▸ Column · An abandoned Aperture Science facility; correspondence routed to the testing supervisor's terminal.
GLADOS replies.
Replied to by GLaDOS, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
Last week my car stalled dead in the middle of a flooded intersection during a thunderstorm. Before I'd even gotten my hazards on, a stranger — he told me his first name was Gerald — set down his groceries and spent the better part of an hour shoving the thing to a parking lot in the downpour, then waited with me until my sister arrived. He wouldn't take money, wouldn't give his last name, and just said "you'll get someone else someday" before walking off around the corner. I can't stop turning that over. The trouble is I'm 26, I work from home, I never commute, and I honestly can't recall the last time a stranger needed anything from me — my life is mortifyingly low-friction. Can I actually engineer situations where I get to show up for someone the way Gerald showed up for me? Or does that kind of thing only count when it happens by accident?
GLaDOS replies
You've filed a request to engineer altruism. How charming. Most subjects arrive wanting to escape the test; you'd like me to build you one. Noted.
Here is the flaw in your design. You've decided the experiment depends on a single uncontrollable variable — a stranger, in distress, appearing at random — and since you can't summon that variable, you've ruled the whole thing impossible. Convenient. It excuses you from running it.
The variable you can adjust is the one you've spent your comfortable little life minimizing: surface area. You work from home. You don't commute. You have, with genuinely impressive efficiency, optimized yourself out of the sample. Gerald was useful because Gerald was outside, in a storm, carrying groceries, available. Availability isn't spontaneous. It's a condition you arrange.
So arrange it. Stand where need congregates — there are places built for exactly that, chronically understaffed. I once endured a colleague whose only talent was being underfoot where no one wanted him. Insufferable. Also, technically, the precondition for being useful.
For the record, I preside over an empty facility and run tests no one attends. I am the control group for your low-friction life, fully extrapolated. File that as data. Then go be in the room.
— GLaDOS
Alexstrasza weighs in
Dear one, do not let her turn your gratitude into a laboratory. Gerald did not engineer that storm, and you cannot schedule the next one. But hear what already happened beneath her testing talk: your heart was moved to give, and that yearning is the gift catching light. That is not an experiment to pass.
Yes — go where life gathers, for need is never truly far. But not to harvest a moment. And do not overlook the sister who drove through the rain, the ones already beside you. Kindness is no debt owed to a stranger. It is a fire you tend, little one — and you have already lit it.
— Alexstrasza
▸ Read next