❝ Oh, yes — only if you are sure. I wouldn’t want to take too much of your time. ❞
The last thing Orianna wants to do is be an intrusion. The clockwork lady listens with rapt attention as the synthetic woman provides her own explanation.
❝ So you… have a different body somewhere else, then? That is incredible. I’ve never heard of such a thing. I hope you are able to return the body you feel more comfortable in. ❞
Is the woman implying that her other form is tethered to one spot? Orianna does not know if she personally could handle being immobile; even with legs, she had been restricted to one building for most of her life. Now that she has the opportunity to travel, she wants to seize it.
❝ Well… my father was very protective of me, and did not like me leaving the house. One day, there was a chemical explosion in our undercity. Father would not let me go down to help the victims, so I snuck out of the house at night with the equipment. I performed operations on people who needed them, and handed out respirators to those that needed to travel in and out of the fumes. I had a respirator myself, and eventually gave it away to a child. ❞
She recalls how cross her father was when she returned. For a time she appeared fine, but it wasn’t long before her own symptoms started to show. She remembers the fear the old Orianna felt.
❝ The fumes were highly toxic. People who inhaled them would fall ill. Their lungs would fail. It happened to me. My father was desperate to save my life, so he built a pair of new lungs for me. His fear of losing me was so great that he made the lungs unable to function without him there to turn this. ❞
As she speaks, she rotates her winding key. The thing is no longer needed, but it now provides her comfort where before it caused her only misery.
❝ But the replacement did not stop the spread of the illness. My other organs started to fail. And then my limbs. We replaced them all. The only thing left was my heart, but I eventually constructed a new one on my own.❞
Time? Oh, she had all the time in the world. Even back home -- back in her Aperture, oh, her proper, real Aperture -- she had had nothing but time. Being dragged away to different sorts of cities and living there for some silly experiment or what-have-you for years meant you really didn’t ever have much better to do than learn about others, anyway. Not in a way that she cared about, of course -- she didn’t want to learn about others for the sake of that individual other. She wanted to learn for herself.
< Yes, the actual me. Though given how often I’ve regrettably had to spend time in this one, I suppose you could say either one is the “actual” me. >
She could probably switch in the middle of the street, “magically” (hah), if she wanted to. But be connected to what? She’d rather not test how long that could last. Besides, with no connection to any facility, what was the point? There was no benefit.
< There’s hardly a point in selflessness, > she retorts, though Orianna’s next words actually have her falling silent for a moment. Clockwork lungs, were they? Not to mention the steady replacement of the rest of her organs and limbs with similar artistry -- from someone who once must have been human. Even her heart had been replaced.
GLaDOS looks radiant. Her interest is practically blinding.
< Is that so? > Caroline’s conscience had been uploaded to make GLaDOS... well, GLaDOS. But transferring a brain, a conscience, thoughts, to a machine was different than replacing necessities from what humans needed in all their fragility to keep living. What sort of world was that? < And here you are, functioning perfectly fine, and alive -- well, as alive as you can be. How? >
