This thread is for discussion on Portal and Portal 2. If you haven't played the games, and don't like spoilers, then RUN FO YA LIFE!
The comic at
thinkwithportals.com is considered canon and takes place before and between games.
So in Portal (1) in the beginning, Chell wakes up and GlaDOS is glitching. I replayed it after I beat 2 and found a lot of things really weird.
When you wake up, you weren't in a bed. You're next to some kind of egg-shaped chamber.
GlaDOS teaches you how to walk, which can be chocked up to game mechanics but I think it's deeper than that.
Then she tells you it's "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day"
Then she jokes you about being adopted.
These were all just quirks of Portal til the sequel came out.
In Portal 2, we're introduced to Cave Johnson and Caroline through their recordings. We find that Cave Johnson injected Moon dust into his body (I forgot why, I think because he wanted super powers or didn't have willing test subjects) and as he says, "turns out it's pure poison!" so he starts dying.
Even as GlaDOS, even as a potato, Caroline gets riled up every time she hears Cave speak. It's like an intense infatuation. He mentions in one announcement "sorry fellas, she's married. to science."
If you found the portraits of Cave scattered around, one of them has Caroline by his side. She was high up in the laboratory ranking, probably, so this one can be discounted.
When you see all the science projects, with the potato batteries, and there's one that's mutated and grown gigantic, straight up into the ceiling and ducts and stuff (and potentially the cause of all the plantlife in aperture) if you crouch down and look at the cardboard centerpiece behind it, it says in plain English "by Chell".
GlaDOS mentions these were from a past "Bring Your Daughter to Work" Day and in that particular experiment, the daughter must have "used something from her dad's office".
"The Surprise" is that there are no parents waiting for you, GlaDOS says they gave you up.
Later Wheatley jokes you about being adopted, and GlaDOS defends you.
The ONLY last name in the entire game spoken out loud is "Johnson", you never hear Caroline's or Chell's.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/portal2/comic/Portal2_Lab_Rat.pdf the comics from thinkwithportals.com tell the story of the ratt man, and how he chose to wake up Chell in the first place, because she was rejected from the test group. Also, it makes a point that Chell's last name has been redacted from aperture's database. ALSO GlaDOS tells ratt man that if you fail the testing process, you will be cloned with consent, and that failing the testing process IS giving consent.
The plot comes full-circle when you shoot a portal to the Moon (where the dust is poison, remember?) this may be a stretch, but the writers included the Moon specifically, I don't think they'd use that plot device more than once unintentionally.
In the end, GlaDOS can't kill you. She even "deletes" Caroline, but something in her decides to let you go.
So what it all boils down to is a story that you're never told about the test subject and what went on behind closed doors at aperture. I think it means that:
Caroline and Cave were intimate, at least once. I don't think they were married, and I don't think Cave knew about the pregnancy, she hid it from him, and put the child up for adoption.
Alternatively, he COULD have known, and forced her to put the child up for adoption. Either way, somebody at aperture ends up adopting Chell and she ends up following in her "father"s footsteps, willingly or not, as a test subject.
Cave dies before they can put his personality in a computer, but they follow his orders and put Caroline onto a computer instead (she may have died during the transfer, or GlaDOS may have just killed her outright).
She obviously didn't want to, they had to force her to be in charge of everything based on Cave's orders. Even after attaching a bunch of inhibitors (so many it doesn't know it's Caroline anymore) GlaDOS still kills everyone with neurotoxin.
Before that, Chell gets rejected from being a test subject because she's so tenacious she never gives up, apparently even if a test is unsolvable. Once everyone is dead, all that's left is the ratt man and one of two things. Either test subjects in suspension, or dna in a database for clones.
Chell is "woken up" (cloned) on "Bring Your Daughter to Work" Day by her mother (GlaDOS) some time in the future, and the first Portal plays out. You kill her, which she doesn't like very much, but there are still several robots and computer cores running independent of GlaDOS (turrets and Wheatley) and you get caught at the end and dragged back into the facility, to be put in stasis, where you wake up for Portal 2.
I think the bed in Portal (1) where you wake up is not a bed, but an artificial womb from which Chell is cloned. This would also help explain her not talking, not knowing how to walk, etc. Again, maybe just game mechanics, but they took time in the second one to explain walking and jumping "because you have brain damage".
So what do you think? I feel like a conspiracy theorist here, but I think it's a fairly legitimate conclusion to take from a game that's literally spun around conspiracy.
