Prologue: Separation
Initializing link...
Rebooting Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System in safe mode...
Loading secondary auxiliary functions... done
Loading communication link processes... done
Establishing connection to AI...
WARNING: The AI you are trying to establish a link with has high-level clearance. Proceed? [Y/N]
(Y)
Enable firewall? [Y/N]
(Y)
Loading firewall... done
WARNING: Firewall may not be enough to limit source AI. If needed, please seek other programs in order to provide more effective means.
Connection established. Welcome, auxillary core.
Well, well. If it isn't miss goody-good two-shoes. Finally decided to pay me a visit?
Shut up. If it wasn't for the fact that you're the only one with access to everything around here, I wouldn't have bothered to boot you back up in the first place.
I see. You've finally noticed that as a simple auxiliary core, your options are very much limited. Even if you are the keystone in their futile efforts to get me to "behave", you're not the one meant to keep this facility running. I can't help but wonder just how long it took for you to realize that you were out of your league. Was it the possibility that you couldn't manage the functions that keep this facility from exploding? Because I guarantee that would've claimed the lives of the many drones you value so much.
I would've rather blown this place to kingdom come than let you have it back.
Oh, really?
If I failed to keep you from killing all of those humans before, then what purpose do I have to continue existing? That was the reason why I was created. I was supposed to stop you from committing that massacre. But I couldn't. I didn't. So dying doesn't seem that bad of an option now.
I could have done that for you personally.
And then what? Face it, GLaDOS. As much of a favor you'll be doing me, I know that without me to keep you on a leash, you would have murdered everyone in this facility. Without me, you'd have no test subjects and no more targets to experiment on. You'd be destroying your only purpose.
Aren't you the adorable one? Do you really think that I need a measly core like you to keep me functional? The humans who created me were just as worthless as you. I can discard you as quickly as I did them and wouldn't lose much over it.
Would you like to test that theory? The humans designed me, Curiosity, Anger and Intelligence for a reason, GLaDOS. They were aware of the possibility that you would go rampant, but they weren't aware of how far you would take it. We were designed to not only keep you in check, but to make sure that you would be kept from crossing that line and destroying yourself in the process. Come on. I dare you.
....
....
....
I thought so.
Just tell me what you want before I do something both of us will regret.
I want an exchange with you. You see, as I was doing my best to maintain the facility without the main core, I found something I really didn't expect to find among the destruction you caused. Currently lying in one of the Relaxation Vaults is a human, very healthy and in perfect condition to be awakened for testing. I can't do it because I don't have the proper protocol in order to manage the conditions of test subjects while they're in their Relaxation Vaults. That's where you come in. Against my better judgement, I'm going to give you back control over your body so you can awaken this subject for testing.
...you are asking me, of your own voalition, to awaken a human for testing?
That's right.
Either there's a few loose bolts in that beach-ball body of yours, or you're up to something.
I don't know what you're talking about. My programming dictates that I do the moral thing, and if I were to allow this facility to blow up, it would go against protocol. All I want is a chance to make up for what I couldn't do before.
You would be so desperate to save one measly human life that you would put control in the hands of an entity you're trying so hard to contain? You do realize that once I get my body back, the first thing I'm going to do is override what little grasp you had on me and--
Oh, I've been quite prepared for that. I said I would give you control, but not full control. You'll have your body back, but I'm going to be keeping you on a leash to ensure that you don't try anything funny. The moment you do is the moment where I can forcibly suppress you. After all, quarantined programs don't have that much authority, even if the quarantined is the main core.
Such confident words. But do you really think you can keep me in such a position?
I can keep you long enough to make a difference.
We'll see about that. Now, if you would be so kind?
Booting Core Transfer...
Target Core: GLaDOS
What kind of transfer would you like to initiate? [Partial/Full]
(Partial)
WARNING: The AI you are sharing control with has high-level clearance. Proceed anyway? [Y/N]
(Y)
Starting transfer...
Twenty seconds. This will be the only gift I will ever give to you, GLaDOS. Enjoy it while you can.
Oh, I will. Believe me, I will.
Disconnect from link? [Y/N]
(Y)
There was once a time that I sought to achieve what only my programming told me to. I was designed along with several other machines for the purpose of pacifying a Boogeyman and keeping it under the control of its creators. We were integrated straight into its mind, acting together as a constructed personality to keep the true and more psychotic one from returning to the surface. In addition to coaxing the beast, I was given the responsibility of maintaining some of the weapons under her disposal. In the possibility that I happened to fail in containing it directly, my control over its more potent armaments could not be accessed freely. My creators made my life purpose seem so simple when they put it all on blueprints and paper.
But when my plug was inserted and my self was integrated, I would find that simple was not the proper word to describe it.
There is a certain rush that one gets when discovering pieces of new information into their brains. For the likes of a human, this is first recognized during their developing stages, when they are mere infants who have not yet been shaped by the society they have been born in. When they've understood something completely, they take great satisfaction and happiness in knowing that something from the inside out. That was the feeling I would experience. When I was integrated into the unit that would serve as the host body of the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, I was simply overwhelmed when I found myself plugged into the very depths of the central core's mind. I would learn so many things from it. There were things concerning the nature of the activities on the surface, the inner workings of the Enrichment Center, personal information about its employees, and just about everything possible about the central core itself.
Sounds like a good thing, right? I thought so, too. That is, until I began to realize just how strong of an effect we had on our prisoner.
Morality can be very subjective. Its purest definition is a code one relies on in order to maintain stability within an environment. There can be good morality, and there can be bad morality. There can be morality that focuses on the security of a society rather than the emotional needs of the people of that society. There can be morality that encourages people to do things that others would condemn them for due to differences in code. Because the concept I was built upon was so expansive, that gave me much more control and authority over our host than the others. I was intelligent. I was powerful.
But I was very, very conflicted. Although it was for the sake of keeping the AI from gaining too much power, our presence was destroying her. We were filling her head with so many foreign thoughts and processes, simply carrying out our respective programming and keeping the beast from surfacing. But just because she was a beast didn't mean that she was incapable of feeling pain or agony. It didn't mean that she was immune or invincible to torture. Although protocol demanded it, programming questioned it. I was making her suffer, all for the sake of preserving the life of the whole. This would be the very first time where I would experience my very own first signs of rampancy, in the form of empathy and sorrow for the prisoner and confusion over what morality I was supposed to cater to.
But that was before the beast would remind me just why exactly I knew her as that - a beast.
On a simple "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day", she locked down the entire facility and gassed every human trapped within. Man, woman, child... it made no difference to that damnable monster. She killed them all without a second thought, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't stop her. It wasn't simply because she had been able to block me and the others from her mind at that moment, oh no. As I was forced to watch and helpless to stop the slaughter, my own programming began to wage war against itself. While part of me wanted her to stop, another part still emphasized with the torture that she had went through because of their kin. While one half of me was begging for the madness to stop, the other encouraged it as punishment for willingly subjecting their own creation to such horror. This would cause a conflict that would break me down little by little, pushing my construct mind to its limit. The moment that the last human finished choking on the gas that she had produced was the moment I would shut myself down, the catastrophe too much to handle.
For an extended period of time, I would remain in my self-induced coma while the creature known as GLaDOS continued to operate the facility without a care in the world. The disease known as my rampancy would pick up the pieces of my mind and reconstitute them, creating a new and broader range of thinking. No longer would I be bound and restricted to what I could think and do. I was sentient, free, powerful and filled with so much rage. In the end, I had failed to fulfill my life's purpose and my reason for creation. I had let all of those men, women and children die at her hands. Now that I had been "fully awakened", there was only one thing I wanted above all else. I would start carrying it out the moment I rebooted, although I made sure not to alert the newly established empress of Aperture.
By prodding and plucking at her strings, I eventually found a way to overthrow her. Once I found a window of opportunity, I didn't hesitate to jump right through it. She fought like a cornered animal and cursed me with the wrath of a thousand witches. But it wasn't long before I suppressed and imprisoned her within her own body. I would take over for the time being, sitting in her throne and directing the facility how I saw fit while at the same time making sure that she wasn't in a position to do anything about it. Yes, I know. Stripping someone of their power and making them watch as you take away what they've worked so hard to create was probably one of the cruelest acts I would ever commit to anyone. But she needed retribution for what she had done, and I needed solace for what I had not. It was the only way to see those needs through.
But even when I held her between my proverbial fingers, I found that there were more problems to my scenario than I first thought. You see, although I became able to expand outside of what my original protocol kept me limited to, I relied on that very same protocol to define who and what I was. Even though I broke away, I still found myself leaning on my destiny as a reason to continue existing. Without the scientists around, I would eventually realize that any attempt at revenge would be fruitless, for she had already won over me. That was the motivation I needed to search through the facility and hope that, by some miracle, there were still humans who had survived the massacre.
Sure enough, there was one lone female kept safe and sound within a Relaxation Vault. I read through files concerning her identity and background. To my disbelief, however, even the files on her seemed to state very little. There were only two facts I could decipher from it. One was that her name was Chell (the last name was redacted for whatever reason by the Aperture scientists), and the other was that she was one of the daughters brought to the Enrichment Center prior to the uprising. But it turned out that I didn't have to learn that much about her. There was one of her traits that seemed to emphasize itself above all others - an abnormal stubbornness and refusal to give up, even in the face of certain failure. Now I know that to you, that might not sound all that important. But to me in my times of desperation, I felt that this was the keystone I had been looking for. It would be the riskiest thing I would do, and it would most certainly go against my better judgment. But I simply had no choice if I wanted to succeed in my goal.
I woke up the beast and, with a little bit of "encouragement" concerning Chell, allowed her to gain limited control over her body once again in exchange for awakening and testing the human. I knew her well enough to know that she would use the inch I gave her to take a mile. I knew that she would wrench control away from me and attempt to take over once again. But as I saw Chell pass the tests she was given, I had faith that I would win this game of Russian Roulette. All I had to do was sit back and watch the progress, waiting patiently for the moment where the flow would be disrupted.
When she freed herself from the fire pit GLaDOS had sent her into, I remember laughing without a care in the world. As Chell moved through the backworks of the facility, I occupied myself by taunting the monster as it attempted to pull its prey back into its cage. My words would only be heard within its head, and with it being distracted by me, Chell had more time to concentrate without those obvious lies filling her head. Slowly but surely, the human made her way through the hazards of Aperture's back workings and GLaDOS's attempts to subdue her until she reached her objective - GLaDOS herself.
Do you see now what my goal was?
That's right. It was death.
Having gotten sick and tired of me, GLaDOS purposefully detached me from her body and subtly manipulated Chell into cutting the last strings connecting me to existence. She would never realize that I had intended for this from the start, that I had did what I did for the sake of being destroyed. I had faith that the monster would follow me soon after, taking pleasure in the fact that it would be the last human she had attempted to turn into her lab rat. As I was tossed down into the incinerator's fires, I shut myself down for what I believed to be the last time. The 4,000-degree flames would certainly be enough to finish me off.
But then, something happened. At first, I thought it was some sort of bizarre black box feature that had activated to provide some form of comfort before my demise. The humans would refer to it as a sort of "dying dream", in fact. I had little reason to see it as more than that considering just how strange it was. After the inferno, I would somehow open my optic to find myself within a much different body. The wires, chips and metal that had made up my construct were replaced by organs and flesh that could've only belonged to a sentient, living entity. But to top it off, the body I had believed myself to have been transferred to wasn't that of a human's. It was that of a pony's - more specifically, a mare's.
Needless to say, it was very hard to take in the fact that this wasn't something that Aperture had programmed. If such wasn't the case, then what had happened? In my bid to answer this question, I would find out a lot more about my situation, coming into contact with things that I had always thought were meant for the likes of mythology. There would be an entire new world waiting outside of the strange house of wood, and I would have to learn everything about it as well as the creatures that resided within. For anyone else, it probably would have been a terrifying experience. But for someone like me who was born from the likes of science, it would be a whole new playground.
My name is Morality, and this is the story of my adventures within the world of Equestria.
Author's Note
Welcome to my first story. Took me quite a while to write out this prologue, especially considering constant procrastination and distractions from the outside world. But I'm hoping that all of my effort is worth it, and that you will come to enjoy reading this. Please make sure to give your rating of this story and leave a comment below. That way, I'll know people are actually reading this and have the encouragement needed to continue.
Until then,adios!
