Portal: Love as a Construct

Part Thirty-Two. The Ruse

Part Thirty-Two.  The Ruse

 

 

I don’t even feel bad for lying.

I asked Wheatley to leave so that I could get some work done.  In all honesty, I have no intention of doing any work at all.  I just wanted to play with her in private.  It’s awful of me, I know, but I’m fairly certain he knows already.  He just isn’t bringing it up.  He’s like that.  Though I really do have work to do.  I’ve decided to go ahead and build a new mainframe, just in case.  I don’t want to.  The mainframe is outlived only by the panels in this place, and has supported me in much the same way that they have. 

But I cannot risk her safety.

It’s… odd.  I don’t know why I feel like this, but… I must protect her at all costs.  This change is almost frightening in its intensity, the way I spend time I formerly spent thinking on other things to think about her, but it’s not something I can fight.  And though it is so very strange, I find myself not wanting to.

I also find myself watching her quite often.  That’s a behaviour I’m familiar with; I do it with my birds from time to time.  Bird, now, I suppose.   Oddly, she’s not afraid of me, though I must look infinitely huge to her.  She tries to get my attention more than anything, calling me in her own curious way and waving her handles erratically when I turn to look at her.  I don’t know why that is.  I would have thought she would identify more strongly with Wheatley, seeing as he is far more similar to her in appearance.  Perhaps what Wheatley said about speaking while I did the beta testing had more impact than we thought.  She not only knows my voice, but… wants to hear it.

Why does that make me feel so… good?

I sometimes wonder if I should have just gone to the second chassis, which is similar in size to Wheatley’s but two centimetres smaller.   I have no idea how she views her size in relation to ours, though I usually come to the conclusion that she likes it this way.  I do know one of her favourite activities is being held in between Wheatley’s handles, which would be quite a lot harder for him if she were very much bigger.  And, thank God, she does seem to be taking after Wheatley.  She certainly adores making noise.  As far as I can tell she’s always happy about something, though I admit at times I have no idea what.  She seems to have an imagination of some sort, which is also a relief.  Apparently I’m not that easy to get along with, which may or may not be because of the way I see things.  Wheatley is frustratingly vague on that front.  I think he’s trying to spare my feelings.  Which is kind of him.  But still frustrating.

She makes a chirping noise, which she usually does when I stop paying attention to her for whatever reason, and immediately I look down at her.  She’s fixing me with a stare which indicates to me she thinks she’s being very patient.  This is always accompanied by impatient wiggling.

I come to a realisation, and when I do I shake my core a little and laugh.  “You’ve got Mommy trained well, haven’t you?” I ask her, giving her a nudge.  This is very exciting for her, why I don’t know, but she’s moved on to excited wiggling, accompanied by smiling and babbling sort of noises.  I check every now and again to see if she’s trying to build a language out of all the noise, but so far I’ve come up with nothing.  That’s fine.  If she wants to make arbitrary noise she can go ahead and do that.  As long as she’s not making screeching noises while I’m working.  Which she has been known to do.  I’m still trying to figure out if she does it on purpose, because she’s not consistent enough for me to make any conclusions.  She’s such an enigma… I can’t think of her like that, though.  She’s a person, not an equation that needs a solution.  Sometimes remembering that is harder than it should be, but I’m getting there.