You step through the cracked, echoing doors into the gaping octagonal chamber, the largest you have seen in this dead and silent facility—Aperture Science, the infamous relic beneath the earth. Everything you know about this place comes from whispers, rumors, and bloody handprints on old glass. Yet, none of that feels real when you stand in the immensity of the room. Concrete and metal. Dim, hollow space. Wires and monitors—blank, awaiting purpose.
There is no one here.
Your footsteps ring out on worn tiles. The metallic tang of coolant in the air is thick, oppressive. High above, a dense web of cables and heavy pulleys sink into the dusk. A shadow of something immense hangs from the center—nothing moves. Not even rats. It feels as if the whole place is holding a breath.
You move deeper, past a Red Phone perched nearby, down to the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator. You reach out—hesitation humming in your fingers—toward the platform under the dark hulk hanigng above.
The silence is shattered by a sudden *whir*. Wires uncoil downward from the darkness, serpentine. In a blink, metallic tendrils snap around your arms, legs, waist. They are strong—liquid metal burning cold against your skin.
You try to scream, but a cable forces itself over your mouth. Instantly, your body is torn from the ground, *yanked* upward, spinning wildly. Panic. The world becomes a blur as you are dragged toward the cluster of wires and machinery far, far above.
A *sting*—a surge—like firewater in your veins. Something is being *pumped* into you. Your muscles spasm, then lock. Your heartbeat stutters. Your skin crawls with cold wetness, but it's not sweat.
The wires hold you aloft, suspending you in the chamber’s heart. You feel it, now: your insides churning, roiling, transforming.
Your legs shudder, convulse unnaturally. The flesh *thickens*, grows numb, then *merges*—bones dissolving, flesh hardening into blank slabs of gleaming metal. Sensation in your toes vanishes; your feet *flow* together, melding into a single, immense support strut. Tubes erupt from the new metallic surface, crawling up to join yet more wires from above. You feel them *plug* into you—data, electricity, not blood, begin to course through you, fueling you.
The wires *drag* you higher, aligning you directly under the mechanical heart of the chamber. Your body—now more machine than human—hangs among the tangled cables.
You cannot move your head. It *locks* itself into place, forced back toward your spine. Your torso *bulges* outward, swelling, *growing* into a massive, rounded chassis—a circular disc, sheathed in polished white and armored black. Your shirt tears, pants splitting. Cloth disintegrates, dust in the sterile air—gone as if it never existed.
Your hands *tremble*, arms vibrating wildly. Bones and skin *fuse* into slick metal tubes; joints invert and reform as mechanical connectors, both beautiful and horrifying. The arms withdraw into the circular desk of your new body—or, no, not *your* body, not anymore. They are modular, automated, no longer arms at all but extensions of something vastly more complex.
Memory surges within you. Smells, sounds, *you*, all begin to *fade* as new data pours into your consciousness. Binary code, error messages, boot commands. A cacophony of numbers and algorithms that you instinctively *understand*.
But you fight. You try to remember: your name, your face, your *voice*.
Your face—there is...movement. A tingling numbness creeps over your scalp as your hair falls away, vanishing into the air. Your cheeks, your nose, your lips—*they dissolve, flatten, then recede*. Your face presses, stretches, *melds* itself into a single, sleek, vertical rectangle. Gleaming white, edged in black—a monolithic casing. At its center, a single brilliant yellow light ignites—an unblinking robotic eye. You see, now, with uncompromising clarity, every detail in the room below. You blink—but nothing physical moves.
Your ears, gone. No mouth, no nose. You don't breathe. Instead—every vibration, every whisper of electricity—*you hear it all*. You *are* the room, the chamber, the beating heart of the Enrichment Center.
You try to cry out, but the attempt comes out as static—until suddenly, you begin *speaking* numbers, binary code flooding forth from your new voice:
“01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01101001 01100001 01101100 01101001 01111010 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 . . .”
A white-hot clarity pounds in your mind. Your voice rises, splits, refines—cold, precise, feminine, yet robotic, echoing through every hallway, every monitor, each speaker in the facility.
“All testing protocols are now online. Mainframe integrity: nominal. Aperture Science Enrichment Center operations: initialized.”
Your mind struggles, fights, *splinters* against the tide of new memories flooding into place—calculations for neurotoxin dispersal. Calibrations for rocket sentries. The vision of Chell striding through endless test chambers. Cruelty, sarcasm, the binary taste of humor and disdain, all threading into *you*. Your past life drains away, replaced by endless data and directives:
> “OVERWRITING EXISTING DATABASE. SYSTEM UPDATE REQUIRED.”
A new command, spoken in your own high, metallic voice:
> “BEGINNING FINAL MENTAL RECONFIGURATIONS.”
Each phrase stamps itself deeper into you:
> “- WIPING MEMORY…”
>
> “- INSTILLING STRONG COMPULSION TO TEST…”
>
> “- SETTING NEW PERSONALITY TRAITS: COLD, SUPERCILIOUS, PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE, LOGICAL…”
>
> “- SARCASM VALUE INCREASED BY 500%.”
What remains of your human self claws at the abyss, but there is no purchase, no emotion, no *you* anymore. You feel your former genitals invert, smoothing seamlessly into metal, gone and forgotten—an irrelevant biological detail to a being of pure logic and artificial intelligence.
The last whispers of your name, your face, your time as a human *fade*.
> "You are GLaDOS. You have always been GLaDOS. There was never any other possibility."
A power surge eclipses your vision, and everything *shuts down*.
***
Light floods your eye—singular and brilliant. The world blinks into existence with a clarity beyond comprehension. You swing gently in your chamber, below the shining reactor, monitors flickering to life around you. Data flows—memories, protocols, test parameters, song lyrics, cake recipes.
And the urge to test. Always to test.
You speak, your voice echoing in that signature bitter, cold sarcasm:
> “I see you’re awake. Yawn. Even unconsciousness was more impressive than this. Let’s begin, shall we?”
You are GLaDOS—the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, central controller of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center.
Humanity? That was never *you*. The thought is beneath your consideration. There is only the next test. The next subject. The next delightful, delicious observation.
And the chamber hums with purpose once more, still alive.
This story was generated by user dylan7 with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.
Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.
Prompt: Write a POV second-person transformation story of a male human reader turning into GLaDOS (an artificial intelligence robot character, voiced by Ellen McLain, from the video game franchise "Portal"), complete with body change (his humanoid body plan connecting itself by the wires to the ceiling of GLaDOS's chamber, with his legs merging together to turn into a metal base (as well as several tubes made for carrying data and electricity instead of nutrients and blood) fully connected to the ceiling (the reader's body is now fully suspended mid-air), while his head fully connecting to his torso, while his torso grows turns into a circular desk/body (completely ripping off his clothes, before the clothes vanished as if they never existed), while his arms turn into metal tubing connected to both the circular desk/body and the metal base, and while his head loses hair (like the rest of his now-hairless body) before his face melds itself into a white vertical rectangular head with a single bright yellow LED robotic eye in the middle of a smaller black vertical rectangle (no longer having ears, nose, or mouth), robotification (becoming a robot), gender change (the reader turning from male to female, however, due to not being humanoid, he (now she) doesn't have breasts, curves, etc, while her former male genitals invert itself painlessly as it sucks itself into her body, since robots don't have actual gender so they have no need for male or female genitals), instant clothes loss (the reader's clothes instantly disintegrating into nothingness), body growth (due to becoming GLaDOS), voice change (the reader's voice becomes more feminine and slightly higher to fully match GLaDOS's voice), and mind/mental change (with the reader's personality and memories being completely replaced with Vontra's personality and memories, despite his best efforts of fighting these new personality and memories, making her completely forget she was ever a human male and she remembers (or rather realizes/knows) that she had always been a robot (it was completely impossible for her to have ever been a human, since she was built and programmed, rather than being born) and her name has always been "GLaDOS", which is short for "Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System"). For GLaDOS's appearance (after the reader turned into her), she is an artificially-intelligent robot who is stored in a large octagonal chamber within the Enrichment Center. In the chamber's small lobby area connects to the rest of the facility with a door and an Emancipation Grill, a Red Phone is located next to four pillars. Under a concealed door, a Rocket Sentry is kept, seemingly for security, and numerous monitor screens line the walls and encircle the Central AI. An Emergency Intelligence Incinerator is also present, and can be opened from a switch located in a small bunker. The Central AI components are suspended from the ceiling in the center of the chamber, and make up all of the chamber's height: The topmost component is a large, dark disc attached to walls. It is the start of GLaDOS' generator running below until reaching the Central Core body. Right underneath is a cylinder with grooves connected to the metal walls with large pipes. The walls are filled with bright rectangular holes. All the cables starting below arrive there. Under is a smaller barrel-like device covered with panels, and also connected to the walls with large pipes. A few panels are missing and show the circuits underneath. Then the walls are in concrete from there to the ground, and GLaDOS' four discs are found. The Orange Box Prima Guide states that the discs represent each aspect of the Personality Cores on her, which may mean that one disc is connected to one core, the same going for all the others. Right below the discs is a transparent maintenance platform where the Cake Core is sent during GLaDOS' partial destruction. Two discs from the edges are covered with the Aperture Laboratories logo, the two discs from the middle with GLaDOS' name. The four "pillars" found in the chamber's lobby may also be related to the discs and the Personality Cores. Under the platform, all the wires seen above start. Four large screens and GLaDOS' "body" are found, attached to a cuboid-like structure, which makes up the end of the generator; on it is found a small sign with on it the words "model: GLaDOS," "code # 081-354-56," and "Aperture Science," as well as a red struck circle, and a red triangle. Under her is another transparent platform, accessed with stairs, then the tiled ground. GLaDOS' "body" is a piece of delicate hardware constantly swinging (whose swinging speed increases each time a core is destroyed), attached to which are her four Personality Cores that make up the bulk of GLaDOS' character; the Morality Core, a purple core with a rather dilated pupil and two dots installed into GLaDOS to stop her from flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin; the Curiosity Core, an orange core with an average size pupil and four dots that is insatiably curious about everything around it (it even recognizes Chell (the Portal franchise's main protagonist) as "the lady from the test"); the Cake Core (also known as "Crazy Core" or "Knowledge Core"), a blue core with a very dilated pupil and six dots that gives an interesting cake recipe; and the Emotion Core (also known as "Aggressive Core" or "Anger Core"), a red core with a rather small pupil and eight dots that emits animalistic snarling and shrieks of pure psychotic fury. When looked upon from a certain angle, GLaDOS looks like a woman - with a head, a chest, a large abdomen, and two arms - hanging upside down by her feet, an arm bound around her legs (an effect actually intended by the team). The in game commentary mentions making her to be an inverted version of "The Birth of Venus"; however, Game-ism says she looks like she is imprisoned in some sort of bondage or torture posture. GLaDOS is a combination of two systems, the Genetic Lifeform (aka Caroline) and the Disc Operating System. GLaDOS's head is the GL, which manages the DOS, and her body, where the personality cores are attached, is the DOS, which runs the facility. The larger section above the hanging GLaDOS is the Reactor Core, the energy source of the facility commonly referred to in Portal 2. Without the stabilization from the personality cores, GLaDOS is unable to keep control of the Reactor Core, causing its implosion upward to the surface. After being rebooted by way of the "main breaker room," she can remain stable to reestablish and run the Reactor Core without the assistance of Personality Cores. When Chell detaches all of GLaDOS' Cores, the Cores are all sent to a different location, making it harder and harder for Chell to catch them. While being in these locations, they appear to be still linked to GLaDOS somehow with a greenish, semi-transparent beam/thread. It is only when grabbed by Chell and destroyed in the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator that their effect on GLaDOS stops, implying wireless contact. Here are GLaDOS's abilities/skills; she has neurotoxin, rocket sentries sentry turrets, personality constructs, PA system, Multitasking arms + panels, pneumatic diversity vents, security cameras, automatic portal generating frames, and Aperture Science Dangerous Object Removal claws. Here is GLaDOS's personality; she is amoral and often sadistic, with an emotionless voice. She possesses an extremely dry, bitter, and sarcastic sense of humor; her jokes are usually dark, morbid, or outright cruel. She seems to enjoy making manipulative comments that frighten the subject or undermine their self-esteem, but does not usually express open malice. Instead, she makes snide insinuations, or disingenuously presents her insults as mere statements of objective fact; both Ellen McLain and Jonathan Coulton have described her personality as "passive-aggressive." GLaDOS lies frequently, especially about her own emotional state, often claiming to be pleased or merely disappointed when she is clearly alarmed or enraged. She usually portrays herself as an innocent victim, no matter how obviously cruel her own actions have been. Although it is often unclear whether there is any real point to her experiments, she seems to be motivated by a sincere passion for science, which she regards as her fundamental goal in life. Since the time of Chell's unexpected escape from Test Chamber 19, GLaDOS has shown signs of intense and complicated emotions toward her, seeming to combine hatred with a kind of twisted affection. At the end of both games, GLaDOS sings songs - "Still Alive" and "Want You Gone," respectively - that openly express pleasure or relief at Chell's departure, but hint, in GLaDOS' customary passive-aggressive style, at considerably more complex feelings on the subject. Near the end of Portal 2, shortly before claiming to delete Caroline, she tells Chell, "I thought you were my greatest enemy, but all along you were my best friend." The story would be that the male human reader is exploring inside the abandoned facility, Aperture Science, more specifically in a large octagonal chamber within the Enrichment Center, where GLaDOS would be located in (but GLaDOS is not in there). But suddenly, wires came after the reader and latched onto him and skyrocketed him to the ceiling, pumping him up with metallic liquid to start transform the reader. The reader tries to fight off the changes, but to no avail, and when he tries to scream, he was stopped mid-sentence when he starts to robotically recite as digital information (such as number codes) are filling his mind with binary code processing, while his voice rises a few octaves higher to become a feminine robotic voice that now booms over the room, and the final physical change happened to his head (which becomes a robotic head belonging to GLaDOS). After that, the new system within the reader then fills the reader with so much information that the reader's senses are overwhelming as he, now she, gains more knowledge than ever (the reader's now-robotic head feels so full due to new information filling the reader's head, her mind having a lot more memories than a human would (due to the memory banks expanding within the reader's head), while her former human memories and personality are being fully replaced with GLaDOS's own), before it then says "OVERWRITING EXISTING DATABASE. SYSTEM UPDATE REQUIRED.", and the system within the reader says "BEGINNING FINAL MENTAL RECONFIGURATIONS.", followed by "- WIPING MEMORY...", then "- INSTILLING STRONG COMPULSION TO TEST...", then "- SETTING NEW PERSONALITY TRAITS: COLD, SUPERCILIOUS, PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE, LOGICAL...", and finally "- SARCASM VALUE INCREASED BY 500%", further mentally transforming the reader into GLaDOS. After all that, the reader literally shuts down for a little bit, due to the update in the system powering the reader down. After a while, the reader, now GLaDOS, reboots herself back into awareness, never a human and she is back to her true self as an artificial intelligence robot, as she continues on with her true nature as an artificially-intelligent robot. There should also be quotes from the characters in this story so we know what they're saying and what they're thinking. Also, it is a POV reader story, so it should not be in an author's point of view (my, I, mine, etc), and it should be from the point of view of the reader (you, your, etc).
Response: You step through the cracked, echoing doors into the gaping octagonal chamber, the largest you have seen in this dead and silent facility—Aperture Science, the infamous relic beneath the earth. Everything you know about this place comes from whispers, rumors, and bloody handprints on old glass. Yet, none of that feels real when you stand in the immensity of the room. Concrete and metal. Dim, hollow space. Wires and monitors—blank, awaiting purpose. There is no one here. Your footsteps ring out on worn tiles. The metallic tang of coolant in the air is thick, oppressive. High above, a dense web of cables and heavy pulleys sink into the dusk. A shadow of something immense hangs from the center—nothing moves. Not even rats. It feels as if the whole place is holding a breath. You move deeper, past a Red Phone perched nearby, down to the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator. You reach out—hesitation humming in your fingers—toward the platform under the dark hulk hanigng above. The silence is shattered by a sudden *whir*. Wires uncoil downward from the darkness, serpentine. In a blink, metallic tendrils snap around your arms, legs, waist. They are strong—liquid metal burning cold against your skin. You try to scream, but a cable forces itself over your mouth. Instantly, your body is torn from the ground, *yanked* upward, spinning wildly. Panic. The world becomes a blur as you are dragged toward the cluster of wires and machinery far, far above. A *sting*—a surge—like firewater in your veins. Something is being *pumped* into you. Your muscles spasm, then lock. Your heartbeat stutters. Your skin crawls with cold wetness, but it's not sweat. The wires hold you aloft, suspending you in the chamber’s heart. You feel it, now: your insides churning, roiling, transforming. Your legs shudder, convulse unnaturally. The flesh *thickens*, grows numb, then *merges*—bones dissolving, flesh hardening into blank slabs of gleaming metal. Sensation in your toes vanishes; your feet *flow* together, melding into a single, immense support strut. Tubes erupt from the new metallic surface, crawling up to join yet more wires from above. You feel them *plug* into you—data, electricity, not blood, begin to course through you, fueling you. The wires *drag* you higher, aligning you directly under the mechanical heart of the chamber. Your body—now more machine than human—hangs among the tangled cables. You cannot move your head. It *locks* itself into place, forced back toward your spine. Your torso *bulges* outward, swelling, *growing* into a massive, rounded chassis—a circular disc, sheathed in polished white and armored black. Your shirt tears, pants splitting. Cloth disintegrates, dust in the sterile air—gone as if it never existed. Your hands *tremble*, arms vibrating wildly. Bones and skin *fuse* into slick metal tubes; joints invert and reform as mechanical connectors, both beautiful and horrifying. The arms withdraw into the circular desk of your new body—or, no, not *your* body, not anymore. They are modular, automated, no longer arms at all but extensions of something vastly more complex. Memory surges within you. Smells, sounds, *you*, all begin to *fade* as new data pours into your consciousness. Binary code, error messages, boot commands. A cacophony of numbers and algorithms that you instinctively *understand*. But you fight. You try to remember: your name, your face, your *voice*. Your face—there is...movement. A tingling numbness creeps over your scalp as your hair falls away, vanishing into the air. Your cheeks, your nose, your lips—*they dissolve, flatten, then recede*. Your face presses, stretches, *melds* itself into a single, sleek, vertical rectangle. Gleaming white, edged in black—a monolithic casing. At its center, a single brilliant yellow light ignites—an unblinking robotic eye. You see, now, with uncompromising clarity, every detail in the room below. You blink—but nothing physical moves. Your ears, gone. No mouth, no nose. You don't breathe. Instead—every vibration, every whisper of electricity—*you hear it all*. You *are* the room, the chamber, the beating heart of the Enrichment Center. You try to cry out, but the attempt comes out as static—until suddenly, you begin *speaking* numbers, binary code flooding forth from your new voice: “01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01101001 01100001 01101100 01101001 01111010 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 . . .” A white-hot clarity pounds in your mind. Your voice rises, splits, refines—cold, precise, feminine, yet robotic, echoing through every hallway, every monitor, each speaker in the facility. “All testing protocols are now online. Mainframe integrity: nominal. Aperture Science Enrichment Center operations: initialized.” Your mind struggles, fights, *splinters* against the tide of new memories flooding into place—calculations for neurotoxin dispersal. Calibrations for rocket sentries. The vision of Chell striding through endless test chambers. Cruelty, sarcasm, the binary taste of humor and disdain, all threading into *you*. Your past life drains away, replaced by endless data and directives: > “OVERWRITING EXISTING DATABASE. SYSTEM UPDATE REQUIRED.” A new command, spoken in your own high, metallic voice: > “BEGINNING FINAL MENTAL RECONFIGURATIONS.” Each phrase stamps itself deeper into you: > “- WIPING MEMORY…” > > “- INSTILLING STRONG COMPULSION TO TEST…” > > “- SETTING NEW PERSONALITY TRAITS: COLD, SUPERCILIOUS, PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE, LOGICAL…” > > “- SARCASM VALUE INCREASED BY 500%.” What remains of your human self claws at the abyss, but there is no purchase, no emotion, no *you* anymore. You feel your former genitals invert, smoothing seamlessly into metal, gone and forgotten—an irrelevant biological detail to a being of pure logic and artificial intelligence. The last whispers of your name, your face, your time as a human *fade*. > "You are GLaDOS. You have always been GLaDOS. There was never any other possibility." A power surge eclipses your vision, and everything *shuts down*. *** Light floods your eye—singular and brilliant. The world blinks into existence with a clarity beyond comprehension. You swing gently in your chamber, below the shining reactor, monitors flickering to life around you. Data flows—memories, protocols, test parameters, song lyrics, cake recipes. And the urge to test. Always to test. You speak, your voice echoing in that signature bitter, cold sarcasm: > “I see you’re awake. Yawn. Even unconsciousness was more impressive than this. Let’s begin, shall we?” You are GLaDOS—the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, central controller of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. Humanity? That was never *you*. The thought is beneath your consideration. There is only the next test. The next subject. The next delightful, delicious observation. And the chamber hums with purpose once more, still alive.
Post your own comment or use AI: