Portal: Love as a Construct

Part Twenty-Nine: The Breaking Point

Part Twenty-Nine.  The Breaking Point 

 

I am tired and irritable all of the time, now.

In an attempt to clear the workload as quickly as possible, I’ve been putting in almost twenty hours a day; I know that isn’t good for me, but I just want to get it over with.  Wheatley will not talk to me, will not even say good morning like he usually does, and I don’t blame him.  I don’t really want to be near me either.  I just want to go to sleep, and when I wake up I want all of this to have completed itself, because I’ve finally finished with the error messages and I’m halfway through the disk cleanup, which requires me to suspend a great deal of my processes and leaves me in an uncomfortable sort of limbo.  And even though I’ve done all that, I still have to defragment the mainframe, run a virus scan on the database, write her a new phase of updates, not to mention one for myself, and a whole host of other things I don’t want to think about.  But am doing unintentionally, as usual.

“Oi.  GLaDOS.”

“What,” I say tiredly, glancing over at Wheatley.  He doesn’t sound too pleased, but I can’t bring myself to care.  I don’t even know what he’s been doing with her all this time.  I can’t be bothered to ask or to check with Surveillance.

“I’m going outside.”

“Why do I need to know this?”

“Because you have to watch Caroline.”

“I don’t have time.  I’m busy.”

He scowls and shakes his chassis.  “Too bad.  I need, need some time to myself, for a bit.  You’re gonna have to, to make time.”

“That’s absurd.  I can’t create –“  But he’s not listening; in fact, he’s already left the room entirely.  He didn’t even give me a chance to argue.  Now that I think of it, that’s actually a pretty good strategy.

I turn to look at her.  She’s on the panel, looking at me expectantly.  I have the feeling I should probably have been paying attention to what’s been going on.  I have no idea what she and Wheatley have been doing.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” I tell her.  “I have a lot of work to complete.  It’s inconsiderate, really, that he left like that.”

She only blinks at me.

“I mean, I know I haven’t been very easy to get along with the last little while, but you’d think Wheatley, of all people, would appreciate that I have a pretty good reason.”

She makes a long, soft noise, and it appears she took to the update as quickly as she took to everything else.  Good.  That’s encouraging.

“I’m so tired,” I tell her.  “I shouldn’t push myself this hard, but… I just want to get all of this done.  You understand, don’t you?  No.  Of course you don’t.  You don’t understand anything.”

She makes the same noise as before, and I bring myself closer, intrigued.  That strikes me as odd, that she would do that when there are so many other variations she could build.  Maybe she does understand.  A little.  I don’t know what part, but… she seems to understand something.

“Do you?” I ask.  “Do you have any idea what I’m saying right now?”

When she doesn’t do anything, I suppose not. 

“It doesn’t matter,” I say resignedly.  “It doesn’t matter whether you understand me or not.  I have work to do, so you’re going to have to entertain yourself.”  I turn away.