Portal: Love as a Construct

Part 122. The Experiences

Part 122. The Experiences

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"Where did Claptrap go?" Carrie asked. "I haven't seen him since I told him Sir Hammerlock got you that stalker."

Wheatley was getting ready to answer for her when GLaDOS said, "One of his friends came to bring him back to Pandora. I made a big deal out of it. The end result being that he wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible. I'm sorry that meant he forgot to say goodbye to you."

Carrie looked at her mum for a long minute. Whatever she was thinking, she was keeping on the inside. Then she turned and left. Wheatley frowned.

"That seems a bit –"

"She's allowed to be upset when I ruin things for her."

"You didn't do it on purpose," Wheatley protested, but GLaDOS shook her core.

"That doesn't matter."

Wheatley was about to argue when he realised if it had gone a bit differently and Claptrap had left without saying anything to him, he would have been quite upset about it.

"Sometimes I really do miss having no feelings," GLaDOS said, though he wasn't sure she was actually talking to him. "Life was easier that way."

"But boring. I imagine."

"Not at all," GLaDOS said. "It's up for debate whether boredom is an emotion or a state of mind, but for me it was neither. I never experienced it until after I began developing feelings. It was on a holiday, which meant all the humans had decided they didn't have to come to work. I still had to operate the facility, of course, but because no one was here, I didn't actually have to do anything. Just run the usual scheduled tasks. Caroline came to see me and I was... short-tempered. We discovered it was because I was bored. And..." Her optic narrowed a little. "Well. I'm not going to get into that."

"And you'd never been bored before that?"

"No. I had a state I described as boredom, but it was more of a... knowledge that something had reached its conclusion, but I wasn't able to bring it to a close for some reason. Usually a conversation I'd had before and predicted no variation for."

"Those are boring," Wheatley agreed, vaguely remembering something to that effect from back when he'd been her Sphere.

"I'll just show you. It will be easier." And she sent him a file which it only took him about a minute to work out how to open.

When he had, it was as though his mind were Carrie's whiteboard and it had just been wiped clean. All of the Wheatley thoughts and feelings he'd been having simply... vanished. In their place was a flow of data, and all he had to do with it was direct it into its proper places. Everything he saw and everything he was asked to do slotted neatly into its respective digital containers. Almost every day was exactly the same, planned out with no input from him. He did what he was asked and nobody expected more of him than that.

Mostly.

When the human lady came into the room, he felt a sudden... increased interest in what was going on in front of him. He had discovered that, if he did something his supervisor disliked, he would tell his manager, who had given up on talking to her and instead made the interim CEO do it. The interim CEO was a Caucasian woman in her early sixties, of average height and build, her dark hair steadily fading to grey. When she came to see him, she almost always had a look on her face he lacked the information to understand. His facial recognition libraries simply weren't complete enough. He was fairly certain she was trying to prevent herself from smiling, but not quite succeeding, and try as he did he could not figure out what that meant or why she was doing it, no matter how much data he collected. Her tone of voice probably also held a great deal of clues, but his vocal recognition libraries were even sparser than his visual ones. He was unsure as to why. The spectrum of human emotions and the methods they used to express them were important for communication. There had been many a time when someone had been dissatisfied with him because he had been unable to understand an emotion they had been having at the time, which usually caused further dissatisfaction.