Wheatley's Story: Part A
Chapter One
I was born on June 23, 1945 as Wheatley Mortimer Pendleton to a modest family in London, England. I didn't have a lot of friends when I was a child, as I was fairly inept with talking to others and had a knack for causing trouble (or being blamed for starting trouble) and having poor thinking skills. The one thing I wanted in life more than anything was to have a close friend without fate dealing a cruel hand.
Most of my childhood was spent at a boarding school in Bristol. My mother (who was a BOAC flight attendant) had sent me there when I was 5, and I stayed there until I graduated in 1963. My father (who was a construction engineer) communicated with me by post starting at age 10, and he sent me Christmas gifts and birthday gifts starting at 13.
After completing my studies in Bristol, I enrolled into Oxford University to study engineering, against my mother's wishes that I be an accountant. I graduated from Oxford in 1967, immediately afterward being enrolled into Nottingham by my mother to study accounting. My father visited me during that Christmas, and I promptly dropped out, much to the chagrin of my mother.
Father had offered to purchase airline tickets to a place of my choosing. My first choice was Australia, but the aircraft had to return to Heathrow when a fire broke out. Father and I both escaped, but my eyes were severely burned by the fire. I was outfitted with spectacles following the ordeal, and Father had to be put in hospital for a number of weeks. I decided at that point to fly to Canada instead.
I arrived in Toronto on May 5, 1968, with a stash of £5,000 that was swapped out for Canadian currency. After renting out an apartment, I was able to find work at a petrol station in Windsor, Ontario. It wasn't long before I read a newspaper article about US Senate hearings about missing astronauts. One of the participants was an applied sciences company called Aperture Science.
The description of Aperture's practices seemed to unnerve my colleagues and the customers who read the article. But I, for reasons unknown to me even now, found myself wanting to look for work with them. I was keen to find out as much as I could about them and figure out a way to get there. I continued working at the petrol station until 1971, when I had saved enough money to carry out my formulated plan to fly from Toronto to Detroit and then Marquette on the Upper Peninsula before going to Aperture by taxicab.
It was a long hike through the grass fields. My only guide beyond the chain link fence lining the back of the parking lot were a pair of tire treads beyond the vacant security booth. Fortunately for me, the treads followed one single path; if there were any forks, I would never have found my way. The hike was made even more difficult with the suit I was wearing. I had always worn a fedora after the aircraft fire at Heathrow to cover my "brownie eyes" as everyone at the petrol station liked to call them.
I finally reached the end of the tire treads, which looped around a small aluminium gardening shed in a teardrop shape. There were no further tire treads in the knee-high grass beyond those I had followed to the shed. Seeing no other options, I tried to open the door of the gardening shed, which didn't budge to my efforts. I decided it wouldn't help to pull harder, so I released my grip and, seeing a button on the side of the door, pressed it.
Inside the shed, I could hear a motor running. It did seem somewhat confusing in that the noise sounded like it was coming from way down below in the earth. Within moments, the noise grew louder and louder until a loud click and a whoosh of released air sounded from right behind the door, which then flew open with enough speed to throw me off balance and fall backward into the grass.
As I recovered and looked through the open door, I could see what appeared to be the inside of a lift. I wanted to believe that the elevator would lead to Aperture, but it seemed impossible that an underground tunnel could house an entire science research facility. I got a good hold of my briefcase and marched into the lift.
As soon as I touched the back wall, the door slammed shut behind me. Before I could figure out what was happening, the lift suddenly dropped like a stone. The sensation of zero gravity was extremely disorientating, and the lack of light made it extremely nauseating.
Finally, the lift started to slow down, and it came to a stop so slowly that it felt like it had never exceeded 1 kilometer per hour.
I felt around for my hat and briefcase as the lift opened back up. After finding them, I stepped out into the pitch black void, unsure of where I was and how I was going to escape. I decided to keep my hand on a wall and walk along it so I wouldn't lose my way.
I don't how far I got, but I soon grew tired and collapsed against the stone wall into a deep slumber.