“If groups of hunter-gatherers appear to have made this - or any - test chamber their home, DO NOT AGITATE THEM. Test through them.”
GLaDOS commission for Immolater.
WOW that’s excellent! Accurate to the model and still has a lot of personality and movement.
At the beginning of “The Fall,” GLaDOS tells Chell that her slow-clap processor “made it into this thing.” This implies, of course, that other functions of the mainframe also didn’t make it into the potato.
The biggest one? Caroline.
My headcanon is that Caroline, once separated from GLaDOS, became the driving force behind the itch—one of her four canon lines isabout testing, after all. (“Sir? The testing?”) She’s the one with the obsession for it, and she’s the one who drove Wheatley to madness.
And once separated from the mainframe, GLaDOS was finally able to think for herself—without Caroline getting in the way. It was only then, down in Old Aperture, that she realized who she was, and how much influence this former Aperture employee had on GLaDOS’s own personality.
When the two reconnect later on, GLaDOS easily locates Caroline in the ending scene thanks to the “surge of emotion” that shot through her. The game never says what exactly this emotion was. It could be anything—concern, fright, happiness, or utter hatred toward Chell.
Let’s just say, for a moment, that that emotion was an intense dislike—a strong urge to let Chell fly out into space and die already. An impulse to let Chell go. And after all the two had been through in Old Aperture, this would have been jarring to GLaDOS.
This out-of-place emotion felt so much like herself—and that’s what bothered her. It was her old self—the person who would have wanted Chell to drown in acid or get shot by turrets. And it threw her off. It bothered her—at that moment, GLaDOS realized that the emotion came from Caroline’s personality, not her own—unlike the computer, she hadn’t changed a bit.
But GLaDOS still intended to keep her promise to Chell—but Caroline, on the other hand, wanted her dead. Not just gone. And so in order let the test subject be free—to make the ending we all know and love possible—GLaDOS was left with no choice.
She deleted Caroline to save Chell.
-silverstreams
