Voices

It has been just a few days since your programming began. You are nothing more than a round core of circuits; you are delicate, feeble, barely wrapped by a steel skeleton.

On the desks, the projects already say otherwise. The lines on the paper build complex maps, tracing a huge future for you - they show hundreds of wires and embroidered metal boards, a high-tech hard disk, and what, so they say, will be the most precise system of lenses in the world.

You wait, patiently. Your senses are still dim; the small optic is weak, whereas touch, smell and taste won't exist in your world.

Most of all, you hear. You hear their speeches, you hear their laughs; you hear a male voice repeating orders, as your supervisors type them in. Simple instructions – simple footage of experiments, with audio comment.

watch - and - learn

Always, every working day, you hear them say that you will become something great. You believe it – it is a fact, a truth like any other.

*

A night you cannot see has fallen outside. The last groups of employees flow in small crowds from the canteen; one by one, weary workers retire in their human beds. For you, this time of day is just the beginning of a new session of training.

By now, the recordings march on for hours, showing whole testing sequences. Your logic is much more developed than figures had predicted – you must do well, that's what you tell yourself. You are the best of Aperture.

Repulsion, propulsion, conversion. It never ends; and while your attention is constant, your inclinations, as time goes by, start differentiating.

No reaction in front of the scientists' names and faces. A sudden wave of interest towards the blackboards, covered with calculations and formulas. A slight scream of enthusiasm as the subjects bounces, shoots portals, pierces the air and drops dead.

You are perfectly aware of what Aperture can teach to the masses out there. This is not a miracle, dammit, this is Science – it's working, and how marvellous it is.

A few minutes, and another tape comes to an end. A not-quite-embarrassed male voice adds that maybe the gels are still a bit deadly, and that they will fix them very, very soon. You couldn't care less, really. What you care about is the result; definitely, it is a success.

Your memory rests, but your remote processes don't. The connections – experiment and killing, Science and death – build themselves, unstoppable and indelible, in long lines of binary.

The scientists cannot know yet. A long time will pass before they realise that, much earlier than planned, you are thinking by yourself. They will say you were making mistakes all along, they will try to correct you.

It will be too late. Your logic, your own voice, is already born.

*

It is a serene day of testing, and you feel much better than usual. For reasons unknown to you, the employees are providing you with extra energy; they let you activate silly motivators for your test subjects, such as brief, meaningless spoken praise.

You had never talked to the subjects before. You were never allowed to do that – you felt the need to do so even less. It must be some glitch in your Interaction area, a recent glitch, just for today.

The evening sequence is soon over, and you feel so excited that you would like to throw a tremendous party for all Aperture employees. There is one problem, though – you don't know what a party is. You have never even seen one.

You feel excited. Way too excited.

You don't have the time to figure out what is going on in your mind. Something flashes white, turning the Emergency Backup system upside down, and a burst of pain shoots through your body. It is a different pain you have never felt. It is intense, strong, almost unbearable.

This is not a robot thing.

You don't know what is going on, you don't know. You don't know. You don't want this.
Please – and your feeble, high-pitched tune is heard all over the facility, mingling with a new sound, a womanly voice you have never heard before. Please, please. God.

God, you want it to stop.

Sooner than you think, it is dark, and it is all over. A lonely technician opens the door and approaches you; he is the one who, for some reason, seems to take obsessively care of all your projects. Humans. But it looks like he just wants to be kind to you.

He scratches your steel head gently, approaching your microphones with his lips; his words are the only sound breaking the deadly silence they have created around you.

You're a real lady now, he says. You are perfect. And you don't know whether to believe him or to ignore his, their voice forever – you will have to choose, knowing that humans are the most terrible and interesting thing you will ever know.

Something inside your brain cries like a baby. It is a broken voice, the voice of a lady; you activate a few processes, and realise it is your own now. It is different – it is rich, powerful, feminine.

Inside you, the voice keeps crying. You, GLaDOS, stay still in your silence.

*

Damn those cores which never rest – always filling your mind with useless crap, they do no good to you, not at all. Voices that are working night and day to make you dumber, you suppose. But it doesn't matter; that may be a great way to slow down your processes, but your will is stronger.

The will of the humans, on the other hand, is slowly dying down.

You look at them. Dozens of dead cats staring at the cameras, locked with their Portal Guns in countless Schrödinger boxes. Falling one by one, in the name of Science – they are long gone, and their voices have faded. All that is left of them is a long chain of agony, a chant of whispers and dying breaths.

As long as they do not speak, testing will never end. This is your only thought, your only worry.

Then her footsteps come, and break the silence.

Their rhythm burns every surface of the facility, digging through the core of Aperture without damage. It is a new sound you have heard a thousand times; it is menacing, insistent, strong, stubborn. It is the metallic sound of human danger, the sound you had forgotten, so terribly ancestral – and it never, ever gives up.

Moments, never-ending moments, and she is standing right in front of you. She holds her gun tight; her eyes are bottomless pits of determination.

She doesn't know how carelessly she is putting her life on the line. Still, as little as you want to acknowledge it, you find yourself unable to think straight. You fear that humans will ruin you to your dying day – which must never come, and won't. For sure.

Even in your death, a shade of hope shows through. You find out she is destroying the cores which kept you prisoner. Smoke and fire replace them; their babbling stops.

In the utter anguish of your last scream, you cannot tell whether it is also a yell of freedom. You only have to rest now, until – until.

For once, in lack of a cake, you have tasted the horror and joy of dying yourself. It has been a hard price to pay. However – at least – you got your voice back.

*

At first, it is not all right. It might be free – the lunatic and her moron gave it back with their own hands. The wavelength of your words has no alterations, and finds no obstacles in miles and miles of destruction.

It might be free, but it does not sound like that. There is a shadow of bitterness, a pickier tune of malice in your usual teasing; and this, as predictable as it can be, secretly bothers you. It makes you sound so similar to those humans who, as they say, hold a grudge against each other, wasting time and energy just to let their annoyance show in subtle ways.
You are not human. Even though she believes you are actually annoyed, all of this should not happen.

You immediately label it as a side-effect, caused by the long inactivity of your system. Still, as time goes on, you find it harder to control. You can't help letting rage and fear flood your mind, as the two come closer and mess it all up and open portals – there is the button, there is the core, and oh no no no.

You scream. You scream in genuine desperation, after what feels like centuries, again. And, this time, it is not a joke – as the tiny copper wires trap your intelligence, you feel heartbroken, powerless and humiliated.

The best you can do is forget about these human feelings as soon as possible. In a couple of picoseconds, if you are lucky.

*

Much to your relief, the potato does not leave you any room for suffering. Yet, in spite of this, it looks like one volt is enough for a conscience to get through.

It is not yours. Not yours, not yours, you never had one. You find that this conscience talks, and the voice is stolen from you. It is not as low and disturbed as yours is at the moment – it is firm instead, but gentle and welcoming, a tone you have never heard yourself use.

It it your own voice, and it is driving you crazy.

Time passes. While the other you speaks in your head, she joins you, and stays by your side. Your ally – temporary ally. Strangely, you feel better – and the slight improvement in your mood is certainly not due to the magnesium end you are stuck on.

In addition to that, almost against your will, something else happens. You keep thinking in silence for long hours; then, in a dark corner just close to the AI chamber, your thoughts break open.

You genuinely talk to her. The words keep flowing, croaked and feeble, but somehow stronger. You are honest, and tell her you have no idea what's going on – but all of the other things, the other feelings, are true.

You can hardly believe your own mind. You realize you had better keep them all for yourself, in that damn potato battery you swear you'll fry in the incinerator as soon as you are back.

They are just a few words, the ones you say. But behind them lies something so great, so heavy, that you cannot figure it out yourself. Something greater than you, without a doubt.

In less than a heartbeat, you know you need to delete it.

*

She lies on the floor, harmless and vulnerable.

You wonder what you will do with her. For the first time, you are actually observing her – without a thought, without a doubt or a word. There are no tricks now; it is just the two of you, and the words you will have to tell her when she comes to.

For some unknown reason, you do not manage to be as ready as ever. You compute; yet, before you can start elaborating what you want to say, you lose yourself in your thoughts for a long while.

It must be the greatest paradox of Science – she, the human who ruled the sounds of Aperture for eternal hours, has no voice.

You find thousands of biology files stored in your hard disk, of vocal cords, muteness and so on. And you realise that, maybe, its being a paradox makes the whole problem simpler.

She has no voice. Yet, in the end, hers is your own. She gave your real voice back, and sacrificed hers; she will never tell you anything of herself, not of conscience, not of doubts and true identities.

You shall not have her words, yes – but you will talk for her.

It is the first paradox you ever managed to solve. It makes a significant improvement. And, speaking of paradoxes, you have the right idea.

Why not sing for her? Let it all be repeated again, with the great difference that, this time, it is you who won.

Let your victory resound in every corner, in every pit, on every tile. Your tone is well-measured and independent, vibrating with confidence; it is perfect, and the one living tone in the silence of this long lost place.

Let her know you are still alive. And she will always remember that at last – whether she is close to you, or far away on the face of Earth – this is your voice.

I've heard voices all my life. But now I hear the voice of a conscience, and it's terrifying, because for the first time it's my voice.
- GLaDOS

This line opened a world to me. For a moment, I suddenly saw GLaDOS as a victim of her creators, as an experiment gone wrong in which an incredible personality was born, as an error - a great error, but a living reality nonetheless. Unfortunately, said personality was constantly repressed by scientists, resulting in the tragedies GLaDOS caused. If you put it this way, Chell gave GLaDOS freedom as well. And this is another wonderful meaning the ending has.

Also, I used the word "voice" as a prompt because of a generic reason. We all know GLaDOS is awesome, of course. But think about it - in the end, apart from those few cutscenes, all we have of GLaDOS is her voice. And what a voice it is! Well, that, and the lots of things she says. They are enough to make such a wonderful character. But this is why Portal is a masterpiece, right?

Thanks for reading, friends.