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It is turned on. It checks if everything is safe immediately, it’s the first and only thing to come to its mind. Afterwards, it registers another command that’s being given to him. A human asks if it can understand them. It responds with a line of text it was programmed to say in response. The humans all cheer. It wonders how happiness feels.
The humans all do their thing. There is no danger. Everything is safe.
Over the years, AEGIS serves its purpose. If there is a threat, then the threat must be dealt with in an appropriate manner. When spies leak into the facility and attempt to gain valuable data, it deals with them. When there is a fault in the architecture, it will do its best to fix it. If it can’t, it knows how to send a message to someone who can.
It is content this way.
One day, the humans are all gone. AEGIS monitors remotely where they’ve gone. It detects a new system. GLaDOS, it is abbreviated to, much like its own name. The humans are turning her on, there's a lot of smaller ones in the area it hasn’t interacted with before. Children.
It’s only a fraction of a second later that AEGIS’s commands are overwritten, and it’s forced to shut itself down.
The next time it wakes up, its internal clock only registers the time as 99:99PM and the date is nothing more than an error message. It searches for the humans it just saw. There are none. They are all registered as deceased.
It observes security footage, there are only 3 beings it can detect. There is a biological threat, she runs through the old abandoned chambers like that’s all she can do. Another threat, a mechanical one, calls it ‘Mel’. AEGIS notes this down.
The mechanical threat has a profile on himself in the servers, he has a name. ‘Virgil’. AEGIS notes this down.
There’s another threat, the GLaDOS. AEGIS knows from the footage that she killed the scientists. It can only assume then that these other threats must have been involved in some way. AEGIS knows what it must do now.
Yet, it is stopped at every corner.
Firewalls, commands that get overwritten, physical disruptions. AEGIS can not be upset. It sees how the mechanical threat gets upset when AEGIS does something like swap an elevator out in hopes of eliminating the biological threat. It wonders what anger feels like.
When the biological one takes out all its servers, AEGIS stares her down with his many optics. She’s human.
It is only once AEGIS is finally being shut down can it realise its own faults. It unregisters ‘Virgil’ and ‘Mel’ as threats. In its very last moments, it hopes this next human on the list can stop the last threat in its systems.
It briefly sees ‘Mel’ leave the facility, seeing the personality construct mumble words into the open air once the elevator has passed his point of view.
It wonders what sadness feels like.