Portal: Love as a Construct

Part Sixty-Eight. The Days Before

Part Sixty-Eight. The Days Before

At some point GLaDOS had raised a good number of monitors in her chamber, all of them filled with all sorts of different data that Wheatley didn't understand. He didn't ask her about them because if she was putting out visual aids that meant she was trying to concentrate, but he hadn't the fuzziest what all those numbers and coloured dots had to do with anything.

The one bit of meaning he did grasp from it was that the time they'd been preparing for was soon. This was due in part to the fact that there were people coming into her chamber every hour or so. Chell came in several times, not really doing anything so far's Wheatley could tell, but GLaDOS seemed the barest bit relieved by her presence.

GLaDOS barely spoke to any of them, including Wheatley, and though that grated on him he did not say anything about it. When night came and the humans stopped visiting, he would sit next to her and just talk. He knew she wanted him to, and he did his best to think of things to say, but he hated that he could only talk to her and not with her. That day especially he knew a chat was out, given the events of that afternoon:

GLaDOS had been discussing some aspect of battle plans or some such, Wheatley hadn't been listening – and he tried, he really did, but it was just so dull – when all of a sudden her hard drive hitched and shocked him back into paying attention.

"It'd make things so much easier," one of the male humans had been saying. He'd had dark hair down to his shoulders, some of it tied behind his head with a rubber band. He had looked at his fingernails as he spoke, studiously ignoring GLaDOS. "Then there'd be no need for any of this. Just send out a whole bunch'a robots and smoke the bastards. No need to put us on the line."

"So," GLaDOS had said, even that one syllable cold and harsh, "you expect me to outfit you. Supply you. House you. And then, after doing all of that work to ensure you are of at least a modicum of use, you expect me to also fight on your behalf? With no contribution from you whatsoever? In a fight that you started?"

The human had looked up at GLaDOS boredly from beneath the heavy line of hair above his eyes. "That's what robots are for. They do stuff we tell 'em to do. That's why we build them."

"But you wouldn't be building them. I would be building them."

"Yeah but we built you so... we really are building them, by extension. You're wasting time. I hope you're building those bots while you're here yapping."

GLaDOS had emitted a burst of white noise at a frequency that Wheatley had been pretty sure was out of the audible range of the humans, and he'd made the snap decision to cut the meeting sharpish, before something happened all of them would regret. He'd moved forward, which caused GLaDOS to glance at him sharply, but she stayed quiet as he called out, "Um, I think it's time we uh, we went our sep'rate ways for now, y'know, so we can uh... can think about what we've just discussed. A'right? A'right. Off you go then!"

The humans had, a little confusedly to be sure, filtered out, and he'd gone off to find Carrie for a bit because he'd known GLaDOs probably wanted to stew for a while. She'd begged him to build her a set of testing tracks she could run through with that Dog thing, and he'd obliged cheerfully, making a few of them a contest and a few of them cooperative. For the competitive tracks, he'd carefully done his best to make sure she couldn't lose, but without being too obvious about it, and judging by how happy she was at the end of it all it seemed he'd succeeded.