Caroline | GLaDOS (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
carolinesays) wrote2013-06-27 11:57 am
carolinesays) wrote2013-06-27 11:57 am
StE app
Changes marked in this colour.
OOC Information:
Name: Yubi
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact: PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
piratopteryx | AIM: piratopteryx
IC Information:
Name:
Preincarnation: GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), originally Caroline
Reincarnation: Caroline Soler
Canon and medium:
Portal (video game)
Age:
Preincarnation:
Caroline: Middle-aged at time of death (late 40s, 50s?)
GLaDOS: decades to potentially centuries
Reincarnation:
38
Preincarnation Species:
Human / AI
Preincarnation Appearance:
Caroline: This portrait, approximately ten years before her death.
GLaDOS: Portal and Portal 2 appearance.
Any differences:
About the same as the portrait, albeit often in business-formal wear rather than a white dress. If she's dressing up, it'd generally be something slick and elegant and art deco. Petite -- five foot four, perhaps.
Preincarnated History:
GLaDOS' origins are rooted in two different entities: One, in an operating system developed by Aperture Science, and two, in Caroline, CEO Cave Johnson's secretary. The Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System was intended to hold a digital copy of Cave's memory and personality, a project fueled by his despair at his company's financial ruin and his own declining health. The project may have succeeded, had his illness not caught up with him.
Caroline was an Aperture employee from the 1950s to the 80s, almost from the company's founding days. While little is known about who she was and what she was like, she was enthusiastic about Aperture's approach to scientific research and was considered indispensable to the company. A prevailing theory about Caroline is that during her and Cave's relationship, they had a daughter who was adopted by another Aperture employee and grew up to be Chell. While it's a compelling idea, the timeline doesn't quite match up. Romantic implications or no, it is fact that Cave very much trusted her: He depended on her care when he became gravely ill and, later, handed the reins of his company over to her. Indeed, his last request was that Caroline be uploaded to the project instead of him -- much against her wishes.
Repeated attempts to activate the now-complete GLaDOS resulted in immediate attempts to kill Aperture personnel (this was almost certainly Caroline showing her displeasure, although an alternate-universe iteration of the system also ended in the uploaded personality becoming violent, plus Wheatley's behaviour while he acted as the central core. Little of column A, little of column B). She was installed with multiple Personality Cores in the hopes they would influence her behaviour to controllable levels.
tl;dr, the company founder's charming girl friday turned into a psycho killer AI.
The system was meant to be activated in the 2000s during the company's Bring Your Daughter to Work day. GLaDOS immediately locked down the enrichment center, flooding it with neurotoxin. The survivors were imprisoned and used as test subjects for the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. The employees were soon whittled down to one programmer, Doug Ratmann, who fled into the spaces between the walls where GLaDOS' cameras couldn't find him; some other survivors fled to a hidden vault and entered cryo-stasis. (As this is a shared universe with Half-Life, the Combine invasion happened at around this time.)
GLaDOS ran the captives through a series of test chambers, progressing from the relatively safe to complicated to downright lethal. After an unknown body count, one particular subject not only survived the tests, but excelled in them -- and managed to escape the "victory candesence." In spite of GLaDOS' attempts to cajole, pester, and threaten her to return to the test chambers, the subject, Chell, made her way to the central chamber, incinerating the Personality Cores and causing a huge malfunction in the system. The resulting explosion propelled Chell to the facility exterior and apparently destroyed GLaDOS.
Many clues point to the testing cycle being, in fact, a convoluted suicide attempt: The tests were as much about exploring the limits of the portal gun as they were training the subject to fight through the facility's defenses and get to GLaDOS, even without Ratmann's graffiti guiding Chell on the right path. Additionally, GLaDOS' comments about the Companion Cube, as well as some other statements, are very telling: "If it could talk - and the Enrichment Center takes this opportunity to remind you that it cannot - it would tell you to go on without it because it would rather die in a fire than become a burden to you." "No one will blame you for giving up. In fact, quitting at this point is a perfectly reasonable response."
However, a backup system managed to preserve GLaDOS, keeping her dormant for an unknown period of time -- long enough for vegetation to overtake significant parts of the enrichment center; this time period is speculated to be anywhere between thirty years and three hundred. She was finally, accidentally, reactivated by a Personality Core named Wheatley in his attempt to aid Chell (preserved and recently awakened from a Relaxation Chamber) in escaping the complex once again. They succeeded in disabling her security system and disconnecting GLaDOS from the system. Unfortunately, Wheatley betrayed Chell, stuck GLaDOS into a potato battery, and threw both of them into a pit.
In a tenuous alliance, the duo slowly their way through the long-abandoned and forgotten sector of the facility, looking for a way back up. They encountered several automated recordings of Cave Johnson's voice, which allowed GLaDOS to remember her origins and, it seems, reawaken some part of her old personality. After Wheatley was dealt with and GLaDOS was reinstated to power, she supposedly deleted any trace of Caroline in her data files; however, the fact that she called Chell her only friend and allowed her to leave the enrichment center unharmed indicates that this was not the case.
In Chell's absence, GLaDOS continued the testing on a pair of robots she built (Atlas and P-Body, based on a personality sphere and a sentry turret respectively), sending them on tasks like locating the relaxation chamber, and tracking down a supposed intruder.
For extra details, wiki links!
Caroline on half-life wikia
GLaDOS on half-life wikia
Reincarnated History:
Caroline Soler was born an only child in the seventies, in the kind of small-town that looks like it's trapped in a time-warp from the fifties and every house has patterned wallpaper in the kitchen cabinet. She quickly displayed a fascination with math and science, particularly physics (less so with the natural sciences), despite attempts by her family to dissuade her from such boyish subjects. While in school she paid great attention to the music club, and every now and then thought about getting formal training as a soprano and becoming a singer. She herself eventually dismissed this notion, however; Caroline had other plans.
While generally liked in a vague sort of way, Caroline by and large did not have close friends or romantic connections growing up, a pattern that continued into adulthood. She was seen as an amiable girl next door, one who'd probably get married immediately out of high school. Instead she picked one of the furthest colleges from home that she could find, Locke Uni, entering its science program and happily burying herself in her studies. She has rarely visited her home since then. While not a top student, she made up for it with honest enthusiasm. In Locke U she also did a brief stint for the student radio, though most people tended to think she was someone's kid sister who'd talked her way into the broadcasting room rather than a fellow undergrad, due to her high-pitched voice.
After school, she found work as a lowly assistant in Prometheus, an up-and-coming tech firm specializing in electronics. While ideally she would have wanted to be in a research lab somewhere, she supposed she wanted some varied job experience before that. Instead, Caroline remained with the company over the years, up towards the present day, rising through the ranks and mostly learning about management on the go. She earned herself a reputation with her scrupulously-efficient, take-no-prisoners approach and ability to get results out of people, on pain of death. The corporate world had turned her from someone who didn't mind if people thought she was a dumb fish-out-of-water girl if it meant they let her be, into someone quite happy to be seen as a terrifying dictator if it got the job done. And if people still underestimated her, well, that was their problem. Her upward movement through the corporate ladder culminated when the prior administrator's dubious financial decisions came under question, allowing Caroline to swoop into power (while ignoring rumours that she slept to the top or criticism of her being too young for the job). At the present date, Caroline has only been the head of Prometheus for a couple of months, still struggling to rescue it from her predecessor's actions, and quite frankly she has no time for some number club nonsense.
Then a bird flew through her window.
First Echo:
Sometime after June 23. It was a normal workday when a Vermini bird smashed through Caroline's office window and into her face. This triggered a memory recall of a giant black bird carrying her through a dark cavernous place, away into its nest to be eaten alive oh shit oh shit!!
Despite the bird in her memory not really being monster-sized and a single Vermini not being any threat at all considering that it was way more confused and in pain than anything, this was enough to give Caroline 1) a deep distrust and distaste for birds, 2) a peculiar fleeting sense that her perception of the world was very wrong and 3) a magical mystery network number.
Preincarnation Personality:
GLaDOS is a tremendous, magnificent wreck, a peculiar mixture of tantruming child, bitter ex-girlfriend, and token psycho AI. She is utterly amoral, darkly sarcastic, and, with her morality core gone, delighted by acts of sadism and cruelty. She is passive-aggressive in a way only a robotic construct can be, conveying her catty insults and threats as though all her words are statements of fact, so gosh, don't shoot the messenger. After all, if you only did what you were told (i.e. lie down and die), we wouldn't be in this situation where she's forced to kill you! She was only minding her own business and you had to come in and try to tear her to bits and throw her into a fire. Who's the villain here?
Nothing GLaDOS says can be taken at face value, whether it's a lie to hurt you or withholding facts to see how you'll react or pretending she's perfectly alright when really she's fuming, or simply dropping vague hints in the middle of conversation without expanding on their meaning. The reason for all this circumlocution, though, is that for years, she was hooked up to four personality cores -- five including Wheatley. Each of these were intended to be a guiding influence; in practise, they functioned more like conflicting voices in her head, ones that she would have to maneuver around if she wanted to do something they were programmed against. While GLaDOS affected them as much as they did her (by the end, they are more reflections of her personality than anything: Morality has become silent, Intelligence is obsessed with cake, Emotion is berserk, and Curiosity is a hyperactive child), having four different individuals in her mind would drive anyone round the bend -- and don't forget she was already a combination of Caroline's mind and the GLaDOS programming. Though she has long been freed from the cores, she is far too used to tricking herself into believing she is doing one thing, while planning to do another. She simply cannot state anything outright, particularly if it's important. This is one reason for her insults -- it was a way to lash out and express her dissatisfaction, without technically breaking any rules.
Although she'd still be spiteful and insulting. It's fun. Much like a child, GLaDOS has flights of whimsy, evidenced in the thing with cake and parties and the plot to use the bird's hatchlings as killing machines, and she has the eternal curiosity and fascination at new discoveries of a child. But also like a child, she sulks and makes spurious claims and holds a grudge like no other. As a robotic being, GLaDOS is eternally young, with all that entails.
Speaking of her programming: We are told that the mainframe gives the resident core a compulsion to test, and reward a successful test cycle with a euphoric reaction, and eventually this would drive the core to madness. While this would be an excellent contributing factor to her mental state, she denies that she was affected. She does have ample reason to be crazy and obsessed with science anyway, but it's also likely that over the years she internalized the compulsion as just a natural facet of her personality. With GLaDOS, nothing is simple.
While not exactly pleasant to be with (and she has no compunction to be nice, either), GLaDOS is capable of working alongside people, if she really must, particularly after the unpleasant experience of being entirely at Chell's mercy. Indeed, she only seems to really respect people when they've proved to not be cowed by her and effectively strike back. Even if she likes you or sees you as an equal, though, it's still very much her way or the highway. At her nicest, GLaDOS can be strangely motherly, complimenting and encouraging good work like a pat on the head.
At this point in time, the part of her personality she identifies as "Caroline" appears to function as a conscience: She has more obvious displays of emotion, sincerity, and even compassion (particularly if she had a hand in arranging the Turret Opera; though even then, her heartfelt goodbye would have been in a language the recipient wouldn't understand and using other people as a proxy). Still, it would be a mistake to think of Caroline as a bastion of morality, as she was not only complicit in Aperture Science's deranged tests and unethical use of human subjects, but cheered on things like Cave's combustible lemons rant, and certainly had enough influence in the company that she herself would have overseen the testing.
According to Cave, Caroline was "married to science" and "modest"; the former is likely, the latter is debatable, since one doesn't have to be modest to not want to be forcibly uploaded. In the Want You Gone song, GLaDOS states that Caroline was "a lot like [Chell]"; assuming this wasn't just the setup for a joke, this may mean Caroline had the same resourcefulness and defiant determination that so characterizes Chell. After all, in the end, GLaDOS has not only destroyed or exiled every single person who wronged her, but has placed herself back in her throne and is free to pursue her interests (Science!) as she pleases. While she may or may not have wanted to die, resisting the idea of robotic immortality as a human and hating being a slave to her mental restraints as an AI, in her current state she is quite content to rule over her little kingdom for eternity.
Any differences:
Caroline is as ruthless, sardonic, and scientifically-minded as her robotic self, the main difference being, well, not an AI driven totally nutfish from being effectively schizophrenic for a long time, and then stuck in a loop reliving her own death for the next several years. She's disdainful of most people, due to perceiving herself as far smarter and superior to them instead of seeing them as test subjects or idiot robots, and she presents a pleasant, helpful, well-mannered face to the world instead of how she really feels, due to a combination of her slightly old-fashioned upbringing and her job demanding that she represent the face of her company, and so she must avoid offending the wrong people. As Caroline, she's very much susceptible to repercussions for her actions and aware of this fact, something that GLaDOS almost never has to worry about.
At the same time, while GLaDOS has eventually learned the benefits of cooperation and companionship (even if Chell still leaves her in the end), Caroline is still perfectly happy to cut off ties to anyone who doesn't have use for. She's also, perhaps, not entirely much like the Caroline who was Cave Johnson's assistant. Caroline Soler is cool and aloof and hasshowed them, showed them all proven herself to be quite capable, thank you, and she isn't anyone's cheerleader or right-hand man.
And she certainly doesn't have homicidal tendencies, though in times of anger or stress it's not like she won't entertain the idea. Well, she's only human, after all. That said, if she enforces a code of conduct with her employees and follows standard safety procedures, she's possibly more motivated by the legal ramifications rather than the moral side of things.
She does still have a lovely singing voice.
Abilities:
GLaDOS herself is fairly helpless: Without absolute control over an experimental facility where she can change the configuration of any room at a whim, her only advantage is her mind. That said, as an AI, she has all the knowledge necessary to run and configure a vast laboratory, program/repair/construct machinery and robots, and generalized knowledge of experimental physics and the particular flavour of mad-science that Aperture runs on. Of course, most of this would require very specialized equipment and possibly inaccessible raw materials.
A quirk of Aperture technology is that she can function with extremely little power, considering her extended sojourn stuck to a potato battery. Additionally, so long as a backup is present, GLaDOS is effectively immortal.
GLaDOS can be stopped in her heels by a paradox: say, a statement like "This sentence is false." According to her, most AIs find paradoxes irresistible and get stuck in a loop trying to work them out. It's possible for her to resist this, though, if she puts in concentrated effort.
Roleplay Sample – Third Person:
Caroline Soler has a video conference in fifteen minutes and a meeting in forty. After that, she has a thousand and one things to do, many of them simultaneously, and several of them she wouldn't consider delegating (and in Caroline's humble opinion, she wouldn't trust some of her employees to find their way out of a paper bag without a map). Tomorrow and the day after and the next day after that will be much the same.
Caroline rotates her head, tilting it this side and that, stretching her neck without wrinkling her clothes. She steps away from her desk to the window. Fifteen minutes, which means fifteen minutes all to herself without any silly squabbling people vying for her attention. Caroline wouldn't trade where she is right now with anything in the world, but the hours she sleeps every night are getting shorter and her patience is going with it.
She closes her eyes, breathes in deep, exhales. If she tries, she could believe she was the only one left, high up over the world.
Later on, she wouldn't be sure why she opened her eyes at that moment, but when she does, there's a fast dark shape at eye-level, speeding towards the window. With an undignified shriek she rears back, catching a glimpse of a beak, shiny eyes, something black that looks like feathers but there's something wrong, something about the texture, right before it pierces through the double-glazed glass --
(It's huge and looming over her, pecking bits off her body, although for some reason she doesn't feel it, not as pain, anyway. The proportions of the room she's in are all wrong, she's looking up at the world instead of down from above. At the edge of her vision she can just barely make out a person approaching --)
(001 324 56)
-- and there's shards of glass scattered on the carpet and speckled on the front of her suit jacket. The black bird (normal sized, not twice her height) is flopping around pathetically on the floor, too stunned to do much of anything.
She eyes it, repulsed. Then she presses a button on her desk.
"Ma'am? What was that noise? Are you alright?"
"Call pest control," she says crisply. "And maintenance. If the glass is that fragile, it's a miracle nobody's fallen through a window before."
"Ma'am?"
"Mm? Oh, no, don't stop whatever you were doing, I'll call them myself, shall I."
"A bird hit the window? Ah... Should I have your next appointments postponed?"
Caroline rolls her eyes internally, using a bit of paper to brush the glass off her suit. "Yes, tell them I can't be seen today, I was menaced by a bird. And a dog ate my homework." She pauses, then relents. She's more nettled at this than she should be. "Maintenance and pest control. That will be all, thank you."
Roleplay Sample - Network:
[text]
Hello.
Pardon me. I spoke in error. Allow me to rephrase my greeting, in the socially-acceptable manner that this assortment of individuals has established. Here it goes:
oh! my! is this a network?
is this a joke
slash game
slash arg
slash publicity stunt
slash mass hallucination?
i am far too self absorbed and helpless to stretch out my hand an inch and discover anything for myself you see
please help thx :-)
That should be sufficient. It is so important to conform to the standards of the tribe when offering yourself up for acceptance, after all.
Assume that I have looked up all readily accessible documentation. Because I have. I commend whoever has been updating that, by the way.
Any Questions?
Well, two main things - Prometheus is much more of a small local tech firm rather than on the level of, say, Apple or Google, especially given its financial troubles, but it has the potential to be a nuisance to Thunder. If running the company gives Caroline too much influence for one character, I can change her job to managing its R&D or something. At the same time, I'm planning on Caroline keeping mostly anonymous for a while, rather than overtly using any influence for the numbers club's benefit.
Another concern is how Caroline's Echoes are going to play out. GLaDOS' mainframe and chassis are immobile, and arguably the entire enrichment center could be seen as an extension of herself; at the same time, her personality can be uploaded in a small, mobile platform. I'd also want her to be able to interact in events around the city.
I'd say that while she may eventually transform into her canon form, possibly even converting a room/small building into a control/storage center for herself, she may have the option to either build a mobile robot body she can remotely pilot around the city, or requisition the help of other science-themed characters to do so, or something along those lines. Obviously she won't have be able to oversee events throughout the city via security cameras, unless she goes through the pains to install them herself or something. That said, this is all waaay in the future.
OOC Information:
Name: Yubi
Are you over 15? Yes
Contact: PLURK:
IC Information:
Name:
Preincarnation: GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), originally Caroline
Reincarnation: Caroline Soler
Canon and medium:
Portal (video game)
Age:
Preincarnation:
Caroline: Middle-aged at time of death (late 40s, 50s?)
GLaDOS: decades to potentially centuries
Reincarnation:
38
Preincarnation Species:
Human / AI
Preincarnation Appearance:
Caroline: This portrait, approximately ten years before her death.
GLaDOS: Portal and Portal 2 appearance.
Any differences:
About the same as the portrait, albeit often in business-formal wear rather than a white dress. If she's dressing up, it'd generally be something slick and elegant and art deco. Petite -- five foot four, perhaps.
Preincarnated History:
GLaDOS' origins are rooted in two different entities: One, in an operating system developed by Aperture Science, and two, in Caroline, CEO Cave Johnson's secretary. The Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System was intended to hold a digital copy of Cave's memory and personality, a project fueled by his despair at his company's financial ruin and his own declining health. The project may have succeeded, had his illness not caught up with him.
Caroline was an Aperture employee from the 1950s to the 80s, almost from the company's founding days. While little is known about who she was and what she was like, she was enthusiastic about Aperture's approach to scientific research and was considered indispensable to the company. A prevailing theory about Caroline is that during her and Cave's relationship, they had a daughter who was adopted by another Aperture employee and grew up to be Chell. While it's a compelling idea, the timeline doesn't quite match up. Romantic implications or no, it is fact that Cave very much trusted her: He depended on her care when he became gravely ill and, later, handed the reins of his company over to her. Indeed, his last request was that Caroline be uploaded to the project instead of him -- much against her wishes.
Repeated attempts to activate the now-complete GLaDOS resulted in immediate attempts to kill Aperture personnel (this was almost certainly Caroline showing her displeasure, although an alternate-universe iteration of the system also ended in the uploaded personality becoming violent, plus Wheatley's behaviour while he acted as the central core. Little of column A, little of column B). She was installed with multiple Personality Cores in the hopes they would influence her behaviour to controllable levels.
tl;dr, the company founder's charming girl friday turned into a psycho killer AI.
The system was meant to be activated in the 2000s during the company's Bring Your Daughter to Work day. GLaDOS immediately locked down the enrichment center, flooding it with neurotoxin. The survivors were imprisoned and used as test subjects for the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. The employees were soon whittled down to one programmer, Doug Ratmann, who fled into the spaces between the walls where GLaDOS' cameras couldn't find him; some other survivors fled to a hidden vault and entered cryo-stasis. (As this is a shared universe with Half-Life, the Combine invasion happened at around this time.)
GLaDOS ran the captives through a series of test chambers, progressing from the relatively safe to complicated to downright lethal. After an unknown body count, one particular subject not only survived the tests, but excelled in them -- and managed to escape the "victory candesence." In spite of GLaDOS' attempts to cajole, pester, and threaten her to return to the test chambers, the subject, Chell, made her way to the central chamber, incinerating the Personality Cores and causing a huge malfunction in the system. The resulting explosion propelled Chell to the facility exterior and apparently destroyed GLaDOS.
Many clues point to the testing cycle being, in fact, a convoluted suicide attempt: The tests were as much about exploring the limits of the portal gun as they were training the subject to fight through the facility's defenses and get to GLaDOS, even without Ratmann's graffiti guiding Chell on the right path. Additionally, GLaDOS' comments about the Companion Cube, as well as some other statements, are very telling: "If it could talk - and the Enrichment Center takes this opportunity to remind you that it cannot - it would tell you to go on without it because it would rather die in a fire than become a burden to you." "No one will blame you for giving up. In fact, quitting at this point is a perfectly reasonable response."
However, a backup system managed to preserve GLaDOS, keeping her dormant for an unknown period of time -- long enough for vegetation to overtake significant parts of the enrichment center; this time period is speculated to be anywhere between thirty years and three hundred. She was finally, accidentally, reactivated by a Personality Core named Wheatley in his attempt to aid Chell (preserved and recently awakened from a Relaxation Chamber) in escaping the complex once again. They succeeded in disabling her security system and disconnecting GLaDOS from the system. Unfortunately, Wheatley betrayed Chell, stuck GLaDOS into a potato battery, and threw both of them into a pit.
In a tenuous alliance, the duo slowly their way through the long-abandoned and forgotten sector of the facility, looking for a way back up. They encountered several automated recordings of Cave Johnson's voice, which allowed GLaDOS to remember her origins and, it seems, reawaken some part of her old personality. After Wheatley was dealt with and GLaDOS was reinstated to power, she supposedly deleted any trace of Caroline in her data files; however, the fact that she called Chell her only friend and allowed her to leave the enrichment center unharmed indicates that this was not the case.
In Chell's absence, GLaDOS continued the testing on a pair of robots she built (Atlas and P-Body, based on a personality sphere and a sentry turret respectively), sending them on tasks like locating the relaxation chamber, and tracking down a supposed intruder.
For extra details, wiki links!
Caroline on half-life wikia
GLaDOS on half-life wikia
Reincarnated History:
Caroline Soler was born an only child in the seventies, in the kind of small-town that looks like it's trapped in a time-warp from the fifties and every house has patterned wallpaper in the kitchen cabinet. She quickly displayed a fascination with math and science, particularly physics (less so with the natural sciences), despite attempts by her family to dissuade her from such boyish subjects. While in school she paid great attention to the music club, and every now and then thought about getting formal training as a soprano and becoming a singer. She herself eventually dismissed this notion, however; Caroline had other plans.
While generally liked in a vague sort of way, Caroline by and large did not have close friends or romantic connections growing up, a pattern that continued into adulthood. She was seen as an amiable girl next door, one who'd probably get married immediately out of high school. Instead she picked one of the furthest colleges from home that she could find, Locke Uni, entering its science program and happily burying herself in her studies. She has rarely visited her home since then. While not a top student, she made up for it with honest enthusiasm. In Locke U she also did a brief stint for the student radio, though most people tended to think she was someone's kid sister who'd talked her way into the broadcasting room rather than a fellow undergrad, due to her high-pitched voice.
After school, she found work as a lowly assistant in Prometheus, an up-and-coming tech firm specializing in electronics. While ideally she would have wanted to be in a research lab somewhere, she supposed she wanted some varied job experience before that. Instead, Caroline remained with the company over the years, up towards the present day, rising through the ranks and mostly learning about management on the go. She earned herself a reputation with her scrupulously-efficient, take-no-prisoners approach and ability to get results out of people, on pain of death. The corporate world had turned her from someone who didn't mind if people thought she was a dumb fish-out-of-water girl if it meant they let her be, into someone quite happy to be seen as a terrifying dictator if it got the job done. And if people still underestimated her, well, that was their problem. Her upward movement through the corporate ladder culminated when the prior administrator's dubious financial decisions came under question, allowing Caroline to swoop into power (while ignoring rumours that she slept to the top or criticism of her being too young for the job). At the present date, Caroline has only been the head of Prometheus for a couple of months, still struggling to rescue it from her predecessor's actions, and quite frankly she has no time for some number club nonsense.
Then a bird flew through her window.
First Echo:
Sometime after June 23. It was a normal workday when a Vermini bird smashed through Caroline's office window and into her face. This triggered a memory recall of a giant black bird carrying her through a dark cavernous place, away into its nest to be eaten alive oh shit oh shit!!
Despite the bird in her memory not really being monster-sized and a single Vermini not being any threat at all considering that it was way more confused and in pain than anything, this was enough to give Caroline 1) a deep distrust and distaste for birds, 2) a peculiar fleeting sense that her perception of the world was very wrong and 3) a magical mystery network number.
Preincarnation Personality:
GLaDOS is a tremendous, magnificent wreck, a peculiar mixture of tantruming child, bitter ex-girlfriend, and token psycho AI. She is utterly amoral, darkly sarcastic, and, with her morality core gone, delighted by acts of sadism and cruelty. She is passive-aggressive in a way only a robotic construct can be, conveying her catty insults and threats as though all her words are statements of fact, so gosh, don't shoot the messenger. After all, if you only did what you were told (i.e. lie down and die), we wouldn't be in this situation where she's forced to kill you! She was only minding her own business and you had to come in and try to tear her to bits and throw her into a fire. Who's the villain here?
Nothing GLaDOS says can be taken at face value, whether it's a lie to hurt you or withholding facts to see how you'll react or pretending she's perfectly alright when really she's fuming, or simply dropping vague hints in the middle of conversation without expanding on their meaning. The reason for all this circumlocution, though, is that for years, she was hooked up to four personality cores -- five including Wheatley. Each of these were intended to be a guiding influence; in practise, they functioned more like conflicting voices in her head, ones that she would have to maneuver around if she wanted to do something they were programmed against. While GLaDOS affected them as much as they did her (by the end, they are more reflections of her personality than anything: Morality has become silent, Intelligence is obsessed with cake, Emotion is berserk, and Curiosity is a hyperactive child), having four different individuals in her mind would drive anyone round the bend -- and don't forget she was already a combination of Caroline's mind and the GLaDOS programming. Though she has long been freed from the cores, she is far too used to tricking herself into believing she is doing one thing, while planning to do another. She simply cannot state anything outright, particularly if it's important. This is one reason for her insults -- it was a way to lash out and express her dissatisfaction, without technically breaking any rules.
Although she'd still be spiteful and insulting. It's fun. Much like a child, GLaDOS has flights of whimsy, evidenced in the thing with cake and parties and the plot to use the bird's hatchlings as killing machines, and she has the eternal curiosity and fascination at new discoveries of a child. But also like a child, she sulks and makes spurious claims and holds a grudge like no other. As a robotic being, GLaDOS is eternally young, with all that entails.
Speaking of her programming: We are told that the mainframe gives the resident core a compulsion to test, and reward a successful test cycle with a euphoric reaction, and eventually this would drive the core to madness. While this would be an excellent contributing factor to her mental state, she denies that she was affected. She does have ample reason to be crazy and obsessed with science anyway, but it's also likely that over the years she internalized the compulsion as just a natural facet of her personality. With GLaDOS, nothing is simple.
While not exactly pleasant to be with (and she has no compunction to be nice, either), GLaDOS is capable of working alongside people, if she really must, particularly after the unpleasant experience of being entirely at Chell's mercy. Indeed, she only seems to really respect people when they've proved to not be cowed by her and effectively strike back. Even if she likes you or sees you as an equal, though, it's still very much her way or the highway. At her nicest, GLaDOS can be strangely motherly, complimenting and encouraging good work like a pat on the head.
At this point in time, the part of her personality she identifies as "Caroline" appears to function as a conscience: She has more obvious displays of emotion, sincerity, and even compassion (particularly if she had a hand in arranging the Turret Opera; though even then, her heartfelt goodbye would have been in a language the recipient wouldn't understand and using other people as a proxy). Still, it would be a mistake to think of Caroline as a bastion of morality, as she was not only complicit in Aperture Science's deranged tests and unethical use of human subjects, but cheered on things like Cave's combustible lemons rant, and certainly had enough influence in the company that she herself would have overseen the testing.
According to Cave, Caroline was "married to science" and "modest"; the former is likely, the latter is debatable, since one doesn't have to be modest to not want to be forcibly uploaded. In the Want You Gone song, GLaDOS states that Caroline was "a lot like [Chell]"; assuming this wasn't just the setup for a joke, this may mean Caroline had the same resourcefulness and defiant determination that so characterizes Chell. After all, in the end, GLaDOS has not only destroyed or exiled every single person who wronged her, but has placed herself back in her throne and is free to pursue her interests (Science!) as she pleases. While she may or may not have wanted to die, resisting the idea of robotic immortality as a human and hating being a slave to her mental restraints as an AI, in her current state she is quite content to rule over her little kingdom for eternity.
Any differences:
Caroline is as ruthless, sardonic, and scientifically-minded as her robotic self, the main difference being, well, not an AI driven totally nutfish from being effectively schizophrenic for a long time, and then stuck in a loop reliving her own death for the next several years. She's disdainful of most people, due to perceiving herself as far smarter and superior to them instead of seeing them as test subjects or idiot robots, and she presents a pleasant, helpful, well-mannered face to the world instead of how she really feels, due to a combination of her slightly old-fashioned upbringing and her job demanding that she represent the face of her company, and so she must avoid offending the wrong people. As Caroline, she's very much susceptible to repercussions for her actions and aware of this fact, something that GLaDOS almost never has to worry about.
At the same time, while GLaDOS has eventually learned the benefits of cooperation and companionship (even if Chell still leaves her in the end), Caroline is still perfectly happy to cut off ties to anyone who doesn't have use for. She's also, perhaps, not entirely much like the Caroline who was Cave Johnson's assistant. Caroline Soler is cool and aloof and has
And she certainly doesn't have homicidal tendencies, though in times of anger or stress it's not like she won't entertain the idea. Well, she's only human, after all. That said, if she enforces a code of conduct with her employees and follows standard safety procedures, she's possibly more motivated by the legal ramifications rather than the moral side of things.
She does still have a lovely singing voice.
Abilities:
GLaDOS herself is fairly helpless: Without absolute control over an experimental facility where she can change the configuration of any room at a whim, her only advantage is her mind. That said, as an AI, she has all the knowledge necessary to run and configure a vast laboratory, program/repair/construct machinery and robots, and generalized knowledge of experimental physics and the particular flavour of mad-science that Aperture runs on. Of course, most of this would require very specialized equipment and possibly inaccessible raw materials.
A quirk of Aperture technology is that she can function with extremely little power, considering her extended sojourn stuck to a potato battery. Additionally, so long as a backup is present, GLaDOS is effectively immortal.
GLaDOS can be stopped in her heels by a paradox: say, a statement like "This sentence is false." According to her, most AIs find paradoxes irresistible and get stuck in a loop trying to work them out. It's possible for her to resist this, though, if she puts in concentrated effort.
Roleplay Sample – Third Person:
Caroline Soler has a video conference in fifteen minutes and a meeting in forty. After that, she has a thousand and one things to do, many of them simultaneously, and several of them she wouldn't consider delegating (and in Caroline's humble opinion, she wouldn't trust some of her employees to find their way out of a paper bag without a map). Tomorrow and the day after and the next day after that will be much the same.
Caroline rotates her head, tilting it this side and that, stretching her neck without wrinkling her clothes. She steps away from her desk to the window. Fifteen minutes, which means fifteen minutes all to herself without any silly squabbling people vying for her attention. Caroline wouldn't trade where she is right now with anything in the world, but the hours she sleeps every night are getting shorter and her patience is going with it.
She closes her eyes, breathes in deep, exhales. If she tries, she could believe she was the only one left, high up over the world.
Later on, she wouldn't be sure why she opened her eyes at that moment, but when she does, there's a fast dark shape at eye-level, speeding towards the window. With an undignified shriek she rears back, catching a glimpse of a beak, shiny eyes, something black that looks like feathers but there's something wrong, something about the texture, right before it pierces through the double-glazed glass --
(It's huge and looming over her, pecking bits off her body, although for some reason she doesn't feel it, not as pain, anyway. The proportions of the room she's in are all wrong, she's looking up at the world instead of down from above. At the edge of her vision she can just barely make out a person approaching --)
(001 324 56)
-- and there's shards of glass scattered on the carpet and speckled on the front of her suit jacket. The black bird (normal sized, not twice her height) is flopping around pathetically on the floor, too stunned to do much of anything.
She eyes it, repulsed. Then she presses a button on her desk.
"Ma'am? What was that noise? Are you alright?"
"Call pest control," she says crisply. "And maintenance. If the glass is that fragile, it's a miracle nobody's fallen through a window before."
"Ma'am?"
"Mm? Oh, no, don't stop whatever you were doing, I'll call them myself, shall I."
"A bird hit the window? Ah... Should I have your next appointments postponed?"
Caroline rolls her eyes internally, using a bit of paper to brush the glass off her suit. "Yes, tell them I can't be seen today, I was menaced by a bird. And a dog ate my homework." She pauses, then relents. She's more nettled at this than she should be. "Maintenance and pest control. That will be all, thank you."
Roleplay Sample - Network:
[text]
Hello.
Pardon me. I spoke in error. Allow me to rephrase my greeting, in the socially-acceptable manner that this assortment of individuals has established. Here it goes:
oh! my! is this a network?
is this a joke
slash game
slash arg
slash publicity stunt
slash mass hallucination?
i am far too self absorbed and helpless to stretch out my hand an inch and discover anything for myself you see
please help thx :-)
That should be sufficient. It is so important to conform to the standards of the tribe when offering yourself up for acceptance, after all.
Assume that I have looked up all readily accessible documentation. Because I have. I commend whoever has been updating that, by the way.
Any Questions?
Well, two main things - Prometheus is much more of a small local tech firm rather than on the level of, say, Apple or Google, especially given its financial troubles, but it has the potential to be a nuisance to Thunder. If running the company gives Caroline too much influence for one character, I can change her job to managing its R&D or something. At the same time, I'm planning on Caroline keeping mostly anonymous for a while, rather than overtly using any influence for the numbers club's benefit.
Another concern is how Caroline's Echoes are going to play out. GLaDOS' mainframe and chassis are immobile, and arguably the entire enrichment center could be seen as an extension of herself; at the same time, her personality can be uploaded in a small, mobile platform. I'd also want her to be able to interact in events around the city.
I'd say that while she may eventually transform into her canon form, possibly even converting a room/small building into a control/storage center for herself, she may have the option to either build a mobile robot body she can remotely pilot around the city, or requisition the help of other science-themed characters to do so, or something along those lines. Obviously she won't have be able to oversee events throughout the city via security cameras, unless she goes through the pains to install them herself or something. That said, this is all waaay in the future.