Disclaimer: I do not own Portal, nor any of the key characters therein. I only own this story, and anything I make up within, and I sincerely hope that this gives the delightfully sick, twisted souls at Valve some ideas for the Portal sequel.
ObInfo: This story rather depends on the idea that it was only ever iterations of Chell going through the tests.
A New Slice...
InterNutter
Some dreams fit. Some didn't. They had always been unrelated to the place where she woke, with the radio playing, and GLaDOS talking to her.
There were colourful dreams. Sparkly and shiny. And blurry. Half-forgotten, like Mother.
But GLaDOS was mother... wasn't she?
And there had been blue skies, and pieces of her burning, and green... things in the distance. She'd been so tired.
So used to hearing the music when she woke, Chell heard it again as light invaded her consciousness. Had it all been a dream?
The bed was hard. The bed was floor. An ancient word floated upward from the foggy, colourful dreams. Concrete.
She sat up. There were still pieces of her. GLaDOS.
Mother.
She'd killed her mother.
But it had been kill or be killed. Hadn't it? Maybe if she tried hard enough, she could have put that silent, purple ball back. Somehow.
Had she tried?
Not this time. One of the times... in her dreams.
Trying to stand on an unsteady chair with legs no longer suited for the purpose. She'd fallen. Again and again. Sometimes, the globe had fallen on top of her... and then she woke up.
Chell picked herself all the way up. The fires had burned themselves out. There had never been any point in talking to her before. The dreams stopped her. Ages upon ages of screaming and crying. It never did any good.
"Hello?" she risked, poking the biggest part. The part that was still talking, even when the pieces had been burned. "Are you still there?"
Silence there, and nothing more.
She looked around. What now? There was a lot of concrete, marked with the remnants of parallel lines. A half-fogged memory of a dream supplied that they were for 'cars'.
Her stomach growled. She needed food. She'd only dreamed of intubation associates, with their peptic salve and adrenoline. She'd only dreamed of beans and milk or water in little alcoves away from her ever-watching eyes.
Tore all her eyes out that she could... and she was still watching.
Chell circled in place. No eyes. GLaDOS couldn't see her, any more. GLaDOS was dead. Dead for good.
And yet...
The floor trembled. Just like it did when the machines were moving things.
There. In the distance. A small building with the Aperture Science logo on it. Aperture Science had provided the weighted storage cubes. She dreamed of opening them and finding supplies.
There were even dreams of opening the companion cube for what she could eat. Crying, hysterical dreams.
Were they dreams?
Chell made her way to the building. The small building in the middle of the vast expanse of... space for 'cars'.
Some of the spaces had writing. Employee Parking Only. Reserved C Johnson. Others were illegible.
The door was locked, but a window was broken. Her portal device made admittance easy.
Someone had worked here. The box with a handle opened without force or tools. It was empty. One lone bottle, long since decapitated, lay on its side in the bottom.
It smelled bad anyway.
There was a computer. For a change, not scrolling though computer code. It showed only one word and a flashing square.
Login:
She typed, cjohnson and hit the enter key. A new word came up underneath. "Password:" Just like the wall. She typed tier3.
There wasn't a lot left. One memo, a picture of the relaxation vault. Some files on shower curtains, and a test that she remembered from her nightmares.
It had all started with the test.
There had been... a kind sort of woman. Older. She'd given Chell cake and made her fill in a form. Watched. A little too closely. Chell had been creeped out a bit, remembering men from other foster homes who had watched too closely and done despicable things in the dark.
She'd been better when she was happy. When Chell had done well in the test. She was mother, not GLaDOS. Cecillia. She had taken Chell home. Given her so many pretty things.
And other tests.
And then there was the Bring Your Daughter To Work day. Mother had let Chell wear her lab coat. Showed her how to log in. Watched the animals go through the maze and laughed.
She'd wanted to play, too.
But that was a dream. There had always been the maze. There had always been GLaDOS. Mother was a dream.
She opened the locker with the name C. Johnson on it. Rotted fabric, once white, fell to pieces at her touch. There was a picture on the inside of the door. Mother and a younger version of herself.
Not very much younger.
There was a passkey in one of the other lockers. J. Smith. Apparently, whoever they were, they were the fabled intubation associate. He'd etched a number into the underside of a locker shelf. 7994.
The next door in needed the passkey and a code. She tried the number, and the door opened.
It used to be cleaner. It used to be thronging with people. And girls of all ages. There was a special event. Each girl would run the maze on Safe Mode and the winner would get a prize. Whole crowds of shrieking females would run from observation window to observation window to see how their competitors were doing. She had laughed, once, when one girl fell off a platform and landed in the water. It had had bubble bath in it.
The stuff Chell was used to now was nearly instantly fatal.
Each girl was scanned before she entered the beginning room. Analysed and sampled for DNA. It was, according to Mother, standard operating procedure.
She, too, had gone through the processing in order to test the Maze.
Chell blinked. She could see where rain leaked through the concrete and made infant stalectites. Computer banks and cubicles eventually gave way to labs.
Coffee cups showed tide marks. Some had left spills.
Someone had left blood.
One printer had a sheet in it. It showed a report, detailing how perfect one Chelsea Johnson was as a potential release product.
Release product.
Not a person. Never a person. Not to Mother, not to GLaDOS... not to anybody.
She had said that she would not be mourned.
Then Chell found the Chair.
She remembered sitting in it, going for a ride into the kids' Maze. She was laughing, having fun. Waving to Mother as she rode on the nonstationary platforms.
And then things went wrong.
One of the other kids vomitted blood on a window. Someone else pulled an alarm. Mother... answered a red phone and put on some kind of head-set.
All these offices were full of stains and mess. Things abandoned.
People abandoned.
She found a skull inside the headset. Locked in. Other bones nearby were delicate, easily broken by a feather touch.
How long did it take a body to melt away in a place like this? How long did it take for bones to become brittle?
"Intruder Alert."
Chell jumped. Whirled. The familliar losenge shape of a turret made her fire at the wall behind it and portal through the floor.
"Intruder isolated."
It had tracks. Brushes. A scoop. It was a cleaner.
Chell watched it, heart rate slowly dropping, as it swept up the dust and tidied the bones back into the chair.
Soon, there would be nothing left of mother. Except, perhaps, a skull in a headset.
"Identify."
"Johnson. Chell."
"Unauthorized personnel. Initiating defense mode."
She didn't hang around to see what happened. Hanging around meant pain.
Finally. A glimpse of a factory floor. It was making cubes. She couldn't portal through the glass, but there had to be another way.
Another passkey door. She slid through easily. Walkways. A lot better maintained than those inside GlaDOS.
A lot cleaner.
The cameras - her eyes - were dead, up here.
Priorities. She seized a cube off the line, before it could be sealed. Milk. Beans. Water. She remembered these. Tore into them with tools left on workbenches.
No cake.
There was never cake.
Chell resisted the idle temptation to etch, The cake is a lie somewhere on one of the walls, and suffered a flashback. Her own, frantic hand writing it again and again. That memory remembered burning.
But she'd never written on the walls.
This time.
Replete, she stowed the rest of the box, and the tools, into a more neglected corner. There was more than just the cube-makers running. Chell recognized the familliar sounds of the hydraulics working. Something had to be going, somewhere.
"Automated Maintenance Equipment initiated," said a new voice. "All personnel must exit in an orderly fashion. In-in-injured personnel will be... taken care of."
That sounded almost as ominous as GlaDOS.
"Damage assessment," it intoned. "Testing rooms. Cameras, all. Windows. Three. Weighted Storage Cube transport tube. One."
Chell smiled. She knew something it didn't know.
"Automated defense turrets. All. Primary GLaDOS interface core."
Wait. Primary?
"All repairs directed by Secondary GLaDOS interface core."
And then a sick chill ran down her back as the eye flicked back into life.
"Hello, subject name here. I told you that you hadn't escaped."
She tried disconnecting the camera, but it was on a protected wall.
"The testing is over. We have our Release. We have our versions. You are... superfluous."
GLaDOS was alive.
She had a backup.
She had to be stopped.
Chell went deeper, trying to find a clue. Something. Anything that would help her find where this AME was and destroy it.
One of the rooms held a video link. The words on it declared that it was an Aperture Science Manufacturing facility. She - no... many different copies of her - were running off an assembly line. Seizing handheld portal devices, and heading off screen.
"You see?" said GLaDOS. "You were Alpha Test. These are the final product. You are... unnecessary."
At just that moment, another maintenance bot appeared. It had heavier ordinance than the one she'd encountered earlier.
"Initiating rescue procedure," it said, and started shooting.
The fight of her life had just begun.
END.