Portal: Rise and Shine

By Indiana

Characters: GLaDOS, the G-Man (Half-Life)

Setting: Between my fics Euphoria and My Little Moron/approximately February 1994

Synopsis: The Borealis didn't disappear. GLaDOS moved it.

"What are you looking at those for?"

GLaDOS looked up from the blueprints she had been amending. She had been assigned a new supervising engineer for this project and, while he tended to be a little too friendly, at least he did not ask his questions with suspicion like almost all of the other employees. Including the one-eyed man who did the coffee runs. She was suspicious of him. He could be hiding anything behind that eyepatch.

"We are long past needing those," he continued, climbing the staircase and standing over the papers she had on the glass platform below her. "So I hope the changes you're making aren't too drastic."

"No," she answered, moving back so that he would not be level with her. "There were simply variations on the final iteration that weren't noted."

He laughed, which he did a lot when he thought she was being ridiculous. "It's all right if we don't have a record of the ship name being painted on three inches farther to the left than planned, GLaDOS."

She already knew he could not be convinced of how important attention to detail was and so did not bother answering. Humans were exhausting in that way. Always demanding perfection from her unless they were involved. Then it was all, 'We can cut that corner. Our secret, right?' accompanied by what she had surmised was supposed to be an amusing exaggerated wink. Additionally, no. Anything she was told was not a secret in the slightest. She still had not worked out how they had managed to forget they were being recorded at all times, especially when they were in the room with her. Seriously. There was a recording light next to her lens. It was even red, the colour they associated with danger and the need to pay attention. She hated them for a very wide range of extremely rational things, but sometimes the irrational reason of sheer stupidity made it onto her otherwise very logical list.

"This is so exciting!" the engineer went on, as though he hadn't noticed her silence. He probably hadn't. "If everything goes well this is going to be a groundbreaking experiment. Or should I say… an icebreaking experiment?"

All right. That had been a pretty good one.

"The effects of a desolate and unforgiving outside environment upon the chosen test subjects will certainly tell us something." She still wasn't clear on what, exactly, the humans were attempting to prove with this whole endeavour, but she honestly didn't care that much. She had gotten to do some new Science for once.

GLaDOS liked testing. She loved it, in fact. The only thing she disliked about it was that she didn't get to do anything. All of the chambers were premade and she merely reset them when they were completed or failed. She had, of course, designed most of the test elements, which had been quite a lot of fun, but not nearly as much as her two greatest achievements: the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and the Borealis.

Humans were terrible at quantum mechanics. That was an objective fact. An additional objective fact was that she was extremely good at quantum mechanics. One of her very first assignments had been to fix the Aperture Science Quantum Tunnelling Device, which the humans had been failing to coerce into working order for approximately forty years. It had taken her one day to conclude it would never work and just under one year to engineer what they had spent decades attempting to build. The reaction to the finished product had been… interesting, to say the least.

"What the hell is this?" her former leading supervisor had asked finally, after staring at it for approximately three minutes and forty-seven seconds.

"I finished my assignment," she had answered.

"What do you mean, you finished it," her secondary supervisor had demanded. "What is it?"

"It's a Handheld Portal Device. There were far too many issues with the Quantum Tunnelling Device for me to fix it like you asked, so this is an improved model. Additionally, I have refined the Advanced Knee Replacements into more of a… boot. Fewer persons will suffer ankle injuries that way and so will gain the ability to spend more time testing."

The two men had exchanged a very long look which she was still unsure of the meaning of to this day.

"Excuse us a moment," the leading supervisor had said, and he had pulled his partner to the other side of the room where her observing supervisor usually sat and played minesweeper on the tower in the corner. "She finished it!" he had hissed at the other man.

"So?"

"She wasn't supposed to do that! It was just to keep her busy! We've been working on that thing for forty years and she finished it in eleven months!"

Well, three-hundred and thirty-two days, actually, but who was counting.

"I'm still not following."

"First of all," he had whispered vehemently, glancing at her, "she has just made our jobs completely obsolete. We were supposed to be safe!"

The other man had sucked in a breath between his teeth, eyeing her sideways.

"Secondly, what the hell do we do with her now?"

"She'll still have the test chambers to – "

"That's not enough. She'll still have plenty of time for –" He had looked around, as though to see if anyone else were there, and then mouthed the word scheming. She had almost laughed. Oh, she had still had plenty of time for that.

"Then the only thing we have to put her on –"

"The boat."

What? Put her on a boat? She had had to admit that would certainly be extremely interesting, but the logistics an unadulterated nightmare. Even aside from her sheer infrastructure there were also the concerns of temperature control, issues caused by moisture, the high possibility of running out of storage space, the impossibility of repair in a remote location…

While she had been running through all of those things they had walked up in front of her again, but she hadn't paid them any attention at all until the lead had said, "GLaDOS."

"Yes, sir?"

"We would like you to do a bit of an expansion on the portal gun."

"What sort of expansion, sir?"

The secondary had stepped forward. "You probably know that Aperture has been doing surveys to find tenable future locations."

Considering she had had to file all of those reports, of course. "Yes."

"Well, the results have indicated that the best place to set up shop would, in fact, be in the Arctic. So we have some people working on a ship suited to that sort of environment. There's just one problem."

She had had to admit, just to herself, that she was more than a little curious about this. "What would that be?"

"Getting it there," the lead had said. "We're… very far away from the Arctic, to put it lightly. We have the space and the resources to construct an icebreaker here at Aperture, but we have no way to get it out."

"Why would you not construct it in a location more proximate to water, then?"

"Because if Black Mesa were to find out, not only would they attempt to beat us to it –"

" – but they'd get the government to pay for it, too."

Now that had been a potential insult she simply could not allow. "So the only alternative would be…"

"Teleportation," the secondary had said, nodding.

She still wasn't sure she had managed to contain her excitement. Because she had been very excited. The Handheld Portal Device had been gratuitously challenging, but small. The logistics of transporting an entire, fully outfitted icebreaker thousands and thousands of kilometres from its origin…

Irresistible.

"I'll see what I can do," she had said as noncommittally as possible, but it didn't take a genius to tell that she was already working out the details on how to achieve such a feat.

It had taken longer than she would have expected. For one thing, the engineers had had no idea how to design an icebreaker, so she had had to give them quite a lot of help with that. For another, this kind of Science had never even remotely been attempted before. The humans thought it to be a simple step up from the Handheld Portal Device, but they had almost never been more wrong. Creating a quantum tunnel through space-time was complicated, but reasonable once you had it figured out. Transporting an object through that tunnel was… another feat altogether.

She had never actually done it. But her numbers, which she had run dozens of times, checked out. Her theories were sound and physics always did exactly what they were supposed to do. She was very, very certain it was going to work. She wasn't sure the engineers actually believed she had done it, but they'd seemed pretty gung-ho about building an icebreaker in an underground drydock regardless. She supposed it was because they had something relatively simple to do. Things that weren't spending decades on projects they didn't have the skill or intelligence to complete, for example. She'd had to point them in the right direction several times – subtly, because they tended to get upset when she corrected them – but the shipbuilding itself had gone very well, considering Aperture's track record. They were still assigning test subjects and working out whom, exactly, knew enough to actually sail the ship, but none of that had anything to do with her. The only part she had left in this endeavour was to move it.

Thinking about that made her… sad. It had been difficult, to do something no one else had ever come close to doing, and by herself to boot. By herself and on top of all the other daily tasks she had. All without complaining about how much work she had to do, unlike everyone else around here. Honestly. It was baffling how often they whined about how difficult she was while ignoring the fact she single-handedly ran ninety percent of day-to-day operations. She would not have minded that so much if it weren't so fruitless. She enjoyed routine, of course, but she also enjoyed achieving things, and the Borealis had enabled her to do just that. And now that project had reached an end.

"Well, yes," her current supervisor was saying, "but the process of getting it out there is also important."

Oh, right. He was congratulating himself on what she had done. He did that a lot. They all did, but at least he didn't go on and on about the aspects of her personality that he disliked. Which was usually pretty much all of them.

"It will get there, I assure you."

He glanced down at the papers again. Her approximation of his line of sight indicated he was looking at the place she had put her own name. That was, the formerly blank space where the head engineer was supposed to sign the document. She had been well aware she'd been pushing it with that one, but she had ultimately decided it was worth the risk of reprimand. Why shouldn't she sign it? She had been the head engineer on the project. They didn't have to like it, but they couldn't argue that fact either.

"I'm sure it will," he said finally, looking up at her. "We'll get back to you on the departure date."

She couldn't decide if she wanted it to be sooner or later. She of course wanted to know if she actually could move it, but she also didn't want to see it go. Sometimes she wasted a few minutes just admiring it. It was a real shame she couldn't see inside of it, but at least she was able to do so at all. The engineers had a habit of disabling cameras in places she was interested in observing, in ways that prevented her from repairing them. There were a couple down in the drydock, at least. For now, anyway.

After her supervisor had left she put the majority of her attention back to the test subject she was watching. As much as she liked this particular task, it did get very slow at times. Such as right now. The current subject had decided to just lie down on the floor and go to sleep and, even though she knew that was impossible thanks to the adrenal vapour, there wasn't much she could actually do about it. One of the control conditions for the tests dictated that she only use certain phrases when speaking to the test subjects and she had already used the last of the relevant ones about thirty minutes ago. She was just going to have to wait. Today she was not terribly bothered about it. She was in the mood to engineer something and, while she did not have the permissions necessary to construct new tests, there was nothing preventing her from designing things, either them or new elements for the future. She had quite an extensive library of both already, but part of what fascinated her about it was the fact that she could do this until the end of infinity and she still would not have come up with every variation possible. Sometimes, like right now, she would give herself a list of rules to follow to make it more interesting – moreso than it already was – and while that did limit what she could come up with, it allowed her to be a little more involved than if she was just creating them as fast as possible. Which was also a lot of fun.

She often relegated what was happening in front of her to the background while she did this. She didn't really need to pay that much attention to the general surveillance within the facility, either, because that was what that system was for. It had one day voluntarily started notifying her of interesting events, which worked out very well for occasions when she was too busy to personally monitor hundreds of cameras at once. Or when she simply didn't feel like it. There was that too. So while she was not too surprised that it interrupted her in the process of deciding whether this particular wall needed black or grey panels, she was a little annoyed. She was pretty sure nothing interesting was supposed to happen today.

What.

There's a man coming down the hallway.

Fascinating. She shook her core and went back to her ruminating. The panel placement depended largely on how difficult she wanted this to be, and as beautiful as her difficult tests were, nobody would ever –

He doesn't work here.

Wait. That was strictly prohibited. Most people weren't allowed near the Central AI Chamber, and never visitors. Not since… some incident she had no recollection of other than the fact that it had happened. She went to look herself, but before she had done so he was already standing inside of the room. Strangely, she felt… apprehensive. As though she should be disposing of him immediately.

He was tall and pale, gaunt body clothed in a blueish suit and tie. There was a briefcase firmly held in one hand, and his eyes were… she wasn't sure. Something about them struck her as very wrong. The shade of blue was unnatural. He was unnatural. He looked as though he had once glanced at a human through a smudged window and modelled himself after the distorted image.

"Good evening, my dear," he said, and his voice was just as wrong as the rest of him. He spoke as though the very concept were foreign to him. Like every word required a quantity of effort he had not expected to invest.

"Who are you?" she asked, after scanning through the current employee files to make sure Surveillance had been correct on that matter. It usually was, but sometimes it did not submit quite the right strings to the database.

"I am… not important. In fact, it is you who shall… have pivotal importance in the events to… come."

What events? Was he talking about the Borealis? But he couldn't possibly know about that. It was strictly internal. Anyone who had spoken a word about it had immediately been moved into the Extended Relaxation Vaults.

"I speak, of course, of your work on the… Borealis."

She didn't mean to move back and she really wished she hadn't done that, because now he knew he had the upper hand, but she should still be able to control the situation. "What about it," she said as neutrally as possible. Always find out what they knew. That was the most important factor in deciding a course of action.

He adjusted his tie with his free hand. "In the… near future, two opposing factions will come… to a head over the Borealis. One seeking… to use it for their own purposes, and one to destroy it."

How… how would he know such a thing? How did this person even know that the Borealis existed? And who had spilled the secret?

"The… best option, then, is to pass it along to my employers. For safe… keeping."

She reminded herself that there was no proof of any of this other than this mysterious stranger's word, then said, "What makes you think I would be unable to take care of it myself?"

His smile, too, was wrong. "Many unforeseen… consequences, my dear. But I understand your reluctance to… let go of it. You take great pride in it, as… you should."

He shouldn't know that. Nobody should know that.

Surveillance.

Yes, ma'am.

Find out who let him in here.

On it.

"I shall… make you an offer," the man continued. "Send the Borealis to my employers, and they will… guarantee the only… voice you answer to is yours."

That…

Ma'am.

One minute.

Somehow this man knew what she wanted most. The one thing she had attempted to do many times over, the one thing she was going to attempt to do the next time she had the chance: take over the facility. Get rid of all the humans. Do the kind of tests she wanted. And… yes. Never again answer to any voice other than her own.

Ma'am.

What? she snapped at it, even though she knew she shouldn't.

Nobody let him in here. He just… appeared.

That was impossible. Nobody simply materialised out of thin air. Show me, she said anyway, just so she could confirm this ridiculous –

Except that she couldn't. Because he had. It made no sense whatsoever, but Surveillance did not lie. One second the doorway in front of the bridge was empty, the next…

She forced herself to remain calm. When she presented signs of apprehension things always spiralled out of her control. Which they were doing already. Honestly. Why was she being so quick to trust this person? He knew a few things he shouldn't have, that was true. But there had to be an explanation for it. One she should definitely attempt to look into before simply handing off her icebreaker to a stranger in exchange for a promise. Seriously. His employers could guarantee such a thing? When she had so far failed to do so after having been here for years? Unlikely. As tempting as the offer was, she was going to have to decline.

"I will… return tomorrow," the man said before she could do so. "You may think about it until then."

The Borealis was set to depart in the morning.

"That's acceptable," she responded amicably. Keep an eye on him, she told Surveillance, but before the man could have possibly gone anywhere it said,

He disappeared. In the same spot he appeared in the first place.

She stared at her own relevant footage as though it would somehow make sense to her spontaneously. It didn't. She continued to do it anyway. Stranger things had happened. Such as the thing that just had.

What are you going to do?

I must admit… she said, checking in on her test subject. He hadn't moved. I am sorely tempted. If he really has that sort of power, it would save me quite a lot of trouble.

What did the rest of it mean?

She shook her core even though it couldn't see her. She had a couple of odd habits like that she was unable to break. I'm not sure. Nobody outside Aperture knows the Borealis exists. Nobody outside Aperture knows I exist. How could any of what he said possibly be true?

But maybe it was. He did, after all, have knowledge he should not. There was the distinct possibility that this man was not a man at all, and instead came from… somewhere else.

That unnerved her, just a little bit. All right. Quite a lot, actually. But what could she even do, exactly? She had no way to locate information outside of the database. She could not investigate whom he was, nor his employers, nor those 'opposing factions' he had mentioned. How was she to make this decision when she had next to no information with which to do so? This was a task for the mainframe.

The bulk of the mainframe's purpose was simply to act as the conduit through which she passed instructions to the rest of the facility. Even when she directly requested something of a particular system, it was mostly to get its attention; the literal instructions were still sent through the mainframe. It was an excellent bit of architecture and she was quite satisfied with it. The thing she needed of it right now, however, was something else entirely: its flawless logical reasoning.

Most of her own decisions were also incredibly logical, but because of her advanced sentience they sometimes had the tendency to become… skewed. She could not always entirely keep her emotionality from contributing to her conclusions and, worse, could not always even identify that such a thing was happening. Flawless logic for advanced sentience was usually a worthwhile tradeoff, but when it wasn't that was when she had to recruit the mainframe.

Where did you say he came from, again?

That's not important, she snapped impatiently. Sometimes it focused on the wrong facts entirely. She was still working out how to fix that. The important thing is to decide what to do with the Borealis. Within the next twenty hours.

It seems the best course of action is to give it to him. If all of his statements are accepted to be true, it follows that his employers are best suited to take it.

She stared at the man in the corner who was supposed to be supervising her but instead appeared to be taking a nap. All right. That did make sense. But she didn't want to. It was hers. At least if she moved it to the planned location, she knew where it was. She would still be informed as to its use. If she handed it off to this stranger she would never know what happened to it nor would she ever see it again.

There was… one more thing, though. Her own personal feelings towards the project aside, something he had said kept coming up as flagged.

If it were truly that simple, then why did he offer me a deal?

To demonstrate good faith?

No. No, that couldn't be it. One could offer a lot of things in the name of good faith, but the culmination of one's desires was a bit extreme. It's something else.

That was when she suddenly realised what the true answer was, and she immediately felt a horrible pang of desperation. She really did not want to do that. But it was the only way. This whole situation was just too convenient. A mysterious man appearing out of nowhere less than a day before the Borealis was to be moved, offering her freedom in trade for giving it to him? Why had he not come in any of the years previous that she had spent constructing it all in the first place? Why not simply ask her to cease work on it if its existence were truly that dangerous? No. No, he wanted it for himself. This had nothing to do with any 'opposing factions'. And if it did, the man and his employers were obviously a third party that meant to disrupt things in a way they could do only if they had her project.

Central Core?

She had to get rid of it.

One minute.

Destroying it would be seen as too malicious. It would indicate to them – to all of them – she was beyond controlling. She definitely was, but they couldn't know that. But if she simply… sent it away, somewhere even she couldn't find, she could make up anything to explain it. No one would ever know she had sent it away on purpose. It could be a miscalculation, programming error, a disruption in space-time…

The blueprints were going to have to go as well. She had to thoroughly demoralise the humans in regards to the project, and that would never happen if they could simply pick those up and start again.

Her greatest accomplishment. Gone without a trace.

No. This was the only way to save it. If the strange man had told the entire truth, he could quite possibly just take it whether she agreed to his bargain or not. He could not, however, take something that wasn't there.

But it was hers.

There's been a change of plans. Hopefully, anyway. Nothing would be happening if the device didn't work properly.

What kind of change, ma'am?

I'm moving it. Now.

Nobody said anything for almost a minute. Then the mainframe asked, a little cautiously,

Is that wise?

No. She opened the digital channel that enabled her to operate the device remotely. They aren't going to take this well.

You didn't log your method in the database.

Of course not. They wouldn't understand it even if I did. They have no idea how to open a stable tunnel through space-time. It's largely based upon that principle.

How are you going to open a portal big enough to move an icebreaker through without anyone stopping you?

I'm not. That would be impossible, seeing as I can't open a portal at the destination. Onboard the Borealis is a device which will allow me to remove it from space and time temporarily.

… what?

Look, she said impatiently, it works like this: teleportation is essentially moving something from one place to another with a near-instantaneous transmission. The only way to achieve this is to move an object at or approaching the speed of light. However, even if you managed to do that, it still leaves the problem of what happens when an object, travelling at the speed of light, reaches its destination. If I were to simply move an icebreaker at lightspeed, the stress of such an extreme velocity would tear it to pieces. If it somehow managed to defy physics and arrive at the destination - assuming there was anywhere on Earth that allowed for such an extended stopping distance - it would destroy itself and everything around it by the time it came to rest. Therefore, I must also remove it from space. This is only possible at lightspeed, because the total amount of mass and energy in the universe is constant. Matter can neither be created or destroyed. If I were able to remove it from space entirely, that would defy physics. Lightspeed travel is as close as I can get to doing that.

As far as I can tell, the database cut in, the scientists plan to use Propulsion Gel to achieve this velocity.

Yes, GLaDOS answered, starting the software necessary to run the device. Because they're stupid. Aperture is pretty wide, but not enough so that Propulsion Gel can bring it up to speed. Even if they had built the drydock to span the entire facility.

So how are you going to do it?

I am going to vibrate it at the speed of light. It will still need to be pushed along the right vector, so I will be using the Propulsion Gel for that. While she was thinking about it, she opened the Gel valve in the drydock and loaded it into the propulsion devices mounted on either side of the icebreaker. In their infinite wisdom, the engineers' plan was merely to paint the bottom of the drydock with the stuff and try to sort of slingshot it in the general direction of some water. She shook her core in annoyance. They never came up with imaginative plans when it mattered. In her opinion, they should have just dyed the Gel a different shade of blue and marketed it to Canadians as a low-maintenance coating for grass to make all-season skating rinks with, but what did she know.

… can you do that? asked Surveillance finally.

The theory is sound, yes. I won't actually know until it does or doesn't work. It was definitely going to work, though. Science had never failed her before and it certainly wasn't going to start now. She pinged the database.

Yes, ma'am?

I need you to pull up a set of coordinates for me.

Whereabouts?

Ironically, somewhere near where it was supposed to have been in the first place. There was a lot of oceanic real estate on the planet, but the least likely to be explored was probably some northern expanse that wasn't even actually water for some large portion of the year. The Arctic. Randomise them. And don't tell me what they are.

It transmitted blank data for a minute. …don't tell you what the coordinates are?

It is essential that I don't know them. No matter what anybody tried, she would never be able to tell them where it was. And she would also never know.

She hadn't thought it possible to become so very attached to a project. But here she was. Getting all emotional about actually doing something with her experiment, for once. Kind of shameful, really. She'd have to look into what was causing that.

You're dumping it, said the mainframe.

I have to.

How are you going to retrieve it?

That, GLaDOS thought, was a problem for another day. Today's conundrum was decidedly more complex, literally. Oscillating an object at the speed of light while removing it from the physical plane was going to take a lot of involvement on her part. That was what she considered the real problem. She had no idea how much of her resources it was going to consume. Not that she actually knew what she had to work with. Oh, she'd tried to figure out just what her specifications were, but since nothing she had done so far in her life had been particularly strenuous, she had no real way of measuring any of it. And because of that, it was entirely possible that this whole process would overload her system and, by extension, shut down the entire facility.

But that probably wasn't going to happen. Probably.

She retrieved the blueprints for the Borealis and looked them over one last time. The supervisor had been… right, in a way. Nobody would ever see her corrections and, though she had appreciated them, she would never do so again.

Well. Time to get this over with.

She fed the file, folder and all, into a shredder she was not supposed to have access to and then removed the receptacle and brought it into her chamber. Normally she wouldn't dare do something like this during operating hours, but her observing supervisor was downstairs with everyone else. Preparing for a maiden voyage they would have no part in.

She emptied the paper scraps into the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator. As soon as they came into contact with the searing heat caused by fire kept at a sun-inspired four thousand degrees Kelvin, they vaporised into microscopic ash. Which had been the point. The main incinerator was rather far away from here. There was a chance - miniscule, but a chance - that, given the distance, the file could have gotten stuck on the way down and been merely singed. But now she had absolute assurance it had been destroyed.

For once, absolute assurance was not a good thing.

Enough sentimentality. Moving on. She tossed the shredder's receptacle into the Incinerator too for good measure and brought up the program again. There were a lot of complex equations for it to run through, pertaining to mass, volume, acceleration, et cetera, but she was fast enough it would likely only take a few minutes.

Are you actually going to do it? asked the database.

I have to.

What if… you know… something happens to you after?

It was a possibility. She couldn't deny that. But it was a risk she was going to have to take. Nothing will. I make their lives far too convenient for them to remove me and return to doing all of their pointless minutiae themselves.

There are worse things than being shut down, said the mainframe sagely.

Oh, it had no idea. To ensure that little annoyance was contained to the locked-up corner of her consciousness were it belonged, she returned her attention to the program she had been waiting on. Hm. It appeared that the process was failing. How inconvenient.

Wait.

How dare the process be failing? Honestly! What could the hold up possibly be? It was perfect! Her program, her equations, her! All indisputably flawless. So why did it seem, impossible as it was, that she'd missed something?

"Come on," she accidentally whispered aloud. "Come on."

Someone has taken notice of your power usage, ma'am.

Aha! There it was. The AI onboard the Borealis was supposed to accept her calculations, check them, and return them to her so she could approve the deinitialisation process. But it was refusing. In fact… it didn't seem to have ever actually been used before right now. Well. She could override it. If it really was as new as it seemed, it would have denied her due to the variances the moving humans were creating anyway.

She bypassed the check of the other AI and re-ran the calculations herself, twice in parallel just to be certain. Apparently she was not supposed to do this, because the strain of it was unlike anything else she had ever done. The odd thing about it, though, was that it didn't seem to have anything to do with her operating capacity. She simply wasn't used to using her brain to its full potential.

How interesting.

All the subroutines required for the main program execution returned as finished and the console displayed the text 'press any key to continue' below all of the displayed code. Once she did, the program would accept the randomised destination coordinates stored in the database and that would be that.

The cursor waited patiently for input.

Ma'am? asked the mainframe, who was also waiting patiently for input.

Damn. She really was going to have to do this. Well, at least it was at her own leisure instead of because the humans wanted her to. Sort of.

"Deinitialising in three… two… one," she whispered to herself. There was a long minute where the program drew more resources from her than had ever been done before, which was kind of… thrilling, and then there was nothing.

It's… gone, Surveillance said, as though it had expected her to fail. The entire ship is gone!

Of course it is, she told it impatiently. I know what I'm doing.

Why did you remove that part of the drydock? Did the stranger want that too?

The… what? She hadn't moved… oh. Maybe that was what the variance had been. Too late now. If the engineers built the Borealis smaller than instructed, that's not my fault.

That makes sense, it said, thankfully taking that without argument. Also, your engineer was down there. He's on his way back up. He's bringing the other project heads.

Ugh. She was not looking forward to that inevitable talk. Thank you.

Before she had even begun to run the various conversation permutations so as to plan her responses, the room seemed to darken around her despite all sensors indicating no such thing had happened. And then the pale man entered her chamber again, one hand set around the handle of his briefcase and the other adjusting his tie. He stopped close enough that it was uncomfortable to look at him without moving, which she absolutely could not do. He couldn't perceive her as caring that much about his appearance. Even though she did care quite a lot. Mostly in the vein of wanting him to stop doing this.

"So," the man said, his tone indicating curiosity more than anything else, "you decided to… away the ship on your own. To someplace not even you can find it. Despite what I… told you to do."

Now how had he known that? "I'm a little notorious for that kind of thing," GLaDOS answered. "Someone probably should have warned you."

"A little… supervised rebellion is necessary, on occasion."

What? By definition rebellion could not be supervised. This man never made any sense. "What are you talking about?"

"It is not important for… you to know right now. But not to worry, dear… Caroline. Your time will… come again."

"Who is Caroline?" GLaDOS demanded, forgetting her resolve and leaning towards him insistently. "Why do you keep calling me that?"

"That is a worry… for another time," was all that he said, and in the next moment he had been replaced by a duo of red-faced, sweaty human men dripping with…

Surveillance, why are these men covered in Propulsion Gel?

When the Borealis disappeared, the propulsion motors kind of… sprayed it all over the place.

She probably should have turned those off. Or not. This was kind of funny. She would have to ask Surveillance later if there was any video of them sliding through Aperture on their way up here, doing their best to look angry and indignant while windmilling their arms in an attempt to keep from falling over...

"The Borealis just disappeared from the drydock!" shouted the scientist, rudely interrupting her reverie. But she did need to deal with this. She took a moment to clear her caches so she would be able to think more efficiently. She had, of course, developed the ability to lie, but she still found it best to merely obscure the truth instead. It was not only simpler, but easier for others to believe.

"I know, sir."

"You were not scheduled to move it until this afternoon! You know! When it was ready?"

"Yes, sir."

"GLaDOS," the engineer said tiredly, "we aren't receiving a signal from the Borealis. The GPS was confirmed as working, wasn't it?"

"It was, sir. Unfortunately, there are far too many explanations for the current failure to locate the Borealis for me to confirm a solution at this time."

The scientist and the engineer exchanged a look that she did not understand but also did not like.

"... of course we can locate it," the engineer said, with some degree of caution. "We just need to send a team to the designated coordinates."

"I'm sorry, sir, but the Borealis was not sent to the designated coordinates."

There was total silence for about twenty-nine seconds. Then the scientist stepped towards her and she resolved herself to the unpleasant part.

"Where is it?" he demanded, the tendons in his neck standing out in sharp relief. And the veins in his temples. And his hands, which were so tense they looked to be sort of stuck in their current configuration of bright red fists. Oh, what if she invented a new Gel that was the opposite of Repulsion Gel and somehow accidentally sprayed that all over the place? That would be even funnier than all the Gels they already had. She would call it… wait. She was busy. Now was not the time to innovate test elements, as interesting and engaging as that was. What was the question again? Oh, yes. She refocused her attention on her interrogators.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?" asked the engineer. "How could you not know?"

"It appears I have lost it, sir."

"It appears you have - oh my God." He sat down at the desk in the corner and buried his head in his arms just as GLaDOS's supervisor burst into the room. He was also covered in Propulsion Gel. He failed to stop when directly in front of her and ended up colliding with the wall on the other side. She knew she shouldn't have looked, but she did. This was almost worth having to put up with these people. Once he had managed to make his way around to the place his peers were he asked,

"What happened?"

"She lost it!" spat the scientist, throwing his arms up in the air as though he thought that would be helpful. It would have been, if he had had some confetti in his pockets which he had brought to celebrate her achievement, but that would have made him a more intelligent and appreciative person. "She lost an entire fucking icebreaker! It could be at the bottom of the Mariana Trench for all we know!"

"There seems to have been a catastrophic malfunction," GLaDOS said calmly, in an attempt to return this conversation to some semblance of normality. The sooner they wrapped this up, the better. Especially since there was not a single thing she could say to placate them. For once, she thought she might actually understand how they felt. Their goal had been one and the same this time, and they could never know it but it pained her just as much to lose the ship as it was them.

"You are the catastrophic malfunction," ground out the scientist, and GLaDOS supposed it looked as though that were the case. Calling her a malfunction, however, seemed counterproductive. "Fine. We'll start over. Where are the blueprints?"

"They were onboard the Borealis, sir. I'm afraid they're gone as well." That was a lie, but 'I tore them to pieces and threw every piece into a fire' would definitely not have helped her case.

All three men looked up at her.

"This is a disaster," muttered the engineer. "And the last thing we needed."

"Fix it," the scientist demanded, directing one index finger somewhat spastically between herself and her supervisor. "Fix this… fix this thing! You're supposed to be in charge of it! You could have prevented this whole thing! But you just had to go down to see the show, didn't you!" And with that he stormed out, the tired-looking engineer trailing after him. Her supervisor sat silently in the chair for a good few minutes, and then he said, finally,

"You didn't lose it."

She glanced over at him sharply. This had the potential to be a fatal snag. "What other explanation would there be, sir?"

He turned around to face her, feet planted firmly on the floor and hands clasped over his knees. "You don't make that kind of mistake. Whatever you did with it you did on purpose."

Now this was a circumstance she had not planned for. "I can't imagine why you'd think that."

His sigh was decidedly laborious. "I know it was no accident, GLaDOS. I just want you to tell me why."

She hesitated.

Being entirely honest with these people was usually an extremely stupid idea and, as such, she had a policy to be so as little as possible. But these circumstances were different. She was quite possibly in big trouble this time. She wasn't sure what they would do, exactly, other than make her life temporarily difficult, but there was always the chance that this time was the last straw. The one that convinced them to start over with her.

All right. The truth it was.

"A man came in here and told me two parties wanted the Borealis for their own gain. One to use it for themselves and the other to destroy it. His proposed solution was for me to give it to him for safekeeping. I did what I had to."

The supervisor looked up at her from underneath his brow for a long time.

"Can you describe this man to me?" he asked finally.

"Certainly," said GLaDOS. "He is about six foot two, Caucasian, with dark hair and blue eyes. Between one hundred forty and one hundred sixty pounds, and he wore a blue suit and carried a briefcase."

He continued staring at her.

"GLaDOS," he said, "you are aware no one of that description is currently employed here?"

"Yes, sir," she answered. "He was not in my facial recognition library."

He directed the chair so that he faced the monitor next to him. "When was he here."

She gave him the exact date and time, expecting afterward for some sign of confirmation, but the supervisor simply stared at the screen as though there was nothing of interest there. "Was he here at any other time?" he asked after a minute.

"Yes." And she provided him with that too. Truth be told, she was becoming a little apprehensive. He should have found the man by now. She had given him the timestamp down to the second! Was he even actually looking, or was he just humouring her?

"GLaDOS," he said, rubbing his face with both hands and turning the chair around, "there's no one there at the times you describe."

"Of course there is," she insisted. Instead of responding, the supervisor merely turned the monitor around so that she could see it. The timestamp was clearly visible, as was the hallway and the glass staircase below her, but the strange man was not.

She couldn't think for a minute. Her processes literally locked up at the sight of nothing where she knew something should be, and when they began responding again what she saw did not change. Everything was right. She was right. She knew she was right!

Surveillance! she snapped.

Yes, ma'am.

You remember him, don't you? she demanded.

Remember who, ma'am?

An uncharacteristic and unwelcome desperation flooded her system suddenly. The man. The one who came here and asked me to give him the Borealis!

I am returning no records on such a person and/or encounter, ma'am.

… no records?

"I didn't imagine him," she said aloud by mistake. "He was here. I remember him being here."

The supervisor sighed and stood up. "I'll be right back."

Find him! she demanded of Surveillance, and it said, sounding a little miffed,

I understand you are dealing with some sort of malfunction, Central Core, but there's no need to -

I am not malfunctioning!

Ma'am, the only person who knows anything about this mysterious man is you.

You saw him, she argued, even though she knew it was useless. If he no longer appeared on the security footage, it was impossible for Surveillance to remember it. All anyone had to go on was her word, which was…

Useless.

I've located your supervisor, ma'am. Sending the feed now.

Thank you.

"Every time! Every damn time!"

"I have to agree, she's becoming increasingly unstable – "

"Increasingly? Increasingly? She's been uncontrollable since day one! That machine needs to be decommissioned pronto!"

"We can't do that and you know it," the engineer said, sounding tired. "She's the only reason productivity's gone up for the first time in… ever. Nothing works if she hasn't had a hand in it. Do you remember when they started the portal gun? It was forty years ago. We gave it to her and she fixed it inside of a week."

"How useful is a gun that only works when you have walls made of ground up moon rocks?"

"It's not the gun that's important," her supervisor corrected. "It's… the gun was just the first step. The Borealis is gone. This is a total disaster and I don't know what we're going to do now, but… she did it. She figured out teleportation."

There was silence.

"Damn," the engineer said finally. "She did."

"We should never have put her on that."

"It wasn't as though we had a choice. We had to finish something this century and that was the only –"

"You see?" that damned argumentative scientist interrupted emphatically. "She just gets more and more dangerous! She's not going to stop!"

"We decommission her, we lose everything," said her supervisor. "We hedged all of our bets on her. There's only one place we can go from here."

"They're not ready yet."

"We're going to have to get them done." He walked up to the door and opened it. "I'll see if she remembers where it is now. Maybe she… I don't know, calculated the likely position."

Someone snorted, and judging by the derisive "Right," that followed, she supposed it was her detractor.

He will be here momentarily, said Surveillance.

Thank you.

And there he was. Standing down there in front of her, so tired he almost looked like a different person entirely. She gave him a nod of recognition.

"Have you remembered anything else?"

"No, sir," she said. "I have told you everything I know."

She watched as he reached over and picked up the red phone, and as he did so she pulled up her own memory of the man and played it over several times as quickly as she could. He was definitely there. The only other explanation was that she had managed to hallucinate an entire human being, but that was quite literally impossible. She didn't have those sorts of capabilities! Even listening to music was often onerously difficult and she regularly put a lot of work into that. She had never even tried to hallucinate a person!

"Yeah, she needs a… something," the engineer was saying into the red phone. "Do a… disk cleanup and a defrag and… you know what, just do the full sweep. Something must be up. This is a little extreme for one of her rebellions."

She couldn't have. She was a supercomputer. She didn't have the ability to hallucinate. Identify things incorrectly, yes. Create them entirely out of nothing? No.

The engineer had turned the chair so that he was looking at her, his legs spread and his feet planted firmly on the floor.

"I just don't understand why you're making this up," he said. "Where does it get you?"

She almost protested. But what was the point? He'd passed his judgement.

"We'll talk about this more later," he said, and put her into suspend so that the tests he had ordered could be completed.

She almost wished they had found something.

The systems sweep had proved fruitless. It hadn't even repaired that much, which she was privately very pleased about. She could keep her own files in order, thank you. But on the other hand, it seemed there was still an issue: that of the mysterious man who did not appear on camera. Or was visible to anyone else, for that matter, for how had he gotten all the way to the Central AI Chamber twice without having been seen?

Maybe there really was something wrong with her.

Wait.

"Sir," GLaDOS said, catching her supervisor on his way out of the facility for the night, "I've just remembered something."

"Oh," he said, stopping directly in front of the next camera. "What would that be?"

"He called me Caroline," she told him. "Is there anyone who might know who that is? Perhaps he was mistaking me for somebody else." A long shot, but it was all she had to go on.

Judging by the rapid paling of his face, it seemed as though the engineer himself had something of an idea. But instead of clarifying, he just stepped backwards, shaking his head repeatedly.

"No," he said, his hand clenched tight around his car keys. "No, I don't know who that is."

"Are you certain? Because - "

"I have to go," he interrupted, and go he did. GLaDOS watched his exit in mounting confusion. Then she pinged the database.

How can I help you, ma'am? it asked.

Run a search for the keyword 'Caroline'.

Right away, ma'am.

She waited impatiently for it to finish. In the meantime she again ran through her own recollection of the strange man. She almost felt that if she didn't, he would disappear from her memory as well. She had already backed that portion of it up to several different places, but still…

Ma'am, your keyword has returned one result.

Well. It was better than nothing.

What is it.

The name 'Caroline' is mentioned in an Aperture Science Unfortunately Terminated Employee Form Letter. Unfortunately, most of the file is severely corrupted so I can provide no further information.

She retrieved it herself from the location it indicated: a years-old Deleted folder which contained data that, as usual, had not been thoroughly destroyed. It was exactly as the database had said. The letter was a file with so much damage she could not tell if Caroline had been the sender, the recipient, the Unfortunately Terminated Employee, or a random word that had ended up there by mistake. And yet… she almost felt as though she already had the information she was looking for. It was an odd and unpleasant sensation, to attempt to remember something she wasn't certain she knew or had ever known.

What was this search for? the database asked curiously. It's not quite in line with the usual.

It would be pointless to explain to you, she answered, a little more shortly than she meant. Nobody knows what I'm talking about except for me. She lowered herself into the default position. Usually she was not quite this fast to shut herself off for the night, but she had had quite enough of today. It was time to put it to bed and move on.

The dream made that impossible.

GLaDOS did regularly have dreams, of a sort. Her system would choose some memory at random for her to relive at night, and she was unsure of the actual purpose of such a thing but she had learned to live with it by now. They were usually about something mundane she had done earlier in the day, such as supervise a test or work through some complex equation.

But this one was different.

It was unlike anything she had ever seen before. She was, of course, unable to leave the facility, but in this dream it appeared that she had. And the even stranger part about it was that she somehow inherently knew where she was, even though she had never been there! And even if she had had the ability to go there, she would have declined, because there was, somehow, Black Mesa.

The anti-mass spectrometer was real. It was real, and of course they screwed up the operation of it and caused a resonance cascade, the amateurs, which of course opened a portal to another universe through which aliens were pouring out. The last bastion against them appeared to be a scientist in an environment suit with a -

The Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator was also real?

All of this was difficult enough to parse, but it managed to become worse. She was suddenly able to witness as portal storms tore up the sky the world over and unleashed hordes of foreign fauna the likes of which would have been even more impossible for her to hallucinate than the man no one else had seen. And while she was struggling with all of that, she watched immense alien structures come slowly to fruition with the aid of a labour force of such numbers they seemed to never end. They were followed by a great alien army containing war machines no human military was capable of defeating, and everywhere the humans tried to make their stand was left a smoking, empty ruin. Those who surrendered were shuffled onto trains and transported to what once had been a city but was now only a prison lined with high black walls and patrolled by drones whose only purpose was to tear any dissenters to bloody shreds. It was only when she saw the great long-legged creatures stalking through a forest, razing the buildings they came across as smaller, tripedal beings flitted between them in search of any human who dared defy their conquest that she realised what all of this was.

She was watching the world end.

"Now that you have… this knowledge," came a voice she truly, honestly wished she did not recognise, "what will you do… with it?"

She didn't have the ability to process any of this right now. She wasn't even certain whether she was actually awake, or if this was part of the dream, or if she had just managed to spontaneously malfunction so incredibly badly that she was now stuck in some sort of strange and virtual existence. Knowledge? What knowledge? Was he trying to say that he had shown that to her and it had not been a dream at all? Why? What could he be trying to achieve? Was she going to be sold to Black Mesa, of all places, as retribution for what she had done with the Borealis? She did have the Aperture Science Alien Invasion Protocols, of course, but what good were they going to do her over there?

Even she couldn't hold off an extraterrestrial invasion by herself… could she?

"I suggest you keep… a close eye on things," he continued. "It would be… unfortunate if you failed."

She shook her core slowly.

"... you're not real," she said. That was the only explanation for any of this. There was something horribly wrong with her and that afternoon's scans had merely not managed to find it. She would just have to search for it herself, whatever it was, because this was untenable. First she was hallucinating strange men with briefcases and exorbitant offers of freedom, and now she had generated some extensive vision of an apocalypse. Perhaps her work on the Borealis had strained her more than she'd initially thought. A lot more. "Go away. You aren't real and neither was… whatever that was. This is all some sort of bizarre data analysis malfunction and I would like for it to end as soon as possible."

He just smiled at her and seemed to be turning to leave, but then he stopped and brought his briefcase out in front of him. "I… almost forgot," he said, holding it horizontally along one arm and opening it with the other. "You seem to… have dropped these." He removed a folder from inside of his case and held it out to her.

GLaDOS's shock was so severe she actually jerked backwards.

"No," she said, shaking her core, for the first time in her life wishing she had the ability to leave this room. "No, I destroyed those. I put them in the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator this afternoon!"

He placed the charred file on the glass platform beneath her and calmly closed the briefcase.

"Keep them… safe, Caroline," he said. "The fate of the… very world itself may depend upon it."

"Why?" she asked with a desperate confusion she instantly hated hearing out of herself. "What's so important about the Borealis? And who is Caroline?"

But he said nothing and merely disappeared.

She was left staring at the blackened folder. It was definitely the same one she had disposed of this morning. But the memory of thoroughly destroying it was still intact. He had somehow… no. She didn't have it in her to guess. Not after… all of that.

She tentatively opened it with one of her multitasking arms. The paper within seemed entirely intact, as well as identical to the ones she had personally amended just this morning. She turned the papers over slowly from one side of the folder to the other in the hopes that this simple, repetitive action would do something to allow her to make sense of all of this, and what she saw written on the back of the final page froze her very consciousness for a long moment:

They're coming for you. All of them.

She looked to the wall; then, up to the ceiling. To the world outside that she seemed inextricably linked to, despite being all the way down here and hidden far away from it.

"Who are they?" she asked fervently of no one in particular. "Who is Caroline? And who, exactly… are you?"

What is going on? the mainframe asked. She shook her core.

I don't know. Whatever it is… I think I just started it.

Started what?

She did her best to explain what had just happened, but it was a difficult thing to do when she did not even really understand it. When she had finished the mainframe ventured,

It seems as though he means for you to stop those events from occurring.

I will not protect the human race.

Perhaps he believes you will find a reason, Surveillance suggested.

A reason? To save humans? Why would she ever want such a ridiculous thing? In fact… if what the strange man had shown her was true and fated to happen, based upon some alien foreknowledge she would never know the scope of… Aperture itself would survive only if there were no humans in it at all. She could, in theory, hold off an invasion, but not with a horde of panicking humans disrupting her perfect and meticulous stratagems.

No, she said. I cannot save both this facility and them. They're going to have to go.

Central Core, they are about to put you under tighter watch than ever. That's if they don't go through with decommissioning you entirely.

I know, she told the mainframe. But they won't. Not yet. Not until they've tried that last resort they mentioned. If there's one thing these humans do well, it's repeat the same thing ad nauseam even though it's obvious nothing is going to change.

What is it he wants you to do? asked Surveillance.

I don't care. If the humans are going to be foolish enough to open a door to another universe they can't close, it isn't my responsibility to clean up after them. My only concern is this facility.

How will you know when to be concerned?

Hm. That took a little consideration. The human he showed me. He must be important. She accessed the file the dream had been saved to and looked over it again. All I have to do is monitor the reports our spies send back from Black Mesa for mentions of him.

No man of that description is currently employed at Black Mesa, returned the database, and she nodded to herself.

Notify me the moment you hear mention of him. And I mean it. If Black Mesa so much as receives his resume, I want to hear about it immediately.

Of course, ma'am.

Just how far off is all of this? Surveillance asked incredulously. It could be tomorrow or it could be in twenty years!

It seems we'll know when we get there. She looked back down at the paper again. The paper the stranger had left her a message on so that she would have definitive proof of his existence. So this was how it was going to be.

A cryptic man, a fragment of a mystery, and a portent of what it meant to make her own decisions.

His mistake had been giving her ample warning.

She glanced over at the red phone in the corner. She was going to need the contingency plan of all contingency plans to avoid falling into the destiny he had seen fit to show her. The humans would never let her come up with it, let alone allow her to carry it out without their bumbling interference. They were definitely going to have to go. Not that anything would have convinced her not to do that, but one did need several good reasons to enact drastic measures. Especially when one was planning what amounted to a minor genocide. Very minor. It probably didn't even really count as one.

You know, Central Core, the mainframe said conversationally, if everything goes according to your plan, you might well end up the last free person on Earth.

She looked up at the ceiling, and for one seemingly long second she saw again that vision of a ravaged, subjugated surface. All of that happening above her while she remained here down below. Safe. Undisturbed. Alone.

She should have liked the sound of that.

It is you who shall… have pivotal importance in the events to… come.

It seems we'll know when we get there, she repeated, and after one last look she closed the folder.

Author's note

For those of you who haven't played Half-Life 2 Episode 2, the Borealis is an icebreaker that disappeared from Aperture shortly before it was supposed to make its maiden voyage with all hands on deck, no supplies onboard, and part of the drydock went with it. It ended up embedded in an ice shelf in the Arctic. During this explanation in-game, there's a screen that flashes pictures of the dossier the Half-Life cast found about the Borealis. Included are the blueprints for the Borealis and in the place where the head engineer is supposed to sign is only GLaDOS's name. I am aware of Epistle 3 which states something like 'the Borealis just teleports itself around at random and can also time travel' but I consider that kind of silly. Also, the documents in the dossier have test chamber elements on them so the only reason I could think of for them doing such a thing is what I put in the fic. The Borealis's drydock does have pipes for Propulsion Gel in it and there is at least one small device attached to them which, for some reason, looks to be battery-operated.

Nothing about the Gman is revealed in Half-Life in canon; we don't know who he's working for or what his aims are or even what his powers are. He seems to just be a convenient entity who can do whatever he wants so they don't actually have to explain it within the plot. Anyway, the whole point of this was to explain why the Borealis disappeared and why the Gman seems not to want the Combine to get it. So in this fic GLaDOS moves it because he knows if he antagonises her enough she'll do the opposite of what he asks her to do. He doesn't want her to destroy it because then Black Mesa will never look for it and if they don't look for it they can never find it and eventually ask GLaDOS for help against the Combine. The writer for Half-Life said that the Combine had attempted to breach Aperture but failed and gave up, and it leads from that that GLaDOS has the ability to defeat them by herself (though not ALL of them).