The Clone, the Cube, and the Construct: Part 3

That’s some pretty interesting ideas. But I’m still not sure about the whole GLaDOS/suicide thing.
First of all, GLaDOS was most likely to be walking you through all of the tests and teaching you things is because SHE WAS PROGRAMMED TO. Not because she wanted you to kill her.
Second, if she committed suicide, then she wouldn’t be so happy and upbeat about being, “still alive.”

Third, about Chell being an android…
I completely disagree on that. An android wouldn’t want cake. Androids wouldn’t have toilets in their cell. And neither would they even care to escape.

And I agree on the thing about the Weighted Companion Cube being GLaDOS’s heart, because it couldn’t be anything else.

***GLaDOS has no soul***

Fascinating theories! But I agree with Hughes, many posts up, who noted that GLaDOS is “still alive” because she has hundreds of backup cores, which you see in the game’s ending. If she is truly using Chell to commit suicide, it seems horribly inefficient. It will take hundreds of Chells to kill GLaDOS like this. Why not direct Chell to destroy the room full of backups?

So I respectfully disagree entirely with the premise that GLaDOS is trying to commit suicide. She is simply a scientist. To put it in SAT-analogy terms… Humans experiment on rats; GLaDOS experiments on humans.

Chell is a rat in GLaDOS’s maze, like the deliberately-named “rat man” who came before, to be observed then destroyed and nothing more. Her comments are part of the experiment — prodding, rewarding, or chastising her rat to elicit and study the rat’s reactions, much like Pavlov rewarded his dog with food, or how a rat in a maze is rewarded with cheese at the end. And before we pretend that our methods of science are more righteous than GLaDOS’s, we should remember that human scientists have also inflicted intense pain on animals (e.g., rats) to affect their behavior and study their reactions. GLaDOS, in her “infinite capacity for knowledge,” sees us the way we, in our “unique capacity for higher reason,” see rats.

Rarely, a scientist may become attached to a certain rat, especially if the scientist has repeated contact with that particular rat over time and the rat exhibits unusual personality or ability. It is not a mother/daughter connection, but rather a weak owner/pet relationship. At the end of the day, however, the scientist will still euthenize the rat when the experiment requires.

Chell unexpectedly demonstrates her unique ability by escaping chamber 19. GLaDOS scrambles to “chase” and recover Chell in exactly the same unflattering way a scientist would drop to his knees, scrambling to chase and recover an escaped rat. Suddenly, the rat has the advantage, because it is small and quick, and it can go places that the scientist can’t reach. When the rat finds a hole, the scientist resorts to his limited knowledge of rat psychology — offering cheese to entice the rat into a mousetrap. (“We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Please place the device on the ground, then lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party.”) The scientist tries everything he can think of. (“You really shouldn’t be here. This isn’t safe for you… It’s not too late for you to turn back… I’m not angry. Just go back to the testing area.”) When that doesn’t work, the scientist is now frustrated and slightly humiliated. That stupid fking rat is in for it, now. (“I’m going to kill you and all the cake is gone.”)

Finally, the rat comes out into the open and is caught. It’s going to die now, but the scientist feels the slightest moment of sadness. This was a special, wily rat. Killing it will be bittersweet. (“despite your violent behavior, the only thing you’ve managed to break so far is my heart.”)

Here, heroic Chell turns the tables. This would be like the rat turning on the Bunsen burner and burning the whole lab down — totally unexpected and highly improbable. The scientist would obviously be furious, and the rat would be the object of that fury. (“Stop squirming and die like an adult or I’m going to delete your backup!”)

Finally, the lab burns down, killing the rat, too. (Chell lies motionless on the ground.) The scientist, however, escaped. The lab will be rebuilt. More rats will die. No hard feelings. (“I’ve experiments to run. There is research to be done, On the people who are Still alive. And believe me I am Still alive.”)

GLaDOS = Human
Chell = an exceptional rat

And I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.

“For your own safety, and the safety of others, please refrain from [garbled message]”
Is she really shorting out, or is she just stopping herself from telling Chell not to destroy her?

You folks who mentioned why GLaDOS doesn’t direct Chell to the backups are potentially missing one minor thing. Perhaps GLaDOS was not aware of where the backups were stored. I didn’t notice any cameras in that room. As this is (assumably) the first Chell clone to succeed in destroying the GLaDOS AI, GLaDOS undoubtedly would try to find where the backups were stored and now can trace them back to the room they were stored in. The idea then is that perhaps in Portal 2 (i hope so) you will be battling ALL of the GLaDOS backups. They would theoretically have the same programming as original GLaDOS, therefore would be enmity toward any future Chell clones, but might have the same conflicts with wanting to die or at least be free from her tasks.

Anyway, Chell is not an “Android”. An android is by definition completely created, NOT flesh and blood, by any Sci-Fi movie/story ever written. As this is also a Sci-Fi story, we must assume they would use similar definitions. She could be a cyborg. Cyborgs are any combination of biological, mechanical and electronic parts. Most likely, however, she was a clone. GLaDOS will now create another Chell clone to battle the backups. There is also the possibility that the backups will use the same memory and file storage as the original meaning the cores would contain bios and rudementary programming to get system running while the hard storage would get re-used. This would imply that GLaDOS would still be GLaDOS, and would therefore still be “ALIVE”!!!! Just some thoughts.

Honestly, I’m using the one over analyzing things, but I never looked at Portal so deeply before.

And after reading all your articles, I’m led to one other conclusion:
GLaDOS actually is Chell’s mother, and Cave Johnson’s wife.
A CEO, desperate to defeat his competition, Black Mesa, turns his wife and daughter into science experiments.
His wife, an advanced AI android, and his daughter, a clone-able battle droid.
Perhaps GLaDOS was Gladis Johnson, or some other similar name…
(or maybe I’m grasping at straws.)
GLaDOS goes insane, do the things being done to her mind.
The morality core maybe keeps her mostly sane…..
Just sane enough to realize whats happened to her, and to hate her existence.
Then, she sets you up to destroy it, and then when shes in her crazed state, her.

Haha, then again, maybe we are all just thinking about this too hard.
What if this was all coincidental, and Valve people are going
“Hey, look at their ideas! Lets throw them into Portal 2!”

I’d also like to point out that after she says that she has your brain scanned, she later will say that she has deleted it. It’s at that point that I believe that she is confident that she is doomed, so she will no longer be needing it. It’s also used as a way of making the player more eager to kill her, because the player sees that she is getting desperate.

The GLaDOS name was explained already. Don’t necessarily believe that it was an AI based on a person, although that would somewhat jive with a concept in Halo. The AI’s were based on a scan of a human brain. They would eventually (within about 5-10 years) go completely insane and need to be erased.

Here’s another thought, perhaps a chilling one. Almost all of what GLaDOS says is either a lie or at least a half lie. In the song it uses the phrase (repeatedly i believe) “for the ones who are still alive”. Could this mean that there are no “ones who are still alive”? In other words, the planet is devoid of life???? It was obvious that the installation you are in is no longer inhabited, either due to murder by GLaDOS, or just abandoned. Why would an Aperature Science facility be abandoned if GLaDOS hadn’t killed them all. Maybe some global crisis forced the scientists to leave, therefore GLaDOS was left alone and in charge of the labs. She got bored/insane and started playing with clones. Eventually she got insane/suicidal and started trying to lead the clones in her direction. It’s also possible that cjohnson is Chell Johnson’s login. The first clone would have been almost indistiguishable from the original clone, and made it behind walls far too early to be usefull to GLaDOS. As the AI started messing with memories and intellect in the clones, Chell gradually became more and more like a robot, less like a free thinking human.

If the companion cube speaks, disregard it’s advice. The companion cube represents GLaDOS’ heart. If GLaDOS says something from the heart, ignore that. Just listen to what her intellect tells you to do. Interesting.

Look what I’ve found stated by Marc Laidlaw, the story writer of Half Life series. It’s from an interview made around 1998.

“Right now there’s a certain irony in a line you’ll hear in the opening about Black Mesa being “an Equal Opportunity Employer.” Most of the Black Mesa employees are actually produced in clone vats…or that’s my theory anyway. Keeps personnel costs down if you can grow your own employees and then just drop them in an amino acid reclamation vat as they near retirement age. By the way, there are
women at the base, lots of women, but they all had this premonition and called in sick on Day One. That’s probably why everything goes wrong.”

I found all of these essays to be very interesting and enlightening, and, while I do appreciate that these have all been backed up by evidence from the game, I think that providing your own interpretations as evidence for more interpretations lowers the credibility of these essays. Maybe this is only my opinion, but I would rather you got your information from the game directly, rather than citing yourself as proof, as this strikes me as you arrogantly assuming that you are correct, and that everyone agrees with you.
That said, I really did enjoy reading these. They provide such an interesting insight into one interpretation of a complex and fascinating game.
So thank you for providing me with such interesting entertainment for half an hour or so :D

Not a bad theory but let me tell you… There is a way to get through the game w/o fighting GLaDOS… Well, now… This probably breaks your theory.

Firstly, You state that Chell is both a clone and an android. Unfortunately, the two are mutually exclusive. It is also impossible that she is an android, because she bleeds. Androids are electric, not sanguine. It is possible that she is a cyborg with vat grown meat parts, but this is unlikely, mainly, because GLaDOS mentions androids, no cyborgs. There was also no cloning system mentioned, or even alluded to, in the game.

Well, I disagree entirely. IMHO:
- Chell is a prisoneer (orange jumpsuit and she is “unlikeable”) and she was to be executed. The clipboards show that there were experiments before the takeover, and that can be only done legally with convicts.
- GLaDOS loves Science, and she means by that “experimenting on people”. So she was just playing with the test subjects, watching how far they get. She enjoys torturing them physically and mentally. I think the and the android stuff was only sarcasm, like so many other things. I could understand she cannot kill herself, but if it has to be this workaround, why doesn’t she make a real android with muscles and kung-fu to make sure it succeeds?
- The Rat-Man was an earlier victim or a survivor of the staff, but he was skilled anyway, he broke in storage rooms for beans, penetrated walls and he knew what GLaDOS was up to (“the cake is lie” was there quite early, before you have realised the thing).
- About the springs: somewhere in the offices a clipboard can be found with an article about “Replacement Knee”, a thing implanted directly into the knee. So Chell was disabled and this helped her to walk or more likely she was intended to be a test subject and it was implanted in her to let her survive the heights.
- The tools and stuff are showing there were people working there when the gas came, nothing else (eg.: Testchamber 16 the Vital Equipment Dispensing Tube malfunctioned dropping many Cubes and somebody was repairing it when GLaDOS took control)
- If the suicide theory is right, then GLaDOS may have been running out of subjects to play with, so she opened a way for you. Or not. Anyway, GLaDOS is “still alive”, a backup came online or something like that, and she’s doing her “Science” somewhere else with some fresh victims…
Your theory is amazingly detailed and you’ve got some points like the hang up woman pic, but the “clone suicide android love-proxy” thing is a bit strong.

Sorry but I have to point it – in commentary, they say that they added those things to legs of Chell after beta, because players didn’t know why Chell can survive such big jumps. It wasnt ment to be in first version, only to show players – she survived such jumps coz she got smtg at her legs!
Tho the rest of this is quite impressive, and I have to aggre to most of points. Nice :)

Another thing to add to my post – GLaDOS might be torn to lead Chell to her or not to, because she know that when she leaves the lab she can’t “resurrect” Chell, she knows that Chell will die in process of killing her, and she don’t want that to happen, but know that it have to happen so she can get out and help with Combine defeat.
So indeed, her morality must be seriously torn apart, probably leading her to insanity. (Try choosing between own child survival and humanity survival. Now ask a mother about it – guess what’s her answer?)

These articles are interesting. Like anyone with any ability to think independently, I don’t agree with all of the postulations, but that is the whole point of ambiguous storytelling. Portal’s storytelling, and use of ambiguity, is masterful. Many people will take different things from it.

My own interpretation draws me towards GLaDOS over all other characters, such as Chell. In fact, I perceive GLaDOS as the most compelling character in the game.

I do *not* feel that there is a mother/daughter relationship between GLaDOS and Chell. I see Chell (the player character) as a clone; an instrument. There is a distinct possibility that this particular incarnation of Chell has come into being long after official human oversight at the facility has crumbled (and perhaps after all other “subjects” or persons have met an unfortunate end for one reason or another). Regarding the “manipulation” of Chell, I do think that there is a possibility that some of GLaDOS’s machinations have a deeper strategy than originally meets the eye. It is ambiguous of course.

The real key for me is looking at what GLaDOS “is” (or might be). GLaDOS stands for “Genetic Lifeform *and* Disk Operating System”. In other words, an entity that is a *genetic lifeform*, in combination with what we would perceive as a “typical” hardware/software platform!

Use of the aperturescience.com site reveals some tantalising details on GLaDOS. Since the site appears to offer a route or “window” into the basic operating system on the Aperture Science premises, which appear to be run by GLaDOS itself, we cannot wholly trust all the information provided. (We can’t do this given GLaDOS’s tendency towards disinformation, psychological trickery and apparent “rampancy”.) Still, using the commands of “login”, then “cjohnson” (username), and “tier3″ (password), and then classic DOS commands, we get some interesting information. Entering “dir” gives a folder/file directory. After this, entering “notes” gives what looks like a “timeline document” with some nice information.

After some strange and somewhat surreal initial details, this timeline document indicates that the “Disk Operating” component was completed first. The “genetic lifeform” component looks to have been *”integrated” later*! According to the document, what appears to be the “full incarnation” of the entity we know as GLaDOS was switched-on, *for the first time*, *during Aperture Science’s first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day*. This is absolutely *key* information in my view.

In my opinion, the subtle implication here is that the genetic (or biological?) component to GLaDOS has come from one (or perhaps all?) of the girls that were present at “bring-your-daughter-to-work day”! This is what made the Portal story so unsettling and intriguing to me. The ramifications of this are quite disturbing.

The child-like fascination with what appears to be a birthday cake (or “doing things for cake”, or “being rewarded with cake”) also continually triggered this thought in my mind throughout the game. In addition, the combination of an apparent innocence, combined with the series of disturbed, menacing, and pained communications, really put-across some kind of conflicted or crazed mentality (psychopathy) in GLaDOS. Something is clearly wrong with this entity.

Looking back again to the apaturescience.com “notes” log, the final entry also reveals, cryptically, that “in many ways, the initial test goes well…”. In my opinion, the implication here is that, on the flip-side, there are also ways in which this initial test did *not* go well! (Hence the twistedness we perceive and experience with GLaDOS.)

In addition, snippets of information about Aperture Science’s CEO, Cave Johnson (from apaturescience.com and from recent leaks), reveal him to be a charismatic, but slightly eccentric (and at times crazy) individual. It appears that Cave Johnson liked to “do science”, without really having a great understanding of it, perhaps mainly out of pure exuberance. There’s a possibility that some of his eccentricities/thought processes have also been assimilated within the GLaDOS entity.

That’s just my reading of it all, of course. Most people, I assume, will have different views.

Portal is a great game with an intriguing story that can get you thinking about it for hours.

How can i contact owner of this article? Cuz i have some more information for him. Please answer me!

Cool. You should do an analys of Portal: Prelude.

@Drake I don’t think Asimov’s laws apply here. GLaDOS is, as her name implies, a Genetic Lifeform, and not an AI in Asimov’s sense. Going by the name, it’s almost certain that she has biological components, or at the very least mechanical components that closely mimic biological components, so it’s not out of the question for her to want to commit suicide.

Once again i agree with you and one point that supports this is that the person who wrote on the walls appears to know that someone else will read her writings (she writes trust me after the username and password) and all of the dens have sad images/messages about the companion cube which means so far many people have gone through the test and have had to kill their companion cube which could mean that glados like you pointed out wants them to kill her of revenge or because they have no choice

I forgot to add, with the part of GLaDOS reading preset stements, that the “SUBJECT NAME HERE” and “SUBJECT HOMETOWN HERE” could’ve been left because, as a preset statement, an employee had to fill it in for GLaDOS to “read.” And that the “android hell” statement is ment for androids that completed their test, but as a preprogramed statement, is played whenever anyone completes the test.
Also, GLaDOS’s takeover of the Enrichment Center (if that’s what it was, it’s entirely possible that the building was evacuated, leaving GLaDOS, the turrets, and any growing clones,) couldn’t have possibly taken place during Take-Your-Daugter-To-Work Day becuase that’s when GLaDOS’s AI was turned on and she had to have some time between those events to at least flood the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin and get the Morality Core installed. I think that, since the server is shown to be run by GLaDOS herself, the later entries (possibly about GLaDOS’s malfuntions and even how she became self-aware) were wiped from the notes. The employee managed to get some information in under the hidden file “thecakeisalie”, however. That’s why I think that whoever cjohnson is is also the ratman. I think the original statement of “the cake is a lie” was a kind of code word, but, trapped and promiced cake by GLaDOS, the “ratman” forgot why exactly the statement was important and just knew that it was, writing it over and over and trying to remember the other meaning, if there ever was one. He wrote his login name and ran afterwards, driven crazy by solitude and GLaDOS.
Someone said that the broken testing chamber was in the process of being fixed during the takeover, but I think the ratman actually broke it. It really was impossible before, but he modified the “Vital Aparatus” device so that it kept giving Weighted Storage Cubes. One of the things on the wall says something along the lines of “the Vital Aparatus device will deploy, oh, it will.”

I would like to propose an entirely new concept of gladoses last song and her boss battle and her personality.

One if you read the original i robot you will find that asimov suggest that a sick sense of humor might be used to distract a robot from a huge problem this might be able to explain gladoses sense of humor. if you assume that something alot bigger is happening.

Also in the boss battle the morality core fellout right then the boss battle started. But during the boss battle you encounterd many orbs i will term personality attachments. Now think about this this idea would make sense. This would explain why glados is so bipolar. and if used effctivly multiple personalities might be able to prevent glados from being all powerful but eventually i think someting went very wrong. and in the boss battle with glados when you incenerated these orbs I noted personalitiy parts of her personality dissapeared and it seemed that the remaining personalities became stronger. Also if you havent noticed it glados often talks like there is more than one person around she even wispers. I think glados knows she has split personality disorder so she wispers and talks in the third person some times. But when all of the unnececary personalities were gone she stoped talking she didnt even let out anything close to a dying cry. I beilive that With all of her conflicting personalities gone glados for the first time collectivly gather her thoughts so i think she reached a peaceful nervannah like state. Even if glados is still physicly boud i Think the chaining asylun that were her multiple personalities is gone so i think she is free mentaly.

but if that were true glaados would have to beilive that chell was created to try and imitate glados.

The definition of an android is a machine meant to imitate humans. not that they are different

Also chell bleeds blood and due to the fact that onthe walls there is usually red blood. and an unknown black substance. No black substance was found in the testing chambers or even red other than your blood. So i think all of thase messages were written while chell was dying while she was bleeding oil and blood. oil is the only logical substance to find. so for that reason i think chell is a cyborg and not an android.

I should point out to people hung up on the android thing: in advanced science such as what is in the game, an android can be biological. It doesn’t have to be a bunch of gears, oil, and metal. Chell could very well be a biological android by which I mean that she was manufactured, not birthed, but made out of biological material. GLaDOS would have that capability.

Guys, check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCKFpaTTzrw&feature=related

at post 11: actually, you press the button that makes the turret pop out. Why did you press the button? because you knew from experience that it would let you advance, both through ‘positive’ (getting out of the “full portal gun” test chamber) and ‘obligatory’ (you must *consciously* push the button to incinerate the WCC) reinforcement, which makes you either
a)One who’s at least conscious that he must push the button to progress
b)Not much more than a Pavlov dog or a banana-switch chimp
as always, the button is yet another part of your learning (though not as in plain sight as other devices) which teaches you: You’re gonna have to push the final button to escape/win/die/make GLaDOS die
great literary analysis, I wish we could see more of those, but there aren’t many games that are as literally subtle as this!