Updated GLaDOS Character Info for Posthumans - PORTAL 2 SPOILERS EVERYWHERE
Player Name: Zippy
Personal LJ: sparklemagpie
E-mail: sparklemagpie@hotmail.com
AIM: calamityzippy
Other characters currently in-game: M'gann M'orzz [AU]
Who referred you to the game?: Myself.
Character Name: GLaDOS
Canon source: Portal
PB: Odette Yustman
Personality:
History:
GLaDOS was born Caroline McClain, her parents' first and only child, in 1930. Although she was rather socially withdrawn as a child it was evident from an early age that the little girl was very smart, gifted in a manner few ever were. Focused on her studies she excelled academically, finishing secondary school by age 14 and advancing to the university level with her sights set on a career in experimental physics. A brilliant engineer Caroline blossomed in the academically geared atmosphere of her new university, still not the best in social situations but easily picking up the strict social rules of her school and sticking to them.
A choir participant since she was very young she was lured by a colleague into continuing with the hobby through university - right up until 19
In the spring of 1972 Cave Johnson was diagnosed with a new and uncategorized disease that his doctors were baffled by. He lived for quite a while fighting everything off as well as he could - I think at first maybe some of the treatments that were tried were semi-successful (because God knows after exhausting conventional options he'd have gotten himself even the wildest most experimental treatments to try to stop the spread). But tumours just kept cropping up and eventually the infection spread to where it couldn't be reached, it got into his bones, into his nervous system and his brain...
When he was pronounced terminally ill in 1979 he launched into the AI research that had been on the back-burner for a while with gusto, hoping he could make himself essentially immortal and preserve at least his mind if not his weakening human body. Caroline was initially kind of horrified by the whole idea because at the time the procedure that was being mapped out looked crude and insane even for Cave's low standards of personal risk. He asked her to do what he couldn't and run the whole lab with the GLaDOS system if he didn't survive to do it himself, obsessed in his dying hours with the experiment being completed, just... grasping for all the things he wanted to finish doing and never would.
He died just a few weeks shy of their tenth anniversary in 1980.
After losing him Caroline - who was already a little cracked from the time she was young - kind of went extra nuts in an 'obsessed with saving his company and carrying out his last wishes' way. The portal breakthrough happened thanks to the moon rocks and the gel created from them early in 1981 and that brought Aperture back from the brink of bankruptcy where it had been teetering in the last few years before Cave's passing. She built a shiny new lab facility with all the money from the Portal technology - the Aperture Science Computer Aided Enrichment Center - and placed the new facility as the crowning jewel at the top of the massive mine shaft maze that the rest of the laboratory was built in.
Then she started in on becoming the GLaDOS system, culling the human parts of her body away bit by bit. There were a lot of reasons that she rebuilt herself. Fear of a lingering painful death from testing exposure like what she'd watched Cave go through was one BIG thing, because robots can't get sick and die. And another part of it was that the other researchers could TELL that she'd been coming apart at the seams since Cave died and they and the investors were trying to wrench control of the company away from her. That made her FURIOUS because the company they'd build together was all she had left of her husband and Aperture had been her LIFE since she was barely in her twenties. Their interference only made her more dedicated to becoming one with the machine, so that she could tell them all to pry Aperture from her cold dead hands and then spite them by NEVER DYING.
When she erased all her human and personal memories in the final step between Caroline and GLaDOS in 1986 she did so almost out of self-preservation. More and more she'd found that her emotions got in the way of her science - anger, fear, loneliness, grief she'd never really allowed herself to resolve and a paranoid feeling of being persecuted by her colleagues piled on top of existing stress and mental instability until the simplest and most painless course of action seemed to be to just delete it all and start over with a life dedicated purely to testing science, developing new things for Aperture, and keeping her company alive.
Carrying out Cave's last wishes was certainly part of the reason for the transformation but she felt she needed to do something drastic to separate herself from the emotional stress of her work and her life in general. Coming home at night and crying because her husband hadn't lived to see how successful they could have been wasn't conductive to research, and neither was having to defend herself constantly to her employees who all felt she was losing her grip, or feeling guilt about people who got injured or killed on her testing tracks. Despite all of her success running Aperture alone was nightmarish in the scope of all that she had to do (largely because she was too paranoid to delegate anything she considered important to someone else). She was worked to the breaking point, depressed and exhausted. Being completely independent of social contact and human feeling appealed to her, as did jacking her brain and body up with the sheer computing power that it would take to run the facility all by herself without needing anyone's help.
She became GLaDOS partly in honor of Cave's memory, yes, but just as much she did it for her.
In 1986 she invited all her investors and employees to a mandatory meeting, an announcement of a change of direction for Aperture Science.
She transferred all of her memories prior to 1981 and all her non-science memories of the years after onto a separate hard drive, installing blank storage hard drives with forty times the data capacity of what those memories had taken up into her remaining brain instead. She installed the mood balancing cores to mitigate her emotion, logic, curiosity and morality, then she jacked herself into the mainframe scaffolding and gassed the whole facility, first with a knockout drug so she could weed out who she wanted for test-subjects and put them in stasis. Then she followed up with deadly neurotoxin before sealing the lab and burning the bodies.
How does your AU differ from canon? GLaDOS in canon was also a woman who became a machine but the implications that she was forced into the mainframe in canon are obliterated here. Rather than just being a secretary Caroline who later became GLaDOS was a scientist in her own right, romantically involved with her boss, and the inventor and cheif engineer of many of Aperture's technology projects including dynamic panel environments, light bridges, aerial faith plates, long fall boots and dual portal-technology, as well as the gravity gun which was leaked by a research associate and stolen from under her by Black Mesa. Though she's been plugged into the system for many years she still has a human-analog body and can move around independently, literally a walking supercomputer.
Strengths:
Incredibly intelligent. GLaDOS's brain has been augmented to give her perfect memory and allow her to play and replay scenarios in her mind. All that she sees, hears, touches, smells, or ingests with her weird fake robot stomach is meticulously analyzed and recorded.
Although she is almost entirely machine inside GLaDOS's outward appearances are completely human and meant to have fooled her colleagues who tried to caution her about all the modifications she was doing to herself. She was and still is a very paranoid and The preciseness of her build it like that of a much less durable verison of a Humanoid Cylon. The only outward sign of her robotic nature is the foursome of Core spheres - each about the size of a crabapple - that are aligned to either side of her spine on the back of her neck. When dormant they look like matte white half-spheres embedded in her skin, but when activated each has it's own literal voice and a different coloured eye, modulating particular aspects of her emotional responses like her anger or her sense of morality.
She is ultimately compatible with thousands of types of electronics and computer systems, able to interface with anything that isn't too old. She shreds through encryptions and security systems like they're nothing.
Her body is equipped with tiny nanobots that serve tbo maintain and make minor repairs to her system, even replacing her small part from an internal stockpile of frequently worn-out bits.
Weaknesses:
The mental instability that GLaDOS displays is extreme to say the least. She is so mired in the machine she's become that she has literally physically destroyed many of her memories - excising 'unnecessary' humanish brainparts like the ones with memories of her childhood. The imperfect destruction of these sections of her brain to make room for impulse feeds and microprocessors has left her with just ghosts of her past life in her mind.
Without her core spheres she becomes anywhere from psychotic and homocidal to listless and without purpose depending on which one you removed from her. If all four were to be taken out she would be a neurotic screaming mess, incapable of self-care little alone her all-important feeling of control. She would experience symptoms not unlike an android equivilant to withdrawal from something like Methadone.