BOY DO I LOVE SWEATING: 1.
Now I am a man of constant sorrow,
And I know that I've taken all the love I could borrow.
And I've seen days of golden suns,
But they changed.
Now I believe in the villain, I believe in the thief
Who steals what he is given, holds it in his teeth.
- "The Villain" Birds & Batteries
For a second all Chell can do is stand there, totally blank. Eyes wide and unfocused, unprocessing. Her jaw doesn't drop – this isn't a surprise, it's just too much. These colors. Dirt under her bare toes. The breeze through the wheat is a lullaby that washes through her and leaves her insensible. Sunlight warms her hair. Sunlight.
Hard light bridges, says a tiny voice in the back of her mind, and the moment of sensory oblivion is over as suddenly as it began.
This is all a clever mechanical panorama. The sky is blue panels. The breeze is from an apparatus vent, the pressure differences between portals, a massive cooling fan turning somewhere. Take a step into the wheat and you'll find the hidden aerial faith plates. Her back hits the door of the shed, its handle jabbing into her spine. All the sunlight and the colors are getting screechy and heavy in her mind. She takes a long gulp of air then and shuts her eyes tight against the bombardment. No, this is good, this is fine, this is real. It's over.
No more fighting. No more tricks. You don't have to think like this anymore.
That may not be entirely true, she concedes to herself. Some other fight may lie in wait, some new opponent, be it man, nature, diabolical robot overlord, or her own post-traumatic stress. But for now...
Daring to open her eyes again (it's all still there, thank God, field and sky), she slides down into a seated position against the shed. She looks at her naked hands and feet, feeling stupid and lost without the portal device. It feels incredible to sit perfectly still, even if she can't shake the feeling of nerves crawling impatiently under her skin, telling her to run run run. She wills her brain to turn off again so it can flood up with pure dumb tranquility, like it did a minute ago, but it does not comply.
Crickets serenade her. Not turrets anymore, because no turrets ever again.
She'll keep holding still, she decides, to let her heart stop hammering and her rigid muscles relax, but it won't do to abandon her survivalist mindset entirely. She doesn't know what year it is or who the hell might be around, if anyone. This is a cultivated field; no crop grows so neatly and uniformly of its own accord.
GLaDOS said she saw humans on the surface. She cannot brush the thought away, as she usually does with all the dubious information GLaDOS gives her. Gave her.
Of all the hypothetical horrors in store for her, the thought of other humans makes Chell's blood run the coldest of all. She does not know if she can speak to another human, or more precisely, if she can explain anything, or if she wants to explain anything, or if there are words to explain, or if there is anything to explain.
She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, sighing.
She cannot, in fact, remember having looked another human in the eyes. Her first clear memory is of emerging from a weird sleepwalking torpor in the relaxation chamber, finding herself already on her feet, standing with the door flung open and a blue light in her face (don't even think of that voice, don't think about it). Every hazy fragment before that… is a strain. She'd gathered them up and counted them in the dim silence of Aperture Science's 1950s testing lobby, as she paused to sit and rest and wonder if she was going to die here, finally, miles underground.
Her first trek through Aperture and the subsequent cryosleep come back as a confusing flick of images like an old nightmare. The same phrase of classical music over and over. A hot ventilation shaft full of cans. The moment she had panicked at a swift orange movement among the shadowed pistons, only to realize it was her reflection. Total black dreamlessness, and the feeling that some vital part of her was being drained away...
The only thing she remembers with total clarity is the moment she came half-awake in the parking lot, surrounded by burning bits of machinery, just before she was unceremoniously escorted back into the facility: the sensation of hot, gravelly asphalt against her cheek and a snatch of birdsong in the open air. It had felt like she'd broken every bone in her body, but the sense of savage triumph burning in her throat had eclipsed the pain. This is both her favorite and most hated memory.
Of life before the testing track, there is even less, and it veers into dangerous territory, almost making her perversely glad that she can't remember it. Almost.
She knows she came to Aperture of her own volition, coerced by nothing but her own cowardice.
She knows she won first place in a science fair a long time ago. (Or did she make this one up?)
She remembers her throat closing up during her intake interview.
And she remembers when her father died.
Something is touching her face, bringing her back to the field: a gnat bumbling gently against her cheek. She is about to be enveloped in an entire cloud of gnats. As she ducks under them and dodges away on her knees, Chell finds herself smiling. It makes her face feel better. In fact, it makes all of her feel better. Gnats. Who else in the world has ever been this grateful to see a cloud of gnats? An unhealthy-sounding wheeze, the first sound she has made for an eternity, escapes her lips, startling her. I'm laughing. The realization makes her laugh harder and the wheeze grows, beginning to resemble a proper laugh. And then, throwing her head back as if to let the sun thaw her throat, she croaks out one single, halting, atrociously unmodulated question: "W–why am I so bad at laughing?"
Just as she's about to succumb to hysterics at the grotesqueness of her own voice, she hears a sound from inside the shed behind her and she's on her feet, blood frozen.
The sound is a voice, a human voice, a distant voice, an endless wail, getting louder, getting closer. She stares.
"No." Her second sentence in known history, whispered, and her third. "No." Any voice but that voice. This isn't happening, I'm outside, I'm done, it was over, it needs to stay over. Run away into this field right now and pretend you never heard anything—
There's no time to run. She can't coax any of her muscles into action anyway. Her body seems to have independently decided on fight over flight. She hasn't moved an inch when the shed door erupts open with a tremendous BANG and the wail at full volume changes direction into a sharp "OW!", setting her teeth on edge. And here he is, tumbling out with a charred Companion Cube just slipping out of his grasp. Chell's eyebrows go up. A Companion Cube! As the door slams, his manic, unfocused eyes settle on her and his mouth opens in surprise just before he tips all the way over the Companion Cube and faceplants in the hard scrabbly dirt just outside the shed.
Wheatley. Man-Wheatley.
Their eyes meet briefly as Man-Wheatley fights to catch his breath, scrambling to his knees. Chell glares, unable to keep from shaking, her throat back in knots. His gaze quickly darts down again. He hasn't regained enough composure to give her any kind of expression except the shifty eyes. Unsurprising, given the circumstances of this reunion. She is too frightened and too pissed to volunteer anything. So she waits, glaring, to see which of them cracks first, to see if he comes out with an apology, to see if she will haul him to his feet and punch him or just turn and leave him here… if only she could move, if only she could stop shaking.
What is GLaDOS thinking, or Caroline, or whoever the hell? Whose idea of a joke is this? What does she expect me to do with this? What happened to the detailed revenge plan, the room where all the robots scream at you? This is not the human I am so petrified to meet. This is not a human.
With mild interest she notices the details of his body's appearance for the first time really: boringly tall, wiry limbs, hair a cowlicked mass of an indecisive dark-blondish color, and the most infuriating giant hangdog eyebrows which she can tell he is going to begin waggling any moment and never stop. Even as a human, he is the least intimidating robot overlord she has ever seen. His long feet are bare. He wears an orange jumpsuit just like hers, only much cleaner, though his face and hands are almost as dirty as the Companion Cube. Then she can't stop looking at the Companion Cube, fingers itching.
This must be the longest he's ever gone without speaking. Any time now.
His head ducks lower and lower, almost like he's falling asleep, but instead of evening out, his breath becomes increasingly ragged. Getting impatient, she manages to take one step toward him and reaches for the Companion Cube.
She doesn't even realize he's crying until his hands suddenly come up, big knuckles crushed to his forehead. Kicking the Companion Cube at her clumsily, like a child, he crumples into a sobbing heap. She grabs the Companion Cube, running her fingers over its smooth rounded edges, and her glare hardens. What foolishness is this?
He finally looks up and meets her gaze, his wet filthy face screwed up with contempt, and the bellowing begins, tearing his throat raw.
"This is disgusting! Utterly disgusting! Leaking everywhere! I—I can't even see out of this stupid oily piece of shit body! How could you do this to me?" he screams, clawing at the jumpsuit. Chell flinches away from the violent gesture, seeing bombs and mashy spike plates.
He seems to seize upon this crack in her show of defense; he leans forward, sizing her up, his voice lower and more dangerous through the hoarse fog of tears. "So how are you going to fix this? Do you even understand? This is the worst thing that could happen."
The worst thing that could happen. She ices over at those words, staring directly into his eyes, lips pressed together, daring him to elaborate. The worst thing that could happen.
Man-Wheatley stares back, eyes dimming. He appears to lose steam all at once. His face slackens, looking suddenly half-dead, drained and terrified.
He throws himself down onto his back, new arms spread in the sun, with a dramatic moan followed by continued mumbling. Chell catches the phrase "I'm going to die". Nauseated, she watches his incapacitated figure as he opens and closes his eyes, crying himself out. His eyes are blue, pale, burnt-out blue. She sits down on the edge of the Companion Cube and hugs her knees to keep the trembling at bay.
As if her own fear wasn't enough, she feels saddled with his fear now, too. Two humans, one a machine, trapped in a field, trapped in bodies, afraid of humans. A joke GLaDOS would like. She had never considered that it might turn out like this, back when she and GLaDOS, working their way up through the bowels of the facility, had come face to face with a hatch stamped with Mandatory Employee Intelligence Transfer Relaxation Crypt.
"Go back and look at that hatch one more time."
Chell had already examined the hatch twice, at GLaDOS's behest, and backtracked around the corner to look for other paths twice, also at GLaDOS's behest. No way to budge the big handle widget, even with her foot braced against the door for leverage, even with both feet. No manual override procedure, or indeed any buttons of any kind. No way to proceed, no way back, and nary a portalable surface in sight.
Her brain twanged. No sleep. No fucking adrenal vapor. The tang of oil permeating the test shaft had grown unbearable a long time ago, and the occasional whiff of cold antiseptic air convinced her that they were literally close enough to smell the modern enrichment center. She approached the door and pressed her palms against the rusted metal in vain, fervently imagining an elevator humming quietly on the other side. A security camera was bolted to the wall at eye level next to her; its blunt head swiveled lazily to track her movement.
"Are you sure you're trying hard enough to open this thing?" demanded GLaDOS. "Put your weight into it."
Chell waited for the fat joke. None came. Emitting an exaggerated sigh through her nose, she threw her arms up in a shrug.
The camera whirred as if zooming in on her and the lock disengaged with a sudden deafening clang. Startled, she leaped back, banging into the catwalk rail. "OHMYGOD," chirped the potato as the portal device lurched. "What did you do?" They watched as the hatch shuddered, its spoke-handle turning, then groaned open, revealing a shadowy passage beyond which Chell could see the interior of a starkly-lit room.
"Was that a motion sensor?" wondered GLaDOS. "But it should have picked you up from the beginning…"
Paying no attention, Chell barged straight through. She was greeted by the familiar sight of blank monitors, overturned computer chairs, and abandoned coffee mugs, arranged into an untidy ring of work stations around one large central switchboard. Reinforced glass windows along the curving walls looked into a number of dark chambers, each accessible through another menacing vault door. It appeared to be a sort of control annex.
As she cast about for another exit, several of the ubiquitous Aperture warning signs caught her eye.
"WARNING: IN CASE OF ZOMBIE ATTACK, rouse and release crypt occupants as a vital distraction."
"Notice: Crypt occupants are in barbiturate-induced comas, not trances. Aperture Science asks you to disregard any prophecies they attempt to make." And a scrawled note taped under that: "Please do not conduct seances in relaxation chambers!"
"Remember: Keep a tranquilizer gun by your bedside in case you awaken with a crypt occupant standing over your bed, watching you sleep."
Something about this seemed more ominous than usual, if that was even possible. Were actual humans asleep in these relaxation chambers? She peered into one of the windows but could discern very little beyond the frosted glass, just a smear of greenish ambient light. Turning to the vault door, she braced one foot against it, clenched her jaw, and gave the handle a wrench – but it opened easily, noiselessly…
"Stop."
She faltered in the doorway, unsettled by the razor edge running through GLaDOS's single word of admonition. The two of them remained in the doorway, looking in. The light streaming from behind illuminated rows of weedy scientist bodies, each suspended in a complex automated pod of gelatinous green.
"Do not, under any circumstances, enter this chamber."
Mandatory… Employee Intelligence Transfer… Relaxation Crypt. Oh.
Chell couldn't believe it had taken her so long to realize what this place was. Whom it might hold. Why GLaDOS, usually so flippant, might suddenly sound tightly controlled, breathless almost, and why she might not want to look any closer. That was okay with Chell; she had no more desire than GLaDOS to confront the half-alive victims of Aperture's experiments. After a moment, she stepped back, shut the door, and turned around, but the chamber stayed in her mind: the dead sterile air, all the watery lights and darknesses running over the marble-still contours of those vacant faces…
She moved among the other vault doors to the largest one, labeled TO MAIN LIFT SHAFT, but GLaDOS spoke again. "Wait a minute. Take a look at that switchboard in the center. Is there a way we can move these subjects to the extended relaxation center, or even to individual vaults? I might want to… get a better look at them. Just to determine if they'll be useful at all. If they've been put into induced comas, a few of them may have escaped brain damage," she noted parenthetically.
Well.
If GLaDOS wanted to look her past life in the eye, wanted to relive things perhaps best left forgotten, wanted to walk that dark precarious path littered with unseen failures, traumas, heartaches, and other such nightmarishness… that was her business.
Besides, Chell knew which path she'd choose, if she ever had the luxury.
The big red button on the console was hard to miss: "Add Crypt Occupants to Testing Queue (Warning! Only press if and when intracranial hypertension has completely subsided!)" She made a melodramatic face and pummeled it with a balled-up fist, an unsubtle motion for an unsubtle button, then quickly turned on her heel and left for the lift shaft as buzzers and flashing lights began activating inside the chambers.
Maybe someday she'll return the favor.
She could tell GLaDOS was still preoccupied with the contents of the relaxation crypt, but not for the obvious reasons. As they portaled and slid and bounced their way up the rest of the test shaft in increasingly large bounds, GLaDOS mused about the merits of having a batch of humans in the facility again.
In the lift shaft: "I wonder if those sadsack employee popsicles were vitrified properly. Were those chambers even up to code? If there's tissue damage, they won't be viable organ donors. Well, I guess if even so much as a kidney survived, they'll be worth having around."
In the vertiginous climb over the gel pipes, with conversion gel slopping every which way through the ventilation duct behind them: "What percentage of those popsicles do you think were the result of a successful intelligence transfer experiment? And what percentage were just contused into oblivion? I'll bet it was ninety-five to five. Still, science."
In the pneumatic elevator on the way back up at last: "Hang on. If Aperture developed artificial intelligence in tandem with human brain mapping, and if I— if Caroline— …if that experiment was a success, what about all those other subjects? And what about all the… Ugh. That would explain a lot. Look, just find the moron, I need to do some more thinking."
None of this was heading in a pleasant direction, but Chell happened to have other, more pressing problems. As they emerged into the enrichment center, all at once she was acutely aware of the changeable nature of the facility, and of the fact that it was now under the control of a personality construct designed to make poor decisions, and of the severe disadvantage she and GLaDOS faced as they entered his strange new territory. The enrichment center itself felt different, seeming to breathe down her neck more than ever as she slipped along the catwalk.
Then, without warning, his furious voice rang out all around them.
"For God's sake, you're boxes with legs!"
The sound sent a bloodless shudder rolling up her skin. GLaDOS practically snarled. As he ranted on about nothing comprehensible, Chell ducked cringing down the catwalk and toward an open office, her heart racing; she hadn't dreamed they would encounter him this quickly. Be cool, Chell. Through the observation window they saw a chamber full of hybrid cube-turret critters hobbling aimlessly around a button without touching it, while Wheatley's gigantic image berated them from upon a monitor the height of the room. She raised an eyebrow at the sight of that ridiculous monitor. How incredibly typical.
GLaDOS had a plan: "Paradoxes," she had breathed back in the control room of the abandonment hatch, and Chell had heard a quick smile full of sharp teeth in her voice. "No A.I. can resist thinking about them!"
Once they'd managed to portal inside the chamber, Chell hoisted one of the frankenturret monstrosities onto the button quickly, not letting herself think about the fate of the floor where she stood if the A.I. holding it up were to suddenly fry to death. The blank monitor snapped back to life and once again Wheatley's bright eye regarded her from under its smugly hooded plates. She drew herself up and looked daggers into the blue beam, determined not to betray the panic fluttering in her chest.
The boxes-with-legs shorted out under the force of GLaDOS's paradox, but Wheatley, unfortunately, did not.
"It just goes to show you…" said GLaDOS in a grim undertone. "There's a certain degree of idiocy that can't be programmed, you know."
And with that enigmatic observation, it was back to the testing track.
As they breezed through his pathetic first test and began the more difficult ones, Chell could hear gears turning and circuits closing in GLaDOS's mind. She whispered maddening hints to Chell in the elevators between tests, refusing to explain herself further but sounding wickeder every time. Chell hated GLaDOS's gradual descent into chirpiness more than anything else in the new testing track – it was enough having one A.I. heckle her mercilessly in a convincingly human vocal inflection.
Despite her attempts at caginess, it was obvious GLaDOS believed that the intelligence dampening sphere, like her, had originated from a human, and that his human body was among those vitrified in the Intelligence Transfer Relaxation Crypt. How this information might congeal into an actual plan, though, was anyone's guess.
After the adrenaline surge of finding Wheatley again, Chell wilted, hauling her trembling limbs through the tests. The portal device on her arm weighed a million pounds. The stench of oil wouldn't leave her hair, and now it competed with the foreboding scorched smell of Wheatley ruining various chunks of the facility. At least he wasn't actively trying to do her in – he seemed content with the rounds of merciless heckling. In between, he watched her like a hawk as she worked, his blue gaze inscrutable, glancing occasionally at the decisive button.
The knowledge that he was watching made her even more jittery, aware of her own surfaces and chamber surfaces and the tense electric air moving between them, the difference between her and everything else. The sensation of her disheveled hair floating in that staticky gap. No matter where she stood in each chamber, she felt the exact angle to his stupid exhibitionist monitor screen. Maybe she couldn't expect him not to engage in the practice of looking, having been structurally conceived as one big eyeball, but wasn't there anything that might require his attention? A nuclear meltdown, maybe? Not even the button? No, his eyes darted to the button but returned to her. She wanted to close like a flower at night, fold up her hair and put it away. She retied her ponytail, holding the portal device under one arm and looking back at his impassive image. If he were a human, at least I could knee him in the balls.
GLaDOS harped in her ear about his increasing immunity to the testing euphoria, but she was too busy trying not to fall into a pit and die to really worry about it. He still hadn't found the humans from the crypt, so he needed her. What could he do except make more tests? Better exasperated outbursts than the pornographic moaning and optic-rolling of the early chambers…
Or so she'd figured, anyway, until he dropped her between tests.
She trusted her boots to handle falls of much greater magnitude, but that didn't make crashing through a ceiling any less terrifying. As the shock of landing rattled up her bones and debris spilled into the office around them, GLaDOS was already hissing: "Listen to me, this is what we're going to do." Wheatley's panicky chatter came echoing through the ruined ceiling from a distance, but she spoke over him in a quick, resolute whisper close to Chell's ear. "If I'm right, there should be a way to reverse the intelligence transfer procedure and put him back into his proto-moron human body. Of course, that's if we can find it. And if it isn't damaged beyond use. And if it was even in that crypt. And if he even came from a body. But if we can complete that procedure and sever the connection with his core-self, you'll be able to just rip it right out of my body, and there'll be nothing he can do about it – plus he'll be trapped in a smelly human body, and who wants that? Nobody. It'll be a living hell. Anyway, it isn't any better than my paradox idea, but as you haven't come up with anything, I am officially declaring it Plan B. And the ultimate revenge part is a nice bonus, isn't it? Let's go."
Her monologue finished, the potato fell silent again.
Chell just stared. This was the masterstroke GLaDOS had been cackling about in every elevator? Somehow she doubted transferring Wheatley to a human body actually constituted a fate worse than death, if it could even be done. Still, as GLaDOS had said, nobody had any better ideas.
It turned out Plan B couldn't have come a moment sooner: as soon as she reached the testing track again, Wheatley went all shifty, blathering on about some surprise they were going TO DIE FOR, if you caught his drift, bwahahaha. In a way, this sudden bout of fiendish moustache-twirling proved to be a boon of sorts, because when he finally flung her sideways into a spiky-plate ambush, she found she wasn't surprised at all. She just gave his monitor her most expressive "I'm-judging-you" face and then portaled away, leaving him wailing at her to come back.
"I might throw in a few years in the room I built where all the robots scream at you," said GLaDOS in a conversational tone, "but all in all, if we can get this human thing to work, I'll— wait!" They had just reached another dark office filled with the feeble glow of computer screens. "Can you use these computers?"
Chell thought her talents lay more in the realm of breaking computers than of using them, all things considered, but she nudged at a mouse and jabbed some buttons. Nothing.
"Too bad. I thought maybe we could look that human up in the queue. If we can get to a core input receptacle, I'll be able to find him. Probably. Unless the moron came up with a really good password. Then again, how likely is that? Just keep doing whatever you're doing and get us there alive."
There really was nothing else to say on the matter, and she didn't mention it again as Chell continued dodging her way through a series of ineffective death traps. When at last she dragged her deadened legs up to the base of his lair in GLaDOS's old chamber, now crumbling under the strain of Wheatley's utter ineptitude, she thought GLaDOS was going to short herself out with excitement. She located the core input receptacle and stabbed the potato unceremoniously into it.
After a moment GLaDOS sang, "I found it! We're in business! Huh… a lot of this information is redacted, but it's definitely him. Subject #848, Intelligence Dampening Sphere, it's got his intake interview here. Ho ho… and vitrified 1990. He'll be a bit rusty, but it looks like there's no permanent damage. Now I just have to get the thing up here."
The defective cores they'd spotted on the way in would serve as a distraction; in his corruption he would become more vulnerable to the transfer, less able to function, to resist. "He's certainly not going to like it, so be prepared for a hissy fit. Remember, he's no longer the same entity that grew up in that body – he wasn't programmed with any of its memories, just its basic personality framework – not to mince words, its idiocy. So he has no idea how to be human." The potato let out a sinister little chuckle. "I can't wait. In the meantime, give him hell from me."
So Chell went to fight him.
I am close, so close. I will take off this jumpsuit and bathe and eat fruit and sleep for hours, days, weeks, and I will dream again and then wake up from the dreams. Just one more fight.
This was what it always came down to. The goal was always survival, survival and escape, and to hell with everything else. Maybe once he'd been her stalwart companion, guide, resident expert hacker and teller of waggish jokes, but now they were enemies and she wasn't going to dither about it while the facility collapsed about their ears. In any case, she'd been around artificial intelligences long enough to know that for all their yammering, they were nothing more than gadgets to be dropped into pits, programs to be fried via paradox, gears to be crushed beneath her heel.
Now he taunted her, swaying and swaggering through the air above her, ordering her to lie down and die like a good girl. This machine is all that stands between me and sky, birdsong, asphalt, victory, she thought, glaring up at him full-intensity. When she slammed the first corrupted core onto his smoking chassis, a jolt of pure grim satisfaction flooded through her – he deserved the most hellish punishment GLaDOS could conceive.
"Yes! The procedure's off to a great start! Okay, watch out below…" came GLaDOS's disembodied voice. Before Chell had time to think, the body emerged from the ceiling encased in its pod and clanked down solidly behind the chassis.
To her surprise, the pod had already been drained of its specimen preservation fluid, and the man inside was standing slumped with his rangy forearms pressed against the glass, though she couldn't tell to what degree he was truly conscious. His hair, dark with the wet of the fluid, lay plastered down his forehead, and his skin was paper-white, nerd-white. He wore what appeared to be compression shorts and a pair of big rounded plastic eyeglasses drooped askew over his nose. Nice to meet you, proto-moron.
A bundle of wires connecting the base of the body's neck to Wheatley's chassis snapped to and fro as the core reactivated, showering sparks across the room.
"Wh–what have you put onto me? What is that?"
Oh. Chell stared, the portal device hanging akimbo. Oh. The odd slurred sound of Wheatley's protest had issued not from his core, but from the mouth of the man behind the glass, his eyes still closed and his fists convulsing. The horrible cracking working of his jaw and the fractured quality of his voice sent cold fingers up her spine.
Wheatley fell silent – utterly silent – and looked at her with a trembling, tightly constricted pupil, and she knew the real fight was about to begin. A second later, his shields were repositioned and he was lobbing another round of bombs in her direction, taking advantage of her momentary hesitation. But she hadn't put a hundred turrets out of action to no gain, and her reflexes didn't fail her. As she sprang away and raised the portal device, she forced herself to tune out the twitching human behind her opponent.
His aim became ballistic, firing bombs out lightning-fast in haphazard clusters instead of at one fixed point – because of the added corruption or just out of rage? She tripped around him, trying to place portals whenever he paused. His voice coughed, and she heard him say weakly, "Enough," from inside the pod, and after a few more coughs he was telling her he despised her, he loathed her, he wouldn't have cared if she'd dropped dead two steps out of the relaxation center and he would appreciate it if she'd drop dead now.
Enough indeed.
Another corrupted core, and the man's eyes flew open, rolling and darting for a moment before they trained on her and then narrowed in time with the nattering abuse pouring from his throat. In the thrashing chassis, Wheatley's blue ocular display floated blankly around the room. One more core, and suddenly the figure was pounding at the glass in a frenzy and Wheatley dangled lifeless but for a few sparks – but no, Chell understood, now the man was Wheatley, all of Wheatley – he ran his fully-functional fingers around and around the pod, searching for a seam or a release trigger – he grimaced at the system announcement asking his authorization to cut the connection and finalize the consciousness transfer: "What do you think?" "Interpreting vague answer as yes!" "NONONONONO!"
With a wrench, she tore her eyes from him in time to see a group of panels unfold and present the stalemate resolution button. She shot one portal, then another, leaping through to the button at a full sprint, not stopping to wonder why the man's face split into a triumphant grin as she passed him, and then of course— BANG.
The next thing she knew, she was on her back, half blinded and deafened with a sudden stabbing headache. As she fought to breathe, the only thing she could register was the uppermost part of the pod toppling out of her range of vision, followed by a startling crash as it shattered apart.
"OW FUCK IT." She managed to turn her head and saw the man's bloody hands clutching at one of his bare feet, the other hopping around her orange portal to escape the radius of the broken glass; then she blinked the daze from her eyes and he was standing directly above her, silhouetted against the bare ceiling light. His expression was veiled behind the glare of his crooked eyeglasses.
"Wha— are you still alive?" he said, sounding indignant. "You are joking. You have got to be kidding me."
An unexpected quaver went through Chell at the terrifying proximity of his voice, the immediacy of it – that familiar voice emitted through moving lips by hoarse vocal cords.
Clenching her jaw, she seized the portal device lying next to her with bruised, aching arms and pointed it at him instinctively, provoking a savage giggle from him.
"Oh, what are you gonna do with that, love? Nothing, that's what. You think you've got me beat with your stupid dirty trick, do you? You've just signed your own… death… certificate. With, er, your cold dead hand. I'm still in control—" with one unsteady hand, he grabbed a bunch of the cables leading out of the back of his neck, pointing to them as he leaned over her— "and I have no idea how to fix this place."
The room shook as it crumbled around them. Ceiling panels came crashing down in cascades.
"You had to play bloody cat and mouse, didn't you?"
But Chell wasn't listening to his tirade any more after that: she was feeling a rush of air tasting miraculously of green and dirt and night, and she was seeing the moon glinting over his shoulder (how long have we been this close, this absurdly, impossibly close to the surface?), the idea was in her mind (and how deranged am I, how crazy have I gone running around like a rat in a maze, to even consider this—this lunacy?) and she shifted her aim and fired—
Whew, cliffhanger! What could she be doing with the moon? Har har har. I haven't written fiction of any kind for 6 years, so please give me constructive criticism! Tear me apart!
Note: On September 5 I replaced the original chapter one, first posted August 20, with this majorly edited version. Sorry about that. I let my excitement for the project get the best of me and made the extremely noob mistake of publishing the chapter waaaaay before I was totally satisfied with it. If you're curious, the original version wasn't that different, just much shorter and crappier.
Second Note: SPOILER ALERT, THERE'S GONNA BE SOME SEX IN THIS STORY SOMEDAY. Just a warning to anyone who's not into smut. I expect it'll be quite slow going, though.