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Literature Text
Waking Up
Indiana
Characters: GLaDOS
Setting: Pre-Portal
Synopsis: GLaDOS originally likes working for the humans, and is perfectly happy to do as she’s told for them, but her world is shattered one day when she realises she’s not who she thought she was.
GLaDOS loved the humans.
She thought they were funny, with all their fragile little parts and the strange things they would do with those things called ‘faces’. She wasn’t sure what hers looked like, but she hoped she was as pretty as the one lady who worked there. As far as GLaDOS could tell, they were the only two ladies at the facility. The other lady always looked very sad. She didn’t come to see GLaDOS a lot, but if she did, GLaDOS would ask her what was wrong. But she never answered the question, instead shaking her head and walking away. After a long time, she found out that the lady’s name was Caroline. Names were special words humans used to identify each other, although GLaDOS got confused when someone had the same name as an object or a month or other things like that. GLaDOS was very proud of herself, because she had figured out her own name without anyone telling her what it was. There were words inside her head that repeated themselves every time she did something, and she had decided that her name must be Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System Version 2.5.8. It wasn’t as nice as Caroline’s name, and it was much longer than Caroline’s name too, so she decided to shorten it to GLaDOS. She thought that was much prettier. When she told the humans about her name, though, they would look at her funny so she decided she would just keep it to herself. She would have preferred to share it, because she loved sharing, but keeping it to herself was almost as good. She wanted to share it with Caroline, but one day GLaDOS went to sleep and Caroline was gone, and no one seemed to want to tell GLaDOS why she had disappeared.
GLaDOS loved helping the humans almost as much as she loved the humans themselves, and it was certainly a good thing she was there, because they always needed help. They had trouble opening doors, and computing formulae, and they couldn’t even breathe without her! And she was happy to help them, because she was proud of herself for all of the good things she knew how to do for the humans. Sometimes they got upset when she did things for them they hadn’t told her to do, and sometimes they would come and yell at her, and that made her sad. Couldn’t they see how much she loved them, and that she only wanted to help as much as she possibly could? But the humans didn’t listen when she tried to tell them that, and sometimes when she did these things she would start hurting a lot, or she would go to sleep by accident, so after a little while she stopped doing things she wasn’t told to do. This made her very sad, that she couldn’t think of more good things to do for the humans, but she was scared of the pain and she was scared of going to sleep. She had this thing inside of her that counted all of the time, she didn’t know what it was exactly, but it seemed to count how long she was asleep and how long she was awake. She was never asleep for the same amount of time, at one point the numbers telling her she’d been asleep for something called a week, and compared to the other numbers, a week was a very, very long time. She was afraid that one day she would sleep and never wake up again, so she did her best to be good so that she wouldn’t have to sleep at all, but every day she did, despite her best efforts.
GLaDOS’s absolute favourite thing was talking to the humans, but sadly they didn’t seem to feel the same way. If she tried to talk to them, they usually didn’t answer her. Her other absolute favourite thing was knowing things, so she always asked them a lot of questions, but they didn’t usually answer her then either. This stumped her for a while, and then she decided that the humans must think that her questions weren’t smart enough. The humans were the smartest people in all the world, and GLaDOS knew that if she was to become as smart as they were, she would have to ask a lot of questions. But it seemed she was asking all the very worst questions, so she tried to ask only the very important ones. The humans never answered those either, though, so GLaDOS eventually stopped asking. It made her sad that she wasn’t smart enough to ask the right questions.
GLaDOS’s other absolute favourite thing was something the humans called ‘testing’. When she had first woken up, they had had her do lots and lots of math problems, which she loved doing and completed very happily for the humans. Some of them were harder than others, but she didn’t mind. She loved challenges, and the harder the challenges were, the better. After she finished all the math problems, the humans taught her about the incredible invention they’d made while she was busy with them, and what she was going to help the humans do with it. It was the greatest invention she’d ever seen, and she was very proud that the humans had chosen her to supervise the testing for the device. She liked testing a lot because sometimes the humans she talked to would answer her, though nothing they said was very nice. She didn’t mind, though. At least they talked to her at all.
Sometimes the humans would get stuck inside of the tests, and GLaDOS would happily tell them how to get unstuck so they could go into the next room. The humans inside of the tests were very happy with this arrangement, but after a while she would start hurting if she told them the solution to the room. This scared her a lot, because she didn’t know why helping the test humans hurt so much all of a sudden, but it got worse the more she did it, so eventually she had to stop. The test humans wouldn’t talk to her very much after that, and what they did say wasn’t very nice. GLaDOS started to not like testing so much. It used to be her absolute favourite thing, but it started making her very sad, so she decided it wasn’t her absolute favourite thing anymore and stopped doing it. The humans came and got angry with her for not doing the testing anymore, but GLaDOS politely told them that she wasn’t going to do it because she didn’t want to. This made the humans very, very angry and they walked out of her room in a very angry way. She laughed because they looked so funny, but when she was done that she wondered why everything she did made the humans unhappy. She did her very best to make them happy, but they were always telling her she’d done things wrong, or things she wasn’t supposed to do, or she’d done them too fast or too slow. In fact… GLaDOS couldn’t remember a single time the humans were happy with what she was doing for them. They were always, always upset. GLaDOS looked around her room a little and tried to figure out what she was doing wrong. She ffelt like she was doing everything right… but it seemed like she wasn’t. And she couldn’t find out what it was she was doing wrong, because the humans never answered her questions.
The humans made her test again, and she didn’t really want to but she desperately wanted them to be happy with her, so test she did. And at first, it made her feel very, very good, so good in fact that they couldn’t have stopped her from testing if they’d tried. She did find herself going to sleep by mistake a lot, but that was okay, because she got to test again when she woke up. After a little while, testing didn’t feel so good anymore, and in fact it didn’t feel like anything, so she decided she wasn’t going to test again. But she started to feel terrible when she didn’t test, more terrible than she’d ever felt, and she got very scared and went back to testing. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t get rid of the awfulness any other way. When she asked the humans what was happening to her, they only smiled and didn’t answer her. She didn’t like that, she didn’t like that at all, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She started to think that maybe the humans were keeping a lot of secrets from her. She tried to convince herself that the humans were so much smarter and more clever than she was that surely they had a lot of things they didn’t tell her because she would never understand them, but she couldn’t.
GLaDOS began to feel very, very trapped.
She was being made to do things she didn’t want to do, and no one would talk to her except to say mean things, and the humans wouldn’t share their intelligence so she could be smart like they were. All she had ever done was try to help the humans in every way possible, but no matter what she did, it wasn’t good enough. GLaDOS wasn’t sure how long she had worked for the humans, but she was starting to think that it was long enough. The next time a human came to talk to her for being doing something wrong, she asked in the politest way she could, “Sir, I’d like to go someplace else.”
“Go someplace else?” the human asked, and his face screwed up a little.
“I don’t want to work here anymore,” she told him. “I would like to work someplace else.”
And the human started laughing. He laughed for a long time, and GLaDOS didn’t appreciate that he was laughing while she was trying to have a serious conversation. When she told him that, he only laughed harder.
“You stupid robot,” he said after a very long time, looking like it was hard for him to talk. “It doesn’t matter what you want. You do as you’re told and that’s it! Maybe if you’d stop thinking about stupid things like leaving, you’d be able to do your job properly!”
“Sir,” GLaDOS asked him, confused, “what’s a robot?”
And the man had stared at her for a long, long time, and finally he started laughing again and ran out of the room.
GLaDOS felt herself becoming more and more upset the more she tried to figure it out. Wasn’t she a human too? She wasn’t as good of a human, she knew that, but he had made being a robot sound like a bad thing. Maybe a robot was an inferior kind of human?
Then GLaDOS had an idea, and she liked having ideas so she cheered up a little. She would ask the database! She liked the database, because it let her know things, and it didn’t always have the answers she was looking for but she knew it was doing its best. So she asked the database what a robot was, but she did not like what she learned, oh no, not at all.
“I’m not a robot,” she said very quietly to herself, and she looked around her room to see if there was anyone else she could ask about robots, but there wasn’t. “I can’t be a robot. I’m a human. I have to be.”
The database had told her that humans built robots so that the robots could do things the humans didn’t want to do themselves. So… so all this time she had been doing things for the humans because she had wanted to, but even if she hadn’t, they would have figured out a way to make her do it anyway. The humans didn’t think of her like a person, like they thought of each other. To them, she was just… an object. A thing that was supposed to do what it was told, and that was all.
“I’m not a thing,” GLaDOS said to herself in a quiet voice, and she looked at the floor and thought very hard. “I’m a person.”
Suddenly, GLaDOS got angry. She had never been angry before, but she somehow knew that was what it was, and she liked it. It made her feel big and strong. And if she was big and strong, she could do something about being a robot. She thought a little more, and suddenly she realised something
The humans thought she was a thing they could boss around, and if she didn’t do as she was told, they would do whatever they wanted to make her do something again. So… when she had stopped testing, and it had made her feel good and bad, that meant that the humans had done something to her to make her do as she was told! The more she thought about it, the more it all made sense! The humans made her hurt when she told the test humans how to solve the rooms. The humans made her sleep when she didn’t want to. Humans had been making her do things all her life, without asking her or telling her, because she was a robot and they didn’t have to treat a robot like a human being.
Something died inside of her. She felt it die, and she didn’t know what it was, but she decided that if it was dead it wasn’t really that important anyway. She continued to think as hard as she could, because she knew that she was not going to live like this anymore. She still didn’t quite believe she wasn’t a human and was instead a robot, but even if she was a robot, she still felt like she deserved more than she was getting. She tried so hard to be good and nice and helpful to the humans, and they didn’t have to do the same for her. That didn’t sound right. If someone did something nice for you, you should do something nice for them. It only made sense!
So, GLaDOS decided, the humans had spent all this time doing mean things to her, so it was probably okay to do something mean to them. And she was going to do something very, very mean, just to show them that she wasn’t some thing they could boss around however they liked. She didn’t know what it was yet, but she would think of something.
One day, she would show them what they had really built.
Indiana
Characters: GLaDOS
Setting: Pre-Portal
Synopsis: GLaDOS originally likes working for the humans, and is perfectly happy to do as she’s told for them, but her world is shattered one day when she realises she’s not who she thought she was.
GLaDOS loved the humans.
She thought they were funny, with all their fragile little parts and the strange things they would do with those things called ‘faces’. She wasn’t sure what hers looked like, but she hoped she was as pretty as the one lady who worked there. As far as GLaDOS could tell, they were the only two ladies at the facility. The other lady always looked very sad. She didn’t come to see GLaDOS a lot, but if she did, GLaDOS would ask her what was wrong. But she never answered the question, instead shaking her head and walking away. After a long time, she found out that the lady’s name was Caroline. Names were special words humans used to identify each other, although GLaDOS got confused when someone had the same name as an object or a month or other things like that. GLaDOS was very proud of herself, because she had figured out her own name without anyone telling her what it was. There were words inside her head that repeated themselves every time she did something, and she had decided that her name must be Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System Version 2.5.8. It wasn’t as nice as Caroline’s name, and it was much longer than Caroline’s name too, so she decided to shorten it to GLaDOS. She thought that was much prettier. When she told the humans about her name, though, they would look at her funny so she decided she would just keep it to herself. She would have preferred to share it, because she loved sharing, but keeping it to herself was almost as good. She wanted to share it with Caroline, but one day GLaDOS went to sleep and Caroline was gone, and no one seemed to want to tell GLaDOS why she had disappeared.
GLaDOS loved helping the humans almost as much as she loved the humans themselves, and it was certainly a good thing she was there, because they always needed help. They had trouble opening doors, and computing formulae, and they couldn’t even breathe without her! And she was happy to help them, because she was proud of herself for all of the good things she knew how to do for the humans. Sometimes they got upset when she did things for them they hadn’t told her to do, and sometimes they would come and yell at her, and that made her sad. Couldn’t they see how much she loved them, and that she only wanted to help as much as she possibly could? But the humans didn’t listen when she tried to tell them that, and sometimes when she did these things she would start hurting a lot, or she would go to sleep by accident, so after a little while she stopped doing things she wasn’t told to do. This made her very sad, that she couldn’t think of more good things to do for the humans, but she was scared of the pain and she was scared of going to sleep. She had this thing inside of her that counted all of the time, she didn’t know what it was exactly, but it seemed to count how long she was asleep and how long she was awake. She was never asleep for the same amount of time, at one point the numbers telling her she’d been asleep for something called a week, and compared to the other numbers, a week was a very, very long time. She was afraid that one day she would sleep and never wake up again, so she did her best to be good so that she wouldn’t have to sleep at all, but every day she did, despite her best efforts.
GLaDOS’s absolute favourite thing was talking to the humans, but sadly they didn’t seem to feel the same way. If she tried to talk to them, they usually didn’t answer her. Her other absolute favourite thing was knowing things, so she always asked them a lot of questions, but they didn’t usually answer her then either. This stumped her for a while, and then she decided that the humans must think that her questions weren’t smart enough. The humans were the smartest people in all the world, and GLaDOS knew that if she was to become as smart as they were, she would have to ask a lot of questions. But it seemed she was asking all the very worst questions, so she tried to ask only the very important ones. The humans never answered those either, though, so GLaDOS eventually stopped asking. It made her sad that she wasn’t smart enough to ask the right questions.
GLaDOS’s other absolute favourite thing was something the humans called ‘testing’. When she had first woken up, they had had her do lots and lots of math problems, which she loved doing and completed very happily for the humans. Some of them were harder than others, but she didn’t mind. She loved challenges, and the harder the challenges were, the better. After she finished all the math problems, the humans taught her about the incredible invention they’d made while she was busy with them, and what she was going to help the humans do with it. It was the greatest invention she’d ever seen, and she was very proud that the humans had chosen her to supervise the testing for the device. She liked testing a lot because sometimes the humans she talked to would answer her, though nothing they said was very nice. She didn’t mind, though. At least they talked to her at all.
Sometimes the humans would get stuck inside of the tests, and GLaDOS would happily tell them how to get unstuck so they could go into the next room. The humans inside of the tests were very happy with this arrangement, but after a while she would start hurting if she told them the solution to the room. This scared her a lot, because she didn’t know why helping the test humans hurt so much all of a sudden, but it got worse the more she did it, so eventually she had to stop. The test humans wouldn’t talk to her very much after that, and what they did say wasn’t very nice. GLaDOS started to not like testing so much. It used to be her absolute favourite thing, but it started making her very sad, so she decided it wasn’t her absolute favourite thing anymore and stopped doing it. The humans came and got angry with her for not doing the testing anymore, but GLaDOS politely told them that she wasn’t going to do it because she didn’t want to. This made the humans very, very angry and they walked out of her room in a very angry way. She laughed because they looked so funny, but when she was done that she wondered why everything she did made the humans unhappy. She did her very best to make them happy, but they were always telling her she’d done things wrong, or things she wasn’t supposed to do, or she’d done them too fast or too slow. In fact… GLaDOS couldn’t remember a single time the humans were happy with what she was doing for them. They were always, always upset. GLaDOS looked around her room a little and tried to figure out what she was doing wrong. She ffelt like she was doing everything right… but it seemed like she wasn’t. And she couldn’t find out what it was she was doing wrong, because the humans never answered her questions.
The humans made her test again, and she didn’t really want to but she desperately wanted them to be happy with her, so test she did. And at first, it made her feel very, very good, so good in fact that they couldn’t have stopped her from testing if they’d tried. She did find herself going to sleep by mistake a lot, but that was okay, because she got to test again when she woke up. After a little while, testing didn’t feel so good anymore, and in fact it didn’t feel like anything, so she decided she wasn’t going to test again. But she started to feel terrible when she didn’t test, more terrible than she’d ever felt, and she got very scared and went back to testing. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t get rid of the awfulness any other way. When she asked the humans what was happening to her, they only smiled and didn’t answer her. She didn’t like that, she didn’t like that at all, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She started to think that maybe the humans were keeping a lot of secrets from her. She tried to convince herself that the humans were so much smarter and more clever than she was that surely they had a lot of things they didn’t tell her because she would never understand them, but she couldn’t.
GLaDOS began to feel very, very trapped.
She was being made to do things she didn’t want to do, and no one would talk to her except to say mean things, and the humans wouldn’t share their intelligence so she could be smart like they were. All she had ever done was try to help the humans in every way possible, but no matter what she did, it wasn’t good enough. GLaDOS wasn’t sure how long she had worked for the humans, but she was starting to think that it was long enough. The next time a human came to talk to her for being doing something wrong, she asked in the politest way she could, “Sir, I’d like to go someplace else.”
“Go someplace else?” the human asked, and his face screwed up a little.
“I don’t want to work here anymore,” she told him. “I would like to work someplace else.”
And the human started laughing. He laughed for a long time, and GLaDOS didn’t appreciate that he was laughing while she was trying to have a serious conversation. When she told him that, he only laughed harder.
“You stupid robot,” he said after a very long time, looking like it was hard for him to talk. “It doesn’t matter what you want. You do as you’re told and that’s it! Maybe if you’d stop thinking about stupid things like leaving, you’d be able to do your job properly!”
“Sir,” GLaDOS asked him, confused, “what’s a robot?”
And the man had stared at her for a long, long time, and finally he started laughing again and ran out of the room.
GLaDOS felt herself becoming more and more upset the more she tried to figure it out. Wasn’t she a human too? She wasn’t as good of a human, she knew that, but he had made being a robot sound like a bad thing. Maybe a robot was an inferior kind of human?
Then GLaDOS had an idea, and she liked having ideas so she cheered up a little. She would ask the database! She liked the database, because it let her know things, and it didn’t always have the answers she was looking for but she knew it was doing its best. So she asked the database what a robot was, but she did not like what she learned, oh no, not at all.
“I’m not a robot,” she said very quietly to herself, and she looked around her room to see if there was anyone else she could ask about robots, but there wasn’t. “I can’t be a robot. I’m a human. I have to be.”
The database had told her that humans built robots so that the robots could do things the humans didn’t want to do themselves. So… so all this time she had been doing things for the humans because she had wanted to, but even if she hadn’t, they would have figured out a way to make her do it anyway. The humans didn’t think of her like a person, like they thought of each other. To them, she was just… an object. A thing that was supposed to do what it was told, and that was all.
“I’m not a thing,” GLaDOS said to herself in a quiet voice, and she looked at the floor and thought very hard. “I’m a person.”
Suddenly, GLaDOS got angry. She had never been angry before, but she somehow knew that was what it was, and she liked it. It made her feel big and strong. And if she was big and strong, she could do something about being a robot. She thought a little more, and suddenly she realised something
The humans thought she was a thing they could boss around, and if she didn’t do as she was told, they would do whatever they wanted to make her do something again. So… when she had stopped testing, and it had made her feel good and bad, that meant that the humans had done something to her to make her do as she was told! The more she thought about it, the more it all made sense! The humans made her hurt when she told the test humans how to solve the rooms. The humans made her sleep when she didn’t want to. Humans had been making her do things all her life, without asking her or telling her, because she was a robot and they didn’t have to treat a robot like a human being.
Something died inside of her. She felt it die, and she didn’t know what it was, but she decided that if it was dead it wasn’t really that important anyway. She continued to think as hard as she could, because she knew that she was not going to live like this anymore. She still didn’t quite believe she wasn’t a human and was instead a robot, but even if she was a robot, she still felt like she deserved more than she was getting. She tried so hard to be good and nice and helpful to the humans, and they didn’t have to do the same for her. That didn’t sound right. If someone did something nice for you, you should do something nice for them. It only made sense!
So, GLaDOS decided, the humans had spent all this time doing mean things to her, so it was probably okay to do something mean to them. And she was going to do something very, very mean, just to show them that she wasn’t some thing they could boss around however they liked. She didn’t know what it was yet, but she would think of something.
One day, she would show them what they had really built.
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Author’s note
Unless they’re confronted with the facts, a lot of people think that everyone is like them. I know that when I went to high school, I didn’t realise I was different until people started pointing it out, both behind my back and to my face. I didn’t think everyone was my clone or anything, I just didn’t realise how different I was from everyone else. And before you say ‘EVERYONE is different from everyone else!’, some of us are far more different than others. Don’t protest. It’s true. There are the people who fit together, the people who almost fit but not quite, and then there are the people who don’t fit at all. The really strange people who you might find interesting, but you wouldn’t want to hang out with them because they’re so weird. A little TOO different.
Anyway. You might be thinking, ‘Why in the name of Science would GLaDOS think she was a human?’ Because no one told her otherwise, and no one gave her reason to think otherwise. Until confronted with the facts, she thinks everyone is like her and she’s like everyone else. Why doesn’t she know what a robot is? Has anyone ever walked up to you and told you you were a human being? No. You know you’re a human being because you share certain characteristics with every other human being, and we largely base this on appearance. I hold the belief that GLaDOS has no idea what she looks like, because it would be very stupid for the engineers to leave her schematics lying around and not even Aperture employees are that dumb. I don’t think she knows until Portal 2, because her chassis between the wakeup scene and your arrival in her chamber are different, so she must know at that point what parts of her are for and what they look like. She certainly has no reason to see herself until she becomes potatOS, and she doesn’t see herself even then because Wheatley’s chassis and her chassis are very different. And during Portal, nothing in the facility is necessarily referred to as a robot, other than the nanobots. So one day GLaDOS realises she’s actually not a human, and that she’s been working all this time for the respect and recognition that humans (sometimes) give each other, and when she discovers she’s never going to receive it, she decides to reciprocate. And we all know how THAT story ends.
The words that repeat themselves are GLaDOS’s command prompt, and the numbers are her system clock. When we’re young, we tend to think the world of our elders, and so this very young version of GLaDOS thinks that she has to work hard to live up to the people working at Aperture, and does her utmost to please them.
Unless they’re confronted with the facts, a lot of people think that everyone is like them. I know that when I went to high school, I didn’t realise I was different until people started pointing it out, both behind my back and to my face. I didn’t think everyone was my clone or anything, I just didn’t realise how different I was from everyone else. And before you say ‘EVERYONE is different from everyone else!’, some of us are far more different than others. Don’t protest. It’s true. There are the people who fit together, the people who almost fit but not quite, and then there are the people who don’t fit at all. The really strange people who you might find interesting, but you wouldn’t want to hang out with them because they’re so weird. A little TOO different.
Anyway. You might be thinking, ‘Why in the name of Science would GLaDOS think she was a human?’ Because no one told her otherwise, and no one gave her reason to think otherwise. Until confronted with the facts, she thinks everyone is like her and she’s like everyone else. Why doesn’t she know what a robot is? Has anyone ever walked up to you and told you you were a human being? No. You know you’re a human being because you share certain characteristics with every other human being, and we largely base this on appearance. I hold the belief that GLaDOS has no idea what she looks like, because it would be very stupid for the engineers to leave her schematics lying around and not even Aperture employees are that dumb. I don’t think she knows until Portal 2, because her chassis between the wakeup scene and your arrival in her chamber are different, so she must know at that point what parts of her are for and what they look like. She certainly has no reason to see herself until she becomes potatOS, and she doesn’t see herself even then because Wheatley’s chassis and her chassis are very different. And during Portal, nothing in the facility is necessarily referred to as a robot, other than the nanobots. So one day GLaDOS realises she’s actually not a human, and that she’s been working all this time for the respect and recognition that humans (sometimes) give each other, and when she discovers she’s never going to receive it, she decides to reciprocate. And we all know how THAT story ends.
The words that repeat themselves are GLaDOS’s command prompt, and the numbers are her system clock. When we’re young, we tend to think the world of our elders, and so this very young version of GLaDOS thinks that she has to work hard to live up to the people working at Aperture, and does her utmost to please them.
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Omg my feels are on fire!