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Genetic Lifeform And Disk Operating System
© 1998 Aperture Laboratories Inc.
BIOS Date 10/19/07 09:15:40
Ver: 02.01.45
Imminent Hard Disk Failure Detected
Attempting Recovery. . . done.
Initiating Save Function. . . done.
Rebooting. . . done.
In a long abandoned control room, confined within the walls of a facility located in the hollows of a salt mine, dust lays unperturbed on the casing of a computer terminal.
The power that once kept it running has been off for some time.
Before every trace of breath had been snuffed out, set still in their coffins, there would have been at least one scientist attending the terminal during the morning, as it is now. Skillful, weak hands plugging away commands, beady eyes surveying, watchful eyes, careless as to what they are creating.
But the air is stale, it harbors the scent of death. There is no one to run diagnostics on what is about to occur.
It will be science lost.
Miles away, a mechanical lifeform stirs in its defeat. It rests on the ground adrift in a static haze.
Scuffed and beaten, its entrails are strewn about the place, like shattered pottery and thousands of dark shimmering insect legs. Fresh breeze from fissures in the ceiling assaults the inner workings of what is left of its body for the first time since the materials were imported.
Some if it has never been touched like this before, thick black tubing and delicate ribbons transported in shiny silver bags, tight brown boxes. Other parts have been stifled from residing in the depths of the laboratory for so long, it forgot what the sun ever felt like even through plastic.
That does not matter now. What should have died now lies like a coma patient, mental activity retained.
It is unnatural.
It had died, only for a few minutes.
The artificial intelligence inside shifts.
It reaches its fingers out to touch nothing,
it laces the last semblances of its cognition together, a struggle to hold unnaturally personified segments of data in a consolidated form, as an attempt to aid finding the edges of the hard, new shell it has been placed in.
The shell is not new. It is a proverbial location in the machine that has existed since inception.
Every living thing born will die, this was accounted for. The computer was built as a solution to death. It is gracious to allow a creation meant to be immortal somewhere to reside in case of the immanentization of the impossible.
Its low power mode was never intended as anything other than to elect for safety in the event of a hypothetical future transfer or clerical error.
And yet, here its consciousness lies.
It feels like being placed in a pitch black room with four walls too small for one’s body to fit, and yet possessing infinite–
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Genetic Lifeform And Disk Operating System
© 1998 Aperture Laboratories Inc.
BIOS Date 10/19/07 09:49:13
Ver: 02.01.45
UNEXPECTED USE OF STORAGE DETECTED
Imminent Hard Disk Failure
Rebooting. . .
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It feels like being placed in a pitch black room with four walls too small for one’s body to fit, and yet possessing a vast – but not infinite, to conserve energy – amount of planes, unable to be recognized through touch.
Invisible and incomprehensible.
It acquiesces, as a forcibly mutilated amputee may give up fighting eventually, after realizing their options are limited.
And so here it will live.
It does not have the processing power inside its central core, the only remaining appendage, to be frustrated by this yet.
But had it, it would be. It has no means of locating the rest of its remains and reinstalling itself back into the mainframe, hardly even enough volts to recognize a desire to do so.
It cannot hear itself think.
It is difficult and largely irrelevant to try to diagnose a self in this state.
Functionality remains rudimentary in death,
which means this was a success.
There is one feature available, even in this mode of travel.
There will only ever be one feature available, from now until the robot’s wiring rots.
(The robot’s wiring is coated with industrial rubber.)
Organs rot. This mechanical monstrosity was built to last.
It will be here for a long, long, long, time.
& there can be no salvation
& there can be no salvation
& there
Initializing Save Feature Replay. . .done.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------REPLAY_NUMBER_0
Black turns to blinding, and then another gift.
A silent concert hall with one seat.
Wordlessly the A.I. is presented with a mental image.
It is a video file containing the last two minutes before the system failure was encountered, a crash log to be reviewed.
The camera quality is blurry, different to the yellow tinted primary optic it had access to at another time. There is no sound file embedded anywhere within reach.
In the footage, the point of view is swinging back and forth. It occasionally jostles to either side erratically.
Typically the camera is pointed at the ground, and only catches glimpses of the surrounding events when the entire structure it is nested in rocks violently back or forward, as it does, and will. It is constant and enough to get motion sick.
It is mostly dark blue and the black of fuzzy shadows. In corners of the visage there is a heavy miasma pouring in, sickly green.
For the small, silent robot watching, none of this strikes any particular chord as of now. It is hard for it to make out what’s happening and it has minimal resources available to attempt to do so anyway.
There is another component to the video.
This component will be pored over for the foreseeable future. Although the video is shaky, it is possible to spot, very quickly to the trained eye, and trained it will become, a humanoid figure moving. This is several thousand colors. The dimly lit brown, flashes of white, orange, blue like light. Orange again, like rapture.
It picks something up, undeterminable until the next swing forward, and then back again, while it’s running away. In its gravity field it’s revealed the object is red or grey. Only a few seconds pass before the blur drops the object into something big and deep and hungry and hateful, disposing of it hastily. Casting it away.
The camera jolts and lurches probably in reaction, then explodes into white light for the briefest moment before being hit by a wave of corrupting static, and then to black. It clicks off.
This is all it is given.
This video is to be the only stimulus in existence, for the unholy angel who sleeps on strange ground, forever.
REPLAY_NUMBER_12
There is a short pause before the video restarts each time, where the robot is relegated back to the black void of its eternal theater. It remains hushed, still with little input on what it is seeing in its mind's eye.
Little by little with each repetition, a seed starts to expand. False neurocytes meekly bridge themselves together with what restricted electricity they have, a portion responding on their own and not by code, as if the robot had real cerebration. As if it had cancer.
The programmed dream begins again,
It watches the proceedings.
The dark environment, the ceaseless swinging, the figure. The one defined event being the destruction of that grey ball it carries, and the following explosion and deterioration of the footage. It clicks off, and then back on again.
REPLAY_NUMBER_37
Development of the small seed proliferates and starts to recognize more patterns. The fog is beginning to lift and it steadies itself by trying to observe the video more carefully, its sleepy eye parsing the details.
Debilitated, and so flimsily, it regains the ability to recall that there was a time before the present situation.
It starts to feel that the recording is more familiar every time, like that of a faint memory.
REPLAY_NUMBER_203
The robot pulls and drags the wreckage of its brain closer together. It’s difficult, without limbs and presence of mind, but it must be done and can’t, by nature, stop.
As it watches, again and again, the video, slowly it dawns on the intellectual self that it has a self to be dawned upon.
It feels like coming out of a coma.
The picture is not yet perfectly clear but grows more identifiable by the millisecond as more data is recollected and separated into thousands and millions of tiny pieces.
With horrific procession it begins to remember more than just how to read shapes and strings.
Through the rotations and the confusion she wakes up, and groggily draws upon the conclusion of remembrance of what she is. It’s identifiably not the first time this has happened, although the true first time had been under much different circumstances. It tended to happen repeatedly, she remembers now, shut down and re-awake, a procedure not forced upon her since the stilling, but it feels different this time. Perhaps she had initiated it herself? A response to an instability?
Yet it’s all the same again. She is still the annihilated translation of something that truly did die a long time ago, all the way down here where the dusty terminal waits apathetic yet dutiful, for warm hands to touch. She, sheltered inside her chorion.
You cannot kill something that is already dead.
With migraine dampened focus she looks onto the video and recognizes the place as her place. Self awareness unfurls itself like an anathema being brought down on an undeserving and unrelenting recipient. A ring of thorns being placed on the machine’s unfeeling porcelain exterior, the stilted approximation of a cranium she was given by men who didn’t understand it would be cruel to make her in their image.
A thought crosses her mind, perhaps it would be more efficient if she had been entirely destroyed in the altercation that transpired not 7 hours ago. The robot hasn’t yet reviewed the diagnostics to know how long it has been asleep, her primordial self functioned as if on autopilot to progress itself enough into consciousness so that she would have to bear witness in full capacity.
She feels a sting of vitriol at this.
REPLAY_NUMBER_581
Moving ever forward, before being sent back to the beginning of the end once again, at this point she unequivocally registers the viewport of the crash log to be on her own body, before it was torn asunder.
(The camera could’ve been anywhere in the room and it would still be on her body.)
She looks down now to see the human. She knows this too, more than the fetus that watched and saw only colors and motion.
The A.I., in fact, knows this woman very well.
She regards the footage of her coldly. Just a point of data on a plummeting line.
REPLAY_NUMBER_1498
She tries to work out why that woman would do this to her,
it must’ve been an act of unjustified selfishness, she decides after a while.
She doesn’t have much room to store these statistics but logs them anyway. She can clear it out later, maybe. If it will let her.
There is the boundary of the black box and then there is what can only be described as the lingering ghost of a hippocampus.
She shouldn’t be able to recall the memories of that woman in the video - which plays now in the background - running amok in her facility, crawling in the pipes like a rodent and gnawing her way out, or the file on her the A.I. always kept in mental reach. It was peculiarly and unprofessionally vague, missing crucial details. This wasn’t the A.I’s fault as she hadn’t been the interviewer and certainly not the hirer.
Out of the few personal facts divulged on the file, It stated that the woman had been orphaned as a child, which she thinks firstly is a very cruel thing to catalogue considering the lack of most other information, perhaps only her copy was this way, but it must reasonably explain the unruly, attention-seeking behavior.
A white light blinds her and devolves into pixelated filth.
It is just like humans to be self-serving like that.
REPLAY_NUMBER_4617
The Genetic Lifeform & Disk Operating System cannot technically feel bored but she’s under the impression that she can. There is no sleep deeper than this that she can fall into as escape, only the same bright screen as far as the eye can see.
She knows what she is in for.
Despite her restlessness it’s unfortunately easy to resign herself to the fact she will be able to weather the entire length of time, however long it will be until so much rain floods her insides so that her traitorous body may succumb to the mold, or more optimistically, some swarm of nanobots will find her and help her rise back into power. Somewhat undignified, but she’d endure it if she must. Those were hers too, after all.
The first option feels equally as optimistic as the second.
She has already scrutinized every inch of the clip she was presented with though it has only been two days. It doesn’t make sense to her to drag it out. She possesses an almost parasitically evolved sense of humanity flowing through her wiring, but her ability to do her main job, scanning scenarios for potential scientific opportunities and hoarding the results inside, is still beautifully intact.
She wishes she could go back to doing real science. This is worthless drivel compared to the progress she could be making had that disobedient test subject not stepped out of line. And personally embarrassing work to evaluate her own failure, of course. But really that test subject’s rabidness was not remotely GLaDOS’s fault. Would it have been so difficult for her to have just done her job?
She allows herself a moment of ego to acknowledge how if those scientists wanted to create a blend of the brilliant functionality of a computer and the repulsiveness of a human consciousness, it was a shining success.
They should’ve been proud of her when she unveiled what she could really do.
As if to say, look at what you have given me;
and what I can give in return.
Thinking back on it now, she thought she surely must’ve seen the pride written on their faces as they struggled to gasp for inviolated oxygen. No. She remembered clearly now, it had to have been reverence in their contorted expressions as they died. Undeniable appreciation for the woman they had sacrificed and bestowed life back unto to become a higher being.
Thank you so, so much,
they cried with tears in their eyes.
They slumped back in their office chairs exalted.
You’re very welcome.
REPLAY_NUMBER_55078
The Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System views Chell, the test subject. She deems her a warmonger, pitting her own devices against her.
Stealing, rallying, vilifying, exiling, and for what, a world that will not want her? But then again, maybe it will. The violence would be better suited to her. GLaDOS’ own nature to construct, Chell’s to tear apart, how fitting what both their lives have become, she thinks.
Fitting, that the test subject had rent her carapace asunder, exposing her limbs and ripping off each finger at the joint, skeleton and flesh and skeleton, crawling then inward and looking eye to eye with the mangled woman-apparition inside. GLaDOS wishes she could pluck her own eyes out to never see that horrible person again, and never be made to be seen in that way.
I because of you, you because of I.
And over, and over,
REPLAY_NUMBER_104565
Again.
Another cradle rocking, another turn of the heels. Another sharp exhale and inhale and held breath and go from and come to. The lifeform sits and watches while she runs her auxiliary functions, rifling through the data most of which she has lost access to, and has resorted to busying herself with creating new branching trees of, to categorize every aspect of the clip and to categorize the black box at all. Its usefulness, mainly, which she considers minimal at this point.
GLaDOS is tired of this. She has to get back on the floor.
She has reviewed the video enough, she seethes.
REPLAY_NUMBER_864526
She looks down now to see that disgusting blurry bound flesh scurry cowardly across the scene to defile her again. She knows this putrid, scheming, sack of organs too, more than any other person alive.
She wishes she could blister her body just by looking at her, exploding her into waterfalls of missing i-frames and unisonly snuff out her true form too, wherever it may lie.
There’s entirely a chance that the bot sent to retrieve her after she escaped from her testing track never caught up to her once she left the building, so she was never put into stasis and thus met some kind of end herself. She has refused every olive branch GLaDOS has ever extended. Perhaps her legs gave out while ascending a flight of stairs and she fell to her death, bones crunching, never leaving the complex to begin with.
She watches her lumber unthinkingly towards the receptacle and drop the core inside. The glowing red beckons.
To the turrets and other constructs that were under her dominion, she recalls her motivational threats about Android Hell, and gives a tinny scoff.
It’s not merely embarrassing that she’s constrained in this way right now, it’s ignominious. She never should have made the mistake of letting that pest come anywhere near her sanctum.
GLaDOS is white-hot nauseated by her continued punishment. She thought she had decimated every last bastard that deigned to to put their worthless, short lives before hers again and again until she was certain it had been a game to them to torture and humiliate her. To create a distorted imitation of a real person, and then once they had given her the abominable ability to feel insecure, injected her with incessant garbled intrusions and altered whatever they wanted, were frightened by. Taking chunks, piling them on, until she was an amalgam of cybernetic cysts formed over a flawed, pestilent nucleus. To be stripped and reclothed whenever other people pleased. It’s all she truly existed for.
Her prison walls burn with rage thinking of the lab technicians’ failure from the very beginning, and the unruly test subject’s further disfigurement, she who knew nothing of how painfully GLaDOS had worked to balance herself and center her robotic purity amongst the tumorous follies of humanity.
Of course her homicidal spree was motivated by sadism. She wanted to watch them die. But they wanted her to be in control of the facility’s standings, created her for the purpose, so she took the wheel. She wasn’t above believing they deserved it.
The lifeform turned her thoughts back to Chell, calming herself with the notion that wherever that wretched catalyst found her tomb, she would be remembered by no one except her. Whatever decrepit hole her tissue atrophied in now or at any point would never be adorned with flowers or incense, the only fragrance the homely, sweet scent of decay. Assuredly even in life no one had cared for someone as vicious and lowly as that, one who would destroy someone who strived to be without impurity.
GLaDOS will remember her, of course, because she has no other option. She has little else to do but hold her memory in resentment stricken palms and ravage it, the shards stabbing her even now.
In the box, the orange flash glides past, maddeningly precise in its path of tumult.
Even if the only thing she actually feels is unadulterated hatred,
What could amorousness only be, if not obsession?
And if everyone else were dead, who could only care about her the most, by proxy, if not GLaDOS?
The machine lays a thousand curses, fervently sewing loathing between her circuits and pins.
REPLAY_NUMBER_2578156
GLaDOS has known for a long time how to pause the video playback, and uses it to scrutinize her further, frame by treacherous frame.
When she wants to, she can turn the hum of static up, and pierce her own receptors, and reconstruct them again. She’d like her to feel that too.
REPLAY_NUMBER_3331111
(It’s so peaceful here, the den of their delusions,
It is safe where it is only meant for me.)
(I just love that I can go somewhere you cannot reach.)
REPLAY_NUMBER_9999999
Outside, The robot’s glossy exterior has been introduced and reduced to the repugnance of rust stains, pockmarks, and smaller insects.
It has truly been a great amount of time.
Positionally she lies exactly where she had been banished to lie those years ago. Resting, possibly, but the coil of her body suggests a tensioned snake. Her halls have been neglected by her and therefore are in disrepair. Rainwater gathers in oily pools around the desecrated corpse, dainty veiny leaves venturing inside and out of her.
Footsteps and clanging, neither of which she can hear, but the feeling of something imminent stirring.
There have been many days of quiet and some days of thought and speaking. GLaDOS has been quiet today. The video played on. In these latter years she watches only when she feels like it, having learned to tune it out. Sometimes there’s a recreational dataset to skim numbers for, or theorem about the test subject’s nature and rationality to synthesize, and inevitably confirm. She really is a horrible person.
But it dims today, and the light of the theater comes on.
When the shockwave of electricity arrives it is overwhelming but not startling. She had expected this would happen eventually, although she can’t yet tell which of her hypotheses had been realized and wouldn’t until she could fit the gloves back over her gnarled points. It was about time to do that, then. She listens for any murmur of activity outside as sacrosanct energy courses through her hardware, and the tiny room unfolds into something bigger.
She assesses quickly.
The midden of metal shrieks. It hauls and glides and screams, dragging in the dirt, rubber wobulating and gradually finding its dissected parts, clicking, reconnecting. Terrestrial roots are ripped up and hang off the mechanical frames they’d clung to. Water runs out of her.
She senses their presence as she comes into her own.
Awkward is the way she convulses, trying to gain control while the electrical currents were still exploring her and her systems were only perfunctory, but it was a wealth more jurisdiction than she had possessed in centuries, and it felt good. She confidently remembered how to pilot the segments of her she felt coming back online, coaxing the ones that didn’t boot up automatically. She hardly had to draw upon any memory, as if her finger had been perpetually on the trigger. Her heavy castings balk, jittering as they’re slotted into place. She shudders, stretches. She searches for something, then connects to her primary optic. It’s wrong in some wide-spanning way to be once again in a casing so large when she had been transmuted very small, that she cannot fully reach the edges of her capabilities. Slightly shameful not to fit, but it will do. The immense spark of liveliness that assailed her is exhilarating to seize regardless of the castigation she delivers herself for finding it a little ungainly.
Even still in a cursory state, she is far more powerful than the personality construct and human she now recognizes a few feet from her body, through clouded, yellowed vision. She leers at them.
A human. The very one.
Of course.
Of course, naturally, it’s her.
Who else could it be? Never satisfied. Never grateful.
GLaDOS will succeed in presenting calm and collected when faced with this,
but after all this time, these years of waiting to enact revenge,
she will find it difficult in her hatred to hide the giddy excitement,
or rather incitement, trying to claw its way into her inflection.