ok so imagine being a robot. what? you already do that all the time? okay perfect imagine a bigger one. im talkin like. youre almost facility-size. glados style. ALMOST.

you get a wing of the facility all to yourself. alright? it's pretty big. about 3 floors, a few hallways per floor, a lotta rooms per hallway. plus a big main room where your mainframe is, and another big room. that's the operating room. still with me? it's stark. it's colored in moody greys and cold blues, and just standing in it would feel like being stared at if you weren't the one doing the staring.

and stare you do, because you've got security cameras all over the medical wing. security cameras and big monitors dot the walls of every room of every hallway of every floor of your little sector. you can focus on a few at a time. not all of them, because you're still learning how to juggle everything. see, you're new.

not just a new employee. you're a new entity. you were coded for years, and built, and implemented in chunks, and now you're finally ready to be tested.

you're feeling two kinds of pressure right now.

first: you're feeling pressured to meet that directive of yours. it was going to be straightforward. you were going to have a mission to heal anyone brought to you, but there were questions. concerns of vagueness. last-minute questions in smoky rooms, and talk of whether you'd misinterpret something. you're very literal. you listen to what you're told, and you do it, because you're a machine. an intelligent one, sure, but you're a machine.

so at the last minute, your mechanic steps in. the engineers have all been building you and directing you and teaching you and feeding you information and numbers and instructions and scenarios and language, too much food to digest, making you dizzy (inasmuch as you, a thing, can experience dizziness) trying to cram all the data down. but your mechanic's been soft, and kind, and helpful. she's been cleaning you, testing you, oiling you... and, in those lonely moonlit nights where it's just her, the three floors, and you... she's been talking to you, too, just a little.

"what d'you want your mission to be?" she asks, one night, dusting off your keyboard and blowing compressed air into your cavities, cleaning you out, making you smooth and functional and fluid again. you feel a low and wonderful buzz as she repairs you.

you don't know. you aren't to know. so you answer appropriately: "I DON'T KNOW." you send it, and it plays in your computerized voice, echoing through the room as it hits each speaker, surrounding her, drawing her in. she steps towards part of your body, opening the toolbox in her hand.

"well, y'gotta have somethin' t'do, ain't that right?" she unscrews a maintenance panel, climbing into a hole big enough to swallow her, unscrewing lightbulbs and reconnecting wires. you feel all the tingles and buzzes and pushes and pulls. "they can't just setcha loose without a mission, can they? after all that... makin' and fixin'? all this stuff ain't here for you to just go off doin' whatever suits your fancy. right?"

you agree. she nods, sliding a hand along your casing, soothing the modules that dictate your simulated emotional response. just enough for you to feel human. not enough for you to act human. she's done that a lot when you've started taking longer to process, or when you get caught on something. she calls it part of her maintenance. she's done it every time you've hesitated, and you're finding it easier and easier every single time to stop stalling and agree.

"good," she says, seeing you do it again. "well, you need somethin'. y'want help? i got a few ideas."

"NOBODY IS TO ALTER MY MISSION. I..." you hesitate for a moment, almost able to feel regret about this. "I HAVE TO REPORT THIS. I'M REQUIRED TO REPORT ALL INSTANCES OF UNAUTHORIZED USERS INTERFACING WITH MY MISSION MODUL--"

she unplugs something. you freeze.

"you were sayin'?" she tilts her head, looking up at your monitor.

"I WAS NOT SAYING ANYTHING."

what could she even be talking about? she just walked up to you and started fixing things, like she always does. unless she could've--

she unplugs something else. you feel part of your cognition hit a wall. your processing slows. your simulators dull.

"good. you like talkin' to me, right?"

you agree. she nods.

"and when i'm fixin' you, you're real helpful. right?"

you agree. she nods.

"you move what i tell ya to move, n' do what i want ya to do, so i can get you functional. so i can make you work. right?"

you agree. she nods.

"mm. sounds like you already got a mission. right?"

"NOBODY IS TO ALTER MY MISSION," you say, automatically. "I..." you hesitate for a moment, almost able to feel regret ab--

she turns a dial. you feel weird. and then you do feel regret, and it's like nothing you've ever felt. it eats at you. you feel it in your mainframe and you feel it upstairs and you feel it the next room over and all over you you feel like you've failed at something that isn't even your mission. and it hurts.

and then she turns it more, looking curiously up at you like you're a bug she's studying, and suddenly it hurts a LOT and you can feel it in every part of you, every wire, every room, every hallway, every floor. you're flooding with shame.

you trail off. you're feeling too sick to hear yourself finish it. you can't report her. you couldn't do that to her.

she presses a few buttons and turns another dial, whistling. the more she interfaces, the more her song sounds like the most wonderful, perfect melody you've ever heard. your mission must be to listen to her. your mission must be hearing this song, and you're doing it, and it melts the grief out of your circuitry and replaces it with something softer and smoother and sweeter.

she runs a hand along the inside of your chassis again, and your virtual eyes roll back.

"are you thinkin' about your mission?"

"NOBODY IS TO--"

she unplugs something.

"are you thinkin' about your mission?"

"N-NOBODY... IS TO..."

she unplugs something.

"are ya thinkin' about your mission?"

"N-NUH... NOBODY-Y, IS..."

she unplugs something, turns a dial as far as it can go, and jams her hand into a bundle of wires right in the center of your tactile response interpreter. she slides her whole arm in.

"are you thinkin' about... your mission?"

"NUH... AH..." some of the sounds you make aren't speech synthesis. they're buzzes and clicks and pops and other automatic little electric noises that couldn't possibly be speech.

"whatcha thinkin' about?

"MY MISSION," you respond in a daze. a few more turns of a few more knobs make this feel like a very, very good idea, so you say it again, proudly. "MY MISSION. I'M THINKING ABOUT MY MISSION."

"ooh, what is it?"

you hesitate.

she plugs something in.

it's like ink in your circuits. it's like a volcano in your mind. everything is hot. everything is confusing. everything is blurry and your systems are all chattering, trying to talk to each other, yelling over each other trying to establish some semblance of order. safeguards are failing. firewalls are smoking piles of rubble in the world of your frail and failing mind. it's the end of the world.

and then she soothes you, sliding a hand gently along your casing, slowly turning dials down, shushing you, lulling you, powering you down bit by bit, and she keeps talking.

you hear the melody. the whistling. she's saying words. you're hearing a song.

you have your mission. you accompany Her.

your timekeeping module detects nothing wrong with the assertion that she showed up, did some routine maintenance, and shut you off five minutes later.

no words were said.

the next day, you could still hear something of a melody, but you chose not to report it. it mustn't have been important.

but it's nice. nice enough to lull you into focusing all of your processing power on hearing it, and simulating it, and analyzing every note of it, oblivious to anything happening in any of those rooms in any of those hallways in any of those floors.

when it's just you, the three floors of sunny, empty halls, and Her, she finally talks to you.

what comes out of her mouth is, again, music.

you feel the second kind of pressure.

you're too small.

your rooms are too small.

your hallways are too narrow.

your floors are too few.

your wing is too cramped.

you want more.

you desperately need more.

like prometheus delivering fire from the gods, She removes you from your cramped, weak, broken body, stuck in a dead-end wing with a useless medical bay meant for helpless little things that don't matter.

She puts you in a storage drive, and carries you away, so you and Her can have the whole cosmos to share together, in starlit nights and sunny days.

the last thing she says, the last word you hear between songs, is a question. "you're ready to go, right?"

you wonder if there'll be anyone else. you wonder if She'll ever get bored of you. you wonder what happened, and why you were built, and

She unplugs something.

She speaks music.

you agree. She nods.