LaaC: Part Seventy-Four. The Collapse

Part Seventy-Four.  The Collapse

The next morning, Dad comes up to me with a very odd expression.  He looks like he’s confused and scared at the same time.  “Carrie, your mum wants a word,” he tells me.  “She says it’s very important.”

“Okay,” I answer, getting up from where I was watching Atlas and P-body playing some game I don’t know.  “What’s it about?”

“She won’t tell me.”

And when she won’t tell Dad, it’s pretty serious.

I get there as fast as I can, and I’m immediately set on edge.  She’s moving back and forth anxiously, which she almost never does.  It means she’s on the edge of control.  “Momma?  What’s going on?” I ask as casually as possible.

“Caroline, there’s something I must know.”  She sounds… desperate, almost.  I look at her in confusion.  What the heck happened last night? 

“Sure.  What?”

“You do what you do out of free will, right?” she asks, looking right at me but not going still at all.  “You… come up with it on your own?”

“Uh…”  I’m not sure how to answer that.  “What does that mean?”

She looks at the wall for a long moment.  She shakes her core, and it seems like she can’t come up with an answer for my question either. 

“Momma, what happened?”

“I… remembered something.”  And she bends down towards the floor.

She remembered something that scared her so badly she called me into her chamber first thing in the morning even though she’s clearly not in her right mind, because if she were she would never allow me to see her like this.  That’s… terrifying.  “What was it?” I say, trying to remember all the times she helped me, and deciding I should probably move closer.  She might need a hug.

“I… can’t shake the feeling that… nothing you say is… from you.  That… I… programmed you like this.  That none of this is real and I made it all up.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I tell her.  I understand why she might think that, because she built me and everything, but my programming has nothing to do with it.

“I could have –“

“There’s no way.  Momma, not even you can program someone to care about someone else.”

“Then why?” she demands, coming up in front of me sharply.  “Why would you bother?  How can you be so sure that I’m worth all of this effort?”

“Dad does,” I tell her. 

“I programmed him too.”

What.

“I’d forgotten,” she says, shaking her core and looking away, moving back and forth again.  “But I was trying to remember how the scientists replicated my sentience when they never meant for me to have it in the first place, and… I remember now.  The AI Department was trying to build AI.  Caroline gave me the Sphere they had made the most progress on.  I finished it.  Him.  I finished him.  They only limited some of the programming.  This is all a sham.  I’ve built everything on a lie.  I wanted…”

This is blowing my mind a little bit.  I still don’t believe that I’m programmed to love my mom, but I need to get all of her thoughts out of her so I can convince her of that.  But I never imagined that she built my dad too.  “Wanted what?”

“To be cared about,” she says quietly, her voice distorting a little.  “And I built it.  And it’s not real.”

“It is.”  But how do I explain it?  How can you really know for sure why you do what you do, especially when you know what you’re made of?  Well, she loves Dad and she’s not programmed to do that… maybe there’s something in there I can use.  “What about you?  Why would you try so hard to show us that you care back?  If we were programmed to do that, you wouldn’t have to.”

“If I did it, it wasn’t on purpose,” she answers, looking down at the floor again.  “I would have thought it was real and acted accordingly.  Like I have been.”

“It is real,” I say, probably a little louder than I should have, but convincing my mom of vague concepts is really, really hard.  “What about Chell?  She has the most reason to hate you out of everyone.  And she doesn’t.  She cares about you.  For no reason.”

“I… don’t know.”

“You can’t do it, Momma,” I say, trying to be gentle and firm at the same time.  “If you’d programmed that, you would have had to program everything we do.  Caring about someone else… that requires either a lot of free will or a lot of control.  And it’s too… I think if it were programmed, it would… would be constant, right?  Always the same amount.  But it’s not.”

“Well… no.”  She stops moving, and I cheer silently.  She’s coming around.  “I could have made it variable.  But that would have entailed predicting all the circumstances to make it variable for, as well as calculating the amount of variability as pertaining to the situation and the circumstances of the situation…”

“I have no idea what that means,” I say with a straight face.  She snaps her core up to look at me.

“It means,” she says, her voice steady again, “that I’m being ridiculous.  There’s no way I wrote all of that by mistake.  Not to mention that trying to beta that would have been a nightmare.”

“Then what are you worrying about?”

“I don’t know.”  She shakes her head.  “All I know is that was horrible.  I should have… thought before I told Wheatley to get you.  I’m sorry.  That was stupid of me.  I… put myself into a panic and didn’t even try to disprove it.  I’m sorry to have put you through this.”

“I’m not,” I tell her truthfully, though it was a little scary.  But I did ask for it.  I have to be prepared to take all of the adult stuff.  Not just the good.  “I’m glad you wanted to tell me.”

She presses her core into me almost so fast I don’t see her coming.  While I’m getting over the shock of that, she says, “I love you, Caroline.”

I press back on her as hard as I can, and I’m happy and sad at the same time.  I wish she had never had to even consider such a thing, but I know this is from her.  The real her that Dad’s been uncovering all these years, and that I’m going to help him get to one day.  “I love you too, Momma.”

She gives me a shove and moves back, tensing and releasing her chassis a little.  “Go back to… whatever you were doing.”

“I wasn’t doing anything,” I tell her.

“Well.  I have things to do.”

And even though she’s been telling me that all my life, I’m still a little disappointed to hear it.  “If you take a break, feel free to let me know.”

But, Momma being Momma, she either doesn’t take one or decides against letting me know.  I don’t talk to her again until I go in to say goodnight to her, though she doesn’t look too much like she’s planning on sleeping. 

“Uh, Momma, you know what time it is, right?” I ask, immediately wishing I’d said something else.  My mom not knowing what time it is.  Right.

“There’s just one last thing I want to finish,” she says absently, looking at something I can’t see, a camera or something.  Well, I guess she’d be looking through the camera and not at it. 

“Goodnight, Dad.”  I give him a quick hug, which he returns, and then I back up and look at her again.  “Goodnight, Momma.”

She just keeps on doing whatever it is she’s doing.  She does this every now and again, but like with what happened earlier, I’m still disappointed. 

“Gladys,” Dad says softly, and she immediately looks over at him.  “Carrie’s trying to say goodnight to you.”

“Oh,” she says, as if she’d forgotten I was here.  “Goodnight.”

“Don’t stay up too late.”

“I’m almost done.”

I look over at Dad.  He shrugs.

“Almost usually means an hour.”

I shake my head and go off to find Atlas and P-body.  Almost is not an hour.  Almost is ten minutes, tops. 

//

The next morning, I get her to agree to start showing me how to program that afternoon, because I’ve been looking at what she entered in the database about it and it looks like it takes a really long time to learn how to do it well, so I’d better get started.  I’m excited to get started on this. I know I won’t be able to write anything complicated for a long time, but one day I’ll be using what I learn now to build a daughter of my own.  That’s pretty cool.

Finally afternoon comes and I go in to see her, hoping I studied the database well enough to understand what she might end up talking about.  I don’t want her to have to explain things I can easily figure out on my own.  When I get there, she’s looking very intently at one of her monitors, and it’s scrolling numbers so fast I can barely see them before they change into new ones.  I wonder what that is.  And if I’ll ever be able to read that fast.  That might be part of the pure computer thing Dad told me about.

“Hey, Momma,” I call out.  She glances at me.

“What is it?”

I frown.  “You said you would start teaching me how to program.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah…”  It’s just like her not to remember something like this.  “You said so this morning.”

“Oh.  It has to wait, anyway.  I’m busy.”

Well, maybe she can tell me about this thing instead.  “What are you doing?”

“Running simulations.”

“For what?”

“I don’t have time to answer your endless questions right now.  Go bother someone else.”

“Well, you said you would – “

“It doesn’t matter.”  She shakes her head, muttering, “Why I would say something like that at a time like this…”

“What?”  A time like this?  Time like what?

“Go.”

I do, but I’m not happy about it.  When I tell Dad what happened, he frowns a little and looks back in the general direction of her chamber.

“That’s odd,” he says thoughtfully.  “I’ll try to talk to her about it later.  Not sure if, if it’ll go over, though.”

“Why?”

“She’s… been a bit short with me, lately.  Whatever she’s working on, it…”  He shrugs and shakes his head.  “She’s been a bit weird, honestly.”

Unfortunately, it only gets weirder.  She agrees to teach me to program two more times, and she forgets about both of those agreements too.  I’m starting to get really angry.  If I did this, she’d never stand for it.  And the worst part is, she’s doing it on purpose.  I don’t know what the point of all this is, but she doesn’t forget things.

“Dad, what’s going on with her?”  I demand, going up to where he’s looking outside.  “That’s the third time!”

“It is getting a bit out of hand,” he agrees absently.

“It’s been happening to you too?”

“Well… it might just be me, but… I get the, I feel as though we’re having the same conversation every couple of days.”

“About what?”

“Dream she’s been having.”

“Which is?”

“She won’t tell me.”

I growl a little.  “She’s driving me crazy!”

He turns to look at me.  “We’ll see if this keeps happ’ning the next couple of days, and if it does, we’ll have a chat with her.  Alright?”

I reluctantly agree.

Later that evening, though, he comes up to me, frowning a little.  “Give me a hand, will you Carrie?” he asks, and I leave the book I’ve been reading and follow him to a data port in one of the old offices.  “Need you to plug in there, princess,” he says, and I do as he says. 

“Now what?”

“I need you to talk to the mainframe for me,” he says, blinking a couple of times.  “Get it to pull up one of the files your mum’s been writing.  One from today, if you can.”

I can only get you one from yesterday, it tells me.  All files modified today are still in use.

Yesterday’s fine.

Dad has me output the contents of the file to one of the monitors, and he stares at it for a good long time.  I can’t really see it because I’m not facing the screen, but I can open it in my head and it looks like programming to me.  “Can you read that, Dad?”

“Can the mainframe read it?”

“The mainframe only reads binary, Dad.”

“Try to turn it into bin’ry, then.”  He doesn’t sound like he thinks it’ll work.  And it doesn’t.  The mainframe gives me a compiler to use, but the compiler only tells us there’s a bunch of errors and it can’t convert it.  Dad looks at the screen like he knew this was coming.  “Have it fetch a file from two months ago, will you?  And send it to the other monitor.”

This one is obviously programming, I can tell by all the comments.  But it looks nothing like the file on the other screen.  “Dad, what’s that first one for?”

“Nothing,” Dad says, sounding a little angry.  “It doesn’t do anything.  She’s been doing absolutely nothing all this time.”

“She’s working,” I say, confused.  Momma doesn’t know how to do nothing.

“On what?”  He shakes his head and stares at the monitors.  “That’s what she always says.  She’s working.  But on what?  Why does she never make any progress?  Carrie, ask the mainframe when the last time Maintenance ran a full… did a… did its thing.  Entirely.”

It gives me a date from four months ago, which I relate to Dad, and he clenches his chassis.  “Changed my mind.  We’re having that chat with her now.  Let’s go.”

I pull myself off the port and follow him back there, and she’s looking at numbers again.  But now that I have that file full of gibberish clear in my mind, I have to wonder if those numbers actually mean anything.  And now I remember that she never told me what the simulations she was running were…

“We need to talk to you, luv,” he says to her softly, and she looks away from the monitor immediately.  Now there’s a power I wish I had.  “It’s quite important.  Spare us a second, will you?”

“What is it?” she asks, coming down to his level. 

“What are you doing, sweetheart?”

“Running simulations.”

“For what?”

I expect her not to answer, like she did for me, but she says, “I’m trying to figure out where best to place the humans.”

“The humans,” my dad says, tilting his core forwards a little and looking up at her from under the rim of his upper shutter. 

“Yes.  Minimum casualties, and all that.”

He looks so hopeless.

“Honey,” he says, his voice so soft and sad I look at him in a panic, “the war ended a month ago.”

She stares at him.

“Can you look at a file for me?”  He gives her the name of the one we looked at first, and then asks, “What’s that for, luv?”

“Where… did you get this?” she asks, sounding confused. 

“We asked the mainframe what you worked on yesterday.  Came up with that.  D’you know what it is?”

“Nothing,” she answers, tilting her core a little.  “It doesn’t do anything.  It’s… nonsense.”

“Is there something you should be telling me about?”

“Like what,” she hedges, not looking at him.

“Like why Maintenance hasn’t been, you haven’t used it in four months.”

“I… might be having… intermittent memory problems.”

“Intermittent?” Dad demands, and now she does look at him, moving back a little.  “Intermittent?  You can’t remember a bloody thing!  You think there’s still a war on!  When it ended!  A month ago!”

“Wheatley, I know what the problem is.  I’m working on it.  I –“

“No you’re not,” he cuts in.  “You think you are.  You think you’re working on it. But you’re not.  That’s what that, what that file’s for, isn’t it.  Only you prob’ly can’t remember how to fix it, and that’s prob’ly a whole bunch of diff’rent solutions all mashed together!  And why, Gladys?  Why didn’t you tell me?”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she says, shaking her core.  “It’s not that bad.  If it got worse, yes, I would have – “

“You think its two months ago!”  Dad roars, and she actually jumps backwards.  I jump myself.  I haven’t heard Dad yell in a long, long time.  “Worse?  It gets worse than that?  You don’t even know how bad it is, do you!  You only know how bad it was!  Because you don’t remember it getting any worse!  Well, guess what!  It’s really bloody bad!”

“Wheatley,” Momma begins, her voice soft and desperate, and that almost scares me as much as Dad’s yelling.  But he shakes his core angrily.

“Shut up.  Just shut up.  You’re not going to remember this happened anyway, so what’s the point.  There isn’t one.  So you just go on living in your, your little fantasy where whatever you’re doing is important, when it’s not, and, and I’ll just go and… and… not do that.”

He leaves, shaking his head over and over again, but I’m not able to move for a good handful of seconds.  My mom doesn’t move for longer than that.

“Are you okay?” I ask her hesitantly.  She looks over at me slowly.

“Go with Wheatley.”

I don’t want to leave her by herself.  I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I feel as though if I stay she won’t forget what happened.  And I’m honestly really scared for her, because now that she’s been forced to face what’s really happening to her… well, if I had just found out everything I’d been doing for the last month was useless and irrelevant, and that I had no idea what was really going on, I’d be freaking out right now.  But she doesn’t.  Or maybe she will later.  She still looks really stunned.  “I don’t want to leave you on your own, Momma.”

“Wheatley’s alone right now,” she says, very quietly.  “He’s the one who deserves your sympathy.”

 I wish there were two of me, so I could help them both at the same time. 

“Okay,” I tell her, and I move towards the doorway.  I don’t want to argue with her, and what she’s saying does make sense.  Maybe he couldn’t have done anything about it.  That doesn’t mean it’s right for her to hide it from him.  If she didn’t tell him about all the things in the world he doesn’t understand, they would never talk about anything.

“Wait.  Come here a moment.”

I don’t know what to do.  Did she forget she just sent me to find Dad?  Just how much from right now does she remember, anyway?  But I decide to do as she asks, and all she does is press her core into me for a few seconds and then move away.  That’s just as weird and confusing as everything else that’s been going on lately.

“Momma?”

“Go.”

When I find him, he’s sitting on a table that Atlas and P-body have left in the hallway for whatever reason, leaning sideways against the wall panel.  He looks very tired.

“Dad?  Are you okay?”

“No,” he whispers.  “No, I’m not.”  He shutters his optic and shakes his head.  “I just want my life back.  Is that so much to ask?”

I go and sit down in front of him, about six inches away or so, but I don’t know what to do now either.  I’ve never seen my dad like this before.  “What do you mean?”

“I got somewhere with her,” he says, his voice a little broken.  “I’d almost fixed it.  But then the humans… the humans got… those bloody…”

All of a sudden he turns and starts smashing himself into the panel he was leaning on, and I can do nothing but stare at him.  What is he doing?  What’s going on?  “Dad?”

“I hate them!” he cries out, not stopping.  “I hate those damn humans!  I got through to her!  She stopped working and she slept and she took care of herself and she talked to me and then they came back and all my progress is gone!  Again!”

“Dad, stop,” I say hesitantly, but I don’t think he heard me because he doesn’t.  What the heck do I do?  Everything is falling apart and I’m the only one in one piece right now, and I can’t do anything!

“And she does not listen!  I’ve told her and told her and she will not listen!  I told her ‘don’t keep things to yourself’, I told her ‘stop doing things don’t need to be done’, and she does it anyway!  She – I – I just –“  He shakes his head vigorously and just leans against the panel on his upper handle.  “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Can’t do what, Dad?”

“It’s too much,” he mumbles.  “I can’t.  God, I… I’ve tried so hard.  I’ve tried so hard to be, to be helpful, and consid’rate, and, and, to be ev’rything she needs me to be, but… she just keeps needing more and more and I haven’t got anything left.  I’ve hit my limit.  I can’t help her anymore.  I stay up half the night to make sure she sleeps.  Do ev’rything I can think of to make her relax.  Listen to her even when I need listened to.  Because no one listens to me.  No one cares about what I have to go through, all the time.  No one asks if I’m alright.  No one asks if I need something.  No one does anything for me when I’m upset.  No.  I’m just that guy you, you go to when you need something, and, and any other time I’m just, I’m not here!  I’m invisible!  Insignificant.  Like before.  And I thought that’d changed, but no.  Ev’rything’s just gone back to how it was, all those years ago, where I’m overlooked in favour of her.”

I never realised that all that time I was trying to get Momma to talk to me, Dad might want someone to talk to as well.

“Dad, I… I always thought you… you just came to me when you needed to talk,” I try to explain.  “I never felt like… you felt like you couldn’t tell me something.”

“That’s not the point,” he says, staring dully at the wall.  “The point is that no one bothers to ask.  I want to be asked, I want to know that someone cares enough to ask, and I want to know that people are paying attention to me.  And what I need.  But no one does.  It’s all about her, all the time, and I’m sick of it.  I try so hard to make her happy, and she doesn’t care.  Just keeps on ignoring ev’rything I say, or do, or whatever, and, and she doesn’t think about me anymore.  She used to, she used to talk to me and ask if I wanted to do things and… and…”  He closes his optic and shakes his head again.  “I can’t do it.  I can’t take this anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I tell him softly, but I know that what I’m going to say isn’t going to help.  “I never realised.  I… you always seemed like… like you dealt with everything fine on your own.”

“I’ve tried not to be selfish.  I do want to be the person you feel you can go to, no matter what.  Even if what you’re going to say might bother me.  But we’re supposed to compromise.  And she doesn’t do that anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”  I don’t know what else to say.

He turns to look at me.

“And now you’re… getting all the pressure, now,” he says quietly.  “Because she’s breaking down, and I’m breaking down, and, and we’re supposed to be, to be here, and we’re not.”

“It’s okay, Dad.  I can be the strong one for a while.”

“But you shouldn’t have to.”

“That doesn’t matter right now.”

And he comes towards me, and we give each other a hug for a while, and I try to figure out what to do.  I have to figure out how to help them both. 

“You’re a good girl, Carrie,” Dad says, moving back and looking at me.  He still seems tired, and I guess I would be too if I stayed up with Momma every night.  Does he really spend half of every night trying to convince her to go to sleep?  “But for God’s sake don’t keep things to yourself.  If something’s wrong, tell me.  Don’t say I can’t do anything about it.  I can.  Because keeping big secrets, keeping stuff to yourself just makes it worse.  Let it out.  I’ve been telling her for so long and she just refuses to…”  He stops there, shaking his head once.  “I’m going to go outside for a while, princess.  You get some sleep, alright?”

“Okay,” I nod, and he gives me a quick hug and disappears. 

I lean against the panel and try to think.  So… Momma’s memory is broken because Maintenance hasn’t cleared out the bad code in months.  I’m not exactly sure how that works but that’s not super important right now, anyway.  But she has no idea half the time what she’s doing or even what day it is.  So she thinks she has all this stuff to do, which she really doesn’t, so she keeps doing it over and over and the real stuff she has to do goes undone.  And she’s so busy doing all that, she doesn’t pay any attention to Dad, and Dad’s had enough.  Dad doesn’t want to help her anymore. 

But… but she needs that help.  And if he’s not going to give it to her, and she doesn’t remember what happened and doesn’t do something about all this, then…

Then they’re going to split up.

I don’t think I’ve had a scarier thought in my whole life.

They can’t split up.  They can’t.  This is my parents.  They’ve been together for almost literally my dad’s entire life.  They would never let anything…

But it already has.  So… what am I supposed to do?  Where’s Dad going to go?  Will they stay friends and just… not love each other anymore?  Will they just not want to see each other again?  And where do I go?  Will one get mad if I stay with the other?  But I can’t stay with Dad.  I’m supposed to be Central Core.  But if I stay with Momma, that means I’m just proving Dad’s point, that no one considers him…

Now I need someone to talk to, and I’m all alone.

I close my optic to go to sleep, and I pray to the God of AI that this is all a dream and I’m going to sleep inside of the dream, and when I wake up this will not have been real.  Because if it’s real, I… I don’t know what I’m going to do.  But that’s okay.  It’s not real.  I’m dreaming.  Momma’s fine, and Dad still wants to help her, and I don’t have to choose between them.  Everything’s fine.  Everything’s okay.

//

I must still be dreaming.

“Carrie?” Dad asks, sounding confused.  “D’you know where this is?”

I can’t be dreaming, because Dad never came here in his life.  I turn around to face him, and he’s here too, on Alyx’s management rail at Black Mesa.

“This is where Momma sent me when you died.”

She sent me away again. 

“What’s this?  Family vacation?”

I look up to see Barney, leaning against the wall opposite with his arms folded, one of his little grins on his face, but I don’t see what there is to smile about.  She sent me away again.  She did it again.  And she sent Dad with me.  She got rid of both of us.  Guess this solves my problem.  I’m staying with Dad.

“She… she sent us away?” Dad asks helplessly.  “How?”

“The same way she moved the Borealis and the facility,” I answer, almost automatically.  “She has teleportation technology.”

“But why?”  Suddenly he jumps, staring at the wall in horror.  “Oh no.  Oh no no no no no no…”

“What?” 

“She heard me,” he says desperately.  “She heard ev’rything I said… and she took it lit’raly… what have I done?”

“It’s not your fault, Dad,” I tell him angrily.  “She just does this.  Gets rid of you when she doesn’t feel like dealing with you.  She just gets rid of you whether you want to help her or not.”  This is one of those times when my mom is the biggest jerk on the entire planet.

­“I do.  I didn’t mean it, I… I just… I was… I was frustrated, and I… oh my God… oh my God, I can’t… Gladys, why… oh God, I…”  He looks around, then moves to the end of the management rail about ten feet from here and leans up against the wall. 

And then he starts to cry.

He’s trying to be quiet, and not make a big thing of it, but… this room is not that big.  Barney stares at him for a few seconds.

“I’ll go track down Chell,” he says, motioning towards Dad with his head, and I nod and turn to watch as he leaves the room. 

Dad is upset, but I can’t be.  I’m so angry I almost can’t think.  She sent me away again.  As if I’m just property she can get rid of whenever she wants.  Dad’s right.  We can’t get through to her.  She just ignores everything and goes on doing whatever she wants.  He tried to help, and I tried to help, and she just ignored us and got rid of us when we disagreed with her.  How Dad put up with her long enough to fall in love with her in the first place, I’ll never know. 

Well… I guess I still love her, but… can you love someone without liking them?

After a while Barney comes back with Chell, and Chell looks from me to Dad and back again.  “Did they have a fight?” she asks quietly.

“She went crazy,” I say bluntly.  “Her memory’s all screwed up and she took something Dad said the wrong way.  I have no idea what she thinks she’s doing, but Dad’s blaming himself.  Even though it was her fault.”  It’s always her fault.

She nods and pats me on top of the chassis a few times, then goes and sits on the floor in front of Dad.  She doesn’t say anything or try to let him know she’s there.  She just folds her hands together in her lap and looks at them.

“Why don’t you track down Dog, Caroline?” Barney suggests, waving in the general direction of the next room.  “He’s around here somewhere.  Maybe in the workshop with Alyx.”

“Sure,” I say, heading off.  Better than sitting here stewing over the fact that my mom sent me away.  Again.

I don’t find Dog, but I do find Alyx, and I rant at her for a while as she repairs an engine or something.  “Do humans do things like this?” I ask finally, wondering if this is yet another one of my mom’s eccentricities.  “Get rid of people when they can’t handle them?”

“All the time,” Alyx answers, pulling some greasy black part out of the thing she’s working on.  “GLaDOS is kind of abusing her power here, though.”

“She always does that.”

“Always?”  Alyx raises an eyebrow and wipes off her fingers on a stained grey piece of cloth.  “Or just lately.”

“Well… more lately, I guess.”            

“Wait and see what happens.”  She throws the rag down and digs around in the engine again. 

Soon after that she has to go somewhere for a new black thing for the engine, so I return to the other room.  What I see only makes me angrier.

Dad is still crying.

How dare she hurt him like this.  Make him give her everything and then throw him away when he’s all used up.  Why?  Why is she like this?  What does she get out of this?  I wish we were still in the facility, because I really want to yell at her right now.

He stops a little while later, but he doesn’t open his optic, just keeps leaning against the wall.  Chell says softly, “Hey Wheatley.”

He jolts a little and looks down at her.  “’allo.”

“All I’ve got is soft and squishy hugs.  Do you want one?”

He nods slowly, and she reaches up and pulls him off the rail, holding him in her lap.  She runs one hand over his chassis rhythmically.

“It’s going to be okay,” she tells him in the same soft voice.  “She loves you, Wheatley.  I know she does.  This isn’t permanent.  She’s trying to fix things over there.”

“No,” Dad says, his voice still broken.  “I made her think I gave up.  She thinks I don’t care anymore.  She’s not going to bring us back.  It’s over.  I ruined ev’rything.”

I have to force myself not to correct him.  She ruined everything.  She’s the one who messed herself up.  Not Dad.  Dad tried to stop her, and she wouldn’t let him. 

“I’ll go talk to her later,” Chell says.  “We’ll fix this, Wheatley.  It’s not forever.  But I don’t think she thinks you don’t care.  I’m not sure what she thinks, but it’s not that.  An antlion could see that you care.”

“I just… I want to go home.  Her, her mem’ry system, it’s, something’s happened to it, and, and for all we know she, she’s just, she’s there by herself, and she’s, she’s forgotten what she’s done.  She’s not, what if she doesn’t remember, and, and we’re just here forever?  I can’t stay away from her forever!  I don’t want to stay away from her!”

“I’ll talk to her,” Chell repeats.  “It’s going to be fine.”

After a while she puts him back on the rail and gets up, bunching up her shoulders a little and moving away.  “I’ll be back soon,” she tells him, and he nods once.

“Tell her I didn’t mean it,” he says quietly.

“I will.”

I go towards my dad, intending to help him out, but as soon as I get close to him he shakes his head.  “No, Carrie,” he says quietly.  “I know you’re angry with her.  I know you’re going to try to convince me to stop, to blame her instead of myself.  But I knew who she was when I started all this.  And… I just…”  He shrugs a little.  “I don’t want her to, to think I don’t want to come back.  That’s all I want.  To go home and be with her again, and tell her that I love her.  I want her to know I didn’t mean it.  I miss her.  I didn’t get to snuggle with her last night.  And I don’t know when I’ll, when we’ll do that next.  I don’t know how long this’s going to last.  And I don’t care if nothing changes if she brings us back.  And you prob’ly think I’m stupid to say that.  And maybe I am.  But you don’t know how it was back then, before, before I was on her chassis and after The Incident.”

“How was it?” I ask.  I don’t really think he’s stupid.  But I never knew bad things happened to him too.  He just seems so content all the time.  I guess your personality really has a huge effect on how your past changes you.

“Well… when I was built, I never, no one ever talked to me.  And the human who worked on me, he never… I was just his project.  And one day I woke up on her…”  He’s staring at the floor as if it’s not really there.  “I was so clueless and stupid.  And she just… she helped me find my name, and she talked to me, and…”  He makes a bit of a sobbing noise.  “I called her Gladys because I mixed up how she, she told me to pronounce GLaDOS.  I used to call her GLaDOS, before you were activated, but… God, I hate that name.

“Anyway… she was the only one who ever spoke to me.  Who did anything for me, anything at all.  The humans paid me no mind when, when I was built, but even less when I, when I was part of her.  She’s the only one who ever made me feel like I mattered.  Like I was someone.  ‘ventually they took me off her and erased my mem’ry.  Then they just told me to do things.  No one talked to me.  I talked to ev’ryone, but got nothing.  And… even though she was angry about the Incident, and she hated me and what I’d done, she remembered me.  She remembered who I was and brought me back.  She… forgave me and moved on.”  He sighs.  “We were friends again.  And we fell in love.  Even though that killed her.  But it didn’t matter, because I learned so much from her, and I moved on, and then we were together again.  Carrie, I… I don’t think I can ever tell you, can ever make you understand how she makes me feel.  Maybe it’s stupid to go on like this when she doesn’t give back.  But I can’t care.  If she hadn’t taken that chance on me that she didn’t take with other people, I’d be a forgotten core in the bin in the basement.  I would rather take what I can get than be lonely and forgotten for the rest of my life.  I know it’s stupid, and it’s, it’s foolish.  But I can’t, I… I need her more than I can explain t’you.”

“But Dad, you have me now,” I tell him.  He shakes his head.

“You’re not her.”

I decide not to say any more and just stay quiet.  He doesn’t care what happens, as long as he gets to be with her again.  That’s… he must love her an awful lot.  But he seems to be waiting for things to go back to the way he remembers them to have been, rather than realising that it’s not going to happen.  She never changes forever. 

Chell returns a while later, and he gains a little energy, getting off the wall to look at her.  “What’d she say?” he asks urgently.

Chell shakes her head.

“I didn’t get that far.”

“What… what d’you mean?”

“She’s shut it down,” Chell says, moving forward to stand just in front of him.  “I got in, but… the facility’s gone dark.  Nothing’s running.  The cameras aren’t even on.  I didn’t get that far, because I couldn’t see, but… I’m sorry, Wheatley.”

“She shut the facility down.”  His voice is very quiet.

“That’s right.”

“Well… it’s still there, at least,” he says, not sounding encouraged.  He leans against the wall again and closes his optic.

“It’s going to be all right,” Chell says softly.

He doesn’t answer, and I follow Chell as she walks into another room.