Once again, this fic and the author note contain Portal 2 spoilers!

"Hmm, a carnivorous… bird. Brr. Give me the shivers, those things do. A bird that eats… cars? Gotta be at least the size of an ostrich. O… s… t… no, wait a minute, too many letters – "

"Pub, Wheats?"

The man being addressed looked up distractedly from his newspaper. "Can't tonight, sorry mate. Got things to do, haven't I? Now, a carnivorous bird…"

Colin sounded slightly impatient. "Well in that case, can you hang around a bit just now? We need to talk about this. These dodgy Americans are buying up the whole department lock, stock and barrel, making everyone sign NDs, making us move there..."

"Suits me – fast cars, white suits, lovely girls in bikinis…"

"You're thinking of, I dunno, Hollywood or somewhere. This place is in Ohio."

"Can't be that far away."

"Look, Wheatley, even you must have heard the rumours."

"Of course I have! Don't imply I'm the kind of person who doesn't hear about, you know, things. Always got one ear to the ground, that's me. But you know what they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?"

Colin stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed with astonishment, then just shook his head and left. Wheatley rolled his eyes, stuck his pen in his mouth, and went back to the crossword. After a moment or two he looked up again.

"Colin!"

Colin stuck his head back through the door, jacket half-on.

"Have you ever noticed, Colin, how a capital "I" is basically the same thing as a lower-case "l"? Cause I just have. And that, my friend, opens up a whole new world of possibilities." Wheatley was smiling.

He headed down the road to the Post Office with a spring in his step, his freshly signed new contract crisp in his back pocket. "Air mail please, love," he said with a grin as he slapped the envelope down on the counter. He felt a thrill of anticipation travel through him as he saw the shop girl reach for the exotic blue stamps. "Yep, they're the ones. Par avion." Carefully enunciating each letter. "That's the only kind of post for me from now on. Air mail! It's the only way to fly. Or indeed, post."

She seemed very impressed, and so she should be, but he left without a backwards glance, letting the door ding behind him on his way out. Can't afford to form any attachments now, Wheatley you old dog, he said to himself. You're leaving on a jetplane. He hummed tunelessly and sang the words under his breath as he strolled, enjoying the sunshine. Getting out of the country and seeing a bit of the world was no bad thing, especially now that those Russian men he played poker with had all of a sudden turned out to be a lot less friendly than they'd first seemed. And so, less than a week later, he was folding his lanky frame into a tiny seat and staring avidly out of the window as Heathrow grew smaller and smaller beneath him. Little ol' Wheatley was moving up in the world. He repressed a smirk at the subtle ingenuity of his own wordplay. You know what, he thought as the plane burst through the grey layer of clouds into the sunlight, this may well turn out to be the very best decision I have ever made.

"…So you just shave off all my hair, tape these things on to my head, then press the old magic button over there, and it records all my thoughts and memories, right, which basically means you'd have like a record of my entire personality, so that if I died, you'd have me saved on file. Like some sort of electronic ghost in the machine, as it were? Man alive, what an age we live in! Oop, and the voice too? No, no, go right ahead mate. Be my guest. Haha, fantastic!"

When he concentrated, Wheatley was actually fairly good at his job. He had long, dexterous fingers, and he was good at building components. He didn't always understand what they were for, but he kept his head down and his nose clean, and he really, really made the effort to concentrate. Because he really liked working for Aperture. Three hots and a cot, a lab coat with his name embroidered on the pocket, an absolutely massive facility in a beautiful rural setting… you had to hand it to them, they definitely knew how to do Science, oh yes. One day he wandered in and it was full of people discussing psychology, and the subconscious mind, and reward versus punishment as motivation. He stayed and listened for a while, but he didn't understand the difference between subconscious and unconscious, or indeed much else of what they were talking about. After a while he wandered out again, thinking he'd come to the wrong room by mistake.

Then came the day of the big breakthrough, and the whole lab had a party. Wheatley slurped champagne from a plastic flute as he tried to explain to his colleagues exactly why cricket was so much better than baseball, and boy were they loving it. His heart wasn't exactly in it though, as his eyes kept being drawn to a Chinese girl leaning on the wall opposite, wearing a tremendous pink dress. After a few glasses, he straightened his tie and strode over. Wheatley was not shy in talking to girls. Don't like that topic of conversation, love? Don't worry, another one'll be along in just a moment. His height also tended to work in his favour. And God bless the US, because here, they thought his accent was strange and exotic, rather than the source of comedy that it served as back home, thank you very much Jon bloody Pertwee.

It soon turned out that long, dexterous fingers weren't only useful for holding a soldering iron, and a thoroughly good time was had by all, even if he did say so himself.

The human Michael Wheatley died crying, shocked and uncomprehending on the floor of his fifth ever test chamber. Even at his best, he was unlikely to have made the connection between his going home after the party with a secretary who turned out to be the head of department's girlfriend, and his sudden transfer to the employee testing program. And Wheatley was certainly no longer at his best. He had passed rapidly through astonishment, outrage, terror, despair, and finally, when his foot slipped and he yelped and plummeted, pain. Lots and lots of pain. He had screamed, pleading, begging them to come and rescue him, until his lips were cracked and his throat could produce nothing more than a hoarse sigh. His last conscious thought was a wish for tea. Cause let's face it, the Americans might have their space program, but they'd never really mastered the art of the proper cuppa, and Wheatley was parched… I want to be subconscious now, he thought as tears ran down his face, and merciful darkness fell, moments before the panel beneath his body shifted and he was dumped unceremoniously into the furnace.

Wheatley the core had no memory of this, as it happened after his personality recording was complete. What was more, when he was uploaded into his new spherical form, his recollections of humanity were entirely removed. As far as he was concerned, his first memory was of staring up at an off-white, fluorescent-lit ceiling.

" … all the personalities in the archives to choose from, and you chose him?" The voice came from somewhere off to the left, and it sounded dubious.

"Well sure, the guy used to drive me crazy. Yap-yap-yapping all the time, hell, being around him used to knock 20 points off my IQ, let alone the GLaDOS." Another voice, standing on the other side of him.

"…ceiling…" Was what he managed to contribute to the conversation, although what he heard was just a strange buzzing sound.

"That needs recalibrating," said the voice away to his left. Someone leaned over him, wielding a drill.

"Oop, nice drill, mate." There was that buzzing again. "Just watch yourself though, cause from here, it looks like you're about to stick it in the sideofmyhead…" Unspeakable pain, then, somewhere deep inside him, and the buzzing sound grew louder and more and more high pitched, until it suddenly resolved itself into his own voice: "…owowowowowowowowowow! Ow. Bloody hell."

"Ok, that's him." The first voice sounded satisfied. "Now let's reduce his processing power.

"No!" He shrieked as the drill came back in, from a different angle this time, but he found he rapidly stopped caring. He stopped noticing the strangeness of the situation, and felt filled with an odd sense of contentment. In fact, the only thing he really wanted was… "CHEDDAR CHEESE! Pop down the shops, get some biscuits, get some cheddar cheese. Let's spell it, C-H-EDDAR! CHEESE!"

"Jesus Christ!" The drill again. "One Space core was enough."

"Do we even need to make that many adjustments? I mean you saw his psych profile. Big ego but super insecure, obsessive but easily distracted…" A page turned. "…he's indecisive but impulsive, risk-averse yet highly suggestible. Rarely plans ahead. And he never shuts up; he's perfect for the job. What if we just… left him as he is?"

"Look, mate, it's not that I didn't appreciate the compliment just then, cause I did, nice to hear I'm perfect and all that, but would you mind just telling me what's going on? Not that it's not been fun lying here with you stabbing me in the face, but you know, a feller likes to know these things. For the planning for the future and all that. Which I do do."

"That's… not a bad idea."

A/N So while playing through Portal 2 the other day, the idea hit me: what if Wheatley was based on a human personality, as is heavily implied was the case with Caroline/GLaDOS? Congratulating myself on my cleverness, I started writing a fic. Then I hit the internet and realised that no, I am so not the first person to have this idea. And the Wheatley porn… oh my word, the porn.

Anyway, I was half done by that point, so thought I might as well finish. Thoughts, reviews, worth continuing? I apologise to everyone who is waiting on the continuation of Episode 3. I am working on that too, just had to get the little idiot out of my head before I could return to the strong, silent Dr Freeman.

This fic is un-betaed so any spelling or grammar mistakes, ooc moments or misunderstandings about the Portal universe are my own.