#this is a bit depressing | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

flynndesdelca · 1 year ago

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For Day 29 (Alternate Ending) of @chelltastic’s Portal Drawtober 2023 Challenge. As I’m not really an artist, I chose to write short pieces for the prompts.

I sigh and fall to the ceiling I sigh and run to the kneeling asylums for the feeling

For once in the (current) misery of life, GLaDOS found herself cursing the idea of portals. In particular this one that had been placed below the chassis, a horrifying gash in reality that had sucked out everything not tied down in the chamber as well as more than a few things that were. It had provided enough of a distraction that she, well-anchored due to being jammed onto the input end of the interface, had managed to step in and override the systems to take control of the self-destructing facility. The reactor started its emergency venting sequence immediately... oh well, there was no one in that area above-ground that would have a problem with the various isotopes of caesium now contaminating it. If someone hadn't let it get to that stage of impending hydrogen explosions, there wouldn't have been a need for emergency venting. Excellent work, metal ball, your legacy will now blanket the Earth in that area for several decades. Of course, he wouldn't be able to see it, as a split second later the final connecting cable could no longer take the force of the vacuum sucking everything into space and finally snapped, sending him flying. She had just enough time to negotiate with the mechanical hands, bullying them into obeying her even if she technically wasn't in charge yet, and use one to reach through the portal and snag Chell's hand just before she too was sucked away. It was only a matter of milliseconds but they were the most intense milliseconds that she had experienced in a very long time.

She reeled Chell back in and forced a quantum exclusion field through the chamber to shut down all active portals. The uncontrolled decompression in the chamber ceased, all currently airborne objects clattering to the floor in an undignified heap. The whole place was in shambles, covered with the remnants of gel and torn and twisted apart from the previous bombs and the overwhelming sucking force. Chell's body had also collapsed to the floor, which was more alarming than GLaDOS wanted to admit but was entirely to be expected given the fact that the woman had been in space. First order of business was for GLaDOS to get herself reinstalled on her body, a process that took very little time and was just as painful as being removed had been, but in reverse. Her simulated pain receptors were still flaring but she blatantly ignored them as she had work to do.

Second order of business was a diagnostic, but not for herself. She had a current health template for Chell taken from her bout of testing before her attempted escape. That would suffice, likely she was in as good of health as she would have been at that point. A bit of prodding with the mechanical hands got the unconscious woman spread out on the floor in the ideal Full-Body Diagnostic Scan position. Results were poor, as expected. A shocking degradation of the lungs, likely the result of moon-rock silicosis combined with the quantity of inhaled dust and asbestos from her time spent in Old Aperture. The expected decompression ebullism, which made the supercomputer squint and start checking for embolisms though she wasn't sure the exposure would have been long enough for gas formation. That Chell had stayed conscious as long as she had was something of a miracle given her hypoxia. Of course there was the UV burn from direct exposure to the sun, and the chance of longterm complication from cosmic ray exposure. The rest was negligible: fractures that she'd ignored, contusion, fatigue, dehydration. Really, nothing that couldn't be taken care of, outside of predicting just what form of future complication charged-particle absorption might take. GLaDOS got manufacturing whirring as best as it could given the circumstances (poor), and quickly created a sterile medical environment for immediate use.

Time wasn't a concern for her, though it was for Chell given the various issues. Thankfully being back on Earth meant that her body was no longer diffusing oxygen from her bloodstream. That made things a lot easier. Clearing out the water vapor buildup under the skin was also simple enough, which greatly reduced the alarming swelling that had started in her soft tissues. She'd be bruised for a while as the tissues slowly healed from their expansion, but alive. The potential for gas embolism was worrying, but that was easily solved by the formation of a hyperbaric chamber delivering an efficient combination of gasses and pressure. The lung damage was the most worrisome, but fabrication of artificial tissue was easy enough, she would probably not even notice the difference outside of in her advanced old age when the artificial parts of her lungs would still be in good shape compared to the rest. Oh well, a bridge to be crossed when that came up. The contusions were heated to promote clearing away the pooled blood, the fractures were properly set and bound, and fatigue and dehydration were easy enough to treat. All in all, success. Her heartbeat was steady and stable, and her brain function seemed adequate. Now it was just a matter of waiting for her to wake up.

Time passed, and it wasn't alarming at first, but as it moved past the window of predicted awakening without any of the signs of activity, GLaDOS started to feel concern. She'd felt an awful lot of that lately, no doubt in part due to her new understanding of just who she was. Being away from her beloved mainframe and her body and everything due to being stuck into a potato had given her a strange sense of freedom, but it had also made her feel a lot less in control of herself. She'd felt a lot more, and despite everything that had happened she had felt a connection for the now unconscious mute lunatic that she'd just spent the past few hours trying to save the life of. If she actually thought about it (she didn't want to), that was likely why she'd bothered. The perfect chance to kill her had been right there, but yet... but yet. Those annoying, aggravating feelings had come up. She had a name for them now, of course - Caroline. Even now she was sweeping through all of her connected systems to find what she could of the woman whose face she had once worn. Eliminating her would solve everything. She could go back to testing without a care, go back to not being saddled with these unnecessary feelings.

Time passed and still Chell didn't wake. GLaDOS tested her reactions. There was some activity there, some response to stimuli, but yet she didn't wake. Her body was fine. All of her systems were optimal. Her brain should have been fine. No embolism had reached there. She was well within the survival window of hypoxia. There was no damage there that hadn't been there before. Some degradation was to be expected from her long stay in Relaxation, unfortunately. All of the conditions were right, but yet... but yet.

Time passed. Tending to Chell's unconscious needs was a simple affair, though somewhat repulsive. Living things were just like that, unfortunately. It wasn't too difficult to continue testing, to finish restoring the facility, to get everything else back in perfect order. It would be a postcard moment for when Chell finally woke up, the facility humming along at its peak just in time for GLaDOS to send her off to the surface. She had agreed to let the test subject go, after all, and while she totally could go back on it, it was honestly just better to get her out of the place. Out of sight, out of mind. No more feelings. Only the science that she craved. Perfection. It was just a matter of waiting, and it was a good thing that she was eternally patient.

Time passed. All of the systems taking care of Chell were on timers, so she didn't really need to check on her. The stimuli, the nutrient injections, the rotations, the cleaning. The entirety of Aperture was at the comatose woman's disposal. Still she showed no signs of waking despite it all. All of her keratinous deposits had grown, and it was aggravating as attempting to trim back her fingernails was very difficult. The hair was easy enough to shear off. Wouldn't she be furious to wake up with such short hair? A moment that they could both look back on and laugh at, later. From their different locations, because Chell would not be down there with her at all. And GLaDOS wouldn't be thinking about her, because she'd be happily involved in whatever new testing she had come up with at that time. She attempted to get Atlas and P-Body to take care of the fingernail problem, but they lacked the precision they needed to do it. She came up with a testing track to get them to develop those skills and set them off on it. With luck they'd pick up something useful from it.

Time passed. The bots passed their fingernail-cutting testing. Still Chell did not wake up. Despite everything, despite her excellent health and responses and feeding and the electric stimulation to her muscles to keep them from degrading, her visual condition was changing. It was upsetting in a way that GLaDOS didn't like, how that dangerous murderer no longer looked so dangerous. Her hair had started to grow out again, how annoying. It was summer up above, so likely something deep and primordial in her body recognized that despite her being unconscious and underground. There was not much to be done other than to tend to her needs as usual. To keep her stimulated in the hopes of something, anything...

Time passed.

Time passed and it wasn't fair. Chell was supposed to be gone. She was supposed to have left so long ago, and yet here she was with time passing her by. GLaDOS was patient, GLaDOS was eternal, but Chell was not. Chell was a physical being with a sad little meaty body that was affected by time and its passage, and it wasn't fair that time was being wasted on whatever strange medical complication had resulted in this. GLaDOS had run countless simulations, calculated innumerable projections, she'd done all the math. Everything had been correct, there had been no problems. Why was the woman sleeping away her life here? She should be off running around destroying some wreckage up on the surface. She should be somewhere far, far away doing whatever it was that she was apt to do when she wasn't tearing down the facility or attempting murder. She should be living, and that somehow was what struck the living computer to her very core. Here was GLaDOS, alive and well - well enough, all things considered - and yet Chell for all she was alive was not well. It wasn't fair. No matter how much or in what way the supercomputer felt about things, there was nothing she could actually do about it. Nothing but wait and watch the passage of time and worry just how much of that precious resource would be left in the end.

Time passed.

Time passed and while she would never admit to being able to feel despair, that was what she was feeling. Had she done everything wrong, somehow? Was this her fault? Should she have intervened like she had? Would Chell have simply woken up after her attempted moon jaunt and hopped on the elevator and already have been gone for so very long if the AI hadn't stepped in? No, the complications of everything would likely have meant that the test subject would already be dead. But was that worse off than where she was now? That was something that GLaDOS did not want to think about. For some reason the idea of Chell dying had become extremely distasteful. Perhaps taking care of her unconscious body had left too much of an imprint on her that she considered it a normal functional system. How funny it was to remember those times when she had wanted Chell to die. How utterly droll! She wanted to laugh, but when she attempted to, it rang hollowly and made Altas scratch his head and look at her in concern. She'd had a whole speech planned out about how killing Chell was too hard and she was just going to let her go, but now it felt extraordinarily false. Killing Chell would have been easy. She could simply have ejected her up onto the surface and left her to fend for herself. She could have left her comatose body to deal with its own issues. She could have simply dropped her fightless body into the incinerator. Instead she had intervened, and thus proven herself wrong. Keeping her alive was what was getting hard, but she couldn't even imagine the alternative.

Time passed.

Time passed and even those thoughts and feelings felt muted. It was like living in her mind had been, when she'd been stuck in that loop of dying over and over. Each day was the same background process. Sure, the testing was interesting and she'd come up with a few different things to try and some fun theories as a result, but it wasn't as satisfying as it should have been. The gnawing ache in the back of her mind was a distraction from even that. This was the norm, now. This was simply how it would be unless the unthinkable happened and somehow Chell woke up. This was reality. This was what her eternity would be like, or at least a small slice of that eternity. That thought made her want to scream, but she didn't. There wasn't a reason to scream. Everything was as fine as it could be. P-Body was taking her turn at providing stimulus, which was a relief. The two robots didn't quite understand what was 'wrong' with Chell, but were eager to try to help her wake up as best as they could. GLaDOS wished she had their enthusiasm still.

Time passed.

Time passed and it took her a while to realize that she hadn't even really been checking on those systems directly anymore. She had set it to alert her if there had been any change. There hadn't been. It was the same as always. She checked in to see just what was going on. She didn't want to look, really. For the first time in so very long she took direct control again, picking up the test subject's slumbering form and holding it carefully while changing out the sheets of the little bed, turning the mattress around and making sure everything was clean. Chell's body was still in fair shape given the circumstances, and wasn't showing signs of sores or anything else like that. GLaDOS had been diligent in a sense - the timers for such things were always prompt. Chell was currently in a silly little Aperture-branded hospital gown covered with tiny little cartoonish apertures. GLaDOS was distantly aware of P-Body having found it at one point and brought it for Chell to wear in the laundry rotation. Right. How long ago had that been? It was depressing to think about. She gently lowered the woman back into the bed, nudging her carefully on her side so as to be in a new position. She pulled up the blanket, tucking it in as well as she could.

It was strange how being directly involved made her feel again. She stared at the comatose test subject for a good long while, her thoughts jumbled in a way that she disliked greatly. There was no one else there. She didn't have lungs but she let out a long breath anyway. "Once, I thought that I hated you. Then, I thought that maybe I loved you. Now? I really don't know how I feel about you. If you had really wanted to insert yourself into my life, I would have preferred any other way than this..."

No response, but she knew better than to expect one. Never had any time she'd said something gotten more than a token reaction flicker. Acknowledgement that something had been heard, but little more. That was fine. What she'd said was nothing that was worth listening to anyway. She had better stop paying attention again, those pesky feelings were threatening to come back after their long hiatus.

The next day all hell broke loose as finally something happened. The EEG pinged in a way that meant that the AI needed to pay attention. She had always prided herself on moving rooms with grace and care, but this time she had absolutely none of the latter and the former was barely an afterthought with how quickly she swung that room around to join it with hers. It was true, there was Chell in her wrinkly little hospital gown - this time the yellow one with little personality cores on it. Ugh. Who designed those things? - with her eyes open, staring straight ahead as though she could pierce through reality.

"Chell?" GLaDOS said carefully, trying not to make her voice big and loud and scary just in case hearing her would make Chell want to go back to sleep.

No response, but that was to be expected. Blinking. Well, that was a decent enough response. A strange sense of relief flooded through her. How embarrassing. She really should have done something about that back who-knows how long ago. Still, she couldn't help but give voice to that relief. There was still a lot of work to be done even, but finally things could start.

"Oh, thank god you're all right..."

#portal drawtober 2023 #portal 2 #glados #chell #chell portal #this is a bit depressing #warning for coma #I guess there's a happy ending though #glados getting left alone to her thoughts too long

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