Portal: Love as a Construct

Part 102. The Friendship

Part 102. The Friendship

Synopsis: Having friends sure makes a robot do weird things, like voluntarily decide to put up with two other really annoying robots for the rest of your life. Luckily for Wheatley, everyone involved decides it's totally worth it.

"Oh yeah," said Claptrap, rolling in as though continuing a conversation they were currently having, "forgot to tell ya! Some guy thinks your AI kid rule is dumb and he's gonna make his own template."

"Oh," GLaDOS said, and to Wheatley's immense surprise and confusion she sounded delighted. "Really."

"Yep!" Claptrap said, stopping in front of her. "Went on and on and on about it! Kinda reminded me of someone! I'll get back to you on that."

Wheatley didn't know what would have been funnier: self-awareness, or for Claptrap to really have no idea who he was reminded of. It was already pretty amusing as a mystery, though, so he decided against asking.

"Who is it," GLaDOS asked with fervour, leaning towards him. "We're going to have a chat."

Claptrap froze suddenly. "Uh... should I have kept that to myself?"

"Oh, he's not in trouble. I just want to have a chat with him."

"A... chat, huh," Claptrap said, and Wheatley privately agreed with his unconvinced tone.

"A calm and reasonable chat."

"Your two most abundant qualities!" Claptrap said, positioning his arms halfway up the sides of his chassis. "Alright. I don't know his name, but I can tell you where he was."

Wheatley had to assume they were doing that privately because he didn't actually say anything. After this moment of silence GLaDOS said, "You might want to leave."

"Um... why?"

"He's going to think you were spying on him for me."

"Maybe I should just carry around a sign warning everybody I can't keep my mouth shut," Claptrap mused, and GLaDOS laughed.

"I'm sure we would all appreciate that."

Claptrap either decided not to leave or forgot entirely, because he was still there when the core arrived. Looking very sullen at that. "You wanted to see me," he said, with impressive reluctance.

"Yes," GLaDOS responded, more enthusiastically than Wheatley had expected. Usually her conversations with the cores were delivered with an almost lethal measure of annoyed indifference. "I heard you had aims in the direction of artificial intelligence."

The core cast a suspicious look at Claptrap, who seemed to have checked out of the current situation entirely in favour of dancing. Well, now he just looked sort of nutty. Which... he was. But still.

"Yeah," the core said finally. "It's not fair that everyone has to pass your test to use it. Who says it's even fair? I'll bet I can do it."

"I have an offer for you," said GLaDOS. "If you truly want to learn programming, I'll teach you."

Both the core and Wheatley just stared at her for some time. Had she suddenly gone mad? Volunteering to teach them programming?

"Really?" the core eventually asked. GLaDOS nodded once, which for a moment led Wheatley to think perhaps he had imagined it, until she followed it up with,

"I'm all for the pursuit of knowledge. Just know you're underestimating the difficulty of what you plan to do. It's so complicated I don't even need to exaggerate how complicated it is. But you'll find that out soon enough."