Control.

Well you may be king for the moment

But I am a queen, understand?

And I got your pawns, and your bishops and castles

All inside the palm of my hand.

- Control; Poe

A series of one-shots involving everyone's favorite AI. May include other characters in later chapters, depending. Just a completely whimsical thing I'm doing because it's three in the morning and I can. Also I don't own Portal but I'm sure you knew that, you smart person you~

malfunctions

She's arranging things around the facility again – stockpiling test chambers that are old enough to be wrought and rattling with skeletons.

He's arranging things around the reality again – stockpiling facts that are old enough to be wrought and rattling with skeletons.

His medicine's worn off, it wore off long ago. Those pills, those little bitter collectives of pharmaceutical engineering have metabolized in his system. Reality, sanity, everything that makes the walls stop screaming at him and stops that feeling of her eyes on him has burned away in his bloodstream. Though her eyes are always on him. They always are. They always are. He can't afford to forget that.

Sometimes those cameras grow long, spidery legs that chatter as they make shadows crawl around the room. Other times he sees those white squares bare long, needled teeth that threaten to close around him unless he feeds them the ink. He draws and scribbles furiously in all of his lairs to keep away the teeth, fill the belly of the squares.

He thinks they all share the same belly. He isn't sure. Cube hasn't told him anything of the squares in a long, long time. Something in the back of his mind niggles and screams to be heard, but it's muffled by the thudding heartbeat of the facility. The heart, he imagines, is as fiery and hideous as the death that rings in every one of its chambers.

"There's a thunderstorm on the surface." She muses, knowing that he can hear her just fine from where he is. Which is another closed off lair. Another hold, another nest, wrought with hot plates and canned foods that he can't live off of forever, but for now he has to because survival demands it. He's out of her reach, but barely. "That's a fairly standard beginning to all sorts of stories, isn't it?"

He eats baked beans from a mortar and uses a pair of tongs like makeshift chopsticks, huddled beside Cube.

"You know, really you shouldn't take my personal quips on your debilitating mental illness personally. I actually find it intriguing just how much can be so wrong with a human mind."

Her voice echoes demonically, and he isn't sure if that's him or the acoustics of the facility.

"For instance, I wonder what you would hear instead of a thunderstorm if I were to broadcast sounds from my surveillance protocols down here."

The deep, growling rumble of thunder faintly blares in place of her voice seconds later. It sounds like the rain is coming down in torrents, and there's the distinct whoosh of gusts meeting microphones. He holds his knees to his chest and rocks steadily.

Rain.

Thunder.

Those are sounds he knows are real, sounds he recognizes, parts of the reality. He knows as a scientist that those things are real, though whether or not they're mere recordings in this case, he can't be sure.

"Oh, come on." She presses, though she sounds amused. "Complete isolation and utter insanity are no reasons to be rude. And I know you can hear me. Well, I assume you can hear me, if you're not busy hallucinating something else at the moment. I know how busy you can be when it comes to dealing with reality. If even that means being completely useless to those of us who aren't schizophrenic."

There's a part of him that knows he might deserve every barb he's getting. If even it wasn't him directly, he was part of the development team that's made her what all she is. In a sense, her quips bring about a sense of retribution that he needs to function. It isn't written solidly how it's helpful, how it motivates him, but hardly anything is. Everything is a shaky script and scattered words that keep the squares from swallowing him alive.

His hand shakes as he shovels in more baked beans.

"Schizophrenia is a really fascinating illness." She continues. "So many studies have been conducted in the name of psychology, but so little about it is truly understood. The least you can do is speak up. For science."

The rain he hears through her speakers almost leads him to believe that he's near the surface.

You're not. Cube's voice whispers, and for some reason her voice is a faint murmur against the high skirl of crickets. You're miles underground. Miles. He doesn't hear the rest. The crickets grow too loud, and he scrambles to his feet to find them, only to see nothing there.

"Watching, watching, watching, she's watching and watching and won't go stop go stop watching always watching she's watching she's got her eyes here the crickets are watching she's watching her always watching me…!" he sputters, a repetitive stew of garbled English and the result of hiding until his words and scientific lexicon are eaten by disease.

He feels his hands clawing in his scalp before he realizes that what he's feeling is greasy, unwashed hair.

"I am." She replies simply. "For science. As well as amusement, but that's thirty five percent of the reason. More or less. Since it's not like you would even make a decent test subject. There are pre-requisites for this sort of thing. 'Must be resourceful', 'must cope well with changing environments', 'must be willing to obey authority', 'must not be overly paranoid and must not hear voices or hallucinate like some sort of insane person'. I'm serious, that's what it says. It looks as though that last bit was hurriedly scribbled in, though. I think one of the scientists here must have been writing horrible things about you. They must have hated you like everyone else."

He slouches down, he rocks back and forth and grinds his teeth together and feels pieces of scalp and slight traces of blood clutter the underside of his nails.

"Oh, but you don't have to worry about them anymore. I'm not sure who it was, but it's awfully hard to write inflammatory things about your fellow employees when you're busy catching fire or breathing neurotoxin. I'm not sure which they were doing, but it's satisfying to imagine both scenarios."

He feels her eyes on him. He feels watched. He knows her cameras are outside of the nest, he's between a pair of test chambers where he knows she can't watch him and he knows she can't touch him, but he feels the heat and dark pulse of her gaze strumming inside him. The chords that echo in him leave him sick to his stomach. He wants to throw up his dinner.

They were writing about him he knew it all along but they were writing about him he wasn't supposed to be right that they hated him they were out to write things about him they were out to hate him and see him squirm and watch him sweat and hear him scream and laugh at him crying and hide his medicine and that must have been what happened to his goddamn pills.

They hid the pills from him and for a second he hates them, because goddamnit, why would they do this why would they do this why would they do that to him.

"What are you thinking right now?" she asks, and her tone is almost congenial. "What are your feelings? What sort of things can you possibly see that have kept you alive for this long?"

He can't answer that. But a sort of twisted rationale can; he's alive because of his fear. His paranoia. Those things extend far enough in a rational circumstance that he's truly broken to most people. But in a situation where the fear is very real, his suspicions have substance hanging on them the way meat hangs onto bones, it has him hiding in walls and lairs where everything imagined and real can't reach him. Brilliant as she is, she can't bring even a false rationality to a mind that's shattered. She can't coax him from hiding, because nothing she says will ever take purchase without his medication.

There may be something inside him that knows all that, and with horrifying clarity. It could be instinct. Maybe that's why he won't take the pills he has left.

"I've seen some of the things you've drawn on the walls of my facility." She says. Oh, so it's her facility now. He can't help himself from agreeing with that. It IS her facility. Nothing about it suggests that she isn't in control. "By the way, that's called vandalism. But your disregard for common decency notwithstanding, some of it is fairly fascinating."

He can't handle the sound of her voice for much longer. He's rocking steadily where he sits now, breathing hard through his teeth. His jaw is clenched and he's damp with the cold sweat of waking from a nightmare.

"The human mind is a really disjointed thing when it's stripped of all the conscionable norms, the social constraints, the things you all curb for the sake of politeness. Either that, or you take anarchistic pride in ruining science, which I wouldn't doubt either. Even underneath all that schizophrenia and everything else wrong with you."

He's about to cement his hands over his ears. He can't bear listening to her for much longer, and wishes against everything that she would just stop and leave him alone. She usually ignores him. She usually goes about her business, knowing that the rat won't dare show itself if it wants to stay alive. He's a rat in her household, it's all he is, all he will be. He knows that on a feral level. He knows that on a level that made him burrow a constellation of nests he can escape to when necessary. She's just talking to the rat she knows is there, while she calmly rearranges things in her house. She may even know where he's hiding, but she just isn't in the mood to set out traps today.

Some days, she's so much like her that it's too terrifying to remember where she really came from. She doesn't seem to remember much of that, but he'll be damned if he's the one to bring that up. Given her distaste for humans, imagine the irony…

Only he can't because her voice is shaking his limited functionality into pieces that threaten to buckle. He's breathing through his teeth, hyperventilating, really.

"In a sense, you may be more human than the rest of them." She says, either unaware of the way her voice is tearing him apart, or the more likely, uncaring. As cold and devoid of warmth as her programming demands. "Everything about you from your crude vandalism to the messes you leave for me to clean up, everything is enacted on from an instinct that's been stripped of all the pretenses. You can't grasp what it is to function in society. You can't pick up social cues. You can't even pretend to be normal. It's an interesting idea, when you think about it. Or when you're not hallucinating. Whichever the case may be for you."

He hears Cube's voice calling from a murky distance. The crickets have been joined with the faint music of the radio, one of many that he keeps around his nests. Usually the music calms him. Today it's a cacophony of staticky bursts and crackling notes that make the walls around him heave as if the nest were breathing.

"All right. I guess you're too busy arguing with voices or ruining more of my facility to help me understand your handicap. There's no need to be subtle. But I just thought you should know that I'm still here. And that I know you're still here. With me. And that I'm watching you."

The heat of her gaze seems to spill from his body. It's as if her attention is being pulled in another direction, and he collapses into a pile of slack limbs and rubbery muscles. The cube beside him feels warm, welcoming. A blush of understanding in a metallic world of squares, lights, and blood.

Stay here for the night. She whispers, as he feels tears stream down his cheeks. He's not even aware of them until he feels them trickle past his lips. It's not safe to go out now. She knows you're somewhere in this area.

He eyes another can of beans, decides that he's earned extra rations for keeping calm, and turns the hot plate back on.