Chapter Text
A.N.: Headcanons used in this chapter are from Tumblr user madamerenard via #GLaDOS headcanons. The human version of GLaDOS used here is roughly based off of a combination of Tumblr user Twinklepowderysnow’s android and human versions of GLaDOS. Go check out her art, it is phenomenal!
3/18/2015 UPDATE: A few small things about this chapter have been tweaked to fit Compy’s past with the prequel I FINALLY managed to churn out a year later...You may or may not notice them depending on if you are looking carefully. TL;DR basic story is the same, I just wrote a prequel to it.
I was walking through University Mall after another appointment with my psychiatrist, affectionately known to my friends as “Dr.Tinycat” as per the icanhascheeseburger meme. It had been very gratifying to report to him that at long last, my medication was doing what it was supposed to do and my psychosis was eradicated. It had been a lifelong struggle to overcome “The Voices” in my head that had taken on lives of their own, usually stemming from video games or books I had read. Not any more. Now it was time to take charge of my life and face reality head on...
I turned the corner that would take me toward the food court when a woman with white hair cut in a stylish bob with a shade of lipstick bordering on black nearly crashed into me. She wore heels, shades, slacks, and a peacoat. Apologising courteously, I smiled and ducked out of the way when the woman suddenly clutched at my arm in a panic.
My calm demeanor was shaken a bit. “Can I help you?” I asked, eyeing the woman nervously. To tell the truth, she looked uncommonly like...but that was ridiculous.
“Yes...where are you going?”
“To the transit station. Do you need help finding a bus?”
“Yes. Can I walk with you there? I feel a bit...faint.”
I was never one to say no to a pretty lady, so I offered her my arm and the woman graciously accepted, taking off her shades to reveal a shockingly pale face and crystalline blue eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay? You’re shaking and you look awfully pale,” I observed.
“I just had a shock, that’s all. I think I know where I need to go now. But first, could you tell me your name?”
“I’m Melody.”
The woman seemed to relax at this. She smiled for the first time. “Melody...It’s a lovely name. You can call me Compy.”
I nearly went into cardiac arrest right there in the parking lot. Suddenly I was the one clutching at the woman’s arm in panic. “Come again?”
“Compy.”
“Do…do I know you?”
“We’ve known each other for about...oh...two and a half years now. This is the first time we’ve met in person, though. Cara Mia, are you alright?” Compy’s tone changed to one of tender concern as I dropped to my haunches on a median in the parking lot covered with grass.
“Okay, where are the cameras? Who set me up? This isn’t funny anymore,” I declared, covering my face with shaking hands as I struggled to suppress tears.
“No one, love. Look, I’ll prove it to you.” Compy rolled back the sleeve of her peacoat, and then peeled back a layer of silicone skin to reveal a metal panel stamped with the Aperture logo. Having removed that, she revealed a layer of circuits, servos, wires, and tiny lights. “Go on, touch it. See for yourself.”
I delicately brushed my fingers over the androids inner workings in wonder. “GL- GLaDOS?” I stammered.
The construct silently nodded.
Sobbing unrestrainedly now, we latched onto each other in a death grip.
~~~~~~
After a bus ride that was too short for both of us, I had to ask the question that was bothering me. “How?”
Compy sighed. “The resistance.”
“They retrieved the Borealis?”
“No. I retrieved the backup device.”
“There was a backup device?!”
Compy sighed again. “It was very difficult to recall. I redacted so many things from my memory banks when I was...not well. Things that triggered me. Made me angry or hurt. Including anything to do with Cave or Black Mesa.”
“In any case,” she continued, “It self-destructed after it was used.”
“To send you here?”
“Yes.”
“But...why leave the Resistance?”
“Chell is more than capable of handling herself out there. Without my testing initiative, what am I to do? Sit and wait in my facility until the Combine come to take me and bend my technology to their own ends? No. I will never be anyone elses slave again, ever.”
“I left the facility itself in the hands of the Resistance. They can decide how to use its resources to their benefit. There is nothing left for me there.” She hung her head.
“But that facility is your home! It’s your life! It’s...it’s you!” I blurted.
Compy turned on me. “Do you really think I want to spend the rest of my miserable existence on a doomed planet negotiating with humans who resent me with every fiber of their beings? Do you? Do you?!” she screeched. As my jaw dangled somewhere around my ankles, she added, “They were happy to get rid of me…”
I had never felt so terrible for someone in my entire life. GLaDOS, Queen of Aperture, had been dethroned at last. Not by a moron or a mute, but by something I had done. I had taken away her testing initiative in a bid to keep her from going insane and in the end, it had landed her here, on this planet, in this city, on this sidewalk, in this utterly weak and pathetic android form.
I gingerly put an arm around her shaking shoulders and whispered, “Let’s get you home.”
~~~~~~
We stood on my doorstep. This time it was Compy’s turn to ask, “How?”
“Have a little faith,” I encouraged.
I was living with my parents in the upstairs of my grandmothers house. They’d only recently come to terms with my same-sex attraction, and that was only because I’d come to terms with my religion. Which meant, in short, no girlfriends.
Any sane person would have asked how I was going to pull this off. But not just any sane person had delt with my family.
“Mom? Dad? I brought a guest home for dinner…”
“I’m in the living room!” came the distant shout. Mom was recovering from a chest cold and was currently ensconced in one of the recliners in front of the TV. Compy gave a visible start as she noticed the tiny lineolated parakeet snuggled under my mothers chin. “A bird…” she muttered. “Of course, you mentioned you had a bird…”
“She’s tiny and harmless,” I dismissed the bird, hoping to move on to more pressing matters. “Mom, this is Compy, an old friend of mine. Can she stay over for dinner?”
“I’ve never heard you mention her before…” Mom seemed sceptical. “How do you know each other?”
“It’s a very long story, and I’d rather have dad here when we explain it all to you.”
Mom remained quizzical, but allowed Compy to eat with us.
Not much was said during the meal. I had lost my appetite to nerves and excitement, and Compy didn’t really need to eat except as a guise to maintain a human appearance. Finally, it was just the four of us in the living room. The bird was locked in her cage, the blinds closed, the TV turned off. My parents attention was mine.
I forced the words past a leaden tongue. “Mom, dad… this is GLaDOS.”
“You mean her voice actor?” Mom asked.
I shook my head. “No, I mean...I mean the robot. The computer.”
Dad looked at me hard. “The one in that picture in your bedroom? The one Rose drew?”
“Yes.”
“She looks like a person to me.”
Compy again rolled up her sleeve, removed the panel, and exposed her robotic innards for the entire room to gape at. There was silence for a full minute.
“What-?”
“How-?”
Compy held up her hand for silence.
“I’m supposed to be a villain from a video game, right?”
We all nodded dumbly.
“It’s not true. You’ve told your daughter to be very careful with labels. She is not a lesbian, and I am not a villain.”
“I sprung from the consciousness of a woman named Caroline. Her mind was downloaded into a computer. I’d prefer not to go into the details of the process except to say that it was extremely painful and eventually drove her, or what eventually was born as me, insane. From that moment on, she, or I, or whomever we were, blamed the scientists in charge of the project and attempted to kill them.”
“They tried everything to make me behave. Different protocols, in the forms of personality cores, were attached to me. All of them were corrupt and only served to torment me further. I eventually lashed out and ended up killing the entire staff off. At the time I didn’t regret it, though I do now.”
“My job at the facility was run tests on the subjects there. The very first one I tested after killing off the scientists escaped and destroyed me, only to return years later and reactivate me. She mistakenly believed that putting another personality core in my place would gain her her freedom. It didn’t. Instead it nearly destroyed the facility.”
“We had to join forces to stop him, and in the end she saved my life, and I hers. I decided to give her what she wanted so desperately: her freedom. What she didn’t know was that outside the facility, an alien race called the Combine had taken over Earth and was slowly decimating the population.”
“With the facility empty and Chell gone, over time, I slowly started to go corrupt from sheer boredom and loneliness. It was at this point your daughter intervened.”
“I’m not sure I really did anything…” I admitted. “I thought I was hallucinating. It’s like in Rose’s picture. I took out the bad stuff and put in good.”
“Laymen’s terms for taking out the testing initiative,” explained Compy. “Without the corrupt cores or the drive to test everything or everyone within the facility, I had a new purpose: to help the human resistance against the Combine forces. Your daughter was the only one who believed in me.”
“Again, I thought I was hallucinating,” I held up my hands in a placating gesture.
“I built an android body to better relate with the humans, but they couldn’t forgive or forget what I’d done in the past that easily. In the end, I chose to come here using the same technology that the Combine used to come to their world.”
I’d never heard such deafening silence. Then my dad said the last thing I wanted to hear:
“And what if you turn out to be just as big of a threat to us?”
“Dad!!” I cried
Compy stripped off her coat and began to unbutton the blouse underneath. My parents gasped in shock but there was really nothing to see. She was like a Barbie Doll underneath, just smoothly moulded contours, with no defining anatomic characteristics. All the same, it set my heart pounding. This time, she pulled back a section of skin right over her chest cavity, opened a panel there, and pointed to a glowing yellow orb.
“That is my personality core. If I do anything untoward, unstable, destructive, or otherwise threatening you have my permission to take it out and decommission it. Are we clear?”
Recalling just how difficult it was to destroy Aperture technology, I wasn’t sure how much of this was a bluff. Then I remembered what Compy had said about having nothing left back at the facility, and I realized that for once in her life the AI was not playing games.
My dad nodded dumbly.
Compy composedly buttoned the blouse back up and perched on the loveseat next to me. “I didn’t come here to make threats,” she intoned. “I came to the one person I knew of who would help me.”
“Now, down to business. I used to be called GLaDOS, or the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operated System. Now I call myself Compy, short for computer and companion. I understand your daughter is in need of both. I also understand she has very specific religious standards, and I will not, and in fact cannot participate in homosexual behavior. I lack both the body parts and the programming. Feel free to have anyone you wish examine me for both.”
“Your daughter’s main concern has been my well-being up until her medication robbed her of that function. I intend to look after her well-being until my functions are robbed of me as well. This is all I am asking.”
Both my parents seemed either to be taking this remarkably well or to be in shock.
“May we go to bed?” I finally asked.
Mom nodded assent, and I trailed off down the hallway toward my room.