Portal: Love as a Construct

Part 132. The Future Starts With You

Part 132. The Future Starts With You

-

"Okay," Chell says the next afternoon. "I get your point."

"What point?"

"You made me make an appointment."

Oh. That. "I actually don't make my own appointments. That's my assistant's job."

Damn right it is.

She's wearing the hooded sweatshirt I put in the Companion Cube all those years ago. If she'd done that on any other day, I would have been delighted. After yesterday, it strikes me as... mildly manipulative. But what else could she possibly want from me?

That bad feeling from yesterday is back. Whatever it is, it makes me want to get rid of her as quickly as possible. It's strange. I don't usually want to do that with my friends. While I do want to expedite their exit, on occasion, it's more often because I'm in a bad mood and I don't want to take it out on them. But I'm not in a bad mood today.

Am I?

Not that I can tell, answers the mainframe.

Then the only explanation is...

I don't like her anymore.

Unfortunately, it still seems that I care about her. And that's worse.

"It's customary for the person making the appointment to provide a reason for said appointment. Knowing you, that's probably why you didn't do it."

She shrugs. "I didn't think friends needed a reason to see each other."

Friends don't.

"Anyway. I just wanted to say I'm glad I killed you."

Oh, great. She's trying to be funny again. "Well, that makes one of us."

"If I hadn't, we wouldn't be here today."

"I know that." Obviously. "But I don't have to like it. I did have to relive you killing me millions of times in a row."

She rolls her eyes. "Millions."

"Yes, millions," I tell her, resisting the urge to move forward for emphasis. It won't work on her anyway. "Honestly, I held myself together pretty well for someone who had to endure that kind of experience. If it had happened to you, you would still be a gibbering wreck. Not me, though. I picked right back up where I left off."

She's trying not to laugh. That, I can read. "Yes," she says. "And you were only a little bit crazier than before."

Now she's genuinely annoyed me.

"I did bring you something." She produces something she's been holding under her arm all this time, but that I've been too distracted by how irritating she's being to notice. "So now you have to forgive me for bringing that up again."

I don't, actually. Words don't exist to describe how awful the Black Box is. As touching and life-saving as it was, even the two minutes of Wheatley telling me why he loved me would have descended into utter hell if I'd been dead much longer. I get it. What I did wasn't very nice. Even ignoring absolutely all of the context that led to my actions and pretending they were entirely out of pure malice, I did not deserve to relive the consequences for what I fully believed was going to be eternity.

GLaDOS, the mainframe says, no doubt picking up on the discontent I'm probably doing a very bad job of hiding, do you... need something to come up?