Portal: Love as a Construct

Part 127. The Understanding

Part 127. The Understanding

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Long after Wheatley is asleep, I'm still staring at the floor. I should have asked him to read to me, or at least told him that I was upset. But I know he's sick of me being unable to get over you. No. That's too harsh. He's tired of not being able to do anything about it. And I can't blame him, to be honest. It's been a long time. At this point I've mourned you longer than I even knew you.

The last time we talked about it, Claptrap told me that sometimes I just have to let myself be sad. I don't know how many times I'm going to have to do that, but maybe now is one of those times. Maybe I just have to spend a few hours pushing the sight of your dead body, limp but held upright in a chair next to me, out of my mind and then I can go back to normal.

The mainframe hasn't said anything since it made its offer. And really. What is there to say? I haven't found your mother. Not that I know if talking to her will even help. Forgetting isn't an option, and trying not to think about it serves to do the opposite. Unless someone tracks down a grief counsellor for supercomputers, I think I'm at a dead end.

Have you ever heard of Tetris?

What a strange question to ask right now. Yes. It's a game where you interlock differently shaped blocks, called 'tetrominoes', with the goal of completing a horizontal line. You lose if the stacked blocks reach the top of the screen.

That's what the database was saying. It pauses. Have you ever played it?

Why would I... No.

I think you should.

I'll... put it on my list. I don't know why it wants me to play Tetris all of a sudden, but I suppose I can humour it.

I mean right now.

You want me to play Tetris right now?

Yeah.

It's an utterly ridiculous suggestion. But it would also be better than staring at the floor and being sad. Pretty much everything is better than that.

Claptrap collects video games almost as obsessively as he collects music, so he ends up having multiple duplicates of the same thing just in case one version has a slight variation from another. Despite the ungodly amount of storage I had to install solely to backup his collections, I respect his thoroughness. This practise does have downsides, however. Namely, that I'm looking at several hundred versions of Tetris and I have no way of knowing which one I should play. He made me a list of the games he thought I would like, but Tetris isn't on it.

I end up picking one via random number generation, and it doesn't have a horrible UI or any rules I'm not familiar with, so I stick with it. I have to speed it up a lot, but once I've done that it's some combination of relaxing and distracting. I don't have to think about it too hard, but I do have to pay a certain amount of attention. Achieving a line is also more satisfying than I thought it would be. It's like a puzzle that changes slightly every time I finish it. It's... pleasant. Soothing, almost. I am now a Tetris AI. My only goal and purpose in life is to keep fitting these blocks together to form a line. That's all I'm ever going to do from now on.

//

I have now discovered that if I can't sleep, I should just play Tetris until I pass out. I have to admit I never would have thought of that. I have also discovered that Caroline is on my list of appointments for this morning. She can't possibly have finished her designs yet, but the mainframe hasn't listed a reason for why she's coming and I can't think of anything else. She clears things up immediately when she says,