A Portal 2 Hypothesis

Yeah, yeah, spoilers and all that... Seriously, if you haven't played it by now...

So here's my idea - GLaDOS was based on Caroline, right? They ("they" being the scientists at Aperture Labs) physically used Caroline as a basis for the AI that became GLaDOS.

Well after finishing the game for the umpteenth time the other day, I was listening to Wheatley's little speech at the end, where he expresses what I thought to be regret for treating Chell so poorly, and it struck me that the same speech could equally have come from Cave Johnson, expressing the same to Caroline.  See where I'm going with this?

Wheatley is based on Cave Johnson.

Now, there are a couple obvious problems with this.  The first is that Wheatley displays almost NONE of Cave's overbearing personality for most of the game. Only when he's in complete control does the Machiavellian nature come forward. Also, Wheatley seems to be unable to plan more than a couple feet ahead of himself, not even really know where he is half the time.

This kind of makes sense to me, though. What would Cave do if he were not only in control of Aperture, but had to actually do the work, as well? Would he be as effective as possible? Or, would he be all talk and no real substance? Let's be honest, Cave's one contribution was to throw out endless streams of terrible ideas, and through monetary pressure, make the scientists bring those to life.

"Endless stream of terrible ideas..." - See where this is headed?

In addition, consider this: You're a scientist at Aperture. You've had to deal with Cave's idiocy, or at least the legacy thereof, pre-recorded messages and such... Now you're tasked with building the dumbest moron that ever lived. Anybody spring to mind?  I would think your idiot boss would be the obvious choice. And even though Cave died before they would have been able to use any physical part of him, it's not beyond imagination that the pre-recorded messages could have somehow been used to pattern the AI.

Like all hypotheses, this is speculation at the moment, but I think the idea merits some exploration. I think I need to play again, and pay more attention to Wheatley's dialogue. The Cave is in the details, so to speak.

Thanks for reading.
-David.