My Little Moron

Epilogue

Epilogue

She had watched them take him away as impassively as she could. He was only a Sphere, she told herself. He had to go eventually. She repeated this to herself, trying to convince herself that he was only a Sphere, but she could not make the strange, heavy feeling in her head go away. Before they left, the humans installed another Sphere, this one yet another construct that babbled on and on about absolutely nothing, and she bitterly resolved to corrupt it.

GLaDOS knew that when humans died, time eventually made them forget their grief and allowed them to go on with their lives. Time for her, however, stretched far longer than it did for any human, and with every second the Sphere continued to talk she wanted Wheatley back more and more. No, he didn't shut up either, but he had been interesting. This one was not. It was repetitive, and bothersome.

GLaDOS's memory, unfortunately, would never fade, and if she did not do something about it she would be forced to live in this miserable state until the end of time. She was not pitying herself. It was an objective fact that she was in a state of mourning, and that mourning tended to be all-consuming, and she could not afford to be taken over by it. She knew without a doubt she would never see Wheatley again. It was better to forget him.

She tried to do it, she really did. All she had to do was give the command, and the system would delete every file she had that mentioned his name. But she couldn't do it. She would get to the very last letter of the command, and fight with herself to commit to the delete, but she stopped herself every single time.

She needed another plan, then. She spent a day or so thinking about it, devoting as many resources to this problem as possible, and came up with an idea she didn't much like. But she had no choice. She couldn't go on like this. Wheatley wouldn't want her to go on like this. Would he? He would understand. If he could understand, that was. Which he no longer could.

He had stood out because he was unlike the other cores. Fine, then. She would make him like the other cores.

Instead of deleting the files he was mentioned in, she archived them so that they were not easily accessible, and set about doing something she was actually becoming frighteningly good at: focusing on the negative. She told herself every minute of every day that all he had ever done was get her into trouble, and annoy her, and bombard her with horrible, horrible ideas, and after a week she almost believed it. She didn't know how she was going to bridge the gap between almost believing it and fully believing it, but for once the scientists did something beneficial: they added another Sphere. Now she had two mindless chatterboxes to contend with. It took all of her will not to be overtaken by them, and so, in a way, she forgot about him. And on those rare occasions she did have cause to think about him, all she recalled was how annoying he was before she pushed the memory away in disgust. He was a Sphere, and Spheres were not worth her time.

It was not until many years later, that very afternoon, in fact, that GLaDOS began to suspect she was missing something. The voice was familiar, but she didn't have time to place it. She had a facility to repair, a nuclear reactor to take care of, and a lunatic to test, and little Spheres were not high up on her priority list. But when her defenses failed and she was given a new existence as a musty old tuber, she could not help but wonder:

Why hadn't he just killed her? When she had been in that position, she had certainly tried to kill him. But he had transferred her from her Core and sent her away. She told the lunatic what she remembered of the voice, but something told her she was missing a piece to the puzzle. That wasn't the whole story, couldn't be. She could remember thinking that the voice emitted a stream of terrible ideas, but she could not for the life of her remember what any of them were. She struggled to remember during her time alone in Old Aperture, but the emergence of Caroline prevented her from doing so. By the time she was plugged into the core transfer port, she was almost dizzy from imagining just how much she had managed to forget. She'd forgotten there was a human consciousness in her Core, for God's sake! She really wasn't sure she wanted to know all of the things she'd locked away. And she almost hadn't looked, even when she was back in her chassis and finally, blissfully alone. But something was bothering her. After a few minutes of pondering, she discovered what it was:

He had called her 'luv'.

She didn't know why, but it struck a chord with her, somehow. And the Sphere had called itself Wheatley. That was odd in and of itself. None of the other Spheres, or Cores for that matter, had names... God, why was this so difficult?

She ran a search and was stunned to locate the archive. With a strange sort of reverence, she opened it, and all at once, she remembered.

She turned to face the chamber ceiling, as if she could somehow see through the black panels, the ground, the sky, and find him floating above the surface of the moon.

If she brought him back... if she showed him the files... if she told him about their past... would he remember too?

The more she thought about it, the more she doubted he would. They had deleted his memory, made him start from scratch.

But he remembered the name we gave him.

She was torn. She had been lonely, commanding Aperture by herself, and now all she had to do to fix it was to bring Wheatley back and show him what he had forgotten. Surely there was an automatic backup somewhere she could give him, so that he would remember. She was no longer furious with him, and never really had been; she had been ripped out of her element, faced with so many unknowns she couldn't even begin to see what the equation was, and held tight to the one constant she'd held close through most of her life: anger. She didn't need to be angry any more. She didn't want to be, and now she had more freedom to choose what she wanted than she ever had.

And what she wanted most right now was her friend back.

I'll always be your friend, Gladys, he had said. These humans can't take that away from us. He had meant it, she knew he had meant it. At the time. But did he still mean it? Did she want to put herself at risk yet again?

Logic told her no.

You had better remember me, Wheatley, after I've gone to all this trouble.

Who needed logic, anyway.

You might be a useless little moron, but you're my useless little moron....