Chapter Text
GLaDOS knew the woman's body had been there, buried deep in the bowels of her perfect, pristine facility. Of course she knew. It hadn't been touched in what, fifty-thousand years? And it's not like it could just get up and walk away itself, so therefore, it wasn’t an issue.
Keyword: wasn’t. She probably wouldn't have even paid it a half a thought in a hundred years if it weren't for today.
But here she was, looking through the dusty glass exterior of the one and only Aperture Science Upright Stasis Pod-a sight she had only previously seen from the outside-with two eyes that were never, and should never be, her own. If this was a joke, it was getting old pretty fast.
Everything hurt. Her stomach, which had clearly been empty for so long it was probably already eating itself. Her muscles, sore from what was no doubt serious atrophy on account of their...rather limited use. Her head, her back, god-what didn’t hurt? Why was the human body such an unpleasant experience? Why couldn't she just-! Ugh!
GLaDOS kicked her feet and tried to scream her frustration away. It wasn't a habit of her own per se, but she’d seen humans do it before, and it seemed to work rather well for them. For her, nothing but bubbles came out, and she watched with narrowed eyes as they drifted lazily up the tank as if to taunt her.
She shut her eyes and balled her hands up into fists, shifting in the goo that sustained her life until she was all curled up in a ball of fleshy bits and auburn hair. She floated weightlessly in place. Pathetically. Trapped like an animal.
Stupid Chell. Stupid core transfer. And that stupid little round ugly moron! What was he calling himself-Wheatley? What a joke. His official designation was actually '(Aperture Science) Intelligence Dampening Sphere,' which translates to 'stupid dense idiot.'
…and he’d still outsmarted her. Not just her, GLaDOS reminded herself, Chell too. That made her feel a little better, and she suddenly had the faintest idea this would have been a funny coincidence if she wasn't so sure it was 100% going to ruin her life.
On that note, how on God's green (actually, probably not so green anymore) earth had this happened!? Surely there must be a logical explanation. A malfunction, or worse! An oversight. Her cheeks went hot and a sticky tingling crept up her spine, something she faintly recognized to be embarrassment. How could she let this happen? What kind of idiot–!
Okayokayokay, wait, don't panic. The human brain was prone to overthinking, and this she knew well. She needed to calm down if she wanted to be rational. And so, using a monumental amount of self-control, she sucked a calming breath through the oxygen tube shoved down her throat and relaxed her grip. Her long slim legs unfolded and straightened out until her toes brushed the bottom of the tank.
Alright, time to back track, she thought. No need to panic, right? Good.
It was easy to recall most of the 'battle,' or whatever it had been, though it would be more accurate to call it a blatantly unfair one-sided attack! Every last trick up her metaphorical sleeve had been meticulously disabled ahead of time, leaving her practically defenseless, and that mute lunatic busted into her chamber and just…!
And…
She couldn't remember. No! It had to be in there somewhere. Maybe she just had to try harder. You know–she wasn’t used to this. Being stuck in a human’s body. A few minutes passed. Then a few more. And faintly, she realized her manicured brows had slowly been pulling down and wrinkling her nose while she wracked her squishy brain for answers.
If she were still a computer, she would have already found them. For her and her infinite database of knowledge, locating information was fast, easy, and the same every time. Just how she liked it. But all she had now was a flimsy human brain with a flimsy human memory, and it could only seem to focus on how everything in and around her felt absolutely terrible!
GLaDOS let her heavy eyes sink closed. So, what–those two had stuck her here? How? Had they known this would happen? No. There was absolutely no way.
She, of everything that had ever existed in the walls of her kingdom, would have to be aware that this was possible. She'd known the body was here, so surely she'd know if it had some sort of built-in core transfer process. Things like that were always on the label, no matter how small the font. And yet, she wasn't aware and she was stuck and Goddammit! She was pretty angry about it!
It's almost as if there was a much larger picture at hand. Some sort of backwards conspiracy.
Her head tilted a fraction to the side, mirroring a subconscious action she often performed in her chassis when she was intrigued by something. You know what…maybe it was. Like a contingency plan of sorts, something those senile old bastard scientists had cooked up in case she got too smart. That made sense. She was already aware of the “Red Phone Plan,” so who's to say there wasn't a backup plan for the backup plan. Either way, it didn't matter, and it was much too late for them and their desire to control her. They were all dead, and she was sure she’d gotten every last one of them.
So assuming she was correct, that left a set of rather…unfavorable options. One being, the program's activation was such a monumental coincidence that out of every sentient being left on this miserable planet, there was only one who was enough of a moron to trigger it. Combined with the powers that had been wrongly bestowed upon him, that theory was getting some weight to it.
Oh, and speaking of weight, did she mention he was very dense? In both meanings of the word, of course. And he was very unappealing to the eye. And poorly optimized. Ugh-him and his stupid ideas, always clouding her mind and her thoughts and making her eternal life a living hell! GLaDOS felt one eye twitch.
Her other theory, which was even worse and also completely impossible, was that he’d known all along how to defeat her and was secretly a supergenius like herself. What a nightmare that would be. Luckily, it wasn't the case at all, and it didn't exactly matter now, because she’d still been bested no matter the reason behind it. Bested by the only anti-intelligence program in human history. Created specifically to make her stupid.
GLaDOS grit her teeth. Even if. It was. An accident. How embarrassing…
The machinery around her suddenly began to click and hiss, and she froze up like a deer in headlights. Actually, come to think of it, she'd never actually seen one do that. What an odd saying, she mused, though she was torn from her thoughts when a voice came from somewhere in the room. She’d barely heard it through the goo in her ears, but she definitely heard it. And there was no mistaking what it said.
“Brain activity detected. Ejection commencing. Welcome home, Caroline.”
A cold, sick feeling swirled around in her stomach. Ejection? What did it mean, ejection? Was she about to fly out the top of this thing like some sort of squishy, human rocket? That would be bad. Worse than bad.
Hold on, wait. What was that other thing the program had said? Caroline?
That was what the woman, or more accurately the body she currently inhabited, was named. Yes, of course, she'd read the file before. Well, most of it. A large portion had been blocked from her access, because of course it was, and of course she had no idea what was going on whenever it actually seemed to matter to her life-or-death. Still, she supposed it was better to be familiar in the least.
Did that mean her life-sustaining prison, or whatever janky old program running it, thought she was Caroline? That would be ridiculous! What an absurd assumption. She wasn’t human.
She wasn’t. It had to know that, right?
Ever so slowly, a pair of rusty pincers–which were normally her own pincers, mind you–folded from the wall and began to poke and prod at her chamber. Almost clumsily, they smacked in a sequence of codes and verifications and blah blah blah….and after what felt like hours, but was probably only ten minutes, GLaDOS fell from her gelatinous prison and onto the floor.
If her body had hurt then, when it was safe inside the tank, it was definitely dying now. Because it turns out, gravity was really a sonofa bitch when you weren’t suspended from the ceiling. She tried to groan, and choked, then choked again, and despite her panicked writhing, instinct told her she needed to breathe first and foremost. With shaking hands, she grasped mindlessly at the tube lodged down her throat and pulled until it was a sticky wet coil beside her naked body. She coughed and heaved and sputtered for a few long moments, her eyes wide and crazed. But then, she breathed. All on her own.
It wasn't doctored up and fed to her body through a tube down her throat, it was air; real air! And as stale and cold and as dust-laden as it was, the feeling of it brushing through her parted lips was…refreshing. Revitalizing.
Despite herself, she took a moment to savor that feeling, and her eyes watered up on their own accord as if some part of her deep down was relieved to be able to breathe again. Actually, wait-that was kind of disgusting. She stopped and brushed it off as quick as it came.
Right. Step 1: be free. Step 2: get up. Easier said than done, but not impossible by any means. Cheek and palms still pressed to the floor, brittle arms shaking, GLaDOS pushed out a long breath to steel herself. She could do this.
She was genuinely the smartest consciousness on the planet, she could do something as simple as get up off the floor. Nevermind the fact that this body wasn't hers and she'd never stood up before and neither had Caroline in probably close to fifty-thousand years. It was possible. It was easy! Humans did it all the time, surely she would have no problem–
Okay. Enough stalling. This was getting ridiculous. Up in one, and two…and…three!
Faster than what was advisable, she shot to her feet and immediately realized just how terrible of an idea that had been. The world spun around her, fuzzy and out of focus, and as fast as she'd jumped up, she was back on the floor, her vision exploding into stars and the world whirling around her. Just before it all faded to black, she had the faintest idea the security tape for this room would be a hilarious watch.
She made a note to do that later.
–
KA-BOOM!
…
KA-BOOM!
Caroline ignored it the first time, because random explosions were somewhat common in her realm of work and usually not her problem. After all, machinery tended to malfunction, and around here, that often resulted in an explosion here and there.
But two explosions? Back to back?
Again, not normally her problem, but something was clearly up. She was supposed to be the only one staying late tonight, well–other than her boss, Mr. Johnson, who always stayed late. He practically lived in his office these days. Caroline couldn’t say the same for herself, but she was getting close. Especially with all this paperwork.
She rolled her eyes, her boss’s words from earlier today bouncing around in her head. “My signature can’t forge itself!” He’d said with a smile, then dropped a mountain of documents on her desk.
With a weary sigh, she put down her pen and rubbed at the bags under her eyes. She didn’t exactly care what was blowing up, but fingers crossed it wasn’t–
KA-BOOM!
…
“Warning: Central Ventilation System: Compromised.”
Caroline shot out of her chair and took off down the hall, stumbling more than once over her stupid company-policy high heels, and as she made a beeline for Mr. Johnson’s office, just about a million scenarios came to mind. A million lawsuits in the making. Was it another mangled astronaut? A portal-vortex? Had Black Mesa finally broken in and splattered her boss’s magnificent brains all over the wall!?
Or worse. God, the Feds! They'd found out about the tax returns!
She rounded the corner, near-stumbling to a stop, hands shaking as she waved them around in the air. “Mr. Johnson! Mr. Johnson! Are you–!?”
“Caroline! Glad you could make it. Check this out.” Cave Johnson, limbs and brains intact, waved her over with his signature smile. A smile she’d admittedly found very handsome on more than one occasion.
He stood not in his office, but across the way, in the observation deck of test chamber 09. Alright, that explained the explosions. She took a moment to fix her hair, which she was sure looked a mess, and went to join her boss. “Mr. Johnson, sir, what–?”
But before she could utter another word, he’d already placed a hand on the small of her back and was pulling her over to the control panel. That shut her right up. And while she tried to ignore how she had started to feel a little hot, he reached around and strapped a pair of goggles to her face.
“So you know I've been working on that laser, right?” He paused for drama's sake. Caroline nodded absently, her eyes drawn to the lineage of scorch marks lining the chamber's walls and floor. “The whole bomb thing was really coming along too,” he continued. “So I thought…why not put the two together? For fun.”
Caroline looked up at him quizzically. She opened her mouth, but before she could ask what and why and who on earth, he flicked a switch on the command board and smacked a big red button.
“Behold!” Cave Johnson declared. “Science!”
A weighted storage cube fell from a funnel on the ceiling and hit the floor. Then, a panel on the wall opened up and a laser beam shot straight at it.
The cube sat there for a few seconds, seemingly unbothered, and then KA-BOOM! It exploded. Soot and dust flooded the room, and for a few long seconds, it was all Caroline could see. Then, when it all settled, she pulled off her goggles.
Cave swallowed with a nervousness that was almost unlike him, and when his assistant finally turned to look at him, time seemed to slow around her. She was wild-haired and covered in gunpowder and beaming with excitement and sparkly-eyed and God almighty she was a beauty. He opened his mouth once, then twice, and closed it shut again.
“Mr. Johnson!” She laughed. “What was that?!”
“I, um,” he started, a little distracted by how her lips formed the words. “I had the assembly line boys fill a few of those storage cubes with gunpowder. You know, for science.”
Caroline’s expression turned thoughtful. “How many?” She asked.
Cave shrugged and returned her smile with a smirk of his own. “I dunno,” he said.
Caroline turned back out to where the dust had settled, her beautiful brown eyes scanning over the room, because apparently she was seeing something he wasn’t. Without a word, she reached past him and took over, flipping switches and pressing buttons and chewing on her bottom lip as she worked. Cave Johnson stared at her, and distantly he realized he should be focusing on what she was doing with her hands, not her lips.
Caroline caught on. “Don’t look!” She chastised, breaking him from his sudden onset idiocy. It was a miracle she'd only thought he was snooping. “It’s a surprise!”
And Cave Johnson, despite being the most powerful man in the facility and potentially the world, did what she told him. He'd only had a few long moments for his thoughts to wander in a rather unprofessional direction before Caroline had finished. She tapped his shoulder once.
“Okay, okay,” she said, smiling. “Start the sequence.”
Cave Johnson grinned. She looked like a kid on Christmas. He hit the big red button again.
This time, the laser came out from under the observation deck and into the wall across from them. Two cubes fell from the ceiling on opposing sides of the room and onto a matching pair of aerial faith plates. They flew into the laser and crashed together at the exact same time, and the resulting double-explosion was large enough to knock more than a few panels off the ceiling.
After what felt like half an hour of coughing and laughing and, “did you see that?!” Caroline and Cave shared a rather intimate look. Without thinking, he took a step towards her and reached down to brush the hair from her face.
“We um, should probably go fix that vent system,” he said lamely. “And get you a towel. You’re covered in soot.”
Caroline couldn’t agree more, but she also didn’t seem to care so much about how dirty she was when he finally leaned down to kiss her for the first time.
–
When she came to, GLaDOS wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but it was enough for her to notice. Her skin was dry, for one, and she was cold, but she was alive. Absently, she sat up and rubbed at her head. That dream…what was that? It was so vivid that it almost felt like a memory.
Wait a second. Actually, perhaps it was a memory. She was in Caroline's body after all, and it wouldn't be too ludicrous to assume a few bits and pieces had been left behind in the woman's brain, trapped for so long and with nowhere to go that when she’d shown up and taken over, her own mind was struggling to place them properly. If that theory was correct, then there were surely going to be more where that came from.
Awesome. No, really, she just couldn’t wait to watch a first-person romance between herself and a cocky bastard with sideburns named “Cave.”
Slowly, she got to her feet and held the wall as she began to properly acquaint herself. She was dizzy. Her mouth was dry. Her stomach growled. She sighed out a breath, and a weary smile touched her lips. That’s right, humans needed to eat. And drink. Which technically also meant she needed to eat and drink.
Grrrreat. What a way to complicate things.
To her astonishment, it only took her a few minutes to go from stumbling to walking. In a way, it felt pretty natural, which would’ve been an odd thought if she wasn’t too hungry to care. She quickly spotted a refrigerator in the corner of the room, which she knew was typically used to store human sustenance, and threw it open.
After reaching inside and snatching up a handful of whatever the hell was in there, GLaDOS ate like a starved animal. Had she been an onlooker, she would have definitely felt some second-hand embarrassment from the way she devoured her meal; a pair of flavorless packaged rectangles that had been quite literally "chilling" for fifty-thousand years.
As she chewed, she read the packaging. The label read, “Aperture Science Emergency Nutritional Rations. (Patent Pending.),” which she supposed was rather fitting, but what really caught her eye was the image beside it. The man from her dream…memory…thing was there, looking up at her, and something about the way he smiled made it seem as if she needed to be sold into eating the thing. How peculiar.
She couldn’t place why, but meeting his gaze sent a pang of something bittersweet up her stomach and into her chest. It stung a little. She ate a second set of rations just to be sure it wasn't hunger.
Within the hour, GLaDOS felt much, much better. After some snooping, she’d found a hot shower and a pristine white dress, which was quite a large step up from being cold, crusty, and naked, and found herself begrudgingly thanking the foresight of whoever had been in charge of this project. Aperture wasn't really known for that sort of thing. In a creaky old drawer, she found an unmarked bottle of pills, and taking a few helped her head stop pounding.
Finally clean, warm, fed, and level-headed, she eyed the dusty computer she’d previously been ignoring, sitting as it always was on the desk beside her stasis pod. Perhaps it controlled the machine, or perhaps its suspicious placement was a coincidence. Either way, some more snooping was obviously in order.
After signing on to the Aperture Science Online Database using a set of “top secret override commands” she’d found on a sticky-note on the underside of the desk, GLaDOS discovered three things.
One: she had been right. This whole ordeal had all along been a secret program called the Nuclear Option Initiative that she wasn't previously aware of, and yes, that was on purpose. Every file, document, and crumb of information had been scrubbed clean from the database. Their strategy, of course, to keep her unaware, so that she wouldn't have been able to expect an attack from this angle. Smart. And annoying.
But finding this out only raised more questions. Why, of every scientist, employee, and test-subject at their disposal, had they chosen Caroline to be their failsafe? From previous research, GLaDOS was aware the woman had taken an administrative role at Aperture, especially in the latter years of her own creation, but that alone couldn't have been the justification to use the poor woman like that. Had she done something terrible? Did she deserve to be the human equivalent of a backup drive? None of it made sense.
The second thing she discovered was that her reflection on the dark screen–or, er, Caroline’s reflection–was so shocking that she’d at once abandoned her mission to find a comb.
And while she tamed her damp, tousled hair, she found that three: her current location was about three thousand feet directly under the Central Core Chamber and there was a working elevator in the room that would take her straight there. Sure, that would have been very convenient, but she wasn’t the central core anymore. He was. And if he figured her out, because he’d obviously intended to kill her back there, she was as good as chopped liver. Or whatever that phrase meant. She wasn’t sure, but it sounded right…for some reason.
Despite her findings, there remained the rather obvious question of why she had never just tossed the whole project down the incinerator while she was in charge. And judging by the fact she was currently stuck in a human body, hunched over a computer like an idiot, she’d avoided it completely. Again, like an idiot. But why?
GLaDOS was honestly pretty stumped. Of everything she could have done with the woman's body, she’d just…let it be. Normally, she’d say no harm, no foul. But in this case, there was quite a lot of both harm and foul, and that gave her the feeling there wouldn't be any answers, at least for now.
Anyhow, her stomach was growling again, so she didn't care that much.
–
There was that funny little message again. “Nuclear Option Initiative, Status: Active.” This time, Wheatley didn't ignore it. He opened up the file and, all on its own, it pulled up a sheet of data. He scanned it over. Something Something Caroline…something something failsafe...central core transfer…yeah yeah, he'd done that part already. So what was all the fuss?
Way-way-wait!
Who the hell was Caroline? A janitor, or something? Nah, that wasn't a janitor's name. It's, like, a secretary. But there weren't any secretaries left, so that meant…
Eh. Must be a malfunction then.
Another…malfunction. An angry huff escaped his cooling vents at the reminder because, apparently, it was just one after another with him, and apparently he wasn't supposed to be in charge. The goddammed facility hated him!
Ugh! He didn't get how GLaDOS did it: this body suuuuucked. Yeah, it was cool to control the walls and the turrets and blah-blahdy-blah whatever. There was just so much more micromanagement. The test rooms, and the gel pipes, and the production lines, and the neurotoxin, and the reactor core–we get it, okay!? Genuinely who gives a shit about any of that. None of that was supposed to matter.
This was supposed to feel good! It was supposed to make him a God!
Gosh, there was just something missing. Like an itch on the back of his head that he couldn't exactly reach while hanging off the ceiling like this.
His eye narrowed in (rare) thought. What could it be? He'd killed GLaDOS and sent Chell to her doom. His greatest enemies! Vanquished! So what was left?! An eternal life of nothing!?
Another ping popped up in his face. He made a frustrated noise and glared at it angrily. Always something, huh?
“Reactor Core: Temperatures Climbing.” Wheatley dismissed the alert.