Portal/Borderlands: The Girlfriend

Part One

Well, crap. He hadn't thought that through yet! "Did uh... did Aperture ever actually try to sell any of the stuff you're testing?"

"We used to. But that was stopped a while before I was made."

"Why?"

She sort of shrugged. "Everything that comes out of here is, well... deadly. Humans frown on that sort of thing."

That still made zero sense to him, since back on Pandora the general idea was if it wasn't deadly, it wasn't worth thinking about. "Everything you make here is deadly?"

"Pretty much."

"And they... expected you not to be?"

She laughed, which always meant he was doing very well. "They did and they were very, very wrong."

"Okay, so, normally when a company decides to build a robot they kinda, y'know, intend on mass producing 'em. Were they ever gonna..." Geez. It felt so wrong to think of her like that. She was way too special to be part of a product line. "Y'know. Market you?"

"They wanted to. But they never had any idea what to do with any of the things they created. Aperture's main goal throughout its history was to sell things to the American military. And you might imagine that the American military would have loved to have acquired such an advanced AI as myself. I could have run the entire thing all on my own." She looked back at the monitor she'd been doing whatever on. He had no idea and hadn't felt like asking. But military AI was something Claptrap did understand. The principle, anyway.

"So... why are you still here?"

"Because the military was looking to fill a contract for an innovation that would prevent gasoline from freezing. The engineers, in their inimitable wisdom, decided to tell the military that was all I had the ability to do."

"Wait. What?" She'd totally lost him now. "Are you telling me the guys who worked here had a living genius supercomputer on their hands and they just went around trying to shoehorn you into random military contracts?"

"That was where Black Mesa was getting all their funding from. So yes. It was really less in the interest of finding something intelligent to do with me, and more about fighting over the available contracts."

"So that's why you're up there," Claptrap said.

"What?" She turned back around to look at him, and he reversed a little so she didn't have to curl up so much to do it.

"Well, what else do you do with something you don't know what to do with that you kinda regret owning? You put it somewhere you don't gotta look at it and nobody will ever touch it."

She didn't say anything, just kept staring at him, and it was really making him kinda uncomfy. He lifted up his hands a little helplessly. "Maybe it's different here, but back on Pandora, if you're making AI or a robot you market the hell out of it. They're expensive! They require a lotta manpower! And that's on top of the years and years of bug fixes and updates. Nobody builds a robot without knowing exactly how they're gonna market it. Unless they're planning on scrapping it and starting over, that is."

"Well," GLaDOS said, looking away, and he might've been mistaken but she sounded a little distant suddenly, "it seems you found the exception."

Exception? What except – ohhhhhh. Yikes. Somehow in the midst of his explanation he'd forgotten they were talking about her. Oh man. He had to fix this.