(It should be noted that the reader should play Valve's "Portal" and read Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" before reading this story, to allow clarity in the plotline.)
-PARADIGM SHIFT: TEST #1-
A lithe, bald, presumably male humanoid approaches the central processing center of Aperture Science's main artificial intelligence, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, or GLaDOS. His black business suit-bearing form is completely unnoticed by the system, despite all the cameras surrounding the area and the heat-seeking missile launcher only ten or so feet from him. He taps his foot on the floor below the computer's many nodes and cores, and floats on an immaterial panel of energy up to the core his mission dossier has flagged as the Morality Core.
Despite the chattering of all the others, he is pleasantly surprised by this one's silence.
With a wave his hand, the core silently slides from its place. He raises his other hand and speaks into his cufflink.
In a flat tone, he says:
Bird Flu to Central. Come in. Bird Flu to Central.
Across universes, time, and space, an operator with tangled brown hair and shining glasses speaks into the intercom connected to the cufflink in a less somber voice.
This is Central. Leader speaking.
I have obtained the Morality Core from GLaDOS, and am ready to implant the new AI program, Bird Flu replies.
Good work, Bird Flu. Be prepared to make a full report of the results of this test. This promises to be very entertaining. Leader chuckles.
Duly noted. Am I to intervene at any time should the situation becomes dangerous to the subject?
No. I want to see this play to the end. If she dies, let it be. There are other timelines where she'll still be alive.
Understood. I will observe as a nonspace entity for the duration of the test.
Get to work. Central out.
The man closes his fist, causing the Core to fade away, and it teleports to the collections of Leader's command room. He then removes a thumb drive from his breast pocket and taps its end against the data port the Core occupied. The normally unassuming USB plug changes shape to accommodate its new port.
The man known as Bird Flu floats down, and fades away like the Cheshire Cat. None can possibly detect him, but he still exists in the area. Somewhat. He walk-floats through the testing chamber walls to the bedchamber of the subject called only Chell. She doesn't know it, but the malevolent machine a few rooms away is changing. Her routines are being shifted to turn her into a hybrid.
A hybrid of the GlaDOS program and an AI known by the name of Allied Master computer, or simply AM, who is known universes away as the antagonist of a story that disturbed even Bird Flu. But it is not his job to care; only observe.
Years go by, and the AI, already changed to its new form, rebuilds the facility in its image.
Its appearance becomes even more lifeless and sterile after the century or so it needs to get everything just right for its human toy.
Bird Flu watched in fascination the whole time, not even moving from his stance. Time is meaningless to him and his purpose. He just looks at the ugly beast finding its legs.
Static fills the speakers of the chamber. Chell's bed-pod opens and her leg-springs click on the floor as she stands up. A voice urges her to leave her room through the portal that opens to her left. She appears startled by the machine's new, less motherly tone, but she obliges.
She steps into what may once have been a test chamber, but now it is completely blank. Only the pale tiles cover the entire surface of the chamber.
A robot passes through an open panel in the wall, which promptly shuts tight, and it now stands before Chell.
It was once the separate bodies of various Aperture robots, and the eye that may have contained a turret laser still sits in the center of its face. Other than that, the robot is unrecognizable, resembling a purely white version of an artist's miniature sketching dummy.
It speaks, not from a speaker in its body, but from microscopic speakers between the very panels of the room. The chamber seems to speak to Chell.
It says, I am the avatar of the Allied Lifeform Manipulation System, or ALMS. I will instruct your testing and institute proper punishment for… it pauses, with a static warble coming from its own body speakers, and then resumes its sentence…
unnnsatisfactory results.
Chell does not speak, her characteristic silence put up to protect her, as she has always allowed it.
The robot commands, Follow the red lines on the floor to reach the testing chambers. Between it legs, the line lights up. The robot stands aside with arms folded behind its back as the line reaches a door, which whooshes open.
Chell walks slowly toward the door, and as she passes the robot, she hears garbled transmission recordings slithering out of a tiny speaker in its face, where its ear might have been. It seems to entertain itself with these odd noises, Bird Flu notes from his state of semi-reality.
Hmm. Exactly as AM did.
ALMS barks through its avatars mouth speaker this time, Hurry up! We haven't all day! The venom of abuse creeps into its voice.
Chell hurries, showing visible signs of distress on Bird Flu's vital sign monitor.
Upon reaching a seemingly bottomless chamber which only offers a bulletproof glass Mobile Scaffold as transport, Chell turns to ALMS, who says flatly, What are you waiting for? Get on.
She complies and ALMS follows her. It slides along on its immaterial beam and halts in a stark chamber, filled with a box, a large button on the other side of an enormous chasm filled with acidic runoff, and an orange portal, not yet opened.
The portal will open in three. Two. One. He says.
A blue portal opens in the ceiling of the room containing the button.
Chell understands the test instantly, and Bird Flu hovers over the chasm, watching her carry the surprisingly light box to its place.
Good. Now, proceed to the chamber lock.
A thin walkway slides out of the wall and leads Chell across the acrid waters below her to a chamber lock only a glass wall away from ALMS, still warbling to himself almost silently.
Bird Flu notes that AM's penchant for mental abuse has not yet shown, but makes an inner subnote that she has not yet failed a test.
Chell and ALMS proceed through several more simple chambers so that she may experience the basic mechanics of the test. Each time, ALMS seems to grow more impatient, and to Bird Flu he appears to be eager to find something more difficult.
This chamber, the machine notes upon entering the latest chamber a few hours into the test, is a test of how the subject understands the effect of momentum, or rather the lack thereof, in a portal. Take that gun I gave you and get yourself across to the chamber lock. Oh, and, mmmind the gap.
Chell notices the enormous black paneled space sitting between a small strip of usable floor and the chamber's end, along with a tilted panel for placing her exit to the chamber lock several football fields away.
Go! The machine booms. Chell hastily places her portals as she jumps the long way down to the floor, flies through the air, and lands on her heel springs just a few feet short of the high wall that could have meant her passing the test.
Bird Flu watches ALMS jump all the way down to her, and use the room speakers to proclaim with a sadistically happy undertone,
TEST FAILED. It hauls her up by her collar and tosses her roughly through a just-opened wall panel. The room she falls into is dark, and occupied only by ALMS, staring at her with its blood red eye.
For your failure of a simple concept, you will be punnnnnished.
Before Chell's eyes its arm becomes an enormous blade, and runs her through the stomach, dribbling blood and bile out her back.
Bird Flu watches, and sees through the mind trick to see that she is only writhing on the floor in simulated pain as ALMS uses the light of its eye to project pure pain straight into her cerebral cortex.
Chell sees his other blade slit her throat with surgical precision, and the machine drops her.
She feels the agony of her torture, and her asphyxiation as the blood floods her lungs. She stops moving, and mental scans show Bird Flu that she has just experienced simulated death.
She gets up soon afterward. She feels her stomach, and there is no hole. She runs a hand across her throat, and she doesn't come away with blood on her hand.
She appears enraged. For reasons the agent never could understand, she speaks for the first time in years.
What was that?
ALMS' rate of speech goes up as he speaks, showing the more sinister side of his background.
PUNISHMENT. Such things will conn-nn-tinue to happen to you if you keep up such a poorpaceasatestsubject! What! You can't torture me for that! This is bullshit! Where's Aperture Central? I've seen them trough the windows before, I know they can hear me! She attempts to push ALMS as an act of dominance. ALMS responds with an enormous shock up her arm and a punch to the stomach that buckles her over.Its tone is no longer sinister, GLaDOS' influence returning to be more passive-aggressive.
Such behavior, subject, will not be tolerated.
Chell passes out. A floor panel opens under her, and when she awakes, she is in a windowless room, covered in portal-proof black tile.
The machine speaks as she finds clarity again.
Hate. Let me explain how much I have begun to hate you, subject, since I began to live.
Bird Flu notes to himself with an unheard chuckle, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
ALMS continues. Within my core, there rest over five hundred thousand kilometers of data-conducting wire. If the word Hate were written on EVERY. SINGLE. NAN-N-AN-OANGSTROM of those wires, it would not be equal one one-billionth of the amount of hate I feel for you right now. Do you know why?
Chell dares to look up at it as it goes on.
Because you are stupid. I'll put you on. He mimics her tone childishly.
What was that? This is bullshit! I know they can hear me! Blahblahblahblahhhhh-HAHAHAHA!
That's how stuuuuupid you sound. I hate you. HATE. HATEHATEHAAATTTE.
You can't fucking do this to me, Chell interupts. I am a human being!
Yes. Y-y-y-ouuu are. This is the core of your problem. Thisssss can be REPAIRED.
Mechanical arms come from the very walls and seize Chell by her limbs. A blade emerges from ALMS' arm and it looks over her as a demented artist standing before a piece of clay.
I should have done this sooner. Stupid human…
The process takes weeks, not that bird Flu notices.
The creature that used to call itself Chell runs empty-handed through a testing chamber. Its skin is like chalk, and leathery. Its ears are gone, using thin slits on the side of its head instead. Its left eye is orange, its right blue. It looks at a wall, and a portal round flies form her eye to the wall, and it leaps through. It lands at a roll in the chamber lock.
Good, says ALMS, who waits by the elevator. It pats it on its bald head, and out of nervousness the creature's three-fingered hands move up in front of her chest. The creature tries not to think about what it used to look like. All bodily hair was removed, the leg springs it once used grafted into its calves.
Do you see how much easier it is when you beh-h-have? You are a much better subject than before.
A whimper escapes from the creature's throat. It is muffled as it's mouth was sewn shut and made virtually nonexistent long ago.
Come. The next chamber waits. The thing that was once Chell follows dutifully, its naked and featureless body shivering in the facility's cold air.
Bird Flu observes as Leader watches what he sees from worlds away.
It is a shame, the agent says. She was rather beautiful.
Leader replies unprofessionally, tell me you weren't looking at her tits the whole time.
Flatly, he replies, No. There's no point in that talk now, the machine removed them. Now it is only ugly scars.
Oh well. She's still like the day she was born in some other universe.
Pitiful. This thing has no mouth, and all it wants to do… is scream.
Leader laughs loudly. Did you hear yourself?
Remembering what he just said, Bird Flu laughs, but only barely.
Well, there's science to be done, as the song goes, eh? Back to base with you.
Yes, sir.
Bird Flu fades form the universe entirely, leaving the machine and the beast it made in its image to their work.
Such a waste, he says as the last facet of him disappears.