GLaDOS and Me

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Wheatley bounded into her chamber a bit early the next morning, having thought of something new he could have her do with her maintenance arms, but to his surprise she was still in the default position, though as he got closer he could see that her optic was on. What was she doing? "GLaDOS?" he called out softly. "What is it?"

She lifted her core just enough to look at him, then looked back down. He frowned and nearly ran up to her, putting his box down and then lying down, scrambling beneath her. "What's wrong?"

She looked down at him for a long, long moment, then hitched herself upward and brought a maintenance arm out of the ceiling. She tapped it on the lid of the box and he sat up, unlatching it quickly and flipping open the lid, and she took the truck out again and tapped at it. He was well and thoroughly confused now, but he opened it and spilled the cars out of the inside. She separated two of them from the group and pushed them violently off the glass.

"Hey!" he cried out, looking up at her. "What're you doing?"

But she only returned to the default position and did not try to answer.

Wheatley stepped over the cars and descended the stairs finding first one car, then the other. He wondered if these particular two had some sort of significance. One of them was a black sedan, the other a white car with a little tailfin, and... hang on. Where were the cars he'd given her? He looked around the room, trying to see if she'd driven them someplace she couldn't retrieve them from, but they weren't there. Maybe she'd pushed these two off the glass for a different reason.

"GLaDOS, luv," he called out softly, "did someone take your cars?"

She nodded once. Wheatley clenched the ones in his hand and turned to face the doorway, brows creased. Now why in the bloody hell had they done that? Okay, sure, maybe they hadn't built a multimillion dollar supercomputer to play with toy cars, but God, it wasn't like that was all she did. Surely she could play with them when she didn't have anything else to do.

Wheatley scrolled quickly up the system log until he saw who had booted her that morning, confirming his suspicions. He slammed the two cars into the desk and stormed out of the room, heading for Greg's office.

"Greg!" he yelled, blasting the door open, "why'd you do that?"

Greg looked up calmly from his computer. "Do what?"

"You took her cars away!"

"She doesn't need them. Henry said you were using them to show her how to manipulate the Multitasking Arms, but she obviously has a grasp of that."

"That's besides the point!" Wheatley ground out, planting his hands on Greg's desk. "They're mine, and I gave them to her."

Greg laughed. "What's a giant robot going to do with a couple of toy cars?"

"Play with them, you arse!" Wheatley shouted, smacking the palm of his left hand on the desk. "Give them back. I'm not finished with them."

Greg pulled open a drawer and dropped them in front of Wheatley, who snatched them up quickly and stepped back. "Watch yourself, Wheatley," Greg said in a low voice. "You're only a glorified babysitter, you know."

Wheatley said nothing to that, only leaving the office and running back to GLaDOS's chamber. "Here," he gasped, holding them out as she lifted her core disinterestedly. "Here you are."

She brightened noticeably, taking them out of his hand and turning to the bare portion of the glass and bending low over them. He watched a little sadly as she did whatever it was she'd been doing with them before Greg had taken them. She needed to play, just like anyone else, but no one got that. They just thought she could work all the time, and just do that and it would be enough. He swallowed and got down on his stomach beneath her. "D'you know that cars make noise, GLaDOS?" he asked her in a shaky voice, and she shook her core and paused.