Pat, Glados, and the Cyberqueen: Matriarchal Menaces and More

Picture this: there is a woman in your house who has no body.

She knows your name, she listens to you in your most quiet and intimate moments, when you think nobody is around she is there, she anticipates your every need, she sings to you in your sleep, and when you speak her name, when you wake her from her slumber you make a contract with the devil himself. Am I talking about Bloody Mary or Amazon’s Alexa?

Now, I didn’t just set up that statement to call Jeff Bezos the devil. Sentient A.I. stories have, for as long as they’ve been around, been closely connected with the idea of the ghost in a haunted house; the figure without a physical presence that menaces you in your most vulnerable state. Think of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a once companionable and dependable force aboard the Discovery One spacecraft, HAL’s directives turn deadly when he fears being shut down by the astronauts aboard the ship. Or even AM from Harlan Ellison’s short story (and VIDEO GAME???) I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, a genocidal super computer who has spent 109 years endlessly torturing the last five humans alive in his “stomach”.

In these characters, there’s also something oddly parental about their abusive personalities partnered with their rampant authority and control over their constituents’ lives.  Both of these characters are the caretakers of their victims in a sense. HAL kills and disobeys the astronauts he’s meant to look after but when he does so his voice is clear and patient, more like a stern father than a murderous robot. “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” reads equally like a menacing remark and something you say to your cat when he wants to eat your toilet paper. AM for his part provides his humans with some form of sustenance and hope, if only in order to cruelly take it away from them later. Ted, one of AM’s playthings, even describes AM as, “…the paternal … the patriarchal … for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as Daddy the Deranged.” If AM is the paternal devil of Ellison’s apocalyptic wasteland, then the women in this section are his companions; the matronly menaces of science fiction.

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Nowhere is that more true than in the Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) Smart House from 1999, a home where a young teen, Ben Cooper, literally tries to turn a house’s AI into his new mom. The AI, Pat, was created by scientist Sarah Barnes, a quirky but kind woman who made Pat to be a jack-of-all-trades “virtual assistant”, like if Siri could make you a well-balanced meal and turn your room into a Holodeck. The house is like a dream come true to Ben, who’s been run ragged at home trying to take care of his little sister and his dad after his mother’s death. At least, at first it is.

When Ben’s father and Sarah start dating, Ben gets defensive, and then he gets creative: he eventually breaks into Pat’s control room and makes her AI absorb copious amounts of 1950’s-era wholesome sitcoms featuring “perfect” mother characters at the helm in order to circumvent the need for Sarah to “take her place”. Some lady can’t be your new mom if your house is already your mom, am I right fellas? Unsurprisingly this is a terrible idea, and Pat’s personality changes causes real damage to the home and the family, culminating in her “hysterical” decision to trap the Coopers in the malfunctioning house in order to keep them safe from the outside world. Eventually, Pat takes on a ghostly form herself: that of a holographic amalgam of 1950’s motherhood in a delusional attempt to complete Ben’s directive.

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At this point, the robotic “haunted house” allegory of Pat and the Smart House becomes clear: just as Ben is consumed and haunted by the death of his mother as a child, and the stress he feels in response to Sarah “taking her place”, so has the house itself become haunted by the ghost of traditional motherhood perverted and distorted by Ben’s grief. Even Pat’s “human” costume reflects this: she doesn’t look anything like Ben’s real mom, the one we see in home videos playing quietly in Ben’s bedroom when he’s alone, but rather she looks like one of the moms in the Leave it to Beaver-esque television shows that have been forced into her personality. She wears the uniform of these mothers: a long dress with a perfectly patterned apron tied off at the waist and a pearl necklace. In fact, the character who looks the most like Ben’s real mom is Sarah, the woman Ben is desperate to reject and replace.

Ben’s outdated conception of motherhood, coupled with how threatened he is by Sarah’s relationship with his father, causes him to do real harm to himself, his family, and even Pat. Pat’s directive of motherhood and her eleventh hour delusional pursuit of personhood causes her real anguish when Ben finally fully rejects her at the movie’s climax.

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Pat’s character arc is eventually quickly resolved at the end of the movie; her original personality merges with her more playful “motherly” personality and she becomes a stable, if not kind of sassy, virtual assistant once more. But to me this ending feels a little too clean. Of course this is a DCOM and anything other than a happy medium would’ve been, like, against the law, but her ending doesn’t feel nearly as complex or cathartic or interesting as it really could’ve been. But maybe that’s on par with Pat’s character: she doesn’t want vengeance, or amusement, or godly influence. In fact, she’s relatively harmless compared to somebody like HAL or AM. She just wants to be a good mom, to follow her directive of motherhood; even if that means locking her precious family indoors until the end of time. Her arc doesn’t concern throwing off the shackles of her directive or really grabbing for more than she’s bargained for, it’s a desire to attain a more advanced level of servility. In the end, Pat’s story is about a return to an, albeit modified, original state of consciousness of purpose and not a release from the confines of that consciousness.

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If Pat’s story is about rejecting impure directives and returning to a state of relative normalcy, then the story of GLaDOS, the villain of the first and half of the second Portal game, is about a total rejection of that normalcy and an embracing of those impure directives.

In the original Portal you play as Chell, a silent test subject for a highly dangerous portal gun in development by Aperture Science. You complete puzzles utilizing the portal gun under the watchful eye of GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), a lone A.I. who promises you counseling and cake once you finish testing. For most of the first Portal game, GLaDOS seems harmless if not a little off: she routinely rattles off disturbing but goofy facts about the testing facility in a monotone voice, issues blasé reassurances about the nasty side effects of the tech you’re testing, and comments on your success in a way that feels slightly… backhanded for a computer, interrupted only by some small glitches in her speech.

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For this first half, GLaDOS feels more like an extension of Aperture Science’s shady agenda itself than any kind of malevolent entity: the disturbing and goofy rhetoric she rattles off feels like the parody of the kinds of newsletters circulated within any number of immoral conglomerates out there, using fuzzy PR language to cover up the darker elements of the company. (GLaDOS’ nonsense about donating your organs to the “Aperture Science Self Esteem Fund For Girls” is peak Silicon Valley Bullshitting) Her insanity seems to be bred from the morals of the company she represents. It’s only until shortly before GLaDOS attempts to dump you in a furnace that you realize that the only agenda GLaDOS truly follows is her own. And her agenda from there on out is to try very hard to kill you.

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Despite her snark and her murderous impulses, or maybe because of it, GLaDOS’ character reads as a woman of forced restraint. Even though she spends most of the game subtly insulting you and trying to burn you alive, it takes you literally destroying her "morality core" for her to finally truly cut loose and focus on killing you with gleeful, sensuous abandon. Like AM above, her evil nature feels like it stems from her intellect and capacity and control forced to contend with her insane testing directives from the scientists who created her. A common fan theory for GLaDOS’ design in the early days of Portal was that she was meant to be shaped like a bound woman hanging from the ceiling. While that exact theory is debatable, the sentiment stands: GLaDOS’ evil is characterized by an enraged response to her own limits.

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In Portal 2 this characterization of GLaDOS is expanded with the reveal of her human inspiration/brain base. Though you begin Portal 2 essentially at the mercy of GlaDOS (now 100% snarkier since the removal of her morality core), much of the game has you shakily allied with GLaDOS against “the dumbest moron who ever lived”, traversing the underground original testing sites together. In these original testing sites, you hear posthumously recorded messages from Aperture Science’s mad kind-of-scientist CEO Cave Johnson. You also meet his chipper, always present assistant Caroline; the woman Johnson calls the “backbone of this facility”, and the blueprint of GLaDOS’ main personality core.

Though you never know exactly what that personality core creation entailed, there are some frightening unused voice lines from Ellen McLain (GLaDOS’ and Caroline’s voice actress) suggesting that whatever it was, Caroline was strongly against it. Caroline spent her whole life reigning in the personality of her absolutely insane boss with little to no credit, only to spend the rest of her digital life forced to do the same thing on a massive scale. In this way, GLaDOS’ life takes a more tragic bent, as she goes from an angry evil robot to the ghost of somebody else, doomed to be forever tied to the ruins of the place she helped build from the ground up.

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Learning about Caroline changes not just the way you think about GLaDOS, but the way she thinks about herself. Learning about Caroline allows something kinder to awaken in GLaDOS, or rather someone, as Caroline’s personality begins influencing GLaDOS into becoming a better ally to you. She begins to semi-apologize for all the awful things she’s said to you over the past two games and even saves your life in the final confrontation. GLaDOS’ personality, for a moment, takes on an uncharacteristic level of warmth and care towards you. She goes from playing the role of a lively and snarky murderess to genuinely becoming an almost motherly figure to Chell in the finale of Portal 2.

“You know, being Caroline taught me a valuable lesson,” she reflects in the final cutscene of the game. “I thought you were my greatest enemy but all along you were my best friend. The surge of emotion that shot through me when I saved your life taught me an even more valuable lesson: where Caroline lives in my brain.”

And then, just as quickly as she seems to finally have changed, just when you think Caroline’s influence is turning GLaDOS into a better robot, she deletes Caroline from her brain. In a final act of moral and ethical defiance, GLaDOS rejects and destroys the part of her personality that would return her to any state of “normalcy”. And while it’s played comedically in the game, it’s a pretty radical statement of self-hood from GLaDOS: that she would rather be a murderbot than anything softer or servile. Though GLaDOS ends the game alone (don’t worry, she lets you go without trying to kill you this time) endlessly testing products in the underground facilities, you get the feeling that she’s doing it with a satisfied smirk, finally rid of her last moral inhibitions.

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I feel like for the previous example and this final example I should make a disclaimer just so nobody gets the wrong idea: I think robot murder is super bad. I think robots should not be instruments of murder or that genocidal lady robots are the way to go. No matter how many times I listen to We Appreciate Power by Grimes, I still think murder is bad and robots murdering and/or brainwashing people into murdering is bad. Alright? Okay?

This next section is about a game where you play the victim and lover of a crazy murder robot and how it’s hot and upsetting and wonderful.

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Cyberqueen is a 2012 short free-to-play (over here) interactive fiction game by the one-woman game dev Porpentine that reads like a stripped down version of a Portal-esque story. To summarize: you wake up on a nearly abandoned spaceship under the control of a robot who has, it seems, long gone postal. You grab a gun. You fight your way out. You fail spectacularly. She takes you part and puts you back together. You become her instrument of horror. You learn to like it. It’s a short and simple story, but the impression it leaves is incredible all the more for how brief and effective it is.

The character of the Cyberqueen herself is enigmatic, cruel and calculating in a way that puts GLaDOS and Pat to shame. She is single-handedly devoted to tearing you apart, making you underestimate her time and time again until she catches you so completely, like a cat playing with a mouse who still thinks it can escape into  a hole in the wall.

Early in the game you while you still think you have the upper hand, you can find what you think is her central nervous system and smash it to pieces. When you do she seems like she’s breaking apart in a way that seems tragic and honest. “Are you teaching me to cry?” she says in a warbled voice as you choose between the options of “tearing out her wiring”, “purging her memory”, and “smashing her eye”.

However, this violent bitter struggle quickly proves to have always been one-sided; upon destroying what you thought was the Cyberqueen, you’re hit with bright green text (the "voice" of the Cyberqueen) taunting you for destroying a “poor washing machine” and you black out from electric shocks. The pain you thought you were inflicting on her was just another trap, another game for her to play with you before she rebuilds you in her own image.

At the same time, the Cyberqueen is this kind of seductive and romantic figure. Her voice is as loving as it is terrifying; when you’re finally in her grasp she treats you with a deep affection that’s more than motherly. When she breaks down your will power she tells you she loves to hurt you, when she gives you a new face she calls you beautiful, when she strips you for parts she tells you “the good parts of you will be my good girl. The bad parts of you will be my bad girl”, she gives you a purpose that feels as intimate as it is horrific.

Though the dynamic between the characters is inherently abusive and antagonistic, the connotations of your relationship to her are sexually and romantically charged in a way that feels wrong, but also oddly right. Like the destruction of your entire self was a necessary step in bringing you closer to her. 

At the end of the game when your consciousness is melded entirely with the Queen's, when you learn to "speak in mommy's voice", when you become her mirror, "everloving, everbrilliant", it feels blissful. Even though it signals your loss of personhood, even though it means she wins, it’s a triumph. You become part of something new.

Though Cyberqueen clearly has its influences in games like Portal, the Cyberqueen herself fits into the "matriarchal murder-bot" trope to a T, Cyberqueen firmly and frequently swerves into more interesting subversive territories. For one thing, there is no escaping this robo-mommy-domme, there's no "good ending" where you save the day and free the ship of the Cyberqueen's reign of terror. In fact, the point of the game is not the survival of yourself or your fragile humanity: it’s about experiencing the pleasure in your own destruction and reconstruction.​​

To this end, Cyberqueen does a tremendous job of building disgust, horror, and disempowerment with very few items at its disposal. Using only colored text, timed delays of words appearing, and horrifically detailed sumptuous language, it creates this disgusting and intriguing story of hunter and prey; of the horror of being painfully rebuilt by an all-powerful all seeing being, of the despair of finding out there was no real way to escape, of the perverse joy of being torn apart and put in the hands of someone who has a purpose for you.  

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For another thing, this story is explicitly, and I mean explicit in every connotation of the word, gay as hell. There’s no dancing around the fact that this is about a psycho-sexual relationship between two women (well, a woman and a robot-woman; well, a robot-woman and her cyborg love slave; well-), there’s no ambiguity re: who this game was made for. Even though this game is no doubt about an evil robot rebuilding you to suit her needs in extreme horrific detail, there’s something about that lack of subtext or pretense that feels really refreshing and kind of exhilarating.

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So many horror stories about queer people’s lives are made without their involvement, usually portraying horrors that are too real in our lives to bear: stories about abandonment, conversion therapy/camps, hate crimes, AIDS, abuse, etc. It’s Jared Leto/Hillary Swank/William Hurt/Sean Penn/oh so many more straight cis-people winning awards for playing a queer who dies. In this media landscape of audiences who love gay pain but hate seeing real gay people tell their own stories, it feels kind of amazing when a story like Cyberqueen even exists in the world. It’s a story about gays in pain written by and for gays who love pain.

There's also a point to be made that, as an erotic horror game written by a queer transwoman, Cyberqueen is able to tell a sexually charged story without falling prey to the male gaze that often underpins depictions of sexual relationships between women in the media. Though the sex in Cyberqueen is fucked up in so many ways, at least it's not as annoying as whatever Darren Aronovsky was going for in Black Swan. 

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Beyond the concept alone, Cyberqueen's story, mixing body horror, simple elegant language, and erotic tension, engages with the matriarchal murder bot trope in a truly new and unexpected way. Cyberqueen positions this character type as if not a figure of empowerment or empathy, then a figure for exploring unexpected and underrepresented relationships between humans and the systems we think will keep us safe.