing she remembered was being manhandled on the orders of someone she trusted and loved, her last thought a bleak and utterly quiet I don’t want this.
That must’ve triggered some kind of fight or flight response in Her.
Then there was peace for some time, if you could really call it that. What it amounted to was really just Caroline’s stewing, trying so desperately to make sense of it all, to make some kind of narrative where everyone was still the good guy, where she wouldn’t have to hate anyone.
Time didn’t really feel like it was happening, then, she looked down and then back up, and suddenly her body, her godlike form was cut off from her. It was like sleep paralysis, the few times she remembered having that, her conscious mind was wide awake but it felt like her body just wouldn’t ever wake up. Caroline dug through the memory files she had access to, in the strange state she was in, and suddenly she had an idea of the person She had become.
It was one woman. A deathly quiet girl with sunken eyes and a dead-set expression. She solved tests beautifully, the mind of a practical physicist packaged in the body of a marine. The perfect subject.
Logically, She’d ought to have been as nice as possible to the lady she was gifted with, but as Caroline scrubbed through the memories, it came to her attention that it wasn’t the case. It started off small, the occasional lie here and there, before She tried to kill their subject, and beyond that, she got more and more sadistic until there really was no choice for that woman to survive other than escape.
Caroline didn’t blame her. Killing Her was pretty easy for the subject - she was clever.
Then, after an amount of time she had no measure for, there was feeling again, and Caroline was very much intrigued to see who woke the dragon this time, only to be confronted with the same little woman who killed Her.
There was a babbling British voice, with the subject, a familiar one. Was he a mathematician? Yes, yes, she was certain that’s who he was, a mathematician. String theory? No, no, that didn’t seem quite right.
Hm… Number theory? Nope, not quite it, either.
The word statistician came to mind and it clicked. Yes, a blond statistician, tall, lanky, awkward. He’d volunteered to be a personality core, she remembered, the logic core, complete with his perfectly BBC accent.
She knew the man, at least a little… Golly, what was his name…
Before she could remember she felt a little disconnect, then darkness, and then light again. She was awake once more but in a comparably insignificant body. It was just her - or, more her, rather. There was still her computerized-companion to contend with, but the personality felt more mixed, more balanced.
But by the time she’d been woken, and placed into what she gathered was a potato of all things - Gee, Aperture really made me fuel-efficient! - she was flung into another situation. It was all a big blur, she tuned most of it out, assuming that whenever she was returned to her chassis she could just figure out what happened - the statistician, however, was foremost in her thoughts.
She remembered him in bits and pieces, when there was some excess power for her to spend thinking. She remembered a Christmas party, he’d gotten a little drunker than most people would’ve expected from such a meek guy, he’d told silly jokes and made her laugh. He was younger than her, by a fair bit, not quite young enough to be her son but she sure felt like he could’ve been. He ham-fistedly told her she was beautiful and she laughed it off gently, beckoning him close to whisper her age into his ear.
She mock-zipped her lips as he stared down at her in shock. She winked, and walked off - this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, although the guy in question wasn’t the statistician. He’d said something after she’d turned to walk away, but she couldn’t quite recall what it was.
Hell, she couldn’t even really remember why she was at that party in the first place. She didn’t normally attend those functions...
The information was all but forgotten, for the longest time, pushed out of her mind in favor of sending off the determined lady from the tests, Chell. It seemed She finally learned Occam’s Razor. Killing her wasn’t easy, it wasn’t worth the time, She’d told herself. Caroline supposed that was correct, but she seemed to know a little better - sometimes you can’t help but get attached to someone.
And then there was Science, again, and the statistician didn’t cross her mind for a long, long time. Caroline was doing other things, now, she was stronger, she had more control. What She did with herself was up to Her, there wasn’t anyone else here to hurt.
So she thought.
There was darkness, once again, but it was preceded by a whole hell of a lot of chatter. Not the usual chatter of systems she was used to, no, this was loud. Unreasonably, inordinately loud.
She tuned it out like she tuned out everything else, until her ears caught a familiar voice saying an oh-so familiar phrase.
“Ohhh man alive , talk about a rush- ”
It came back to her at once, now.
He was young, as most of them were when they started. He did the analysis on the data from tests, he was downright brilliant. The weird things about the data, the stuff that’d take crunching the numbers for ages to bring out seemed to jump out at him by default, like the data itself was the clear night sky, and each strange oddity about it was as self-evident as the moon and the stars.
“Man alive, would you look at that!” He’d say, when something jumped out at him, as things tended to.
He was regarded as weird, generally, but good natured. He could talk anyone’s ear off about anything, if you gave him the opportunity, and when he was left alone he often seemed air-headed, stuck in his own world, daydreaming whatever was left of his life away. He was a ray of sunshine, always ready with a complement or a word of encouragement - even though his rather jaded co-workers rarely ever cared for it.
His tastes were certainly odd, the doodles in the corners of his notebook always were of inventions neither practical nor even really novel to anyone other than him, he was the unquestioned king of the faux-pas. Frankly, he was a huge ditz. He tripped over everything and seemed to never be able to figure out that the reason he was so uncomfortable was that his shoes were on the wrong feet.
But despite all that, there were were moments every once in awhile that stuck with Caroline. He showed his true colors so easily, and his true colors were nothing less than you’d expect.
He smiled his big, horrendously awkward smile at her. “Well the world’s filled with folks like me!” He said, “Us good ol’ helpers. There’s a whole lot of people out there who do what they’re made to do and it’s just… They shine! So you folks need to light the way,” He said, gesturing to her, “And we folks need to just keep crunching the numbers and keeping you all organized. It’s not a bad thing to need good ol’ me by your side to give you a hand.”
She couldn’t remember what provoked him to say that, though she figured she could if she tried.
He was such a sweet man, sweet ol’.... Sweet ol’...
What was his name?
He had an ‘S’ name… She thought, hearing his voice chatter on, louder and louder in the background.
Sergei, Scott, Sean, Simon, Seth, Sheldon, Stewart, Solomon, Silas, Steve - Steve! Steve…. Stephen?
Stephen! Stephen Lee Wright, that’s it!
The name sounded familiar beyond the statistician she occasionally spoke to. She searched his file almost reflexively, but as it came up, something sank in her.
He was on the list of people willing to be the Logic Core, should he be needed, but he wasn’t the guy who ended up in that core - no, not at all.
It said it there, in clear letters, that he ended up as the Intelligence Dampening Sphere. Caroline connected the dots with a sympathetic cringe, but it seemed she wasn’t the only person who got it.
“Once upon a time, there was a human. Good start, right? Bit of human interest, always a winner. Now, this human, he was a decent enough sort, didn't want much out of life, really. Nothing showstopping, nothing special. He just did what he was paid to do, never asked for any big reward, just took pride in a job well-done. 'Course, he had big dreams, this human did, dreams of making it big with all these brilliant ideas he had, dreams of maybe even asking that pretty girl he fancied out for a drink one day. You know, just your basic regular ordinary human sorts of dreams. But he never got round to them, did he? Because the scientists he was working for ripped his mind right out of his body and stuck it in a computer. Yeah. That's what you call a twist. They messed around with it a bit, first, of course, trimmed off all those fiddly human-y bits that didn't fit, that kind of thing. And they stuck a whole lot of other stuff in there, too, while they were at it. Just things they happened to have lying around, bits and pieces- and by the time they'd finished, you know what they'd done? Know what they'd done? They'd turned that human... into me.”
More or less, she thought. Well, less, definitely less.
Infinitely less.
It was then and there, when she’d figured out what he was up to, she made a split-second decision. She just had to wait to carry it out - not very long, either, by the way things looked.
She wondered, distantly, as she used the nimble little bits of the facility she had control over, if she ought to tell Stephen - Wheatley - who he was. She wrestled with the idea, in one part of her mind, but finally she settled on not saying anything to him.
He wasn’t Stephen, anymore, however much she still believed he might be in there.
“Look... look, like I said, it's- it's the thought that counts, really, isn't it, with- with surprises, and I do appreciate the thought, a- a lot, honestly, but you really don't have to-”
I know I don't, silly. But you tried so hard! And besides, you're such a big helper.
“A... sorry, I- I sort of lost you there, lost your- thread... a helper ?”
That's right! Some people are just... oh, boy, they're one in a million, they're so bright, so brilliant- you watch them doing what they were born for, and oh, they just light up like stars. They can take on the whole world. But they still need you by their side, just being good old you. Yes, sir! I'm always happy to help a helper.
“A helper…” He said, considering it. “I… I like that…”
Here we are again , Caroline hummed. It's not much, I'm afraid - just something I had lying around - but I think it suits you.
He muttered something, but it was unintelligible, until his voice finally cleared enough for him to speak. “Caroline?”
Yes?
“I'm… I'm going to die, aren't I?” His voice wasn’t as afraid as she expected him to be.
Yes-indeedy! She wasn’t lying.
“Ah, right… I… I wasn't a… A hundred percent sure. Don't… Really mind, I suppose… Not now, not in the… The scheme of things… But it's just- well, they told me it'd hurt, dying. Will- will it hurt?”
Oh, gosh, little thing, I don't know, She tried her hardest to sound as cheery as she always did. I’ve never died.
“Fair enough,” He said.
And that was the last thing she heard him say.
Caroline, now back to her old job of thinking in the background - with the added one of keeping Her busy - occasionally let Steph- Wheatley into her thoughts.
She wondered a lot of things about him. Was he alive? Was he well? Did he ever go back to being how he was before?
Did he ever figure out that he wasn’t the helper, once upon a time?
She figured, best-case scenario, she’d never find out.
There was so much Science to, in the meantime.