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Caroline stood in the cavernous expanse of the chamber, the sheer scale of it swallowing her whole. The cold seeped in from the panelled walls, and her breath fogged faintly in the stale air. Goosebumps prickled along the length of her arms, though she wasn’t sure if the chill was to blame, or if it was the emotions rattling inside her — the tremble in her fingertips, the unsteady weight in her chest — as she stared upward. A good scientist would have paused, taken note, considered the evidence. Caroline was not in the mood to be a good scientist.
The thing loomed above her, hanging limp and unfinished. The Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, or GLaDOS, as the lab boys called it, rolling the acronym off their tongues with the easy familiarity of an affectionate nickname. At first it had been a convenience, a shortening born of laziness. Then it became something more, a way to humanise the monstrosity they were building. They had even started calling it she. Caroline found it insulting. If they wanted to pretend it was a woman, they could have at least given it a shape that bore some resemblance to one. Instead it was… this, an enormous, impersonal machine, made of cables and panels and lifeless motors.
Though, she mused, they wouldn’t need to pretend once they stuffed her inside the thing.
Her eyes drifted slowly over the faceplate, which caught the glint of the overhead fluorescents on its smooth, pale surface. Against her better judgement, she reached up and lightly brushed her fingertips across the metal. The touch jolted her. Cold. hard. But strangely captivating. The machine had an elegance that was difficult to deny, a kind of grace in the way it hung. It was beautiful in the way a statue might be. It commanded awe without the need to move. She could almost admire it. The engineering was extraordinary, and the sheer immensity of its construction was nothing short of astounding.
But that flicker of admiration soured once reality reasserted itself. They wanted to put her inside of it. They wanted to rip her mind from flesh and bone, peel it away from everything human, and wire it into the machine. Circuits instead of veins, and algorithms instead of thoughts. It wouldn’t be a life at all, but an eternity dictated by code, her body shackled to the ceiling with no reprieve but the hum of her own processors.
Her hand recoiled sharply from the machine’s faceplate, as though the cold metal had burned her.
White-hot anger rose in her chest. How dare he. How dare no one tell her. Years, she had spent by his side, holding him steady through his coughing fits and doling out his painkillers. And all the while, he had been lying to her, smiling that fading, Cave Johnson smile and lying point-blank to her face. And her devotion — curse that devotion — had made her too blind to see it.
Cave Johnson had been dead for less than a year, but his voice still rang through her skull, as alive as ever.
“She’ll say she can’t,” he had said in a tape he never thought she’d hear, “but you make her.”
The bastard.
And worse, his absence hadn’t loosened his grip. The board still parroted his desires as though they were scripture, and the engineers still laboured as though their prophet hadn’t died choking on his own poisoned lungs. CEO, successor… it turned out that titles meant nothing when Cave Johnson’s ghost still stalked the halls. It lingered, heavy and immovable, pressing Caroline closer and closer to the fate she swore she’d never accept.
Apparently, they had ruled Cave out long before his body finally gave up. Too frail, they’d said, too much neural degradation from the sickness eating him alive. His mind was crumbling even before the tumours left him bedridden, and no amount of money or flailing bravado could patch the damage.
So they turned to her, not with a choice, but with a statement, clinical, flat, as a document slid across the desk toward her. It will be you, Caroline. As if she were the spare part lying in wait. She saw her place in their plans, written there, not in bold, but in the fine print, a tiny footnote beneath the grand letters of Cave Johnson’s name. The contingency. The backup. The one they’d quietly counted on all along. And they spoke to her as though it had already been settled, as though her loyalty in the face of his declining health had been consent enough.
Still, she had clung to a tiny shred of hope. She hoped that he might live long enough to try it himself. She hoped that, by some miracle, the attempt would succeed — that Cave Johnson’s sheer force of will would prove stronger than biology, that he would conquer even this. She prayed for it, in the quiet moments where she allowed herself to dream so frivolously. Because as long as there was a chance it might be him, there was a chance it wouldn’t be her.
But then he died. And she chastised herself for being so foolish.
Cave Johnson’s widow was the warm body adjacent to his brilliance, and that proximity alone made her a resource to be spent. The audacity of it stung: the way they spoke to her, never with her, the way they reduced her entire life to a function of his. To them, being Cave’s chosen meant that she was theirs for the taking, and they had long since decided that her life was to be signed away, for she was simply a mind to be harvested, slotted into the frame hanging overhead to fulfil a dead man’s dream.
In that moment, Caroline realised they had never really seen her as authority at all. She was as much of an experiment as the rows upon rows of test subjects they kept in cryogenic storage.
Sometimes she thought back to the night it had all been sealed — the two of them drunk, laughing far too loudly in some dingy hotel bar after a successful funding pitch, both already slipping into their early forties. On a whim, one of them had suggested marriage, and the other, equally reckless, had agreed. The joke turned serious once the paperwork was filed, and even more so once the ring was on her finger. At the time, it had seemed harmless, even funny, an impulsive pact between two people who had spent the better part of two decades together.
Now, however, that band felt like a chain she had clasped around her own throat. If she hadn’t said yes that night, if she had walked away while she still could, she wouldn’t be here, standing in her own facility, being butchered for a machine she wanted no part of. The marriage was fine enough, as far as marriages went. What she regretted was believing, even for a second, that Cave Johnson’s madness wouldn’t eventually consume her.
As she stared into that blank, glassy optic, the first true stirrings of horror curled underneath her skin. This is what they wanted for her. To strip her thoughts from flesh and bone, and tether them forever to this cold, unfeeling carcass of wires. The machine wasn’t her, and it never would be. If there was one thing she was certain about in her life, it was that. She didn’t want eternity, not like he did.
And yet, a whisper of something flickered inside of her, something traitorous and quiet. The thought that maybe, just maybe, it would be easier to surrender. To stop fighting. To dissolve into the machine and let it swallow her whole. To become indistinguishable from the facility she had devoted her life to, her very existence transmuted into walls, cameras, and test chambers. Never again would she feel the ache of exhaustion in her blood, the inconvenience of a body that had to be fed every six hours, or the emptiness of a bed that felt far too large for one. Never again would she feel the grief that had gnawed at her ever since Cave’s body had been lowered into the ground.
Caroline shivered, and with a sharp intake of breath, turned on her heel and forced herself away before the machine’s silence could tempt her further.
Too far, that train of thought had gone. Too far indeed.
The chamber’s airlock shut behind her with a heavy hiss, sealing the machine back into its stillness, and sealing her, if only for a moment, on the outside.