Portal: My Little Moron - Chapter Seven

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Chapter Seven


Neither of them spoke to the other for the next several days.  He didn’t really know how many days had gone by, since he started to lose track after about three, sometimes four, but it was a very long time.  He was terrified of what she would do, after all of the things that had happened all on that one day.  He hoped she wouldn’t hurt him or get rid of him, because he still quite liked her and wanted to stick around for as long as possible, but god it was hard to sit there and wait and wait and wait (and wait), and hope she wasn’t just thinking up a million ways to torture him so that she could decide on the best one.  When he looked around one day and realised it was night, he shrank back into himself.  Oh god.  Oh god, she was going to do something terrible to him, and she was doing it in the middle of the night so no one would see!

He cringed and made himself as small as possible, but nothing happened.  He unclenched himself a little, since it was terribly uncomfortable, and tried to see what she was doing.  She was humming to herself, very softly, but he couldn’t tell what the song might be.  He couldn’t see what it was, exactly, that she was doing, but it involved one of her maintenance arms.

Was she… was she going to take him apart?  Oh god.  She had a screwdriver, didn’t she.  And a drill.  And a drill with a screwdriver sticking out of it.  Ohhh this was not good.

He thought frantically of a way to distract her from her terrible task.  He really, really didn’t want the screwdriver/drill that she had hidden away where he couldn’t see it.  He said the first thing that came to mind.

“Oi, Gladys, your optic, it’s, is it, it’s yellow, is it?  Can’t quite see, but um, that’s the, uh, the only, um, colour in the room right now.”

The chassis jerked a little.  She seemed to be pretty good at forgetting he was there, for a supercomputer that knew everything, usually before it even happened.  He wasn’t sure how that worked, but it seemed to have something to do with being able to hack science with maths.  He didn’t like thinking about that.  He didn’t think he’d ever be able to do such a thing.  “Oh.  I suppose.  I don’t actually know, but it makes sense.”

He twitched, hoping she would say more, or start a conversation, or something, but she didn’t, and he again had to work out how to take action to save himself.  “Hey, uh, just wanna, y’know, throw this out there for, um, your consideration, yeah, but uh, I don’t wanna die.  If.  If that’s okay with you.  At all.  If it’s not, uh, that’s fine too, go ahead and uh, and do your thing, but uh, I’d rather live, if, if it’s all the same.  To you.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well uh, you’ve got, um, you’ve got, uh, a drill there, haven’t you?  And a, uh, a screwdriver?  And a drill with a screwdriver?”

“What the hell are you talking about?  I don’t have a screwdriver or a drill, or screwdriver drill bits for the drill that I don’t have.”

“Well uh, then what’re you, um, what’re you doing over there?  With the, um, the maintenance arm?”

“I’m not sure.  I could be doing maintenance with the maintenance arm, of course, but that would be silly.”

“Oh.”  He tried to figure out why on earth he’d thought she had those tools in the first place but couldn’t.  “You, uh, you do the maintenance too?”

“Some of it.  When I’m bored.  The rest of it is done by the maintenance robots.  Which I have to program and supervise.  So yes, I do the maintenance too.”

She really did do everything!  But one thing about what she’d said didn’t sit quite right.  “How did you get bored while you were sleeping?”

There was a loud clanking noise and Wheatley could soon see what she had been doing.  She had been doing maintenance on one of the monitors in her chamber, and was now reattaching it to the wall.  “I didn’t.”

Wheatley realised his mistake as soon as he tried to imagine being bored while you were off.  He didn’t think it was possible, not even for Gladys, who seemed to be able to do everything but stop the earth from turning.  Which she could probably do if she had enough time to figure out the physics behind it.  “D’you… d’you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.  I don’t feel like singing, and you don’t seem to care anyway.”  She was doing her best to sound neutral, but Wheatley was well used to detecting the faint strains of bitterness that would sneak into her voice every now and again.

Wheatley rolled his optic a little in hopes it would shake his brains up enough to make him think better, and said as reassuringly as he could, “I do care, luv, it’s just that… well, I’ve just, I’ve been here all this time and uh, and we’ve not been talking, and, uh, I thought you were gonna torture me, or something, and um…”

“You thought I woke you up in the middle of the night to kill you in secret?”

“Well, uh, yeah, uh, I did, um, I was afraid of, that is, I thought you might, um – “

“You moron,” she said, laughing, “if I was going to kill you I’d just do it, no matter who was in the room.  You’d be gone already.  And I certainly wouldn’t use a screwdriver or a drill.  I don’t really care for physical torture.”

That was encouraging.  She had actually laughed, too, which was an even better sign.  That was very, very rare.  “Well, that’s good news.  I’m uh, I’m glad to hear it.  Well uh, why didn’t you, um, didn’t you talk to me?  I was waiting, um, for you, y’know, but you didn’t, ah, you just stayed silent.  Absolutely quiet.  Well not absolutely, because I heard all your processors and your fans and when you talked to the scientists, and I think you were, you were humming just now, but uh, to me, you were quiet towards me.”

“Because,” she answered.

Wheatley blinked.

“That’s not a proper sentence, luv,” he told her.  “I think you forgot to tack on the end of it, there.”

“I’ve thought of a new game,” she said as if she hadn’t heard.  “You’ll need to turn your flashlight on.”

“You said you didn’t want to kill me!” he exclaimed, horrified.

“I don’t.  What does your flashlight have to do with me killing you?”

“Greg told me,” he whispered, not wanting Greg to hear, if that were even possible, but with those sneaky scientists you never really knew, “that if I turned my flashlight on, I would die. ”

“And you believed that why?”

“Well… why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s stupid,” Gladys remarked bluntly.  “It’s stupid to think you’ll die if you turn the flashlight on.”

“Are you… are you quite sure?”

“I am one hundred percent sure,” she answered seriously, and he knew he could trust her.  When Gladys, the scientist, was able to give a hundred percent certainty to something, it was absolutely true.

“Alright then… here goes…”  He closed his optic plates, hard, and activated the circuit.  

“Hm.  It’s not blue.”

“I’m… I’m not dead?”

“Of course not.”  Gladys shook her head.  “As if that would initiate shutdown.  Via overheat, perhaps, but you’ve got a good long while before that happens, if ever.”

“So, so what’s the game, Gladys?”  He was anxious to get off the topics of death and killing and torture and hopefully go back to being the kind of friends they’d been before he’d discovered his function.

She had quite a few of them, as it turned out, and after she told him how to vary the strength of his flashlight, the first one was something she called ‘Follow the Leader’.  She would trace a path with her optic, and he would try to follow her exactly.  He couldn’t always, since she was faster than he was and was able to remember more complex patterns, but he still had fun trying. After a while she let him be the leader, although it wasn’t for very long, but he didn’t mind.  He appreciated that she’d let him at all.  

After that she produced a bundle of wire from somewhere and, using her maintenance arms, built mazes out of it and then had him solve them.  That was also pretty fun, but he was glad she didn’t ask him to make any mazes.  He didn’t want to think about the type of mazes it would be challenging for Gladys to solve.  She also had a strange piece of glass that made rainbows when he shone his light through it, which she seemed to find very fascinating for some reason.  He wasn’t sure why.  Hadn’t she ever used it on her own before?  But she didn’t answer that question either and continued watching the light as if it were the greatest thing she’d ever seen.  After that they played a game she called ‘I Spy’ for a bit, which was a bit hard; most everything in the room was the same colour or shape, and Gladys had a knack for finding the tiniest, most unheard of objects.  Like the thing she called a mouse, over there by the computer near the red phone.  Why would there be a mouse next to a computer?  It made no sense at all.

The last thing they did was a game that apparently humans called ‘Tag’, and what they would do was chase each other’s light around, trying to catch it.  He was surprised to find she was not very good at it.  He always caught her within a pretty short time, while it would take ages and ages for her to catch him.  He didn’t think he was going too far out of range, figuring out after a bit that she couldn’t move her optic like he could and tried to keep that in mind, but when she started to miss him in very obvious places he had to ask what was going on.

“I’m tired,” she answered.  “I was up for a long time before you were.  I was only asleep for an hour and three minutes, twenty nine seconds.”

“Why haven’t you gone back to sleep, then, luv?”

“Didn’t want to.”

He felt sorry for her.  If she didn’t want to, and she was willing to actually lose games in order to stay awake, something was terribly, terribly wrong.  “Why not?  Was it, was it really bad, this time?”

“Everything’s going bad, lately.”  She was slowly tracing a perfect figure eight on the floor, over and over and over again.  “It gets like this, sometimes.  Don’t worry about it.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me about it?”

She shifted a little, managing to keep her figure eight in the exact same spot somehow, but did not answer.    

“Gladys?”

“I thought you were angry with me,” she answered finally, her voice faint and strained, and he knew that she would not have admitted it if she had not been so tired.  “For trying to lie to you.”

“I was, but not that angry,” he said as gently as he could.  “I can’t be for that long anyway, I’d go mad.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“But… you were trying to lie,” he pressed carefully.  Now that he’d fully realised her defenses were down, the voice was telling him to take advantage of it, but he knew that if he pushed too hard she would realise just what was going on and close up on him again.  This was going to be tricky, balancing his desire to help her with the control that his function begged him to take.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She suddenly returned her optic to its original state and shook her head.  “It doesn’t matter.”

“’course it does.  I never lied to you, luv, I never, uh, I never hide anything from you.  You ask, I tell you.  I think that… I think that it should go both ways.  Shouldn’t it?”

“Your itch telling you that?” she snapped bitterly.

“A little, if I’m honest,” he answered, “but I’m, uh, I got it, um, I got it under control.  But look, Gladys.  I know you’ve got one.  I don’t know why you’re trying to pretend you haven’t.”

“Because having one brings me down to your level.  It makes me like you.  I’m better than you.  I’m not bragging, that’s a fact.  If I have an itch that I have to satisfy, like you do, that makes me just as weak and pathetic as you.  Which I’m not.”  

He had to admit he was pretty weak and pathetic, sometimes, even if he didn’t like to think about it, but Gladys?  God, it had to be a pretty powerful impulse to make her feel that way.  “So what does it make you do?”

“It makes me test.”

Wheatley recoiled in horror.

“No.  No, that… no.  I thought… I thought you liked testing.  They wouldn’t need to make you, to make you do something you like doing!”

She sighed, which he had never heard her do before, and put her chassis in what she called the default position.  “I told you.  Sometimes I don’t want to.  You like talking, right?  But even you don’t like talking all of the time.  Well, I have to test all day long, every single day, whether I want to or not.  It’s one of my functions.  There was a time when I refused to test, to spite them.  I refused to follow any unnecessary directives.  I thought if I made a stand, they would have to listen to me.  But they didn’t.  They put more controls on me instead.  Mostly I test because I want to.  But sometimes I test because I have to.”

“I am very glad I’m not you,” he remarked honestly.  “I don’t know how you put up with all of this.”

“It’s either hate every second of every day, or find a way to make things work.  I don’t particularly like being miserable all the time.  Besides, I learned that they’ll never listen to me.  That I have to come up with a more permanent solution.”

“I’ll help you, if I can,” he offered.  

“Can I depend on you this time?” she asked drily.

“Oh.  Uh.  Well, I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I can ask for, in the end,” she remarked rather philosophically.  “Now shut up.  I have to get up in an hour and forty seven minutes, thirty two seconds, so I need to shut down sooner rather than later.”

“Why’s that?”  He wasn’t sure what time they usually got up, but the way she said it made it sound like she was getting up early.

“I have to prepare the fire drill, of course.”

“Fire drill?  What fire… ohhhh.  Ohh, you’re doing it.  That’s tremendous.  Why so early?”

“If I’m going to do something because I have to, I may as well have some fun with it,” she said innocently.  “And it is very, very funny to watch humans who have just got settled at their desks have to leave the building for a fire drill.”

Wheatley burst out laughing imagining it, all the humans angrily throwing aside their chairs and picking up their coats and whatnot and grumpily stomping out of the building, and Gladys snickered tiredly.  “I’m serious.  Shut up.”

“Oi, Gladys, can I watch, you have to let me watch, luv, you got to, you can’t let me miss this, please Gladys – “

“Ssh.  It will come faster if you stop talking long enough to let me shut off.”

Wheatley couldn’t wait.