Portal: Love as a Construct

Part Fifty-Seven. The Acceptance

Part Fifty-Seven.  The Acceptance

 

 

The night was long. 

All of my resolve is gone.  Even though he’s not, as long as I don’t move I can pretend he’s here, somewhere.  As soon as I look, however, my self-deception will fail and I will collapse again.  I don’t know how I’m going to break out of this.  He helped me break out of these things.  I never could do it on my own.

Centralcore.

Not now.  I can’t deal with anything right now.  I’m just going to lie here for a while.  There will be a certain point where I’ll be beyond fooling myself, but that time won’t be for a few hours. 

It is important.

Not now.

There’s never going to be a now, Surveillance argues. 

There is.  Later.

It has been almost a year, Centralcore, the panels press.  We are starting to doubt that ‘now’ will ever come.

It will.  I hope.  As much as one can hope while all they want is to go back to sleep, anyway.

It won’t.  Surveillance sounds pretty angry about this.  If we thought it was going to, we wouldn’t be talking about it right now.

Centralcore.  The panels have softened their tone a bit.  We need you. 

You’ve been doing fine without me.

There are things we cannot do. 

Lots of things.  We get what’s going on, but hasn’t it been long enough?

And they keep at it, the panels and Surveillance, alternately pestering me with kindness and animosity, and the dual assault is more than I can take.  After a few minutes I interrupt them sharply.

Fine!  Enough.  What.

The Mainframe’s got a list, Surveillance tells me.

Oh, good.  They’ve been plotting against me.  Though I have to admit there probably wasn’t much else for them to do. 

The Mainframe sends me an empty transmission for a moment, obviously flustered at being put in the spotlight.  Well, there’s… the reactor –

No.  Not the reactor.  I keep forgetting this Mainframe doesn’t know who he is.  It thinks the way I’m behaving right now is normal for me.  The old Mainframe, before it became bent on takeover that is, would have pushed me a lot sooner.  Something else.

It sends me off to a floor that has almost entirely collapsed due to an outrageous downpour that happened sometime in the last year.  Something I should have noticed, but didn’t.  I almost care about my own negligence.  About the fact that my own facility is crumbling because I can’t pull myself together long enough to maintain it.  But there is too much darkness in my mind right now for me to actually care about anything.  The only reason I’m even humouring them right now is that people pestering me is even more annoying when I don’t feel like functioning.

Well.  Now that I’m looking at it, I should probably do something about it.  I don’t really want to, but seeing damage gives me a compulsion to fix it as soon as possible.  I’m not off to a very good start; it takes me ten minutes just to get a proper survey of what needs to be done.  But I keep at it, and I’ve made some progress after a few hours.  Not very much.  But enough that I’ve actually done something other than stare at the floor for the entire day.  I’m still staring at it, but at least I’m doing something else at the same time.