Portal: Love as a Construct

Part Forty-Nine. The Potato Battery

Part Forty-Nine.  The Potato Battery

I leave her be and go play that weird version of basketball with Dad and the co-op bots.  I think me and Dad are winning.  I’m not sure.  Atlas and P-body appear to be playing by their own set of rules that we don’t know.  “Carrie,” Dad says after a while, “I’m glad you’ve uh… you’ve patched things up with your mum.  I understand she gets difficult at times.  Can’t let that stop you, though.”

“I still don’t get how you grew up with no parents,” I tell him, trying to flick the Cube out of the corner.  “Did you have friends, at least?”

“No,” Dad says, grimacing.  “We weren’t exactly um, encouraged to talk to each other.  Humans’ve all these, these bits of folklore where um, where they build robots and then the robots uh, they kill them all and then the humans have to heroically vanquish the evil main computer, or something.  They decided the best way to do that was to uh, to not have us talk to each other.  Didn’t really stop me, but it did a lot of the others.  Not that we ran into each other a lot anyway.”  He snatches the Cube out from under me and throws it at the portal, but he misses.  “They’d give us um, assignments that kept us fairly far apart, fairly distant.  Other than the uh, the nanobots, but they’re too small to be complex thinkers.”  He shrugs.  “That’s it, really.  Life wasn’t that exciting.”

I pick up the Cube but I don’t throw it.  “So why are you and Momma different?  Shouldn’t you be… I dunno… like her?  Or vice versa?”

“Nope,” Dad answers, looking on thoughtfully as P-body throws Atlas’s core through her portal.  “I didn’t have to deal with the humans hardly at all, really.  They uh… didn’t want anything to do with me, so they’d give me something or another they thought I couldn’t screw up, or that uh, that wouldn’t matter if I did screw it up, and ignored me the rest of the time.  They usually kept quiet around me.  Said I talked too much.”  He shakes his core, narrowing his plates in annoyance.  “Even though it was their fault.”

“That you talked too much?”

“They programmed me to do that.  Problem was, I wasn’t supposed to come off your mum’s chassis in one piece.  She’d already broken a good number of cores by the time I was installed, so uh, when they programmed me I was supposed to stay there until she corrupted me.  They found my terrible ideas and  nonstop, my talking as annoying as she was supposed to.”

Wow.  Dad was built for the express purpose of driving my mom crazy until she killed him.  Maybe they’re right about humans.  I’ve never even heard of something like that.  And it’s not only inconsiderate, but it’s cruel, to do that to people.  They wouldn’t do it to themselves.  Like Dad said, they just shoved him in a corner somewhere they couldn’t hear him.  “Why haven’t you guys told me about this stuff before now?”

“D’you like thinking about terrible things?” Dad asks quietly.  “We didn’t notice so much at the time, but now… now, those days were a lit’ral living hell.  Endless and boring and lonely.  You don’t understand and I hope you never will.  If ev’ry other, all the other species on earth can have happy, healthy lives, then so can we.”  He throws the Cube at the wall pretty hard, and it flies halfway across the room and rolls into the wall.  “You want all of… all of this, in the future?” he asks, waving the maintenance arm very vaguely.  I look around the room.

“The facility?”

“Well… yeah.  And… people to uh, to run it with.”

“Yeah.”  Why wouldn’t I?