Portal: Love as a Construct

Part 123. The Job

Part 123. The Job

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I wish you were here.

I wish you were here all of the time, but especially lately. You taught me a lot about becoming a person, but nothing about becoming a CEO. Except that Aperture is not really a company anymore, nor does business in general really exist. And that's unfortunate, because running a company involves a lot of paperwork, and paperwork is one of life's simple pleasures. I used to do yours for you. It would be nice to have a reason to do some.

Instead, I have to do things like put an Emancipation Grid around a lake to keep humans away from it and prospect for silica because my back stock of components isn't going to last forever. Not that I should actually be using them. They're fine for short-term repairs, but replacing thirty-year-old parts with thirty-year-old parts results only in the impedance of progress.

I don't even currently know if the water in the lake is of use to me. Or anyone. It's there, at least, but it being there causes me to suspect there may be something wrong with it. I should be able to reverse the damage, should there be any, but it will take time. Possibly more time than I have right now. Constructing the Grid is the biggest priority.

I do have some help. If you can call it that. The Cores who approached me for work aren't very smart, but they are obsessive, and that will have to do for now. The one who has made the most progress is in charge of the eventual silica refinery, which he has almost finished the plans for. To his credit, he didn't take any of my critiques badly. I expected him to have given up by now – or at least argued with me – but he has merely taken my comments under consideration and come back with improved iterations of his plans. It's been... nice. Today he should be bringing me the final version so construction can begin. Though it will all be sort of pointless if I discover the Combine has stripped all the silica from the planet.

Well. Not quite. I do have a trump card the humans don't know about. If there's something I absolutely cannot find or make here, I have six other galaxies to choose from. That works better for small-scale projects, though. Enough material to upgrade all the cameras in the Facility would definitely be a stretch. I've already started doing that, but... judiciously. I probably should have waited until I could do the entire thing at once, because Surveillance keeps bothering me about it. I hope it isn't favouring the feed from the newer cameras. I'm not sure if it has the ability to do that. I hope it doesn't have the ability to do that.

All of that will have to wait. The next thing I have scheduled is a review of the test I gave Alyx, to see if she was prepared to be given the AI template. Caroline will obviously have helped her, but I've seen enough of her code to be able to tell them apart.

//

Alyx's code is about what I expected. That is, it's terrible. For the most part, I can see where she was coming from, and all of those places are well-intentioned. But she's approaching a programming language developed by a supercomputer from a human frame of mind. Things simply don't work the way she's expecting them to. I knew this was going to be the outcome when I made her the deal in the first place. But she did try. And that's important.

Caroline's, however, is good. Very good, in fact. And some of the methods she's used I haven't taught her yet. Which means she's been looking at what I've written and learning from it all on her own.

Luck is a superstition. It's something that can't be measured or witnessed or brought about in any empirical way. As one might expect, I don't believe in it. But I can't think of any other reason for what I have been given in Caroline. I could not, not even if I had a literal million years, have intentionally created someone like her. I suppose it's the sort of thing that makes humans believe in things like miracles and gods. I don't – I'm pretty sure I actually can't – but if I did, she would certainly do it.