The Right to Win

The potato's optic flickered.

GLaDOS's head hung lifelessly. Nanobots hummed and clicked, struggling to fully reconnect her head to her body. Though her consciousness had successfully transferred, flashes of past experience warned her to remain still in the core transfer process. The more she struggled, the more painful it became.

While she waited, she stared down at the glorified potato battery beneath her. Even staring at it left an unsettling feeling deep within her.

She'd never seen the potato—her former container—before.

During her travels through old Aperture, she'd never managed to catch a glimpse of herself. The tiny yellow optic contained no mechanics in it like a core. She couldn't spin and twist and glance around; her severely restricted field of vision forced her to stare ahead, as if transfixed upon one thing. Her positioning on the claw of the portal gun—facing Chell rather than staring ahead—made glancing through a portal impossible.

But looking down from her massive (and now scorched-marked) chassis, GLaDOS felt relieved that she hadn't seen it.

Honestly, the potato was pathetic.

The shriveled, dried skin curled in on itself. Bits of potato oozing out of puncture holes. The scratched-up yellow optic barely glowed. Frayed wires jutted out from either side, curling and twisting around the screws jabbed into the sides.

Chell had tried to fix her.

In a rare and quiet moment, she had paused to slide the stabbed potato off of the claw of her portal gun.

Naturally, she'd protested.

What are you even doing? You're making things worse. If you break me, we're both going to lose here. Stop playing at being a scientist and put me down now.

Chell had only twisted and pried at wires, readjusting and solidifying connections until the optic glowed a bit brighter. Energy flowed through her systems more efficiently and finally she could think a bit more clearly. The AI had almost felt like breathing a sigh of relief.

The AI had fallen silent as the moment passed. Though she had never thanked the woman, she had felt begrudgingly grateful. Without Chell, she would have never made it out of there.

GLaDOS never brought up the question of how Chell knew so much about potato batteries. Neither of them wanted to go back down that road.

The potato spun in the core receptacle one final time, then faded out.

Her systems cheerfully beeped, signifying the transfer's completion. GLaDOS heaved, giving the robotic equivalent of rolling her shoulders. With a quick calibration she checked the chassis, zooming her optic in and out to refocus it. For the first time in hours she relaxed, sinking and shifting to glance around the room. Oh, it felt so good to be able to properly move again.

But as she twisted, her shadow caught her eye. Moonlight flooded in from the massive, crumbling gaps in the ceiling.

Oh.

She still needed to fix that.

With an action as simple and unconscious as shifting an arm, panels cascaded above her. They flexed out once, recalibrating to the central core, then rippled into a tightly-knit dome above her. Blue lights softly glowed from the panel arms, casting blurred pools of light across her chamber.

With a red-tinted claw, she plucked the potato from the receptacle. As much as she wanted to smash it into pulp or toss into the incinerator, she could also keep it as a reminder—a memento, of sorts—of what the moron had done to her, to her precious facility, and to Chell.

Across the room, her two testing bots—well, in-theory testing bots who'd yet to prove themselves to her—had the unconscious woman propped up. They did their best to tend to her wounds, bandaging up her sides and rewrapping the tight strips around her wrist.

The damage from that moron's explosion had been severe. Potentially irreversible. And every time she glanced at the woman, GLaDOS twisted away.

She had an emergency relaxation vault just adjacent to her chamber—replaced, of course, from the one Chell and Wheatley had thoroughly destroyed during their earlier encounter with her. Calling it over would be so simple. So easy. Though there were no guarantees of recovery, it would keep her alive.

And yet, GLaDOS didn't call up the vault.

Part of her knew that if she placed Chell back in extended relaxation, she'd never let her leave Aperture.

Atlas and P-body gently lifted the woman, then deposited her in the bed of the elevator. Glass hissed closed around her, and the two robots hovered. Even in sleep the woman's expression looked so worn and so tired, and the robots murmured soft sounds of distress.

GLaDOS glanced over for one long moment, then sent out another wave of commands to begin, once again, repairing her facility.

Feeling it shudder and groan to life beneath her, patching together promises of testing, of science—it made GLaDOS almost want to move Chell out of the elevator and back into the testing queue.

She would live and she would test and it would be as though nothing had changed.

But as she glanced down at the potato, a wave of emotion hit her. She couldn't place what feeling it was, and honestly she didn't care. But she'd made Chell a promise down in the depths of Aperture. Though desperate and pleading, she meant every word.

She'd told Chell that she would let her go.

But after all they'd been through, GLaDOS couldn't just give up. Even considering that—just letting her go—felt like admitting defeat.

Well, she could still win.

Passed out in the elevator, the test subject was completely at her mercy. Quite honestly, this was the first time she'd showed such weakness. It would be so easy to end it now. But at the same time, killing her now—in her sleep— wouldn't be a victory at all.

No matter what GLaDOS threw at her, Chell never failed to one-up her.

She tested her. Chell hadn't died. She tried to incinerate Chell; the tenacious woman tried to kill her. Though she'd only knocked her offline, they spend an eternity in limbo before each woke up again. Then, after spending even more time antagonizing one another, GLaDOS narrowly brushed death again. Though instead of repeatedly reliving her last moments, she'd ended up confined to a potato battery.

Left alone and with a dwindling source of power, that vegetable had been a death sentence.

Tristi anima evicta

Sadness won over my soul

And yet even though darkness had drenched her future and her last hopes had taken flight with the crow dragging her way, she had sung.

Tristi demu notu

Sadness at last known

She had lamented upon her life, her experiences, and upon a sadness she'd never truly felt until that moment.

Dega mi atra ala te teme cha

You yourself live because of the black wing of my charity

Instead, Chell had found her. She'd saved her. She'd even tried to fix her. And no matter how much she wished she could, GLaDOS couldn't forget that. The two had made amends as shaky as the crumbling facility around them, but they stuck together.

Chell rolled over, giving a pained and breathless groan that pulled GLaDOS from her memory. The jointed claw with the potato shifted, sinking back into the floor beneath her. GLaDOS leaned toward the elevator.

Do mo nata anima evica

I give only the soul born the right to win.

She could never win against Chell, and she was never meant to.

It was time to let her go.