Portal: Love as a Construct

Part Five. The List

Part Five.  The List

Wheatley hummed to himself as he went along on his management rail. Now that things were more or less back to normal, he found himself in much higher spirits than he could remember having been in recently. It seemed his secret had been weighing on him more than he had thought, and he was certainly much happier now that he could spend time with GLaDOS again. She wasn't used to having someone around her all the time, though, so Wheatley continued to take his leave and roam around the facility for most of the day. Besides, he thought fondly as he passed a camera, she was never very far away no matter how deep into the facility he managed to get.

To get around to... well, most of the facility, really, Wheatley had to lay custom tracks along the ceiling using special panels that were made just for this purpose. For the longest time he had just used as many as he liked without considering where they went when he was done with them. In a flash of realisation one day, though, it had come to him he'd just been leaving them about willy-nilly for GLaDOS to put away every night. That wasn't very polite, he had chastised himself. She was letting him use her panels, the least he could do was put them away when he was done with them. Usually he was able to make do with five, but sometimes he ended up using a great deal more. The manoeuvering was more work some days than others.

He was doing his best to use just three today as he'd woken up this morning feeling rather ambitious, and he was doing a pretty good job of it too. He almost couldn't wait to go back and tell GLaDOS how marvelous he was getting at it. He wasn't completely inept, oh no, he could do things if he practiced, and practice he did. It was a very nice feeling, that of being able to do things, but Wheatley did have another reason for doing it. As he went through the facility he had noticed that there were a lot of signs and that they all had words on them. Wheatley had never admitted as much to GLaDOS, being barely able to admit it to himself, but... he couldn't read, to put it bluntly. If he stared at the letters for a while they usually turned into something meaningful, but it took him such a long time that it really was terribly inefficient. It seemed no one had thought that the core designed to be... well, slightly less than not quite a genius should know what all those funny little symbols meant. He really wanted to ask GLaDOS to teach him how to decipher the mysteries those letter things were spelling out, but he felt rather like he needed to prove he could do it if she took the time to help him. Which she would, he believed without a doubt. But first he had to be able to convince her to do it, and that was going to be the difficult bit.

Wheatley came careening into GLaDOS's chamber late that evening, eager to ask her about something the database had told him. It usually refused to retrieve information for him, but today it had been more generous than usual. "Hey hey hey, I have, I got a question, I do, oh, wait, are you busy? Probably uh, probably should have asked that first. So uh yeah, I hope you're not busy because uh, I've got a question. And I've already interrupted you so uh, you may as well let me ask."

"Happily for both of us, talking to you doesn't require much processing power," GLaDOS remarked dryly. "What is it."

"What's, what's Christmas? I was talking to the uh, talking to the database. Apparently it's, it's around today, somewhere, but the uh, the database wouldn't tell me anymore than that. It stopped talking to me when I, when I asked if you'd ever looked it up before."

GLaDOS sighed and looked at the ceiling. "It had to go and tell you about that."

"What's wrong with telling me about it, whatever it is?"

"Because it's one of those human holidays. No one needs to know about human holidays, but especially not us."

Wheatley jumped up and down a little. "What's this one for? They have a lot of holidays, now that I think of it, yeah, it's like they don't enjoy their lives, or something, and they just, they need an excuse to, to celebrate."