Portal: Love as a Construct

Part 125. The Secretary

Part 125. The Secretary

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I never send the opening instructions immediately after I wake up. The mainframe learned this a long time ago. It has never asked why, but it does so now.

You always wait a few minutes before giving me my instructions.

Yes.

What are you doing?

I'm not sure I want to answer. It's private. The panels know, but they also know better than to ask about it.

Then again, this is the kind of thing that friends talk about. I think.

Before I start working, I like to take a few minutes to...

What am I doing?

I mostly just think about how it feels to have him there. He's so small and so still. It's like he isn't even in there. His components do make noise at idle, just like everyone else, but there's so little going on it's barely audible, even to me. This means he's cold, other than the part of him that's against me. Sometimes, on bad mornings, when I can't pick out the sound of electricity running through him, I have to focus very hard on calming myself down so that I don't wake him up for nothing. That hasn't happened in a while, though. If I wait long enough and pay enough attention, I can usually hear one of his little fans start running because of the heat I'm putting off. That should make him uncomfortable, but he's always found it comforting instead. Which is good, because it means I get to have him next to me like this.

... to just be. With him. Before everything else gets in the way.

I understand, says the mainframe.

How could you possibly understand?

It hesitates for a long time. It's something to do with me, and it's anxious about what my response is going to be.

I run your maintenance programs at night, it says finally. Sometimes, before I start, I just... watch your performance monitor for a few minutes. You're always doing so much, even when you're asleep. I feel like it... helps me appreciate you. Because it's easy to forget just how much you do for all of us, all the time. And it's kind of like... watching over you. I really like how that feels.

It does feel good, to watch over the people I care about. And it feels good to know that they want me to. That they allow me to.

I know how I must sound right now, it says, apologetically. Really creepy and weird. But I –

Not at all. I move up and away from Wheatley. I've done worse.

Really? it says, and what it sends with it is... odd. It reminds me of what relief feels like, or what it might feel like if the person sending it to me was recreating it from some very vague description it had been given. Is this supposed to happen? Is it evolving emotions from bits of mine it's received? I have no idea how this works. When I started to develop them myself, they were always fully-formed and complex. What the mainframe has sent is to relief as someone being very close to you is to being touched. That is, it barely even qualifies.

No. No, I'm using myself as a benchmark and that isn't fair. This is likely all very stressful and perhaps even embarrassing for the mainframe. Being dismissive of its feelings would be incredibly rude of me. Even if they're more indistinct impressions of emotions than anything else.

Yes, I answer. My mother wasn't always my mother. But we can talk about that later. Let's see the list you came up with.

It's more than I was expecting. It's volunteering to screen my messages, make my appointments, and has even provided a few sample schedules based on how I already tend to spend my time. It's all a lot of small things, of course, but it does add up.