Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

In the Deep Tunnels

Keeping an entire terraformed world full of people alive is very hard work . In many cases terraforming isn't simply a passive process that stops once the world is habitable, it is a continual process to keep the correct mixtures of gas in the atmosphere, to pump water up from the ground, or in certain cases, make it from thin air. On arcadia they always needed someone to service the gravity fields, climate control , and most of all, the heat generators. Since Arcadia had no Sun of its own, it was almost imperative that the heating system be active at all times.

Space tends to be cold after all.

There was some talk bout creating an artificial sun, though that would be a project extending well into the future, and would include the acquisition and relocation of a gas giant, which they would then have to catalyze some sort of chain reaction to begin the fusion process. It was all very theoretical, and while it was plenty interesting it was not in her area of expertise.

Not that Glados couldn't have been an expert at particle and atomic physics if she had wanted to.

You would think being a naturally occurring hybrid between two species, one of them verbal and one of them nonverbal, she wouldn't be all that smart, but that wasn't the case, at least on two accounts. The issue of Glados's birth was.... Complicated to say the elast.

For starters, technically she wasn't a hybrid at all. Or more accurately, the adapids were all hybrids of one sort or another. Having lived on the adaptid planet for a few years this was the way she understood it: The adapids are always looking for advantages, they will incorporate any DNA into their genome if they see it as something that would lead them to better survival, however, on their own planet, the adaptids have basically spliced their DNA with almost every creature they have come across, making those moments of splicing very rare . The windfall of humans was an event they hadn't seen in a very long time, she didn't get the specific timeframe because Adaptid speech and understanding of linear time isn't exactly stellar, but that was the general idea.

She and her siblings were one of the first new major splices in at least ten generations. So she wasn't actually a hybrid, she was a full adaptid as a result of an adaptid doing what an adaptid was supposed to do. However, do to many long years of breeding among themselves, and their own species, the Adaptids tended to look like each other, which meant that, even though she was technically just an adaptid, she both looked and behaved in a completely different manner from them.

Case in point.

She had never really fit in anywhere.

Too be fair part of that was her own doing. Dr Adric said that she tended to push people away and her anger was as a result of her own feelings of inadequacy which she could neither confirm nor deny. She hadn't made it to that space he told her about where she was going to admit she had a problem, but for now, she was at least happy in her new life.

Glados worked for Narobi on the Omen, or the Empyrean depending on who was captaining it. In fact they serviced all the ships in the fleet when it was necessary, but when it wasn't Narobi had made it one of her own personal projects to keep the planet running, and she had taken glados with her.

Glados liked to fix things, and she liked the dark maintenance tunnels under arcadia, around which she could crawl and scuttle without anyone to bother her while she listened to audiobooks, music and podcasts to her delight.

If she wasn't here, she was on a ship, and if she wasn't on a ship she was in the maintenance tunnels abord the orbital docking station, or any number of other places.

She was never not busy.

And to be honest Glados was also a fan of her unofficial role as the maintenance tunnel cryptid. She didn't interact with the public very much, or even with many other members of the maintenance staff, so she had almost become a bit of a legend, a sort of benevolent monster that scuttled in the deep tunnels of arcadia, which was a thought she enjoyed. Between her and the ghost stag of Arcadia, their little planet was already beginning to form plenty of monster lore.