Portal: Love as a Construct

Part Seventy-Four. The Collapse

Part Seventy-Four. The Collapse

The next morning, Dad comes up to me with a very odd expression. He looks like he's confused and scared at the same time. "Carrie, your mum wants a word," he tells me. "She says it's very important."

"Okay," I answer, getting up from where I was watching Atlas and P-body playing some game I don't know. "What's it about?"

"She won't tell me."

And when she won't tell Dad, it's pretty serious.

I get there as fast as I can, and I'm immediately set on edge. She's moving back and forth anxiously, which she almost never does. It means she's on the edge of control. "Momma? What's going on?" I ask as casually as possible.

"Caroline, there's something I must know." She sounds... desperate, almost. I look at her in confusion. What the heck happened last night?

"Sure. What?"

"You do what you do out of free will, right?" she asks, looking right at me but not going still at all. "You... come up with it on your own?"

"Uh..." I'm not sure how to answer that. "What does that mean?"

She looks at the wall for a long moment. She shakes her core, and it seems like she can't come up with an answer for my question either.

"Momma, what happened?"

"I... remembered something." And she bends down towards the floor.

She remembered something that scared her so badly she called me into her chamber first thing in the morning even though she's clearly not in her right mind, because if she were she would never allow me to see her like this. That's... terrifying. "What was it?" I say, trying to remember all the times she helped me, and deciding I should probably move closer. She might need a hug.

"I... can't shake the feeling that... nothing you say is... from you. That... I... programmed you like this. That none of this is real and I made it all up."

"Don't be ridiculous," I tell her. I understand why she might think that, because she built me and everything, but my programming has nothing to do with it.

"I could have –"

"There's no way. Momma, not even you can program someone to care about someone else."

"Then why?" she demands, coming up in front of me sharply. "Why would you bother? How can you be so sure that I'm worth all of this effort?"

"Dad does," I tell her.

"I programmed him too."

What.

"I'd forgotten," she says, shaking her core and looking away, moving back and forth again. "But I was trying to remember how the scientists replicated my sentience when they never meant for me to have it in the first place, and... I remember now. The AI Department was trying to build AI. Caroline gave me the Sphere they had made the most progress on. I finished it. Him. I finished him. They only limited some of the programming. This is all a sham. I've built everything on a lie. I wanted..."

This is blowing my mind a little bit. I still don't believe that I'm programmed to love my mom, but I need to get all of her thoughts out of her so I can convince her of that. But I never imagined that she built my dad too. "Wanted what?"

"To be cared about," she says quietly, her voice distorting a little. "And I built it. And it's not real."

"It is." But how do I explain it? How can you really know for sure why you do what you do, especially when you know what you're made of? Well, she loves Dad and she's not programmed to do that... maybe there's something in there I can use. "What about you? Why would you try so hard to show us that you care back? If we were programmed to do that, you wouldn't have to."