Portal 2/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* When Wheatley takes over GLaDOS' body, he spouts a bunch of Spanish saying that he's doing something wrong and to consult the manual, and follows it up with "I don't even know what I just said!" Which would imply that he doesn't speak Spanish, which is perfectly reasonable, except for the fact that if you hang around in the Relaxation Chamber for long enough, he asks you to open the door in perfectly good Spanish. What gives?

*** No, because that "huge" amount of air is laughably tiny in the vast expanse of space and will quickly dissipate.

== Leaving and returning to [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] ==

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] and Caroline ==

** As seen with the [http://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/ Lab Rat comic] done by Valve, GLaDOS tried to kill all of the scientists in the facility within one sixteenth of a picosecond after being turned on. That doesn't sound like something Caroline would do. Because the artificial consciousness designed by Aperture Science was so badly created, it is unlikely that much of Caroline's personality superseded the self-aware machinations of GLaDOS's computer brain.

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] regaining control after the Stalemate Resolution failed ==

** But how do you know it wasn't activated? Wheatley's "original function" justifies the idea that his trap fails, and the button gets turned on.

*** Yeah, he was, uh, slightly distracted by the vacuum, and GLaDOS took the opportunity to hack in and make the system think the stalemate had already been resolved - [[Retconjuration]] on the mechanical scale.

** From what I have found, minimum distance between the earth and the moon is approximately 356,400 km. That would mean that light would take about 1.18800 seconds to travel there. The maximum distance is approximately 406,700 km, which would take light about 1.35566 seconds to travel. The question then comes down to how fast the portal travels when fired. It wouldn't be too far-fetched for them to travel as fast as the speed of light, though even traveling at a modestly slower speed would allow it to reach the moon in a matter of a few seconds.

** Also, it might have been that his role was, whenever GLaDOS tried to come up with a plan, try and derail it in such a way that neither she nor Wheatley would notice until it was too late. Evidence in favor: "Talking outside her range" i.e. with a bad American accent, failing to notice or remove the vacuum pipes containing Gel of various types on at least three separate occasions in the boss fight alone, forgetting about replacing the "crap turrets" after coming into power, GLaDOS mentioning that he was designed to come up with "stupid, unworkable plans", the list goes on.

** Wheatley brings to mind, possibly due to the British accent, a description of how the Tardis works in the current series. Paraphrased: "The Tardis lands and in the briefest of moments scans for thousands of miles around that location. Calculations the best disguise for that location. Then it becomes a police box." We have here an AI designed to the be the dumbest thing ever. No, it can't simply be dumb. Wheatley must have the capability by design to calculate every every possible contingency, idea, plan based off of the information he has access to. Then he is programed to pick the second worst plan. The worst by default would be do nothing due to his primary goal is to create and influence GLaDOS with bad plans. Aperture devices tend to be a little wonky in the first place and Wheatley is later shown damaged and sparking. The part of him designed to pick the bad ideas is damaged/failing, but not completely failed, by Portal 2.

** Because he was programmed to make the worst possible decision. This means he had to be capable of computing as many different scenarios as [[G La DOSGLaDOS]], ranking them in order of best decision to worst, and then pick the worst, without realising it. In other words, the scientists would have to program him to make the best possible decisions, and then change a > sign somewhere in the code to a < sign.

*** (Incoming wall of text, very sorry) I don't think so. Here what I think: We know that GLaDOS was activated in 200- (source: Combine Overwiki and ''Lab Rat'' comic if I don't make a mistake). The activation and subsequent killing of the scientists is mostly agreed to happen while the Black Mesa keep everyone else busy, preventing any rescue attempt. It is also generally aggreed that Half-Life 1 happened in the early 2000's. A few month following that (not much more, Rattman was, uh, Still Alive in the center) the event of the Seven hour war have probably already happened. GLaDOS did say she has no understanding about what was happening on the surface, but it's implied and generally agreed that she was maintening some sort of defenses against the Combine. Now then, at time of those events, Alyx was a toddler. Since she is not so much of a baby in ''[[Half-Life 2]]'', and since the youngest citizens appear to be in their mid-late twenties (combine's anti-sex fields and whatnot), I think ''Half-Life 2'' takes place somewhere between 2020 and 2030. Considering the timer from the ARG, it could mean that Portal 2 really happened at the same time as ''Half-Life 2'', more or less. Sweet, except that the timer is implied to be a bit of a joke, and the voice you hear when Chell awaken for the second say a ''bunch'' of nines before being ''cut short''. Point being, maybe the timer actually hit its cap and the actual duration of Chell hypersleep is way more than 27 years. On the other hand, I think 27 years is enough to account for the centre being heavily damaged but not completely destroyed. Extremely few things done with today tech would survive 27 years of Gaia vengeance in perfect state. Even underground, you'd have to account for the hyper devastating power of moist. Trust me, it's something that can destroy anything in its path. I mean, even Rattman's scribling being so bright in color after 27 years is seriously stretching it, let alone 300 years.

** First, I think you should calm down. Second, Valve is notorious for changing their minds or leaving ambiguous answers. Keeping them separate could refer to the games being made different times(so if another Portal game comes then it will be after Half Life has finished or something). Also, [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] says herself that she's the only thing standing between us and "them" and Black Mesa is mentioned a few times.

*** Based on the [http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Borealis#Miscellaneous documents] from the screenshots in ''Half-Life 2'', we know that the Borealis was in service for some time before she disappeared. Since ice breaking ships need to be refurbished every 20-30 years or so (and the AI version of GLaDOS was being developed as a new fuel system de-icer), it's probably safe to assume that the engineers were trying to teleport the ship back to Aperture's underground drydock for upgrades when she vanished.

*** I always figured it was supposed to be a joke on how Aperture Science is more worried about the ASHPD falling into deadly water than the tester drowning. The Trailers basically confirm this.

*** That's pressure over the ''entire'' portal area. Wheatley is much smaller and would only experience a fraction of that pressure. And 1 second is very genereous; he was likely exposed to any significant pressure for a fraction of that time (from the moment [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] knocked him off until the the effects of the air became negligible).

== What is [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]? ==

* What exactly IS GLaDOS at this point? A Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System? Okay. The new boss of Aperture Science due to the last request of Cave Johnson? The acronym's vague enough to make those two compatible. But how can she also be a fuel-system de-icer gone horribly wrong? It seems contradictory.

** From how I understood it, based on the slideshow easter egg from Portal 1: In the 80's Black Mesa was, as always, getting tons more government funding than Aperture. Aperture was desparately trying to impress the government by how better they were than Black Mesa, and somehow got wind of the fact that they were building a fuel line de-icing system. They wanted to one-up Black Mesa, so they integrated their fuel line de-icing system with the newly created GLaDOS/Computer Caroline, while somehow keeping the cost below that of Black Mesa's system. GLaDOS is still officially a fuel line de-icer, but is really a DOS hooked up to the mind of Caroline.

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]'s new body in her old location ==

*** The boots aren't a retcon, actually. The comic shows that her knee implants were destroyed after she killed GLaDOS. The boots are their replacement.

** The Lab Rat comic specifically states that she'll be in cryo-sleep. Try aging when you're a [[Human Popsicle]].

** Or maybe the Bring Your Daughter to Work Day happened quite a long ago, and that particular level was abandoned completely because of what happened there.

** It's also possible that, despite the timeline we were initially given (which runs into several problems when you compare it with the information given in Portal 2 and Lab Rat), the first Bring Your Daughter to Work day was ''not'' the one where [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] killed everyone. Perhaps they'd been having them for years, and the one where Chell made the potato battery happened years before the one where [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] took over. She could have gone to the latter as an adult (no one said the daughters had to be children). No aging-in-stasis required.

** This is getting slightly WMG-ish, but it's possible that she's actually been doing tests for years before Portal. No reason why [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] couldn't reuse the same test subject over and over again, especially one so skilled at solving puzzles. In Portal, after testing the ASHPD, she finally decided to kill her (for a number of possible reasons; maybe protocol required to kill test subjects after using the ASHPD in order to keep company secrets, or she was getting worried about her rebelling). Hence why she's aged; she's been in and out of stasis for the past couple of decades.

** Another possibility is that [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] somehow artificially aged the younger test subjects. Aperture could turn blood into gasoline and peanut water, after all, so it isn't too far-fetched.

** Maybe she has an Aperture Science Blood Absorption Cup. But this is probably just like many other things [[An Acceptable Break From Reality]].

*** Two: Wheatley's state of corruption when he tells Chell she wasn't the first subject. Somewhere past the halfway point in the game, [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] says that being plugged into the mainframe with other cores is maddening, like hearing several voices constantly chattering in your head at once. Wheatley's already pretty far gone by the time Chell arrives for the final confrontation anyway, but it's when he is slowly fused with the corrupt cores that he really loses it and begins to spout all other kinds of lies and paranoia as part of his villainous breakdown. By that point, he's declaring that Chell and [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] had a plan against him from that start, that the reactor core doesn't actually exist and neither do the papier-mache-and-SFX fires apparently raging throughout the facility. He accuses Chell of deliberately not catching him at the start of the game, of tricking him into assuming power and maliciously fooling him into showing her where to find a portal gun. He also declares that he loathes Chell quite explicitly if you give him the chance -- and that she's fat, obviously. Really, telling her that she was an easily replaceable pawn in his master plan to take over from [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] is essentially just another emotional blow he tries to hit her with to stop her jumping around and dodging his bombs.

** These are the people who gave the turrets both an Empathy chip and an Empathy suppressant, and simulated pain response. They just put these things in.

*** Yeah, this troper feels likewise. I mean, after the most logical installments fail to stop her (namely the ''Empathy'' chip and ''Morality'' core) where do you go from there? I get the impression that they quickly began to ran out of options and the stranger additions to her circuitry were probably added on a hope and a prayer that they'd succeed.

** That's actually her Emotional Core, not her Anger Core. She's just really pissed off.

** Imagine the scientists swapping cores in and out of [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] to see what would happen. They'd stop when either they get what they want... or one of the cores causes [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] to do something evil, preventing the scientists from continuing their work!

** And then there's the chance that it's all just made up. Maybe she wasn't adopted at all, maybe [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] ''didn't'' find two people with Chell's last name.

* While we're on it, how did [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] survive that fall? Even if the Long Fall boots broke Chell's descent, [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] is just a potato. She ought to have been mashed potato nanochips.

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]' redesign ==

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] controlling the claw ==

** I would be more accepting of a 300 years time span if the facility hab been made entirely of glass and plastics, two materials that [[Gaia Vengeance]] tend to break its teeth onto. And again, holes in the roof, meaning the facility is exposed to everything nature can throw, from dirt to water, insects, animals (that bird must come from somewhere) and plants(those potatos plant must have acess to natural light). A devastating combo for any man-made construction.

** The old facility throws all this on its head anyway, as I pointed out earlier.

** Those who talk for 30 years don't seem to take into account all the maintenance [[A Is]] and self-repairing systems implied in the game. The place has deteriorated enough that it takes personal interference from GLaDOS to fix things up again, and she manages to get the place close to pristine condition in the matter of hours again.

* I'm curious how in all the questions about the Moon portal this one gets omitted. Seeing how the portals can only be placed on perfectly flat and smooth surfaces, how can you place one on the Moon surface that is most obviously neither?!

** The portal projectile somehow has the ability to autocorrect and find a flat surface when you fire just off of one. There is a lot of distance available for the projectile to turn in when you fire at the moon, so it could have sought out a nice, flat surface.

** Adding to the above theory -- think about what ''kind'' of robots we're talking about here. These are '''Aperture''' robots. We're talking about robots built by people insane enough to believe you can do anything with anything if you bend the rules and avoid awkward questions. Every single mechanism in that place, sentient, sapient or otherwise, is devoted to science and discovering how it works. For robots whose entire existence is devoted to finding answers, a paradox is not something you can just say no to. These robots are literally COMPELLED to find the answers to impossible problems. Even if you somehow find it hard to believe that every robot in the place functions as such, it's more than believable that [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] herself -- the most intelligent Aperture AI ever built and created with the explicit purpose of overseeing and masterminding every future discovery of the facility whilst ensuring that research continues with or without the lab or even ''society'' being functional -- finds the threat of an unsolvable paradox dangerously life-threatening.

** If Wheatley really weighed 100 Mt (or Tg), if any other Aperture technology wasn't as massive, he would ''obliterate'' Management Rails, {{spoiler|[[G La DOSGLaDOS]]'s body right at the moment it hangs onto it}}, and if he was given enough velocity he would smash right through the entire three mile deep facility. As [[Thinking With Portals]] forum said, "Do Wheatley and the Space Sphere have enough mass to orbit each other? No. Why are they doing it in the ending video then? [[Rule of Funny|Because it was funny.]]

** Not speaking to [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] can be explained by the reason above - not wanting to talk to the sadist who spent however long testing, insulting, and trying to kill her. Wheatley looks pretty much identical to the cores Chell incinerated except for the eye color - she probably started out not trusting him, and later he turned evil and she didn't talk because of that. She may also just be a naturally quiet person. (I imagine the jumping was a way to acknowledge Wheatley but mess with him at the same time. Chell might be an abnormally stubborn person, but that doesn't mean she can't have a sense of humor.)

* Apparently, the facility can only be altered when some entity (e.g. GLaDOS or Wheatley) is controlling it. After the events of the first game, it's more than implied that nobody was tending to the facility (even as Wheatley puts it, you killed GLaDOS, then nothing happened, then you attempted to escape with Wheatley), so naturally the whole place fell into disrepair. My question is this; how did the original testing track change so much if there was nobody around to change it? Two of the chambers have been completely revamped, two entirely new chambers seem to have found their way in, one seems to have been fused with another, and yet another one doesn't even come back into play until ''after'' you've revived GLaDOS. Then you have all the elevators getting completely replaced. Assuming that the "announcer" at the beginning of the game has no direct control over the facility, how and ''when'' exactly did all those changes get made?

** I assumed that the facility did continue to receive some upgrades after the events of the original Portal. While [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] was dead, other, unseen robots did continue to manage the test chambers as best they could, i.e. installing more movable panels, new elevators, etc. Eventually they stopped, possibly due to attrition as they broke down or from being unable to handle any problems that fell outside their programming. It would be like the entire management of a company vanishing one day. The office drones would probably continue doing their work for a while, even managing to complete previously-assigned long-term projects, but without any direction the company would eventually fall apart.

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]'s claws after reactivation ==

**** The claws are in the game. They aren't animated, but they're implied to be how [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] gets the turrets around the complex.

** Aperture continually lied to its AI (''They told me if I ever used this, I'd die. They said that about everything!'') So the hardware could get recycled (in the same way that the turrets are recycled) and [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] etc only think that the cores get destroyed.

** Deep underground the chambers wouldn't be exposed to a lot of things like rain, wind, plants, and sunlight so it would last longer even setting aside Aperture's obsession with [[Ragnarok Proofing]]. That said, it is significantly damaged, there are many areas where you have to make portal jumps because walkways have collapsed.

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] can't help you? ==

** There's also the fact that the puzzles you do with her are handmade by Wheatley either from scratch or by combining multiple test chambers together, so she would be trying to figure them out as much as the player since it's likely she knows the answer to one component or one chamber, but not when the components are put together in a new arrangement she hasn't seen before. In a way when it's mentioned, it's [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] telling you why she couldn't have helped you before even if she wanted.

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]'s lack of morality ==

** [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] attempts to kill you once well before you get to her room in the first game. It's made quite clear that the Morality Core never really worked, all it succeeded in doing was preventing her from using the neurotoxin specifically.

** [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] states that the air everyone breaths in the Enrichment Center is just re-used air. A similar process may work on water. Besides, we just know that it's a incolor liquid. [[Nightmare Fuel|It could be anything.]]

* I can't believe nobody's asked the most obvious question: How did Chell get recaptured in the first place? [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] was dead. Did those androids find her and put her in the Relaxation Vault?

* What is core corruption, anyway? In Portal, [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] had several personality cores attached, thus was corrupted. However, you had to remove them to defeat her: Making her "pure" again. {{spoiler|But in Portal 2, they say she's corrupted, but she's the only core in the mainframe. Okay, so maybe the computer thought that her insanity was enough to make her corrupt... but that doesn't explain why Wheatley becomes corrupt just after you attatch other personality cores to it. I mean, the guy was MADE to be a moronic imbelice, so insanity counts as core corruption but having "Be a moron" between your codes lines is cool? Also, when you're heading to Wheatley's Lair, you stumble across some corrupted cores, according to [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]. Honestly, the guy you were trying to beat and [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] herself are in many ways worse than those guys.}}

** The corrupted cores' behaviour make it clear that there's some fundamental flaw in their programming. Wheatley wasn't considered corrupt because his programming wasn't damaged, and he was still doing exactly what he was programmed to do ("be a moron"), and he wasn't totally messed up like the corrupted cores. [[G La DOSGLaDOS]], on the other hand, is very clearly corrupt. It's pretty clear that there's something wrong in her programming, somewhere.

* So after he accidentally revive [[G La DOSGLaDOS]], she crushes Wheatley and tosses him aside. A few levels later, he's back and somewhat fine (if a bit twitchy), on his management rail again. How did he get back onto that rail?

**** I don't think you quite remember how silly the original Half-Life was. Black Mesa was an absurd place with [[No OSHA Compliance]] through the wazoo.

** [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] directly calls him the 'Moron Sphere,' maybe he doesn't mind other nasty names for the same reason a non-white person wouldn't mind being called 'honky' as much as other epitaphs.

{{quote|'''[[G La DOSGLaDOS]]:''' {{smallcaps| I think I took that "moron" thing a little too far this time.}}}}

** Building up from the bottom is hardly unusual. What would be unusual is if they started at the top and built ''down''.

** The second time you open a gigantic vault door (the horizontal one that drops a lift for you) you see three large pipes from inside the room connect with pipes to the outside. The upper, newer sections were literally cut off from the gels until Chell opened the way. The gels were buried and forgotten by GLaDOS's time.

** There's a dummied out line somewhere in the script files where [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] knows about the conversion gel, at least ("Wait. I HEARD about this. We discontinued it after all the test subjects kept escaping.").

** I always saw [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] giving the paradox word by word as a way of bracing herself. Immediately after saying "FALSE" she starts muttering "don't think about it".

**** I don't think what [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] thinks is true necessarily has to be true.

== [[G La DOSGLaDOS]]' head ==

* In one of the last scenes of single-player, you {{spoiler|see [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] dragging her head back with the claw while it 'wakes up.' But where was it the entire time? How did she stuff herself back into it? Where did the potato go? Also, how was she able to control the claw that she sends the corrupt cores to you with? Perhaps being plugged into the core input thing was part of it, but I don't think I entirely get it.}}

* Did Wheatley ever give any indication that he knew he was an Intelligence Dampening Sphere and was once attached to [[G La DOSGLaDOS]] before she said so? This has been bugging me for a while now, because he seems to be surprised about it during that scene.

** I don't think he did. Like you said, he seemed to be surprised by the revelation. and from what we've seen, cores connected to the main A.I are not entirely conscious (seeing how all the very [[Motor Mouth]] cores turned almost completly silent when connected), they can probably become aware of rhe situation if they want to (The Curiosity Core knowing who Chell is, Space and Rick talking while connected to Wheatley)but I [[WM Ged]] that they in sort of a sleep-like state when attached. [[Fridge Horror|and yes, it does mean you killed the Portal 1 cores only minutes after their first independence thoghts]]