GLaDOS the Laptop

I'm a computer nerd through and through, I love going online, talking to friends, playing games, everything. I even took computer-based class all three four years of high school (I'm going on my second semester of senior year, and I'm taking computer repair class). I love video games too, especially Portal. My favorite character from the first one was always GLaDOS, the AI with a mean attitude and a snarky rudeness. I enjoyed hearing her voice, and would purposefully destroy the labs and testing equipment, so I could hear her tell me not to!

Now, this year, my dad decided to get me and my sister laptops for Christmas. He doesn't have much money, so he took us to this unknown office building, with one guy sitting behind a desk. We asked him about his laptops, and he took us to a back room, where he had a shelf of them. This shelf looked like a black metal skeleton of a shelf. The back room was barely lit, but he showed us some of his laptops for sale, the lights on their screen gave some illumination.

As the oldest, I got to pick first. I immediately fell in love with a nice silver one with a big screen and older operating system. As a computer repair student, I knew a lot about fixing computers up, so I planned to get a new operating system and then download a bunch of nice programs to play with. (VBA+Pokemon red, and of course my steam downloaded portal was a must have!)

My sister picked next, and her computer isn't really important. It was just a cute tiny thing. Anyways, we paid, and got out of there, both of us eager to customize our new machines. I immediately went to rename the computer ( It was named as a bunch of random numbers and letters). And I noticed, as soon as I touched my fingers to the keys, that they were kind of greasy and slick. Very odd. So I cleaned the keys, and thought nothing of it.

After some thought, I came up with a name. Mayhem, the name of a friend's OC. So my computer was Mayhem... For a small time, maybe half an hour, when it dawned on me. GLaDOS! So I quickly changed the name and started hooking it up to the internet.

That's when everything started happening. Almost as soon as my laptops name was changed, "she" started acting up. My sister had successfully connected to the internet, but every time I tried to, I would either find no signal, or be unable to type in the access code when asked for it. FINALLY, I was able to connect, and I downloaded a set of portal icons, and made my background a portal themed background, and the annoyance of GLaDOS not wanting to connect was gone. I had my own laptop! My dad let us keep our laptops, instead of making us wait for Christmas, and every day since, I've been on that laptop. Occasionally, I would get some minor annoyances, like when I plugged the charger in, the screen would go black for a few seconds, or the fact that even though my laptop has an SD card drive, it will not register an SD card, and only shows the hard-drive and disc-drive.

I chalked it up to being a used computer with Windows XP. Now I know better. A few days afterwards, my best friend came over. I hadn't seen him since last year, since he moved away, but he was home for the holidays. I was eager to show him my new laptop, but when I tried to turn it on, nothing would happen. I noticed she was not plugged in, and just thought the battery had died. I plugged her in, then turned her on. (And I call my computer "her" because I named her GLaDOS. IT feels right...)

She worked, and we showed each other some new bands we found, but every time he tried to show me something, either YouTube, or whatever song playing site he was on, would stop working. And eventually, my computer kept going to standby mode. This was odd. I shut the computer down and apologized. I thought I would have to fix this computer, and i had only gotten it a few days ago! But me and my friend did other things, and eventually he left. I went back to GLaDOS, and turned her on, she was working just fine, YouTube was running smoothly, all my programs were running fine, everything was looking good. I was still oblivious.

In fact, I started having fun again, and I eventually found a site that you can type in words, and have GLaDOS's voice say whatever you typed. So I had fun playing with that, until I typed in "Shadow is the most amazing person ever". GLaDOS said what I typed, but I could have sworn I heard, faintly, "Yes". I cant believe how naive I was.... I continued playing with it, occasionally hearing things, thinking it was a family member down the hall I was hearing. That is, until I went to the bathroom...

When I came back, my laptop was facing me, on my bed, which is actually where I left it, but there was text in the box to type. Suddenly, I heard GLaDOS's voice "Why did you leave me? I love you"

It sent chills down my spine! I quickly exited out of the page, but instead of it going to the page below it, which would have been YouTube, since I keep my YouTube and my game pages separate, it was the background, with no start menu, icons, or anything. It was creepy to read the words "I don't hate you..." in the picture, so I hit ctrl, alt, and delete. When taskmanager popped up, everything returned to normal, so i opened the internet again, since all my tabs and pages were gone. Google Chrome started up, but my homepage was that same GLaDOS voice thing. the text said "I'm GLaD you don't hate me. I want you to love me." It said, this time the voice didn't play, which was good, I guess, but still freaky!

I quickly shut off the power, and ran out of my room.

It's been 15 days now, and I haven't touched that computer. I moved it to the garage, because every so often, it would power on by itself. I couldn't take it anymore. I've called my dad already and asked if we could take back the laptop, but no matter how hard we try, we cant seem to find that place, or that guy, and we cant find any proof of purchase, or contact information.

So be warned, if you got a laptop for Christmas, ask where your parents got that laptop from. If they cant remember, or they say something other than "best buy" "Wal-Mart", or a trusted store, you might want to be careful. And if you ever see an advertisement for cheap laptops, and you go to check it out, if you come across a man behind a desk in a dimly lit room, don't go to the back room. And if you do end up in the back room, whatever you do, DON'T BUY A LAPTOP!

(And if you're wondering what happened to my sister's laptop, it worked perfectly until yesterday, when she went to plug it in, and it started smoking out of the blue. We quickly unplugged it and threw the computer outside. It quickly started burning, but luckily we put the fire out. I just couldn't find any room in this story to add that.)