The screams still echoed in his mind.
Rang in his ears. Reverberated in his skull.
Rattmann wasn't sure if they were real, or a memory, or one of... them.
Images flashed through his mind: his workmates locked in their offices, pounding against the glass walls, screaming, shouting, begging to be let out. Slumping to the floor as their bodies began to shut down, wilting from the noxious fumes of neurotoxin...
He slouched in the chair of his half-furnished temporary office - a brief displacement, he hoped, until the rest of the facility was cleared of gas. The cheap wooden desk was outfitted with a single computer monitor. No modem. Just a monitor. Blank and flat and lifeless. He avoided looking at it; he knew he would be able to see the reflection of his face on its surface.
And he didn't want to see the memory of the last two hours reflected in his own eyes.
He turned his eyes to the corner instead. There in the corner sat a lamp. A cheap desk lamp. He stared hard at it, trying to keep his mind empty. Trying not to remember.
"Rough day, doc?"
Rattmann shoved his hand into his pocket by reflex, fingers enclosing around the plastic pill bottle hidden there. His thumb traced the lid, ready to pop it off. There were a few doses left. Calling to him, as if from a distance. From the other end of a tunnel. Faint beneath the phantom screams in his ears.
"You need them, Doug. You know you do."
No. He could do this. Without the medicine. He could do this.
"Doug..."
He forced his hand from his pocket and set it on the desk in a tight fist. His knuckles were whitening with the strain. He focussed on the tension, training his mind explicitly on the sensation of his hand against the surface of the desk.
Skin and wood. Skin and wood. He could do this.
Rattmann started listing all the bones of the human hand by their scientific names. He felt his blood pressure beginning to rise.
"...Doug..." The lamp.
"Doug." The pills.
"Doug..."
"Doug. Doug. Doug."
"Doug!"
Rattmann whipped around in his chair, eyes wide, panting. His coworker Greg stood in the office doorway, looking frazzled and still a little shaken.
"Uh." Carefully Doug unfisted his hand and set it in his lap. He felt like he'd just woken from a trance. His palms were sticky with sweat.
"I said your name like eight times. Are you... Never mind." Greg cracked a nervous smile. "What am I saying. Nobody's alright right now." He chuckled, a flimsy sound, and ran a hand through his hair. "Want... ah, want to get some coffee?"
Doug Rattmann somehow managed to rise from his chair to stand on shaky legs.
"Yes," He pushed his hand into his pocket and popped the lid off his pill container, "please."
It was then that Aperture began developing the personality cores.
GLaDOS' murderous impulses gradually dwindled in number. Measures were taken each time she was activated to ensure a minimal loss of life, were she to continue releasing neurotoxin every time she woke. It was only after countless months of work and millions of dollars invested in the application of the cores that she finally began cooperating more. But all the same, she remained coldly subdued.
She was only pleasantly passive, no longer attempting to eradicate all sources of life within the facility. Acting as if their efforts to subdue her had finally been successful. The rest of the facility seemed to suddenly be at ease with her. Like she was some horse that had finally been broken, and did whatever it was told to do.
There was a darkness lurking within her, Rattman knew. And it had nothing to do with faulty programming.
"Since the installation of my new morality core," she'd stated tonelessly, earlier that day, "I've lost all interest in killing. Now I only crave science. I find myself drawn to the study of consciousness. There's an experiment I'd like to perform during 'Bring Your Cat to Work Day.'"
Greg had been more than pleased. The morality core had been his project, after all. "Wonderful!"
"I'll have the box and the cats. Now I just need one more thing."
"What's that?"
"...A little neurotoxin."
"Well," Greg had only paused in a moment's indecision. The fool. "As long as it's for science."
Doug had suspected foul play from the start.
And now, holed up in his office at three in the morning, surrounded by a sea of scribbled notes and sketches and all manner of pencils and post-its, he thought hard.
No doubt she was plotting. Brooding. Luring the humans into a false sense of security with her passive trickery. Pleasant words and soothing computerised tones. And if he was right, if she was up to something... they didn't have much time.
But no, Doug tried to rationalize, she needs to test. If there was one thing reliable about the GLaDOS construct, it was that she had the compulsive need to test. And she required humans to carry out testing. So essentially, she couldn't eliminate the humans of her facility without depriving herself of that one necessity.
...Or could she?
Which impulse was greater? The science, or the murder?
Rattmann hunched over his dimly illuminated desk, nervously chewing on his fingernails.
Something had to be done. Someone had to do something. He had to do something.
But what could he do?
A pen spun in the hand not occupied between his teeth, twirling around his bony fingers in a spastic dance. Absently he stilled the pen, then pressed its inky nub to a nearlying post-it note. Without tearing his eyes from the middle distance, his hand sketched abstractly across the paper. The ink began to trace the path of his mind.
When he finally refocussed on the present, the doodle of his mind's eye lay before him. Doug capped his pen and set it aside, feeling numb from a sudden rush of adrenaline. He pushed away from his desk and stood; pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Crumpled the slip of paper and shoved it into his pocket.
They called him the Rat Man, down in the laboratories. Scrawny, timid. Reserved to the shadows, working in the background. Out of sight, out of mind.
It was time to live up to his name.
