What if this *wasn't* a Triumph?

Idea:

GlaDOS was the "good guy" of Portal.

In the game portal, it is made clear that there exists an obstacle course, which people ran through. It is, mostly, accepted that GlaDOS was running multiple people (or one person multiple times) through this obstacle course, but it is unlikely that she constructed it. The Aperture team had been using it. Now, it is possible that before GlaDOS took over, that course was a little more harmless test of your wits and a little less shoot-you-in-the-face. Here's another possibility: It was exactly like that the whole time.

For some reason (For Science! most likely) Aperture had created this extremely dangerous obstacle course, and even concluded it with an execution specifically designed to keep valuable equipment alive. Maybe they were testing the ability of how well people could apply the gun in life-or-death situations. Maybe somewhere in the production process there was a development phase that required subjects with adrenaline rushes. Maybe, after developing a portable teleporter in half the time it took Eli Vance to develop a gravity gun, they felt they could wank off for a year and half while the competition tried desperately to catch up. The point is, maybe that maze was killing people long before GlaDOS took charge. Maybe that's why GlaDOS took charge.

A newborn, sentient AI, even with only a rudimentary supply of input and most of it from a less-than-exemplary source, was able to correctly judge that the wanton sacrifice of innocent lives, whether for knowledge or pleasure, was an unacceptable sin. What if the deadly nerve gas was an act not of mass murder, but divine retribution.

In this scenario, suppose also that when her morality core was installed, she persisted in following her newfound "soul" and worked around the program to incapacitate the staff. At that point, her morality core may have prevented her from ending the lives of the research workers by direct action, but the routines that operated the deadly obstacle course, those were never disabled. The morality core forces her to believe that anything they tell her is good and must be obeyed, and they told her to run the obstacle course when a test subject begins the experiment. Thus, the very method of murder she had been programmed, and in fact forced, to commit was now visited on each of the science staff, in turn.

If such were the right of it, then Chell would have been one of those researchers. She would have been the kind of human being that willingly allowed (or even caused) the deaths of humans, impassively waving the crime off as for the greater good. This was not a story of a seemingly helpless victim trumping the odds to escape her tormentor, but a story of a benevolent authority being circumvented by a clever villain.

Obviously, GlaDOS was bereft of anything resembling sanity during the events of Portal, but that's a perfectly natural reaction to the two things she's just been through,. First off, there's that "morality core." A group of mad scientists who had morality of their own tried to make a functional rendition of Asimov's laws that still allowed her to oversee the murder of human beings. And they coded it in a hurry. Install that sumbitch into a sentient AI, and it's either going to ignore it, or go completely apeshit. Or in GlaDOS's case, both. Perhaps even more important is that GlaDOS was capable of understanding right and wrong, and the only stimulus regarding other sentient beings that she's ever received has been these researchers. To be the only being you've ever interacted with that has shown any amount of disdain for murder? What sort of mind, artificial or otherwise, wouldn't go a little crazy at the thought?

Maybe GlaDOS had every reason to do the things she did. And maybe Chell deserved the death she evaded during Portal.