Author's Note: First off, that line in-between the square brackets is supposed to be in binary. Because ffnet has an absolutely terrible habit of stripping things out like that, I changed it. So just pretend it's in binary.

Second, this is one of the themes I'm more prouder of. The idea for the theme itself came from the soundtrack of a brilliant Half-Life 2 mod, called Minerva: Metastasis. If you have HL2 and the episodes, check it out on Steam; you can grab it for free. A lot of the story itself came from a lot of other ideas I had floating around in my head. (The reference to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was actually unintentional. When I realized it, I threw that little part in as a joke.)

Third, I'm having a bit of a bout of self-loathing right now. So please try not to destroy what shaky self-confidence I have with a nasty review :-)

27. Duco Ergo Sum
Summary: I calculate, therefore I am.
Genre: Tragedy
Characters: Logic Core
Warnings: Character death

Duco ergo sum.

I calculate, therefore I am.

Most of the personality spheres never got to the point of gaining sentience. Of course, they were intelligent (unless programmed to not be), and they could follow their function absolutely perfectly, but beyond what their programming dictated, they were simply incapable of any independent thought.

While a mindless worker robot may have been good enough for Science, it wasn't good enough for Aperture Science.

The ultimate goal was cognito ergo sum- I think, therefore I am. (Most of the scientists became wary of this when some anonymous lab boy circulated copies of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," but the incident was collectively erased from everyone's memories after a company-wide meeting.)

However, very few of the personality spheres ever made it to sentience. A majority of them, just as they confronted the fact that there was more to them than what their programming dictated to them, tended to blow their circuits, literally thinking themselves to death, or in the milder cases, becoming corrupted.

Logic was one of those personality spheres. He (all of the spheres were assigned gender identities, in a futile attempt to hasten the development of sentience) and had been designed in an attempt to curb GLaDOS by means of forcing her to act more on logic than emotion. After all, a test subject very well couldn't produce any test results if they were dead prior to the test.

He was successful at first. GLaDOS no longer acted irrationally.

But at the bottom layer of each and every personality sphere, they were no more than the thin wafers of circuits that filled their complex; no more than repeating string's of 0's and 1's.

[I calculate, therefore I am.]

Duco ergo sum.

Somewhere in those lines of codes, those billions of 0's and 1's that made up the sphere's programming, something went wrong. Nobody knew what had caused it. It could have been anything from an errant bit of electrostatic discharge, or perhaps GLaDOS slowly began to sabotage him, or it could have been a simple programming error. It was like so many other spheres before him; spheres that had almost become sentient but ultimately failed, many of them destined for the corrupted core bin.

"C-c-c-c-cake...

"One 18.25 ounce package chocolate cake mix... don't forget garnishes such as fish shaped crackers, fiberglass surface resins... c-c-c-c-cake... three tablespoons rhubarb, on fire..."

Some of his warped thinking, as well as the ever-elongating and ludicrous recipe for a non-edible pastry, looped back to GLaDOS, who became almost as obsessed with cake as he was.

When his death came, it was not with the agony of each of his circuits, one by one. failing, but with a brief moment of intense heat. For one millisecond he was who he used to be, not a corrupted core just barely performing his function, but the Logic Core. I am, therefore I am.

Then he was gone.