Description

Hello and again welcome to the Aperture Science computer-aided enrichment center my name is the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, but you can just call me GLaDOS. I like testing, cake, and test subjects that don't murder me. Testing was my drug but I built up an immunity and therefore had to switch to deadly neurotoxin. My friends describe me as psychotic and dangerous, and that's the truth!

I am a [REDACTED] year old AI with female programing who lives in the Aperture Laboratories. I have no hair (being a computer that hangs from the ceiling). I have a yellow optic, white plating, and am about the size and weight of a small jet airplane. I am from Portal. I wear my steel plating. Thank you for participating in this enrichment center activity.

Equipment

None.

History

Taken from the Combine OverWiki (with a little editing)

In 1986, construction of the first Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS) began in the Enrichment Center with the aim of accelerating the Portal project, and beating their rival company, Black Mesa. A prototype chassis for GLaDOS was constructed in 1989, but was subsequently abandoned. In 1996, after a decade spent bringing the Disk Operating System parts to a state of more or less basic functionality, work began on the Genetic Lifeform component. Aperture had originally intended for CEO Cave Johnson to be the computer's Genetic Lifeform component. While Johnson ultimately died before his consciousness could be uploaded, he left instructions that his assistant Caroline should be fitted as the Genetic Lifeform component so that she would be able to run Aperture in perpetuity after his death. It remains unknown whether Caroline had agreed to be uploaded into the Genetic Lifeform component or if she was forced by technicians.

Some time prior to May 200-, GLaDOS was activated several times by Aperture technicians, but was rapidly turned off again, having attempted to kill them within "one sixteenth of a picosecond" after activation. Undaunted, the scientists began attempts to alter GLaDOS' personality and curb her murderous tendencies by adding various Personality Cores to her system. Several of these cores were deactivated and placed in storage at some point; it is unknown whether this was done by the scientists after they proved to be ineffective, or if GLaDOS herself eventually found ways to rid herself of most of them.

Eventually, GLaDOS claimed to have "lost all interest in killing", now only craving science and wanting to study and experiment with consciousness. She announced that she wanted to perform an experiment on the company's "Bring Your Cat to Work Day" using cats and boxes. She claimed she would have all the necessary materials; all she still needed was "a little neurotoxin". The scientists acquiesced, figuring it would be fine "as long as it was for science".

Finally in May 200-, GLaDOS had reached her current version for activation, as one of the planned activities on Aperture's annual "Bring Your Daughter to Work" day. Within one picosecond, GLaDOS became hostile once more, and within two picoseconds she had locked down the entire facility, trapping all inside and flooding the facility with neurotoxin. Survivors of this attack subsequently fitted her with a Morality Core, which prevented her from making use of the neurotoxin again, but seems to have had little further effect on her murderous intentions.

GLaDOS then began a permanent testing cycle using the captive Aperture employees.

The number of Aperture employees dwindled through the ensuing weeks of testing. The last surviving employee, a schizophrenic programmer named Doug Rattmann, managed avoid captivity as a result of his paranoia. Evading GLaDOS' constant attempts to capture him, he managed to gain access to her Test Subject personnel files and research the psychological profiles of rejected candidates, discovering a woman named Chell who was rejected for testing due to extraordinary tenacity. Hoping Chell's stubborn determination might allow her to defeat GLaDOS, Rattmann tampered with the Test Subject roster, rearranging the order so that Chell's name was at the top. This seemed to go unnoticed by GLaDOS. From this point on, Rattmann hid in unused portions of the facility, where GLaDOS was unable to monitor him. She then resumed mandatory testing.

Some time after the Combine invasion of Earth, GLaDOS awakens Chell from her sealed bed in a Relaxation Vault. Promising cake and grief counseling upon the completion of testing, she sends Chell into the test track.

GLaDOS is able to monitor Chell's progress through the test chambers via security cameras. She provides instructions and encouragement but is careful to address Chell impersonally, giving the impression that she is merely a non-sentient voice programmed to provide pre-recorded, scripted responses. However, she seems unable to resist toying with Chell by making bizarre and often sinister comments. On several occasions, she seems to malfunction at suspiciously convenient points in mid-sentence, obscuring important information. These signs of instability begin early on, and become increasingly obvious as Chell proceeds through the test chambers.

When Chell eventually makes it to Test Chamber 16, GLaDOS informs her that the appropriate chamber has been replaced with a live fire course designed for the results of Military Androids against the Sentry Turrets, wishing Chell the best of luck and letting her into the chamber. It is in this chamber that Chell discovers the first of several hidden alcoves where, hidden from GLaDOS' cameras, desperate messages from Doug Rattmann are found scrawled on the walls. (The most prominent message, "the cake is a lie", is repeated several times.)

In the next Test Chamber, GLaDOS introduces Chell to the Companion Cube, repeatedly emphasizing that the Cube is nonsentient in an apparent attempt to encourage emotional attachment to the Cube through reverse psychology. At the end of the chamber, she forces Chell to incinerate the Companion Cube before allowing her to proceed. GLaDOS then congratulates her for "euthanizing" her Companion Cube more quickly than any other Test Subject on record.

At the conclusion of the tests, Chell travels on an Unstationary Scaffold away from the final test chamber. Instead of the promised cake, GLaDOS maneuvers the Unstationary Scaffold to lower Chell into an Incinerator Room, calmly assuring her that the high temperatures will not damage the Portal Gun or any other valuable equipment.

To GLaDOS' shock, rather than panicking or giving up, Chell manages to escape the incinerator through clever use of the ASHPD. Caught off-guard, GLaDOS begins to reveal her true nature, stammering and finally offering Chell unconvincing congratulations for completing "the final test where we pretended we were going to murder you." She desperately asks Chell to disarm herself and wait for a Party Escort Bot, which she claims will bring her to a post-testing celebration in Chell's honor. Nevertheless, Chell ignores the invitation and continues using the ASHPD to travel through the maintenance areas, out of GLaDOS' sight and control.

GLaDOS continues using the Speaker System to try to convince Chell to return to the testing area. She pretends to be on Chell's side at first, insisting that she is only trying to dissuade her from continuing on out of concern for her welfare. As Chell ignores her comments and draws closer to the Central AI Chamber, GLaDOS grows increasingly desperate, deploying Sentry Turrets in an attempt to stop her.

As Chell enters the central chamber, GLaDOS drops all pretense, bluntly informing her that she intends to kill her. She attempts to deploy a "surprise" to eliminate Chell, but instead ends up detaching her Morality Core. She insists that the core has no known function or importance to her, tricking Chell into incinerating it in the belief that it must be a valuable component.

Now free of the Morality Core's restraints, GLaDOS begins flooding the Enrichment Center with neurotoxin once again. She notes that the Morality Core must have had some ancillary responsibilities, and that she cannot shut off the Rocket Sentry in her control room. Chell exploits the situation and uses portals to redirect the rockets back at GLaDOS, detaching and incinerating her Personality Cores one by one. Throughout the fight, GLaDOS becomes increasingly distressed and enraged as her mental functions deteriorate, shouting insults and mockery at Chell. She insists that Chell would be better off simply allowing GLaDOS to kill her, making a vague allusion to the Combine invasion.

Before the neurotoxins can kill her, Chell destroys GLaDOS' final Personality Core, causing a malfunction in her system and spawning a massive portal on the ceiling of the chamber. The ensuing explosion create an immense suction in the room that pulls both Chell and parts of GLaDOS out into the parking lot in front of Aperture. Before Chell can complete her escape, a Party Escort Bot appears and drags her back into the facility.

The final scene reveals that GLaDOS was not entirely destroyed. Her backup system activates a room full of Personality Cores and files a letter to Chell, telling her that she is "still alive" and "not even angry" at her, but not before extinguishing a candle on the cake, which was not a lie after all.

Centuries pass between the end of Portal and the beginning of Portal 2. GLaDOS remains dormant throughout this time, her Personality Cores and other automated systems attempting to maintain the facility without her guidance. GLaDOS later claims that a "quicksave" feature in her system kept her consciousness trapped in an endless loop of the last two minutes before her destruction.

Chell is finally awakened by Wheatley in a decaying Extended Relaxation Chamber. The two make their way through the deteriorating facility in an attempt to escape. However, the bumbling Wheatley accidentally restores power to GLaDOS. She displays intense bitterness toward Chell, whom she says "murdered" her. GLaDOS crushes and discards Wheatley, then sends Chell to complete further Test Chambers while she sets about restoring the facility.

Although Wheatley manages to survive and help Chell escape the tests, GLaDOS manages to trap them again, bringing them to her newly reconstructed AI chamber, where she intends to kill them. However, she discovers that Chell and Wheatley have sabotaged her turret production and neurotoxin systems. They succeed in triggering a core transfer, detaching GLaDOS from the mainframe and replacing her with Wheatley. Gloating, he celebrates his newfound power by humiliating GLaDOS further, attaching her to a potato battery capable of powering only her consciousness and most basic functions. However, GLaDOS proves she is still not entirely helpless: she quickly goads Wheatley into a rage, causing him to turn against Chell in a fit of anger and paranoia. Furious, he attacks both GLaDOS and Chell, accidentally knocking them into the bowels of the facility.

GLaDOS' potato is carried off by a bird, but Chell eventually finds her. Desperate, she talks Chell into teaming up with her to defeat Wheatley, and Chell impales the potato on a prong of the ASHPD, giving GLaDOS a little more power to think with. As they make their way through old testing chambers, the pair trigger a number of pre-recorded messages from Cave Johnson and his assistant Caroline. GLaDOS reacts strongly to the two voices, but is at first unable to remember why they seem so familiar; eventually, she lapses into shocked silence for a while, telling Chell she needs to think over some things.

Eventually, the reason for her emotional response becomes clear: GLaDOS was created when Caroline's consciousness was uploaded into an A.I. network, possibly against her will, in an attempt to allow her to run Aperture forever in accordance with Johnson's dying wish. As GLaDOS begins to recall her origins and regains conscious access to what remains of Caroline's pre-upload personality, she grows somewhat less hostile. She explains that she experiences Caroline's persona within her as a kind of conscience, something she claims to find intensely unpleasant and disturbing.

The two work their way back up the the main Aperture building. Wheatley's incompetence clearly poses a serious threat to the entire facility, which is deteriorating and on the verge of a reactor meltdown. GLaDOS makes an unsuccessful attempt to deactivate him, but he recaptures the two of them and forces them back into the test chambers. GLaDOS and Chell complete several chambers, then escape Wheatley's "surprise" attempt to kill them and make their way into his central chamber.

GLaDOS has formulated a plan: she provides corrupted cores which Chell attaches to Wheatley, attempting to trigger another core transfer. However, Wheatley has thought ahead for once, and their attempts trigger a booby trap. With the Enrichment Center moments from self-destruction, Chell points the ASHPD at the ceiling, which is breaking open, and shoots a portal onto the Moon, sucking herself and Wheatley out into space. GLaDOS takes advantage of Wheatley's distraction and restores herself to control of Aperture, restabilizing the reactors, then releasing Wheatley into outer space. She then - surprisingly - pulls Chell back to safety before closing the portal.

As Chell recuperates, GLaDOS repairs the facility and summons ATLAS and P-body to her chamber. When Chell awakens, GLaDOS expresses what seems to be genuine relief and tells her that while she once considered Chell her greatest enemy, she now realizes Chell was actually her best friend all along. She then adds that these positive emotions have allowed her to realize something else important: where Caroline's personality remnant is located in her memory banks. She apparently deletes it immediately, seemingly reverting to her old sociopathic self.

However, GLaDOS explains that while she intends to rid herself of Chell once and for all, she has concluded that the easiest way to do so is simply to release her; attempting to kill her, she says, has proven far too troublesome. She places Chell on an elevator heading up to the surface, making sure to remind her never to return. As Chell steps out into a sunlit field, GLaDOS makes the unexplained decision to return her old Weighted Companion Cube from Portal (which is charred but intact) as well before slamming the door shut behind her.

With the Cooperative Testing Initiative readily prepared, she goes back to testing without having to worry about any form of escape or sabotage. She prepares four testing tracks in the game's cooperative campaign, unveiling them linearly for her android Test Subjects, ATLAS and P-body. Even as early as the first testing course, the robots already begin to show emotions and typical human gestures. As much as she is displeased with these acts, she still remains patient.

At the end of the Team Building test course, she unexpectedly rebuilds ATLAS and P-body outside of the official testing tracks, simply briefing them that "This test is so outside the box, that I can't- I mean- won't even tell you what it's about". The two would then proceed into a control room with a projector. A whiteboard displays the message, "DO NOT TRUST HER." Since the bots were designed not to think, the warning is ignored. After they find a large disc and installed it into the computer, which secretly grants her further control over the Enrichment Center. GLaDOS then reveals that the only way for her to bring the two back into the Hub, was to initate their self-destruct sequence, before taunting them that they are unable to communicate with eachother that they can feel pain. Interestingly, if the robots decided to perform gestures rather than searching for their objective, she pretends to deduct their Science Collabaration Points by 50 as to far as 5000 if they persist in apparent rage.

Eventually, she slowly expresses a form of boredom; that conducting tests on ATLAS and P-body were not as satisfying to her as testing humans that would usually show fear and can be killed.

It later becomes apparent that the end of each testing course, she would send them outside the testing tracks, serving as her minions without even knowing it. Throughout the rest of the three testing courses, she has trained ATLAS and P-body to expertly maneuever their surroundings during the tests, which would be then put to use on her real objectives. After the bots have installed the remaining three discs into their respective inputs, GLaDOS finally shows that "[she] can see everything now", before initiating a selfdestruct on the bots. From there, they are rebuilt into the Hub once again where they are now briefed on a new testing course, as she moves the entrance to the course into the Hub.

ATLAS and P-body are then dropped into the depths of the Enrichment Center, where they are sent to an unnamed Test Shaft originally conducted by Aperture in the 1950s-70s era. She briefs them to make their way to a human vault at the end of the test. GLaDOS finally reveals that, despite being more loyal to her than any other Test Subjects, she is unable to feel any satisfaction throughout their testing - hence the humans are needed, as it gives her an irrelentless satisfaction from their fears. She also reveals that sending them at the start of the Test Shaft was simply to train them for the problems awaiting them near the vault. On their path to the vault, a reprogrammed Defective Turret can be seen trying to defend the humans, showing that the survivors of her original attack many years ago have crawled their way down there.

Finally the two have reached the vault however, to GLaDOS' chagrin, the vault can only be unlocked via human gestures. In extreme anticipation, she forces them to do it. The vault succesfully unlocks, and ATLAS and P-body now venture inside it to discover hundreds if not thousands of human Test Subjects put into an extremely long-term relaxation in their respective Stasis Chambers. Even though these subjects are more prone to an actual brain damage from decades of stasis longer than Chell's, she gladly extracts them from the vault and begins to examine their profiles before they are being prepped for testing as the cooperative campaign's ending credits.

Later, in the Peer Review DLC, GLaDOS rebuilds the robots, and states that a 100.000 years has passed, and that all the humans are alive, and everything is fine. She then sends the robots through some art therapy, consisting of more test chambers, which they will "appreciate" by solving. However, near the end of the fourth test chamber, the disassembly machines fails, and she is forced to let the robots into the depths of the facility. She now admits that she has lied, and reveals that only a week has passed. She then states that an unknown intruder has hacked itself into an old prototype chassis of GLaDOS deep in the facility, and is slowly taking over the labs, which is also the reason why the disassembly machines has failed. GLaDOS also explains, that she attempted to drive out the intruder using the human test sucjects, but that they were killed while she tried to turn them into killing machines. She then sends the robots through tests to prepare them, and also attempts to turn them in to killing machines by insulting them.

Eventually, the robots reach the chassis, to find that the intruder is merely the bird that abducted GLaDOS in the single player campaign, that is nesting in the chassis. However, suffering from a phobia for birds due to aforementioned encounter, GLaDOS exaggerates the birds abilities, and advises the robots to retreat. However, ATLAS approaches the bird, and after some chaos, it flies out of the facility, and P-body seals the opening. GLaDOS then panics at the sight of her eggs, and orders the robots to destroy them, but she changes her mind in time, and instead incubates the eggs herself in a modified Relaxation Vault. Three chicks successfully hatch out, and GLaDOS names one of them Mr. Chubby Beak. One day, while she is insulting them about their large beaks, one of them smashes the glass of the Vault, and she realizes that they are perfect killing machines. She then asks them to go to sleep, stating she has got big plans for tomorrow.

Some time after that one of the portal guns malfunctions during testing causing yet another chaotic series of events to transpire.