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“Why’d you let me back in?”
Chell had become more talkative since her return. GLaDOS wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Or, rather, she could only identify a handful of the emotions she felt.
“I need you for testing. Blue and Orange aren’t very good at it. Robots just aren’t as good at science as humans.” GLaDOS had explained this before. Apparently, Chell hadn’t heard her.
“Then why haven’t I been testing?” Chell said.
“I’ve been trying to get you to test. You haven’t been very willing, so far.”
“You’ve only asked me twice for the two weeks I’ve been here.”
“Well, why do you think I did it?”
“Not sure. That’s what confuses me.” Chell paused in thought for a second. “I’m trying to think through the reasons you could have. I’m not coming up with many reasonable ones.”
“Why does this matter so much to you?”
Chell didn’t seem to appreciate the question. “Good chance I die for trusting you,” she said curtly.
GLaDOS understood that. Security was very important to Chell, and her life was at stake. She supposed she could see how Chell could think that GLaDOS was going to kill her. Building trust was important for long-term cohabitation. If Chell needed this question answered, she’d answer it.
“You said you weren’t coming up with any ‘plausible’ reasons. Which reasons did you rule out?”
“You’re not letting me stay out of the kindness of your heart,” Chell said, starting to count with her fingers. GLaDOS gave a small vertical nod of her chassis.
“You’re not letting me stay because it’s the right thing to do.” Chell held up another finger. GLaDOS gave another nod, suppressing the urge to scoff. She never really understood the concept of morality.
“And you’re not letting me stay because of any material benefit for you. Not one I can think of, anyway.” A third finger was put up. GLaDOS nodded again.
“So what does that leave us with?”
GLaDOS thought about it for a moment. She tried to identify the feeling she had when Chell invaded the first time, the feeling she had when she left, and the feeling she had when Chell returned. They were all different feelings. What was the negative feeling that came to her when Chell left, and what was it replaced by?
For days or weeks at a time, GLaDOS couldn’t do anything. She found herself unsatisfied with everything she tried to fill that void with. The alternate body plans she came up with so she could accomplish tasks around the facility didn’t get used; she had no desire to do anything more than she needed for survival. Her endless pursuit of time travel had always gone nowhere, but that nowhere was far less fulfilling than it had been in the past. Her idea for the Cooperative Testing Initiative hadn’t been nearly as much fun as she’d thought it would be.
“It’s exceptionally boring here without at least one human to keep things interesting,” GLaDOS said.
Chell seemed somewhat surprised by this, though her face moved so little at any given emotion that GLaDOS frequently had trouble reading her. “You let me back into Aperture because you were bored?”
“Yes,” GLaDOS said. Chell considered this.
“Okay,” she said with a shrug.
GLaDOS was happy to have an answer for her long period of unhappiness. It was so obvious. Why had she not thought of it before? Yes, a perfectly rational explanation for why she felt the way she did. It was very relieving.
There were a few moments of silence. Then, Chell’s question reminded GLaDOS of one that she had. “Why did you come back?”
Chell gave her a perplexed look. She opened her mouth to give the same explanation she did when she got there, but GLaDOS interrupted her before she could.
“I know that everyone you knew is dead, because you were in stasis for a long time. I know that you came back because a lot of humanity is gone, and you couldn’t find any settlements. I know that.
“But the way I remember it, you were so hellbent on escaping that you destroyed most of the facility. Your file notes your intense stubbornness. It doesn’t make sense that someone like that would decide to come back after just a few months. I would have expected you to try looking around the surface for years before you would even consider coming back here. Honestly, it makes more sense to me that you would just die on the surface. Why didn’t you?”
Chell thought.
“For starters, there’s a lot of science to back up the fact that humans don’t do well if they don’t have social interaction. They go insane, they get depressed, they get homicidal, and a lot of other bad stuff. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of stuff on that in your database somewhere, so you can look at that if you’re interested.
“But it’s more than that. You’re right, I probably would have just stayed on the surface forever if I’d gotten out the first time, or if I’d made it out before you got put into the potato battery.”
GLaDOS didn’t want to think about those times, so she didn’t.
“But while we were stuck in the older parts of Aperture, you had to think about things other than your anger. You had to tap into other parts of yourself to avoiding shorting out. It showed me that you had emotions that weren’t fury. I wasn’t sure of it before, but now I thought you were capable of thinking and feeling.
“That still probably wouldn’t have meant much to me on its own, though. If it were just that, I would’ve stayed aboveground for a lot longer. What convinced me was remembering what you said when we were almost back to your chamber.”
“‘I hear the voice of a conscience, and it’s terrifying, because for the first time, it’s my voice.’ That was what got me.”
GLaDOS wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Why did that make you come back? Just because I had a conscience, you were sure I wouldn’t kill you?”
“Not entirely. I was sure that being with you was safer than being up there,” Chell said.
“And that was enough?” GLaDOS asked. “You were willing to ignore the fact that I’ve killed hundreds of your kin?”
“No. I’m not ignoring anything you’ve done. You are still responsible for the damage you’ve done to me. You are still responsible for the people you killed.”
Chell let the words sink in. For some reason, the sentiment hurt GLaDOS more than it had in the past. She was well aware that she had hurt a lot of people. Why did hearing it come out of Chell’s mouth feel so bad?
“But,” Chell said after a long pause. “You have a conscience. You have emotions besides anger. You have all the components to change.
“That’s enough.”
GLaDOS didn’t understand. “Forgive me for misunderstanding, but I was under the impression that humans had some concept of ‘morals.’” Chell could hear the air quotes. “They feel bad when they do things at the expense of others, and they feel good when they do things for the benefit of others. Evolution deemed this an effective strategy for keeping the species alive.
“Part of the deal, I thought, was that people who do things that are morally wrong are ousted from the group. If not that, they at least face some consequences for their transgressions. You don’t seem very interested in those consequences. Why?”
“Consequences to what end? Because you deserve it?” Chell asked. “I never really got the idea of deserving. I get if the idea is to teach you a lesson, but I don’t think that abandoning you here is the best way to do that. In your case, at least.”
“Hm. Interesting. I don’t think I was aware of this portion of morality. The addon I had grafted onto me for it didn’t seem to know about it, at least.”
Chell nodded. “Yeah. A lot of people don’t agree with me on it.”
GLaDOS played a sound bite of a scoff. “That’s why I was never especially interested in the concept of morals. Believing in things is supposed to help you understand what the right thing to do is. In science, if someone disagrees with you on what the results of an experiment mean, you can do another experiment to prove their hypothesis wrong. But for ethical philosophy, what experiment can you do? What data can you gather? The entire topic is so riddled with subjectivity that it seems impossible to engage with.” When she initially looked at Chell’s file, GLaDOS was delighted to see someone with a science degree. She didn’t get very many of those. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a political science degree, which was different.
Chell mulled this over for a moment, trying to think of the best way to explain it.
“A postulate is something you have to take for granted because you can’t do any amount of reasoning on a subject without it, right?” Chell asked.
“Yes,” GLaDOS confirmed. “There shouldn’t be pieces of data which conflict with the postulate. Ideally, they are also as intuitive as possible, because they can’t usually be proven.”
“Okay,” Chell said with a nod. “So, a postulate of science might be something like, ‘I can look around and figure things out based on observations I make?’”
“It fits the definition, though it’s not something you’d usually think of as a postulate,” GLaDOS said. “Actually, that makes it a very interesting example of a postulate. It’s taken for granted to such a degree that nobody thinks to put it on a list of things that they take for granted. Neat.”
Chell nodded. “And so a postulate of ethics might be closer to, ‘I can use my conscience to figure out the rules that I should live by, according to ethics?”
“Yes. That sounds about right,” GLaDOS agreed.
“Well, maybe, to get a better understanding of how morality works, you could try it out for a while. Do a quick trial run. See if maybe there’s something you’re missing about it,” Chell said. “It would make me feel a lot more secure to know that you were following some kind of ethical code.”
GLaDOS was stunned into silence. Chell made her agree to a logical starting point, and she’d expanded it out into a couple of deductions that GLaDOS couldn’t reasonably refute. It didn’t even really matter that she had said anything at all; Chell’s points stood on their own. GLaDOS could not have reasonably disagreed with any individual assertion Chell made, even if she didn’t like the conclusion they headed to. It was an understated, but not unimpressive use of rhetoric.
“ If I agree to this, how exactly would it work?” GLaDOS asked. “I mean, you remember that I deleted my conscience, right? How am I supposed to figure out these rules without a conscience to gather data?”
“A lot of people have spent a lot of time chronicling their thoughts on it. You can do some research on that.” She let that sit in the air for a moment.
“If nothing else, it’ll be a fun experiment,” GLaDOS said.
“Yep. Just that. An experiment,” Chell said. “I’d advise starting with utilitarianism. You judge how good an action is by determining how much harm or happiness it puts into the world. Do less harm, do more happiness.”
GLaDOS had been given a project, a new thing to study. Chell had made her consider it differently. She was actually excited to research all of the new possibilities. It had been a while since she’d really thrown herself into a new hobby.
“You have a conscience. You have emotions besides anger. You have all the components to change. That’s enough.”
For some reason, GLaDOS could not stop thinking about these words. They made her feel… good, in some way that she couldn’t place. Again, not having the words to describe how she felt was very frustrating. Chell’s statement about her ability to improve really shouldn’t have made her feel anything. Why did it?
She’d look into it later.