You Do Know I Can't Wave Back, Right?

Indiana

Characters: GLaDOS, OC (a random scientist introduced solely so that GLaDOS would have someone to interact with)

Setting: Pre-Portal

Cleaning up Aperture Laboratories was a lot of work.

Luckily for the dilapidated facility, GLaDOS liked work. In fact, she loved work. The more work to do, the better. She was not a supercomputer who enjoyed idle moments; lack of stimulation, particularly meaningful stimulation, well, that bothered her quite a bit. And it looked like she had enough meaningful stimulation to last her a good long time. She set to her task with great enthusiasm, going forward with the Cooperative Testing Initiative at the same time. Having so many things to process and supervise and complete was exciting. Not only did she have plenty to do, but now she got to test her own operating capacity while she was doing it. Prior to… the incident, she had known what that was, but, now outfitted with her own personal upgrades, she was eager to measure her abilities anew.

On the third day, GLaDOS had been carefully supervising the Cooperative Testing Initiative while reprogramming Jerry to be able to tell a nanobot apart from another robot (and really, this should have been obvious from the outset, she had chastised him; anything larger than him was clearly not nano-sized) when one of the robots assigned to one of the unfinished levels of the facility told her of a room that contained objects of an unconventional nature. That required her conscious attention, so Jerry was put on hold and GLaDOS took control of the robot's optic in order to see what the (probably overly exaggerated) fuss was all about.

It was a cake.

"Oh, that," she muttered to herself. She had never thought she'd see that again. Back in her chamber, she shook her head in exasperation and prepared to tell the robot to destroy it so that she could go back to more important things, but as she casually swept the room, ignoring the cube sitting patiently near the cake, something caught her gaze.

Something was glittering in the dim light from the robot's optic. Her curiosity got the better of her, and she had the robot move forward so that the object was in view.

It was a black pen.

GLaDOS stared at it.

What was a pen doing down here? No human had ever entered this room. And it didn't have the Aperture Laboratories logo on it. That implied that it was from outside the facility. So she must have put it there. But where had she gotten it from?

She sent the robot away after retrieving the object with one of her more mobile manipulator arms, and carefully looked it over once she finally had it in her presence. It reminded her of something, but of what, she couldn't say. That usually meant that she had archived whatever it was that the object (or person) had to do with, and if she had archived it, it was probably a bad idea to look it up again.

Well. She could always archive it again, after she was finished.

"Oh," she murmured after unlocking the files in question and scanning them quickly. "I'd forgotten about that…"

Once, a long time ago, a scientist had come up to her. Unlike the usual scientists, he had no lab coat and did not look at her sideways, as if she were about to attack him. At the time, she had been curious about their defensive stature, but they offered no explanation when asked. She knew better now, of course, but back then, oh, back then…

This new human, well, he had been a curious one indeed. Instead of standing in front of her with his arms crossed and his face in one of the more unpleasant configurations (unpleasant because they usually meant they were about to reprimand her for a mistake she had not known she had made, and not because their faces in general were unpleasant; she had not yet come to that conclusion), he had sat down on the floor of the platform, propped himself up against the railing, crossed his legs, and balanced a clipboard across his knees. He had had very short hair, and was wearing a curious brown suit. She studied it intently. She had never seen a suit before, only read about them in the database. She had wondered why he was not wearing a tie, as that appeared to be something you wore when you had a suit. She had wondered if he would be angry if she asked.

"Hello," he had said, in what must have been the friendliest voice she'd ever heard. "How are you doing?"

She had had to scramble to collect herself in order to answer the question within a reasonable amount of time. Friendliness and questions about her well-being were rare.

"I am well, sir," she had answered in what she fervently hoped was an equally friendly voice. "And you?"

"Pretty good, pretty good," he had replied, making a note on his clipboard with a very shiny black pen. She liked shiny objects and, now knowing it existed, could not help but look at it.

"What can I do for you, sir?" she had asked as politely as she could. He had looked like he was getting comfortable, and she wasn't sure why. Humans did not stay in her chamber for long.

"I just want you to do a couple little tests for me," he had answered, smiling up at her. "They're easy tests, don't worry."

"I've never done a test before, but I would prefer a hard test to an easy one," she had told him, a bit hesitantly; the scientists had rarely responded well to her opinions. "Things that are easy are things that are boring."

He had paused a moment, then scribbled something down on his clipboard. "I can see that being the case," he had nodded. "But these aren't that kind of test. They're a different kind."

"What kind?" she had asked eagerly.

"You'll see. I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it, on a scale of one to six. One means you strongly disagree, two means you moderately agree, three means you slightly disagree, and then the same in reverse, for positive agreement. Answer as truthfully as you can. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," she had answered, nodding a little bit and mentally preparing herself for the test. She had wished she'd known what kind of test it was. Then she would have been able to prime the relevant data.

"Okay. There are five questions: In most ways my life is close to my ideal."

"I can't answer that, sir," she had said after a few seconds. He had looked surprised to hear it.

"Why not?"

"I don't have an ideal life, sir."

"Surely you have dreams," he had said.

"Maybe." To her chagrin, she had looked away rather shyly.

"Well, answer it according to those. I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to talk to you for a while."

"Well… five, then."

"If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing."

She had not had much of a life as of yet to change, she had thought, but no, she would not change any of it. "Six."

"I am satisfied with my life."

She had wondered if this test had any right or wrong answers. It hadn't sounded like it did. She didn't like those kinds of tests. She hadn't known how to do that kind of Science, not yet, and 'human Science', as she took to calling it, bothered her somewhat. "… three."

"So far I have gotten the important things I want in life."

She had started to feel a bit anxious then, trying and failing to keep still. She was about to give him another negative answer, which humans did not like, but he had specifically asked her to be honest, and so be honest she would. "One."

"The conditions of my life are excellent."

That one had been easier. "Five." The conditions themselves had been pretty good, there were just a few minor things here and there that went away if you worked hard enough.

He had nodded and asked, "Do you want to add up the score or would you like me to?"

"Twenty," she had answered automatically, and when he had laughed she felt embarrassment coursing through her circuits. She hated it when humans did that. Didn't they know that she couldn't not complete a calculation? "I'm sorry, sir. It would have been all right if you did it."

"Oh no," he had replied. "That was fine. I should have known you wouldn't have been able to help it, that's all."

Oh. He understood. That had struck her as very odd, but very nice nonetheless.

"All right. I have another test for you. This one has fourteen items. One now means never, two means sometimes, three means often, four means almost always, five means always. Are you ready?"

"Yes, sir," she had said anxiously. This test was quite a bit longer, and she hadn't really wanted to do it.

"How often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?"

She had thought about that one for a few seconds. It was slightly annoying, but not upsetting. In fact, she quite liked it after she was able to figure out what had gone wrong. "One."

"How often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life?"

"Five," she had answered promptly. She was in control of every important thing!

"How often have you felt nervous and "stressed"?"

That one had been a little harder. She only felt stressed when she was nervous, which was about five times a day, on average. She had wondered how this compared to the amount of times humans felt that way, then remembered she was doing a test and answered, "Two."

He had gone on to ask her the rest of the questions, all on a similar vein, and she had decided he was measuring her stress level and put a corner of her brain to work on figuring out why he'd want to know such a thing.

"The first one was out of thirty, the second, seventy," the scientist had told her.

"What do the results mean, sir?"

"You're pretty satisfied with your life," he had answered after a long pause, "and you're not experiencing a lot of stress."

"Is that good or bad?"

"It's good." He had leaned forward, and twitched his finger at her. After a quick perusal of her human gesture library she discovered he wanted her to come closer. Humans did that because their ears were a lot less sensitive than her aural pickups were, but she had decided to put him at ease and to do as he wanted.

"Yes, sir?"

He had looked at her very seriously. "Are you happy, my dear?"

She had stared at him, and to her shame she could not answer. She was a lot of things at any given time, even managing to be despondent and proud of herself at the same time on one occasion (and her processors had made it quite clear that she was not to do such a thing ever again; trying to figure that one out had actually made her head hurt), but happy? Not really.

So that was what she had said.

The scientist had shaken his head sadly and sat back against the railing. She had taken that to mean she could go back and did so, regarding his pen again with great interest. There were so many different ways to examine the light moving up and down the shaft as he scribbled across the clipboard…

He must have noticed at some point, because he had looked up and waved a little to get her attention. "Yes, sir?"

"Do you like it?"

"Like what, sir?"

"The pen. You've been staring at it for quite a while now."

Oh. She hadn't realised it had been that obvious. "I do like it, sir."

"Do you want it?"

Oh yes, oh yes she had wanted it. She had wanted to snatch it right out of his hand, then figure out how to make time go faster (because it was painfully slow) so that she could shine different coloured lights on it in the peace of nighttime and see what that would do. But the last time she had done that (although in that case it had been a vial of something that changed colour when the scientist put different powders into it; she had just wanted to analyse the liquid! That was all!) she had been reprimanded. She had only been reprimanded twice that day, which was a new record, and she didn't know what to say. He had placed a lot of emphasis on honesty, though, so she had been honest. "Yes, I do want it, sir."

He had scratched away at his clipboard for another minute, then extended it to her. "Here. You can have it."

She had instantly been suspicious. No human had ever offered her something for nothing. And when they had, they usually wanted something in exchange at some later point in time. "What do you want for it?"

"I don't want anything for it. I have more at the office. I want you to have it." He had looked around as if he was afraid of being watched, whispering, "Put it somewhere they won't find it."

"No. No, I'm not falling for that. You're telling me not to tell them, which means you're going to tell them that I took your pen, when you gave it to me. I did this already, I'm not doing it again."

"I don't work for these people," the scientist had snorted. "I don't work here at all. I'm from outside the facility. It'll be between you and me. I wouldn't lie to you."

Cautiously, she had extended a manipulator arm from the ceiling, carefully pinching the extended shaft and withdrawing as soon as the physics required to keep it from falling out of the claw were in effect. The man had blinked, staring at his outstretched fingers. "That was fast," he had remarked.

"Of course," she had said, tipping her head in confusion. "I do everything fast."

He had nodded, an odd smile on his face. "Of course, of course."

The two of them had stayed in a comfortable silence for a few minutes, with her becoming a bit anxious as time went on. Humans usually asked something of her before this amount of time had passed. Then he had shaken himself and looked at her optic.

"I have to go," he had told her, picking up his clipboard and standing up. "Thank you for your time."

"Thank you for the pen," she had said in return, hoping that was not why he had been previously silent. It was a silly oversight, to forget to express her gratitude for the gift, but humans didn't usually respond favourably to her forgetting things. "I will take care of it."

"I'm sure you will." He had descended the stairs, stopping when he reached the doorway. He had waved to her, smiling, and then stared at her expectantly. After a few seconds of running through the possibilities, she realised what he was waiting for.

"You do know I can't wave back, right?"

His arm had abruptly responded to gravity, and he had looked at the floor, an odd expression on his face. She had tried to figure out what it meant, but her library yielded no answers. She had waited patiently for him to tell her what was going on. Finally, he had looked back up.

"Take that as a compliment, my dear," he had told her, and she was able to read his expression then. He had been wearing what was called a 'sad smile'. "You're so lifelike that I forgot what you are. You would pass the Turing Test for sure, GLaDOS.

"Goodbye."

And he had continued to walk away.

There had been so many things she wanted to ask. Who was he? Why had he come? Why was he different? Why was her inability to wave back deserving of a compliment? Who (or what) was she, and why had he forgotten? And what was a Turing Test?

She had meant to ask any one of those things, to make him come back, to make him stay a while longer, but she hadn't been able to choose one and had had to content herself with an echo of his own farewell. For the next few weeks, she had held onto the hope that he would come back, that he would talk to her and ask her his funny questions, and maybe stop being shy for long enough to ask some of her own, but he never did. And as she eventually learned to do to deal with unpleasant subjects that would otherwise consume her to the point of non-functioning, she had archived those days so that she wouldn't be able to think about them. She had carefully put the pen away in a little room in the basement where she kept her special, secret things: her box of candles, her Weighted Storage Cube with the hearts on it, and her little roll of blueprints for what would eventually be her robot friends, when she was able to start building them.

And she had settled in to wait patiently for another human like him to come along.

No human ever had, of course, and as GLaDOS inspected her pen, just as fascinated with the phenomenon of the refracted light playing across its surface as she had been all those years ago, she went over the questions she had once had, able to answer them by herself. He had been a psychologist, obviously; probably he had come to assess why she was misbehaving (and then discovered that she wasn't, she thought with some amusement); because he had managed to forget that she was not human, and was instead a supercomputer (although as to how you forgot such a thing, she couldn't figure out); and… well, nothing in the database said anything about a Turing Test.

Well, whatever it was, she needed to know, and as she set about looking for the answer to that question, she printed off a copy of the survey and went about filling it out with her pen, marking each number with a perfect, identical circle. She wasn't quite sure why she was doing it this way instead of just completing it in her head, which would certainly have been a lot faster, but decided not to think too much of it. This was the traditional way, after all. Sometimes you could sacrifice efficiency for tradition… if it was for Science, of course.

"Huh." She had calculated her score automatically, without even being aware that she had done it or that she was going to do it, and, as coincidence would have it, it was exactly the same as the first time she had done it, all those years ago. With some amusement, she made a note to look into that. Studying herself! That was new.

She looked at the pen one last time, after a few minutes carefully putting it back in the exact same spot in the little room in the basement. Maybe those things could stay in there. Not because she needed them or anything. But they weren't hurting anyone, so to speak. They weren't really taking up space (and she happily reminded herself that the physics of an object in a 3D plane were different from the idea of an object that wasn't in the way), so it wasn't like it would be bothering anyone, meaning herself.

"You're so lifelike," she murmured dreamily, remembering that she had to finish with Jerry before the day was out. It was suddenly less pressing, however, in the face of this new-old knowledge. Once, a long time ago, a human had regarded her as a living, thinking being. It had actually happened. It was amazing. She hadn't thought they had the capacity. But there had been one.

And maybe, she thought, casually exploding Orange and Blue for what was to be the final time that day, maybe there had been others. Others that she had locked deep inside her infinite brain, waiting for a day to come where she would be ready to remember. It certainly seemed likely.

First things first, though.

On to researching the Turing Test.

Author's note

Two of GLaDOS's lines in Portal make me sad. One of them is "I've heard voices all my life". The other is the title of this story. One is a human attribute she should never have had, and the other is an incapability there really is no reason for her to have. I don't understand why you would build a moving robot that was mounted on the ceiling. A popular fanfic estimate (as far as I recall) has GLaDOS at two tons. That's how much a full-sized Chevy conversion van weighs. I don't know what she's made of (although I'd conjecture she's made of ceramic and computer plastic), but computers are heavy, and old computers from the 90s are heavier still.

Anyway. That had nothing to do with anything. So, this was built off of that title up there, and although I'm sure GLaDOS loves being a robot and wouldn't want arms to wave with if she had the choice, maybe sometimes the humanity in her (or the subconscious urges of Caroline) make her wish she could. And that would suck, having a phantom urge to wave, where you know you can wave but you actually can't because you don't have arms (it's hard to explain but that's kind of what it's like, I think; I have both my arms, in case you were wondering). So I was like, so what if they didn't understand why the young GLaDOS was misbehaving (only she really wasn't, she was doing what kids do and just doing things just because), and they asked a psychologist to talk to her about it. So he gives her a personality test to see if she is satisfied with her life and if she has a lot of stress, to try and determine if she's acting out because she's upset and overworked, and he finds what I just told you, that she's not misbehaving, she's just misunderstanding. He's sad because he knows the Aperture scientists will not understand what he found. He understands that she has the mentality of a child, but doesn't know how to explain it to the scientists, not that they'd believe him anyway.

Yes, we just went over those very same tests in my Personality Psychology class. How did you guess?

Oh yes! The Turing Test is an annual competition where programmers and maybe computer scientists, I guess, they spend all year trying to make artificial intelligence. What their goal is is to create a computer that can have a conversation with a human being, but the human being thinks they're talking to another human being, and not a computer. No one has ever won the contest, and I don't remember what the prize is, but I'm guessing it's a pretty good one. Turing is a guy who made up a programming language for the University of Toronto (I think; it has something to do with U of T), and it's a useless language. Don't learn it. No, seriously. It's a language they use to teach you how to write in other languages. If you wanna be a programmer, skip Turing, go straight to C++ or C#, that's what they use. Although apparently Python is getting popular. GLaDOS would be able to pass the Turing Test if she was careful.

That was your lesson in Psychology AND your lesson in Computer Science for the day! Who said you learn nothing reading fanfic!

The first test I gave GLaDOS is from my Personality textbook, and it is called the Satisfaction with Life Scale. The citation under the table says Source: Diener et al, 1985. The second one is from my class. I think that I have a pretty good idea of how GLaDOS would answer and I do think that she would have low stress and high satisfaction. Although it's interesting to think about the kind of things that would stress her out.