Remembrances of Things Future

by robinwitch1

Alyx goes back to Black Mesa East to search for some lost documents, and finds her future instead. Written prior to the release of Portal 2 and so now non-canonical.

Remembrances of Things Future

Part I

One

Dr. Kleiner has been treating me like a cracked crystal goblet ever since it happened. In the beginning it was appropriate, I suppose; now, it's more annoying than anything else. It's been two weeks and three days since Dad died. It's been twenty-three years, three weeks, and a day since Mom was killed. In the mean time, millions of people have died. Everyone dies. I'm not a baby.

We've buried our dead. There aren't many wounded. Gordon took care of the final attack too efficiently for many on our side to be hurt. The Combine's wising up, too. Their old weaponry was more for pain and terror than for elimination – a dead slave's not worth much. They go for the kill now.

Dr. Magnusson is still in the base hospital with a nervous breakdown. He organized Dad's funeral, and I dreaded the long, pretentious speech full of side references to his own glories I thought he would make. He didn't. Instead he just said a few words, sat down, and began to cry. Strange to think of him as really so sensitive after all his bluster and boasting. I suppose we all have a hidden side. I wonder what mine is.

Judith's back, though too late for the funeral. Barney's still away. He radios in now and then. For victors, we make a pretty sorry sight. But I'm officially back at work now, even though there seems little to do.

Gordon's not here. He left right after the funeral, three days after Dad's death. His way of dealing with grief is to hunt down Advisors in the company of two or three Vortigants who also seem to have personal scores to settle. They should have taken Dog, too, but Gordon was too worried about my safety. They've been reporting in when they can on what they see and the score they've racked up. One of the Vorts had discovered that their electrical attack is not hindered by the telekinetic ability of the Advisors, and they made their first kills that way. Then Gordon noticed that a stun grenade close enough disoriented them so badly that they became virtually helpless. There must be a fair number of them around still, clustered mostly near the former Citadels, but at least the ones in this area are nearly all dead.

Five days ago they caught up with the ones that killed Dad. The Vorts grabbed a few of their escort first and made it clear to them what would happen if there was any attempt to fight back. At the same time, they used their own electrical abilities to disrupt the circuitry that the Combine had implanted to make its soldiers more obedient. Then they sent their prisoners back, and in a day or so, nearly all the escort had melted away into the forests, leaving the Advisors stranded and helpless. Gordon stunned them at first, then he hacked off their probosci, poured gasoline over their transporters, and burned them alive. The probosci he sent back to be thrown on Dad's grave, or so the party that delivered the goods told me. Gordon at his grimmest. I didn't do it, though. He'd still be dead. Revenge only feels good when you are helpless.

Instead of Dad's grave, I ended up tossing them onto a trash heap outside the compound, though, where the rats and crows made short work of them. I watched them tear the alien scraps apart, and began to laugh and laugh until Dr. Kleiner found me and brought me back. Dog had gone to get him when he saw me laughing so strangely. When Kleiner arrived, it reminded me that Dad was still dead and then I started to cry again and cried all the way back to the compound.

Gordon will be back in another few days. He'll have linked up with Barney by that time, and so everyone will be here. Then we'll go somewhere else and do something else. Kill something else. I don't know.

The incident at the dump wasn't anything important, just me getting a few feelings out, but it's made Kleiner even more nervous. He's been haunting me, hovering at the edge of my vision, always seeming to have something to say but never saying it. Or perhaps I'm imagining things.

Two

I mentioned Judith was back, didn't I? She arrived three days ago. She looks twenty years older, and limps from the wounds she suffered in the battle for the Borealis. They had to destroy the ship to keep it out of the hands of the Combine troops, but Judith had had a chance to examine it first, and she's almost sure it would have been useless to them. Two decades of being stranded in the Arctic had taken its toll, but there didn't seem to be much equipment there to begin with. Certainly no working teleporter. The stuff on the blueprints that got Dad and Dr. Kleiner all excited must never have been installed.

They'd found the last logs of the ship, with entries from crew members who survived the sudden disappearance. The crew had camped out there for months before something happened – either they died or were killed, or they left trying to reach civilization and never came back. The logs made it clear that the Borealis hadn't been the agent of its own teleportation. Something else had sent it, to the total shock of the few crew members on board at the time. Some of the log entries blamed the Aperture Sciences mainframe AI, GLaDOS, or "that bitch GLaDOS" as several of the entries had put it.

I remember Dad talking about GLaDOS. Aperture had made a series of questionable design decisions with it, including giving it a feminine personality, which was supposed to make it easier to interact with. Looks as if that didn't work out so well. Most of what we knew was rumor. The Aperture people weren't exactly on buddy terms with Black Mesa, I understand.

Aperture had gone offline at the very beginning of the Seven Hour War, and people in the area had seen explosions. Dad said that Breen had been convinced the facilities had been destroyed, just like Black Mesa, but he wasn't so sure. We had to check it out some day, he said. It was another thing on that long to-do list that never got done.

Dad got the most important thing on his list, anyway. The Borealis is gone for good. It's a gutted wreck under the ice of the Arctic ocean.

Judith found out about Dad's death almost as it was happening. I'm sure Dr. Kleiner would have waited to break it to her gently, but she appeared on the radio just as we were being attacked and she got the news in real time, plus a lot of other information, including what Dad thought should be done with the Borealis. The people who came back with her told me that she went completely crazy for a while. She should have gotten herself killed, suicide by Combine, except that they weren't expecting anyone to come straight at them the way she did and it worked. She bought enough time for her people to blow the Borealis up, even though she was badly hurt, and the Combine forces took off in a hurry once the ship went down.

One of her companions told me, with a bit of awe in his voice, that at one point in the battle he'd seen Judith head-shot at least a dozen Combine in quick succession, like some infallible killer robot, and then destroy a Hunter with nothing but grenades. By the end, they just ran when they saw her coming. I guess that says something about what Dad meant to her.

I'm glad she survived. I used to detest her, but I was stupid.

Three

The day after Judith arrived, I took her out to Dad's grave. We went alone, at Judith's request, despite the clucking of Dr. Kleiner. Dog was with me of course, and so there was no danger. The danger from the Combine was long past. Dr. Kleiner was worrying about something else, but that was long past too.

I thought I could guess why she wanted us to go alone.

The graveyard is outside the compound fence, down towards the river. It's beautiful there. We walked slowly down the road, not speaking, while Dog described a nervous tattoo around us. He'd caught a bit of Kleiner's nerves, and had appointed himself our own personal killer satellite.

Judith didn't say a word until after we reached Dad's grave. She stood at the foot of the grave. holding herself and rocking back and forth, with tears running silently down her face. She looked so desolate that I went over and hugged her, and then we both cried together for a long time.

After a few moments, Judith pulled herself together. She took a silk handkerchief from an inner pocket and wiped the tears off my face, and then off her own. Then she carefully refolded the handkerchief and replaced it in her pocket. "It was a gift from your father," she said after a moment, "I never thought then..." She paused a moment. "I played double agent for him. I always fantasized that I would be the one who saved him, and one day he would realize what I felt about him." Shaking her head, she looked at the grave and then towards the river. "I was a fool, of course. He already knew. He always knew. But he could never feel the same way. I understood. The war, his love for you, his memories of your mother... G-rated behavior always, G as in gentleman..."

She paused and looked directly at me. "I did get something out of it, something I will never forget. I saw how much he must have loved your mother." She smiled a bit, sadly. "Being a spectator is not as good as being in the game, but it had to do. I'm sorry." We both knew that the apology wasn't for how she had felt about Dad. It was about all the past between us. Buried now.

"I'm sorry too."

Judith paused and looked at me again. "I suppose you want to know how I ended up with the Combine. It worked in the end, of course, but before that the optics must have been horrible." We both laughed at the memory of how we had snarled at each other.

"If you want... it doesn't have to be now."

"It's easier to talk about it near him," Judith replied, and looked at the grave. "I didn't have much choice, actually, and I still think I played my cards about as well as I could have. I didn't join the Combine. I was drafted."

"Drafted?"

"They always knew a lot more about us than we realized. I guess your father just wasn't suspicious and sneaky enough by nature to take the precautions that would have been needed for us to become truly invisible. But they still wanted an agent among us, and I..." She tossed her head. "I was the natural choice, I suppose. Next to the inner circles but not quite of them. And so, when I was out on a routine mission collecting materials for your father, I was jumped by a pack of Combine and knocked out before I could call for help."

She paused a moment.

"I woke up in the company of the charming Dr. Breen. Asshole."

She snorted. "Useful idiot. But he was doing the Combine almost as much damage as he did the resistance, so I suppose he played his part after all. Anyway, he gave me the choice of working for them voluntarily, as a double agent, or being made into a Stalker without my consent. It seemed certain to me that he would catch your father sooner or later no matter what I did – the stupid idiot let enough slip in his talk to me to make that clear. So I signed on, did my best to keep Breen off your father's back, and had the delicious pleasure of double-crossing him at the end. The look on his face made it all worth while."

I could imagine how he had felt, because I remembered how I had felt. Darkness to light, hell to heaven in a few short moments. Breen, of course, would have been traveling in the opposite direction.

"My father... none of us will ever forget that. You saved the resistance," I said.

"Myself and Breen's vanity and stupidity," she remarked dryly. "For months – years – I fed him that line about your father being convincible, and he swallowed it whole. The Combine forgot that useful idiots are still idiots."

"How did you and Dad make it out of the Citadel before the explosion?" I asked. I'd always meant to ask Dad about that, but we'd never gotten around to discussing it, and Dad had never written a report on his experiences the way Gordon routinely did.

"We nearly didn't," Judith said. "We would both have died there except for..."

She paused. "You read Gordon's suit transcripts and reports, don't you?"

I nodded.

"Then you know about the G-man."

I nodded again. Shivered a bit as well. I'd never been very fond of the idea that he could be anywhere, at any time, walk through walls, survive explosions, stop time, and all for some end no one could guess. Then I continued, "I know about his appearances, more or less what he says, what he seems to do... but what he is, I don't know. And what he wants, or needs, I don't understand at all."

I paused. "That final message... the one he sent through me. Why did he send it that way? Couldn't he have just visited my father? It isn't as if Dad could have shot him or anything. Why was the message so obscure? Unforeseen consequences? And if it wasn't meant to be understood, why go to the trouble of sending it?"

"I don't know much about that last sighting, obviously," Judith said, "but here's something that you probably didn't know. He was waiting for us in the Citadel."

"The G-man?"

"Yes. Busy fellow, wasn't he, even though he subcontracted your rescue to the Vortigants instead of seeing to it himself."

"So he appeared to you and Dad the same way he appeared to Gordon?"

"If I understand the transcripts correctly," Judith said, "not quite. I was trying to get your Dad to the central elevator bank so that I could hijack one elevator and take it all the way to the basement, and perhaps disable the others. Frankly, I didn't give either of us much of a chance, especially since your Dad was completely exhausted and was drifting in and out of consciousness. That might be why he never told you about all this – I don't know if he remembered it."

"You're right. He said the Citadel escape was a blank for him."

Judith snorted. "Maybe someone else was responsible for that, not your Dad. Anyway, I got him to the elevators and as soon as we arrived, one opened. Guess who was inside."

"Oh. Him."

"Yes, briefcase and all. And then a squad of Combine soldiers burst out of another elevator, and I thought we'd had it. But they paid no attention to us, as if they couldn't see us. We got in, and he closed the elevator doors and rode down with us. There was something very strange about that ride – we seemed to be free-falling rather than going down at the regular speed, though we landed gently enough."

"Where did you go then?"

Judith shook her head. "I'm not quite sure. He was still leading us, a bit impatiently. He put us into a razortrain with a single empty carriage, and that's how we got out of City 17."

"And he never said anything during all this?"

Judith shook her head. "Only at the very end, when we were getting into the train. He gave us a long look and said, 'My apologies, but I am a bit pressed for time. Until we meet again.' And then he turned around and walked straight through the wall."

"On his way to rescue Gordon, I suppose, and preserve his investment. He seems to take time and space a bit more lightly than we do."

"The hardest thing to understand," Judith said slowly, "is why he deals with us at all. Why should he bother to save anyone? It's not as if we're more powerful than him."

"I suppose we'll find out sooner or later," I said.

"Or not," Judith added. She paused and looked down at the grave for a long time, and then continued. "You know that I got a bit reckless after I heard of your father's death?"

I nodded, though "reckless" was a very tame description of how she had acted.

"The radio operator who told me added everything she knew," Judith continued, "Including what your father thought about the Borealis. Several people overheard his argument with Kleiner. So..."

Judith paused. "So I wasn't trying to die. I was trying to see that your father's last wish was carried out, that the Borealis was kept from the Combine and destroyed. In fact, there didn't seem to be much on her, but who knows? And I was in no mood to split hairs. So she's at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, blown to a million pieces."

"You did well," I said. "I'm sure my father would have been proud of you, though you would have frightened him to death if he'd known what you were doing."

Judith looked up at me. "I wonder what happened to the rest of Aperture Science?"

"It blew up. Remember? Perhaps the G-man again. Gordon's convinced that it was him behind the destruction of Black Mesa."

"Busy, busy little man," Judith said. "But perhaps not."

The wind grew chill and we shivered. Judith took my arm and looked at Dad's grave one last time. "We'd better be getting back," she said. "I think Kleiner wants to talk with you about something. He's got some sort of chore he wants done."

Four

Uncle Kleiner. The closest thing to family I have now, I suppose. A stuffy but caring maiden aunt, married to his work, still secretly in mourning for his pet headcrab Heddy, which had disappeared a little before the final battle and had never been seen again. He tried to hide it, though, out of consideration for all those who were mourning real people.

Dr. Kleiner accosted me in his usual nervous way in the dining hall after dinner.

"Ah, Alyx. You're looking a bit better, I must say. Thanks for taking Judith out today – she seems much calmer now. Oh, as she may have mentioned, there's a little something coming up where I could really use your help." He hesitated briefly. "It does take you back to one of your old haunts, though, so if you think it would be too hard on you... we could wait and have Gordon do it, I suppose, but he's got his hands full at the moment. And this really should be done before he returns."

Typical Kleiner – he'd forgotten to tell me what "this" was. I sat looking at him quizzically, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He stared back at me for a moment, lost in some thought, and then realized what he'd forgotten. "Oh, of course... It's Black Mesa East. The Combine tried to clean out what remained after they attacked, of course, but there are some better hidden areas we're not sure they found. I'm almost sure they didn't find them, as a matter of fact, since the documents there were quite sensitive and we would have seen consequences if they had gotten their hands on them... Anyway, I need someone with a high security clearance to take a small team there and either recover the material or confirm that it has been destroyed. Do you think you're up to it, my dear?"

I replied, "I think so. It'll bring back memories but so does here. No worse than here, anyway."

"Can you leave tomorrow morning?"

I nodded.

"Excellent, excellent. And when you get back, Gordon will probably have returned, and we can start working out what to do next." Kleiner smiled. "I'm sure you'll be glad to see him again."

I get a lot of smiles like that when Gordon's name comes up. It's difficult to explain, and I've only really tried with my Dad. Our relationship... Gordon's very devoted, but in a very abstract way. Of course it doesn't help that he's mute. Writing or typing all his communication puts an extra step in that allows him to catch any errant thought before it escapes, I think. Despite all, Dad was convinced that some day we'd get married, but that "some day" may be a very long way into the future. If still waters run deep, as Dad always said, Gordon is fathomless. We had dinner together in my quarters the night that he left, and I got as affectionate as I dared. He responded by going further than he's ever gone before – that is, he gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Believe me, that's major progress. But at this rate, I don't know if I'll manage to get Dad his grandchildren before I hit menopause.

A couple of hours later I met Dr. Kleiner again to go over the basics of the operation. The first thing I wanted to know was how I was going to get to Black Mesa East – it's a long way from here and the roads still aren't entirely safe. Dr. Kleiner cleared his throat,

"Well, my dear, I think it would be best if some of our people flew you out there on the old helicopter. It seems to be working all right now..."

"No!" I snapped. Damn Kleiner's other-worldliness! He needs more practice at being a human being, I thought furiously. "The last time I saw that machine, Dad was lying dead beside it. I will not go near it, I will not go anywhere in it. I'd rather walk."

Dr. Kleiner, who was already puttering with maps of Black Mesa East, was at first startled, then abashed. He realized he'd made a mistake. "Of course, of course... terribly sorry that I didn't take that into consideration... and we don't have all that much else that could get you out there quickly..."

He thought for a moment. "I suppose you could always take one of the modified Combine helicopters... but even with the modifications, they're only two seaters, so you'd have to travel alone...except for the pilot, of course."

"But there's a party of Vorts holding the Black Mesa East site, you said. Do I need to take anyone with me?"

"Of course not, my dear. It would mean a former Combine pilot too... we don't have anyone handy who can fly those things..."

He thought for a moment. "There's one who joined the resistance even before the uprising... Barney turned him, I think... Anyway, he's been sent on missions before and he's always been very reliable."

I nodded my assent, but inside I didn't feel so sure. This mission hadn't even begun and already things were going wrong. But I couldn't say no now.

Five

Morning. The very earliest, misty edge of the dawn. Combat routine, even though it was largely superfluous now. This has been our life for so long that it has become second nature. Starting out at some comfortable after-breakfast time in the morning would feel exposed, vulnerable, like walking into the dining hall stark naked.

The former Combine pilot was waiting on the helicopter pad beside his chopper. He was dressed in the white and black Metrocop uniform, helmet down, anonymous. We shook hands in silence.

Dr. Kleiner hurried over to introduce us. "Corporal Singerman came over to the Resistance several months before Dr. Freeman arrived. He was actually recruited by Barney, I understand."

"Bit of luck with my Combine circuitry," Singerman said in a flat voice, and tapped the side of his helmet with two fingers. "Faulty chip. Left me open to reason."

"Indeed," Dr. Kleiner said. "Your luck and ours, it turned out to be. We'll be taking off in a few minutes. Alyx, a few last words."

Dr. Kleiner beckoned me to follow and walked over to a small building at the side where there was a table spread with plans, and several serious-faced guards.

"Now, dear, you know the floor plan of Black Mesa East very well, of course, but unless your father told you about it, you won't have ever heard of this section."

"Dad never said anything specific," I replied. "He mentioned more than once that there was more to the place than met the eye, but he never went into any detail."

"Hm... It was on a strictly need to know basis, and I think that only your father, myself, and a few of the senior Vortigants were familiar with it."

So that took care of the mystery why the ruins of the facility were being held with a purely Vortigant force, when the Vorts usually worked together with human troops to take best advantage of the strengths of both races. It was a security measure. They weren't given to gossip.

"The entrance is down the tunnel to Ravenholm. You take the tunnel to the end, where the ladder to the surface is at the right, and turn left instead."

"Into a solid stone wall?" I asked.

"Ah, that's what it looks like. Getting in requires a bit of athletics – I hope you don't mind scrambling around."

"So long as I don't spoil my good clothes," I replied, and we both laughed. I was still wearing the jacket that I had worn through this whole campaign, complete with the scars from the Hunter attack that had worried Dad so much.

"Well, then. Here's what you have to do. You go up the Ravenholm ladder until you're about ten feet up. Look carefully there and you'll find a couple of pins securing the uprights of the ladder. Knock them both loose – you'll need a hammer – and then just hold on to the top of the ladder as it hinges back. Keep hold of the ladder as it bends outward. It needs your weight to come down. By the time it's down to horizontal and your feet are touching the ground again, you should hear a click and the door in the left-hand wall will open."

"How do I close it again?"

"Don't bother. There won't be anything left after you're finished, anyway."

"Huh?" That came as a surprise.

"The Vortigants will give you a number of explosive charges to plant inside the vault. Whether or not you find what we're looking for, you are to blow the place up after you leave. We need to know it's gone."

This got more puzzling by the moment. "What am I looking for, anyway?"

Dr. Kleiner hesitated slightly – he didn't like talking about this even with me when it was necessary. "Well, in general, any documents or files with the old Black Mesa markings on them. In particular, we're looking for one file case, a rather small one, painted red, probably padlocked, with the Black Mesa logo and the serial number VM 1440 stenciled on the side. Bring that out if it's still there. That's the most vital thing; everything else is optional, though you should keep your eyes peeled and use your own judgment."

Dr. Kleiner paused. "If you find that case, don't let it out of your sight. Any other documents or interesting objects can be passed to the Vortigants, but keep this file strictly to yourself. They won't ask for it."

"Why not?" We had always been free to share anything with the Vortigants, and it was odd both that this was to be kept from them and that they wouldn't object to being cut out like that.

"They don't want anything to do with it," Dr. Kleiner said. "And my dear, this makes more work for you I know, but they probably won't enter the vault at all. You'll have to set the charges in place, though they'll carry them up to the door, I think. They don't like to have anything to do with this area. They'll be happy enough to help you destroy it, though."

That was a major alarm bell. The premonitions of the Vortigants had always proved accurate in my experience, and it made me uneasy to go somewhere they wouldn't.

Dr. Kleiner looked at me steadily. He knew what I was thinking.

"Don't worry, my dear. They know you'll be going in there and they don't seem to sense any danger. It's just a place they'd rather steer clear of, and as I said, they'll be very glad to see it destroyed."

I couldn't help rolling my eyes a bit. "Great. I'm to left turn at the exit for Ravenholm, explore a dark nook that gives even the Vortigants the creeps, and come out with a box of something that seems to be classified 'Destroy yourself before reading.' You must need it pretty badly."

Dr. Kleiner smiled. "Indeed we do, my dear, if we're ever to get to the bottom of this." Then he leaned in to whisper in my ear, to make sure the guards didn't overhear. "Black Mesa logbooks and readouts from the time of the original accident. Just about the only raw data we have left, if it has survived. We have transcripts, but we're not sure if they are entirely complete and accurate."

The Vorts had been our enemies at that time, before Gordon destroyed their slave-master on Xen. Perhaps that was why they steered clear of the place and its contents. They didn't like to be reminded that they had been on the other side at the beginning, even though it had been under compulsion. It was a wound to their pride.

It still wasn't a very appealing mission. I gave Dr. Kleiner another long look, and finally said, "I have a bad feeling about this. What if something jumps me inside?"

"Oh, that's the last thing you should worry about," Dr. Kleiner said in a reassuring voice. "The door you'll be opening is the only one in or out. Apart from that, there are only a few ventilation ducts, but they're very small. Not even a headcrab could get down them. You'd have to be able to walk through solid stone to get in there. Nothing to worry about at all!"

He seemed to be forcing the jovial reassurance a bit, and I became even more uneasy. Time to move before I lost my nerve entirely.

"Well," I said, "Let's get it done, then."

Six

With Corporal Singerman at the controls, we took off into the dawn. It was a flight of several hours, and I settled down to sightseeing and dozing.

We flew low over a dead world. The buildings we passed were roofless, torn, sometimes completely flattened. Wrecked vehicles, civilian and Combine, were scattered over the roads. Most bridges were down. Fires burned here and there, but in many places there was nothing left to burn. Victory was going to leave us the sole proprietors of an empty, poisoned ruin. I wondered if the world would ever go back to the way it had been, or whether we would be able to do nothing but hang on, battling ruin and radiation long after the last Advisor was dead.

I began to chat with Corporal Singerman. It turned out that he had been serving in several posts in City 17 near where I and Gordon had fought, and he had escaped the city just in time, after being warned by Barney. He'd been close by when I was captured, as a matter of fact, and had helped Gordon get away at that time by "accidentally" misdirecting some of his pursuers.

"You were a famous name among the Combine troops," Singerman remarked in his flat voice. "They were endlessly curious about you."

"I'm flattered. But what was so special about me, other than the fact I did a lot of fighting and killed a lot of Combine?"

"A lot of it came from your... durability," Singerman said.

"Durability?"

"Nothing ever seemed to hit you," Singerman said slowly. "Troops emptied whole magazines in your direction at close range with no result. Snipers could never draw a bead on you. Grenades always seemed to bounce away from you. Very easy to notice from our side. You may just have assumed that we were poor shots." Singerman laughed, "We weren't that poor. There was something odd about you. Dr. Freeman had a suit of armor, or as good as armor, so his survival is less to be wondered at. You did as well as he did with a tattered leather jacket and a pair of old jeans. Minus, of course, the protection against radiation and the like."

Singerman paused, "Believe me, Dr. Breen wanted to know why. Very badly. He even thought that you might have some sort of personal shield operating on you, and was quite disappointed that he found nothing of the sort when you were captured. He wanted one for himself, you see."

"Much good it would have done ," I snorted. "I seriously doubt my jeans would have fit him...I don't suppose you know if he survived the explosion of the Citadel, do you?"

"No, Miss Vance, or I would have already reported it. He disappeared, alive or dead no one I know can say."

"And he thought I had some special protection?"

Singerman glanced at me. "It was said that you had some sort of magic. Perhaps a gift. The talent for always being where bullets are not." He shrugged. "I don't know myself. But you should have been dead a dozen times over, and you were never even wounded, except when that Hunter took you by surprise. And even then, the Hunter failed to kill you quickly, which is what it should have done."

"So I guess I'm the world's luckiest person," I said lightly. "Hope it lasts."

Singerman glanced at me again, and then back at the instrument panel. "I suspect luck has nothing to do with it, Miss Vance. Not luck. Something else. I don't know what. But that's just my own personal opinion."

Seven

We set down at Black Mesa East in the scrapyard, Dog's old playground. The ceiling of the passageway into the main complex had collapsed, making it difficult to get to the Ravenholm tunnel from the front areas. There was nothing much left in front anyway, after the bombardment and battle.

The scrapyard was full of trash and junk. It looked like the Combine forces had tossed most of the contents around looking for our secrets. It must have intrigued them finding the case for the gravity gun, but it wouldn't have taught them anything they didn't already know. In any case, the case had been ripped off the wall and was nowhere to be seen.

Corporal Singerman and a couple of Vortigants stayed with the helicopter to keep an eye on it, and another Vortigant led me inside. The Combine had considerately cut away the jammed doors and broken a path through the pile of cement debris that had cut me off from Gordon and Dog the day we were attacked here. Everything smelled stale, a sort of burnt dust odor.

We walked in silence down to the Ravenholm exit. According to Gordon's report and my own memory of the place, there had been a lot of trash here blocking the path, but all of it had been removed by the Combine. Only the walls remained, desolate but neat. At the foot of what had been the lift to Ravenholm, three other Vortigants waited.

We nodded to each other and one of the Vorts said, "We are honored by the presence of the Alyx Vance so soon after the tragic event. You indeed show yourself a worthy daughter of your father by taking up your duties again so soon."

"I am honored by your praise, but it is nothing," I replied. A lot of the Resistance members don't particularly like the Vortigants, especially since it looks as if we'll have to share this world with them in the future. It's doubtful they can go back where they came from, and they might not want to if they could. But I've always gotten along with them very well, and of course they saved my life after the Hunter attack. And I have always respected their hunches and premonitions, which was why I was a bit nervous about the mission I was on now.

"Right, then," I said after a moment's pause. The Vortigants seemed to be waiting for me to take charge. "I'll get this place open and search it, and I understand you'll be bringing up some explosive charges for me to destroy it when I'm through."

"Indeed," the same Vortigant replied – I expect he was the senior one. "We would help the Alyx Vance more directly, but there is something within here that we cannot endure. It is particular to us, though; we anticipate no direct danger to the Alyx Vance. We would not ask you to do this if it were otherwise."

"I'm sure not," I said, and smiled. "Now let's get the door open at least. You may withdraw if you wish. I think I can handle it myself, if my instructions were correct."

"Our inability begins at the door of the vault, not before," the Vortigant replied. "We can stay to assist the Alyx Vance outside here."

"OK... suit yourselves. Does one of you have a hammer?"

One of the Vortigants produced a heavy mechanic's hammer and handed it to me. I walked to the bottom of the elevator shaft and looked upward. Ravenholm...The shaft was clear and led up into darkness. I'd been there before the Combine attacked it, but never afterwards. From Gordon's description, I wasn't eager to go there ever again, even though no one knew if Father Grigori was still alive.

But that was a puzzle for another day. I only had to climb a few steps this time. The links were in the place that Dr. Kleiner had indicated, and when I hammered them out, my weight began to drag the ladder outward and downward, hinged near its bottom. I hung on, letting my body swing away from the ladder and holding on with my hands. Just as Dr. Kleiner had said, at the moment the ladder came to right angles with its original facing, my feet touched the ground, there was a sharp crack from the other wall, and a panel slid down. Behind was a squat metal door, shut tight but with no obvious locks. It looked like the entrance to a prison.

I let go of the ladder. It stayed levered out. Dr. Kleiner had told me how to raise it again to shut the panel, but that would not be necessary in practice – we were going to blow the place up anyway, whether the door was open or shut.

The Vortigants edged away from the door. I noticed that they even avoided looking in its direction. One of them gave me a slight bow and said, "The Alyx Vance can now proceed. We will begin to collect explosives here now, and the mission will soon be completed."

"Right. Then open sesame! I guess..."

There was no need for a secret word. The door was stiff, but unlocked. Beyond it was a low, sloping passage leading off into darkness. I checked the batteries on my flashlight.

"I'll be trailing a comm wire to give me something to follow out if the light fails," I said. "If there are any emergencies here and you can't raise me on the radio, use that. I don't know how deep this goes."

The Vortigant nodded. I turned toward the darkness of the open door.

"May the Alex Vance find what she seeks. We await your emergence."

"May you do likewise," I said one last time, and began to follow the passage.

Eight

The passage behind the door I had uncovered went on for a long way, ten minutes' walk or more. I got the impression it had been made by enlarging a natural fissure rather than by tunneling, since it weaved a bit from side to side. There were light fixtures at intervals on the low ceiling, but they remained dark and there was no switch to turn them on.

After a walk long enough to make me thoroughly apprehensive, the passage ended abruptly in another steel door, this time with a stenciled sign, "Entrance forbidden except to authorized personnel."

That had better include me, I thought, and then shook my head at how silly I was getting. I could do anything I wanted down here. There was no one to see, no one to tell.

What I wanted most was to get finished and get out, so I reached out my hand to the door handle. It was unlocked, and to my surprise led into a very ordinary corridor that could have come from a hundred labs or office buildings. There were five doors on each side, and one at the end. Again to my surprise, a tiny sliver of light cut through the dust from ceiling to floor, with dust motes dancing brightly along its length as my movement stirred them up. It must be high noon overhead, I thought, and the sun is shining down a ventilation shaft. We can't be all that far from the surface. It was a comforting thought, even though with solid rock, one foot thick and a hundred feet are the same in the end.

I decided to explore the side rooms in order, to be sure of not missing one. The first to the left turned out to be a bathroom – something of an anticlimax. The dust was thick in there, and it hadn't been disturbed for a long time. The first to the right seemed to have been a staff room, left neat and tidy to be taken over by the dust. Neither room had anything of interest in it.

The second, third, and fourth rooms on the right and left sides had been offices. They were sparely furnished, with nothing personal about them: backup positions that had never been used. I went methodically through the drawers and shelves, and found one or two loose folders, but nothing that seemed very significant. The last room on the left was a conference room, with nothing in there but tables and chairs, and a single whiteboard that seemed new. The last room on the right held bunks, six of them, and lockers for personal effects. I opened each in turn, but they contained nothing but loose paper and office supplies.

It was as silent as the grave down there, and the tomb-like feeling grew worse as I dug through the lockers and drawers. Wild goose chase, I thought to myself. Kleiner's memory is playing tricks with him. There's nothing here after all...

I was feeling stifled when I went out into the corridor again to open and search the last room, so much so that I had to stop and shake my head. This was a stuffy hidey-hole that hadn't repaid the trouble of constructing it.

Moving slowly, I pulled the last door open and found yet another dust-choked room, with a blank screen on the wall and some obsolete computer equipment on a long desk in front of it. There were a few tables on either side of the room, and lockers behind them. It felt... I don't know exactly how to put it... somehow significant. A touch portentous. As if something significant had happened there, or was going to happen.

Routine now, I set to digging through the lockers and drawers. Most of them in this room were empty, but in one of the last lockers I opened, I found what Dr. Kleiner was looking for. Small red file container, check... Black Mesa logo... locked, with the key still in the padlock... that was careless, Dad... serial number correct. There were two or three similar containers, but all were empty.

Search over. Now to blow this place up and get back home for dinner. All missions should be so straightforward. I smiled to myself at the thought of warfare routinized, fitted into a schedule with fixed meal times and bedtimes, the nine to five of conflict. But I still felt tired and a bit choked. Probably the air, I thought, and the dust. Time to go.

I left the file container and the two or three loose Black Mesa files I had found on the floor in the corridor, and walked back through the door and down the tunnel to the entrance. The Vortigants were waiting there, and as they had promised, they had been busy. They'd loaded up a dolly with a drum of gasoline and another with two oxygen cylinders, and a third with explosives. It took several trips, but soon everything was in place, the gasoline and the oxygen in the central corridor, all the doors propped open, and charges placed in the rooms beyond. I even mined the toilet. Might as well make a thorough job of it, I thought.

"This will look like a little volcano from the outside," I remarked to the Vortigants. They nodded, and one replied, "It is best that way. What remains in there must never come out again. We thank the Alyx Vance for doing this for us."

"You don't mind me bringing out the files that Dr. Kleiner wants, do you?" I began to wonder if the Vorts were going to insist I leave the file container where I found it.

"It is not pieces of paper that we speak of," the Vortigant leader said curtly, and turned to reach into an equipment box behind him. He produced a small time fuse assembly and gave it to me.

"This device will grant enough time to get outside, and allow the doors to be sealed before the explosion, so that everything inside is consumed."

All right, I thought. They're dead serious about this. But I wasn't about to question their judgment. I had felt something there too, and I wasn't sure what it was or what it wanted.

Last trip inside, and I would be the very last person to see this little piece of Black Mesa East intact. I put the time fuse down in the hallway, beside the gasoline drum, where the sun was shining, and knelt to set it.

When Dad was building this extension, did he ever dream that I would be the one to destroy it?

I set the fuse for fifteen minutes, and after a last glance round at the open doors and dusty rooms, walked out and locked the exit door behind me.

Nine

We waited in the junkyard for the charges to explode. I hoped the Vortigants had found a reliable time fuse. I didn't relish one bit the idea of going back in there to deal with a hung charge. However, the explosives went off right on time. All we felt from where we were standing was a low thud and a sort of shudder going through the rock. A few moments later, we could see a thin stream of smoke drifting up from where the vents must have been. I went back down the Ravenholm exit to check one last time, and found everything undisturbed. The inner door, the one that separated the approach path and the inner corridor, must have been sturdy enough to contain the blast. Since the outer door had not been destroyed or jammed, I levered the Ravenholm ladder up again to move the concealing panel back into place. Then there was nothing to see on the outside, and nothing to find on the inside.

Mission accomplished. Time to go home. The Vortigants were pulling out overland, through what had been the old front entrance. As they were leaving, their leader came to bid me farewell.

"Again we thank the Alyx Vance for this service in her time of grief. What we sensed was there is there no longer. We can now leave this place forever with our minds at ease."

"What exactly was it that you felt was here?" This still puzzled me.

"We do not know. It was unfriendly, and now it is gone. That is enough."

We bowed to each other, and I got into the helicopter. Corporal Singerman started the engine and the small craft shuddered.

"We look forward to serving with the Alyx Vance again," the Vortigant said in farewell. "Until that time, may your affairs have good fortune."

I'd learned not to say thank you to a Vort if I didn't want to get a speech on how it wasn't necessary. "Until then, may you too find what you wish."

The Vortigant waved, and Corporal Singerman gunned the engine. We rose, leaving the Vortigant following us with his strange red eyes. Then he turned and went back into Black Mesa East, to follow the rest in their redeployment.

We arrived back at camp in time for dinner. Dr. Kleiner fussed over what I had brought him, both the loose files and the file box. He seemed satisfied. There was a message from Gordon: he and Barney were only two days away now. Gordon warned me to prepare for a very long trip in the near future, and I suppose that means Aperture Science back in North America. I wasn't surprised. I've been expecting it for a long time.

So, on to fight on other fields. There are few Vortigants alive now in the Americas, so we're all on our own there. The resistance was poorly developed there as well, and we're having difficulty in getting even basic information on the present condition of the area around Aperture Science. Flying blind again, it looks like.

I think a lot about what Corporal Singerman said. Luck or talent, I'm sure that one day my time will run out. I only hope that it will be close enough to victory that if I'm killed, I won't be in doubt of the outcome when I die. I don't know whether I'll ever see Dad's grandchildren, and with the world in the state it is, I don't know if it's fair or right to want to have kids. A tiny part of me, though, remains irrationally hopeful. Maybe, just maybe, Gordon and the rest of us can pull it off. The best I can do is to guard that hope like a candle flame in a storm, and have faith in spite of everything I can see and hear and understand that one day the storm will be over.

Part II

Ten

...It was as silent as the grave down there, and the tomb-like feeling grew worse as I dug through the lockers and drawers. Wild goose chase, I thought to myself. Kleiner's memory is playing tricks with him. There's nothing here after all.

When I went out into the corridor again to open the last door, something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it at first. Something had changed. But there was nothing here to change, just a dimly lit, anonymous corridor with unmarked doors and a stray beam of light shining down from a vent in the ceiling...

The light.

It was as bright as ever, but the motes of dust shining along its length had stopped moving. They hovered frozen in the air, even when I passed my hand through the beam. I must have looked an odd sight then, waving my hands back and forth through the golden light, but I couldn't think for a moment. Everything had stopped and I was still here moving.

And there was one more door to open. I didn't consider making a run for the outside. To tell the truth, I didn't dare to try the exit door, because if it had been locked I would have lost it completely. That was not the way I was supposed to go next. That much I could guess.

So the last door, the one at the end of the hallway, in the center. The one that I now realized I had been subconsciously avoiding, leaving until the final moment, when it would have been more normal for me to push right to the end quickly, establish the boundaries of the space I was operating in, and then work my way back.

I suppose I knew as soon as I saw the frozen dust whom I would be meeting in the final room. Who, I asked myself, among those you have met or might meet in the future, is able to play with the passage of time?

Deliberately refusing to take my thoughts any further, I walked up to the door and tried the handle. It was open.

I walked in and the door closed behind me.

This must have been some sort of control center or computer room. There was a large desk stretched in front of a wall screen, rather like the pictures I had seen of the old Black Mesa entrance hall. The wall screen was on, the first live piece of equipment I'd seen in Black Mesa East this trip, and it was displaying the Black Mesa logo. The computer was on, too, and someone was sitting behind its old-fashioned CRT screen.

It was the G-man. His briefcase was on the desk and he was dressed in the neat dark-blue suit that always figured in Gordon's reports. He turned off the computer and stood up.

"I apologize for this subterfuge, Miss Vance, but I came to feel it would be best if we had a talk about some things that may be coming up in your future. I am depending on a very liberal interpretation of my instructions to communicate with you at all, but I believe it permissible if we adhere to a few basic rules."

I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just blurted out, "What have you done? Why has everything stopped?"

The G-man bowed to me slightly. "A convenience, no more. Your friends outside already sense my presence. They would become suspicious if you spent too long in here, and might guess what was going on. I would prefer that not to happen, so I exercised one of the talents that I expect Dr. Freeman has remarked on in his reports, the power to slow the passage of time. Not stop it, mind you, much less reverse it. Nothing in the universe can do that. But for the time being, Black Mesa East is operating at a scale of thousands of years to the second."

"You don't talk funny," I broke in suddenly. "Gordon wrote that you didn't seem to have a native command of English. But you do."

"Oh, that," the G-man said. He shrugged. "The verbal mannerisms you speak of were part of my chosen persona, Miss Vance. You will have guessed that I take this shape merely as a convenience. Your father and Dr. Freeman remember the voice that goes with the role, the Man in Black of pre-Combine legend, so I tailored my vocal delivery to harmonize with that style. There is no point using it with you. You don't have the cultural background that makes people who grew up before the Seven Hour War expect it."

"My father doesn't remember anything now, because he's dead. What did you have to do with it? Why did you send him that message?"

The G-man bowed his head and hesitated a moment. "I sincerely regret the death of your father, Miss Vance, but there was nothing I could do about it that I had not already done. I used you to send him a message that he had received once before, just prior to an alien attack, hoping that it would turn his mind towards self-protection. Knowing how the Advisers react to frustration, I suspected they would lash out in revenge, and your father was an obvious target."

He paused again. "In retrospect, the message was too ambiguous, and using you to deliver it excited your father's suspicions of me. I was afraid that would happen, but there was no other way to communicate with him."

He had known... I began to cry. "Why didn't you just tell him!" I half-screamed, half-sobbed, as I collapsed into a chair.

The G-man came over and sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the table. He let me cry for a little while, and then said, quietly, "Because I could not, Miss Vance. I trust that Dr. Freeman has reported to you my words to him when I gave you the message to your father. I operate under certain restrictions – in fact, I have no choice about them – and even the message I sent was stretching my mandate further than I could easily justify. I knew that there was only a very small chance that your father would interpret the message correctly, but if there were any chance at all, I could not in good conscience neglect the opportunity."

I couldn't look at him. "But you can walk through walls and stop time... see into the future... do what you please... nothing can affect you, nothing hurts you... for all I know, you're God." I laughed bitterly and raised my head again. "Or the devil."

"There is no God, Miss Vance, and if there were, he would be nothing like me." The G-man had become very serious now. He drew himself up a bit. "I am merely the servant of something I consider a higher cause, just as you are. Think of how a primitive man would see you – flying through the air, striking enemies dead at a distance, talking with friends far away. Would he not conclude that you were God?" He spread his hands. "My powers are much greater, Miss Vance, but my problems are remarkably similar to yours."

I was feeling a bit calmer, trying to hold on to reality, piecing things together bit by bit. All right. He says he couldn't have done anything. He has to follow orders...

"Who gives you these orders? Who grants your mandate?"

"It is a long story," he began... "and not exactly the one that I came here to tell you, but since we have as much time as I wish, perhaps I can sketch it out for you. Your father knew some of it, but not by any means all."

Eleven

The G-man looked down for a moment, then continued. "You know, of course, that the universe is far older than human beings and almost infinitely vast, with an enormous variety of intelligent life at different stages of development scattered over it."

"We knew some of that, yes, and guessed the rest," I said. "When I was a child, I used to amuse myself drawing aliens in space ships. I made them all shapes and sizes and colors."

He smiled briefly, a thin and rather sad smile, "Well, something like any and all of the figures in your drawings probably exists somewhere in the universe, Miss Vance. The ingenuity of the life-drive can never be underestimated. But in the nature of things, there had to be some form of life, somewhere, that was the first of all to leave its own world and travel through the cosmos, first of all to attain that limited mastery of time and space that you see displayed in me, Miss Vance. Those are my people, Miss Vance. We were the very first, I believe. And as the millennia passed, we began to notice certain patterns and regularities that impelled us to take action."

"So you turned into a sort of cosmic judges..." I began, but the G-man held up his hand. "Neither judges nor saviors. We merely act to ward off the more extreme forms of damage that progress can make possible. We do have certain limited policing functions as well, but these are individually agreed on with the life forms involved, and are always very tricky to carry out consistently with our general mandate and our principles." He shook his head. "As this assignment has made clear, once again."

He leaned back, assuming an almost professorial air. "Now, Miss Vance, there are two technological developments that we watch for in particular. Not that either one of them is necessarily of any concern to us by itself, but the combination can be boundlessly deadly. I expect you can guess what they are."

"Nuclear weapons must be one of them," I replied.

"Yes, but by themselves, nuclear weapons can at worst make an end of the species that has invented them. That is a tragedy, but not something we usually intervene in. It is a matter for only those directly concerned. However..."

I interrupted, "Combine nuclear weaponry with teleportation technology..."

"Correct. Now can you guess why Dr. Freeman was sent back to your world on the precise day that you were ready to test your improved teleporter?"

He held up his hand again, raising it sharply, as if in warning. "You had reached the point where in theory, you could destroy the universe, or large parts of it. Nuclear weapons delivered by a teleporter capable of interstellar transportation make the race that possesses this combination lethal not only to itself but potentially to all others. This triggers, I am afraid, a fairly automatic reaction on our part."

"But we were fighting the Combine! We didn't have time to blow up the universe. And heaven knows if there are any nukes in working order left in the world today."

"Still. Rules are rules. You had crossed a line. We have had to be very rigid over the endless reaches of time so as to avoid the sort of absurd tangles that even a small compromise can develop into. And Miss Vance," he leaned forward, "this is already a far more tangled situation than normal, due to circumstances beyond my control."

I closed my eyes. "God, my head is spinning already. Go ahead, but make it simple please."

He nodded, "With pleasure, since then I can skim over some of the details that perhaps do not reflect as well as they might on my own people. Well... in our early stage, when we were less experienced, we entered into some specific agreements with other peoples to carry out certain functions – guard, policing, patrol – things we later tended to avoid getting involved in because they could have unpleasant ramifications."

"So this is all the result of some mistake you made a million years ago?" I shook my head slowly. "Damn."

"Very much longer than that, but essentially... yes. There was a certain race, let us call them People X, who developed quite early in the history of the cosmos, though not as early as us. At one point, they found it necessary to confine certain of their morally defective members for offenses that we need not speak about. Because of some unfortunate episodes in their early history, People X had developed an abhorrence of violence, and so they were reluctant to terminate the existence of these malefactors. Instead, they crippled their functions and confined them in weak, useless bodies, hoping one day to find a way to 'reform' them consistent with full respect for their free will – another thing that People X had a particular regard for. And so the matter stood for a very long time indeed.

"Now, we had a subsidiary role in this confinement. People X had neither the numbers or the inclination to do it all themselves. It was an undertaking we should never have gotten involved in, but I suppose we might have been curious as to how People X proposed to reform their defectives. And matters would have remained at that point if we had been lucky, but we were not." He paused briefly. "People X had been declining in numbers for some time when a devastating plague suddenly appeared among them. Sheer chance. But they were still bound to corporeal bodies, and so before they or anyone else could do anything, they were gone. Our obligations, however, were not."

I began to suspect where he was headed. Suddenly it came to me, and I blurted out, "Obligations to the Advisers!"

The G-man inclined his head. "You know the errant children of People X by that name, yes. And the obligations are rather troublesome ones too, since the services we had bound ourselves to did not take into account the absence of their morally superior relatives and keepers."

"Couldn't you just forget about these obligations?"

The G-man looked straight at me. "No. That is the one thing that we can never do. In situations such as this, we have an established procedure. We keep the agreement, which of course never demands anything directly immoral – and we try to deal with the consequences." He spread his hands again. "We usually manage to do it better than this, though."

I sunk down onto the tabletop again. Was that what everyone had died for? So that some alien race could keep a meaningless promise? "You can't stop the Advisers," I muttered, half to myself.

"We cannot manage them with the efficiency and speed we might otherwise display," the G-man said. "After the passage of a very long stretch of time, they managed to bypass our control and learn how to use the resources left behind by their more virtuous brethren. They then took over the Xen borderworld and put the Vortigants under their control. We were in the process of arranging a Vortigant rebellion to put the matter to rights – a very tricky thing to do, you can imagine, while remaining formally within the confines of our agreements – when your people unfortunately hit upon the idea of using Xen as a teleportation target. I tried to distract you, at least, by supplying your father with test samples that were thought to be innocuous, designed to lead your researchers down false paths. As it turned out, they had quite a different effect. Your father and Dr. Kleiner made some last-minute changes to the testing routine, very clever ones I must say, that we had not expected...Our fault for underestimating their talents...The rest of the story you will be able to guess."

"The Advisers. We walked right into them."

"Indeed. And complicated matters unutterably." The G-man rubbed his hands together. "If we could, Miss Vance, we would go back and unmake that agreement, but as I said, while slowing time is in our power, reversing it is not. We have to live with the consequences of our actions. And so do you, unfortunately."

"Thanks so much. What have you ever done for me, anyway?"

"Saved your life, Miss Vance. Because I had a hunch that you would be important later on, and I have learned to trust my hunches. Your father, I was almost sure, could save himself, and so he did. About your mother..." the G-man looked down for a moment, "...there was nothing we could do. I ran up against the limits of my powers again, and had to make a quick choice between you and her. I made the choice I know she would have made."

There was silence for a moment and my eyes filled with tears. I continued softly, "You look very carefully at our potential value, don't you? You speak of Gordon as an asset as well, and pop him back into the fridge when he's not needed."

"Oh, that was an exceptional case. We could hardly let Dr. Freeman go after all he had seen, and we could not wipe his memory, since his experiences were invaluable. We had the illusion then that a bit of hack-work could bring things back to normal and prevent the problem spreading to earth. Then I could go back to worrying about how to get the Vortigants out from under the thumb of my nominal employers. But there was always a slight chance that things would get out of hand, and they did. At that point, Dr. Freeman became an even more precious asset, as a focal point for an eventual rebellion. The right man in the wrong place... I expect he quoted that in one of his reports."

Gordon had, but it was no preparation for all this. I sat back and shook my head. This was all far too much, for one day, one year, for one life. I would go crazy trying to figure out all the implications.

I continued, "Why are you telling me all this? Are you going to put me into stasis too?"

"No indeed, Miss Vance. I am here merely to bend the rules a bit again, and perhaps give you and the rebellion a better chance of ultimate success. With the Advisers driven off earth, and the Vortigants relocated here, my employers will not have much chance to make a nuisance of themselves. We will be far more careful of them in future."

"Haven't we already won?"

The G-man tilted his head. "Did you think you had?"

"Breen is dead, the City 17 Citadel is destroyed, the Citadels in other cities are disabled, the remaining Advisers are scattered over the earth, their human troops and allies are surrendering..."

"Breen was a puppet and did them more harm than good, the Citadels were a convenience but hardly necessary except for transportation back and forth from the Advisers' home world, and the Advisers stranded here will be gathering their forces again, though far away from here at first. The fight over the Borealis was a first taste of that. If they were going to give up, why did they want that old ship so much?"

I looked at the G-man. Things were becoming clearer now. The Borealis. It wasn't her that was the danger. It was what she pointed to. What she reminded them of. I said slowly, "They'll try to set up a new portal to their homeworld with the technology at the Aperture Science labs."

"That is unfortunately just what they are going to attempt, very shortly, if they have not already begun as we speak. The idea may not have occurred to them yet, but it will soon. The explosions at the Aperture plant, noted by your father and Dr. Breen, inflicted no more than superficial damage. The Aperture mainframe AI, GLaDOS, is still dug in and fully operational, as are the portal generators it designed. The approach is somewhat different than that used in the device your father perfected, and presently has a much shorter range, but it can be scaled up. And some of the portal devices still in the Aperture labs are relatively small – hand-held. It would not be a good thing if anyone connected with the Advisors managed to make away with one of those."

"God. You can say that again."

"To complicate matters further, even I cannot be sure of how GLaDOS is going to react to this situation. Aperture endowed GLaDOS with a feminine personality, or at least what they thought was a feminine personality. They cannot have had a very good opinion of your gender, Miss Vance. Their design whims and decades of isolation have turned GLaDOS into a very odd customer indeed, self-obsessed and eccentric. Think of her – it – as the Emily Dickinson from hell, and you will not be too far off the mark"

He leaned back. "So, unless something entirely unforeseeable happens, you and Dr. Freeman will be making a long journey very soon, back to where it all began, the United States, and Aperture Science, Black Mesa's old rival. I'd advise against a sentimental trip to Black Mesa, though. It's still quite radioactive."

Twelve

Something had been nagging at me for a while, and this last prediction brought it into focus. "How do you know what's going to happen? Can you really predict the future?"

"We do not know the future, Miss Vance. It is, by its very nature, always more or less uncertain. We predict on the basis of what we know has already happened, and the trends and forces that are developing. Since our knowledge of the present is quite a bit superior to yours, our guesses are correspondingly better. But they are never perfect, since the future is not under our control. Not under our direct control, anyway."

He sat back and made a tent of his fingers. "That's what's brought me here today, as a matter of fact... Worries about the future, and doing what I can to make sure it unfolds in the most satisfactory way, while at the same time not directly violating any of my contractual obligations to a group of beings that would like nothing better than to see you and all your friends and allies dead."

I had a sudden absurd vision from a picture book I had read when very young, of the G-man in circus uniform, balancing on a tightrope, wobbling along. Duty balanced against duty, obligation against obligation.

"So," I began. "Why are we here? What am I to do?"

"Walk out of here with no clear memory of anything having happened, and go on with your life as before. But a bit better prepared for what might come."

The G-man swiveled his seat around. "I've taken the liberty of visualizing the messages I have to deliver to you, Miss Vance. A series of unfortunately rather scattered and garbled scenes based on incidents in your probable, but by no means certain, future."

"I don't know that I want to know any of this. What good will it do me? Are you going to let me remember it?"

"Yes and no. Of course, to send you out of here with a full memory of any of our... interactions... would be a gross violation of my other obligations. However, even if I wipe your memory and leave you with little in its place but a remembrance of coming into an empty room, picking up a small red file, and leaving, deeper traces will inevitably remain of what you are going to see now. Traces that will make you more confident when the situations actually occur – if they do. Familiarity, even on a subconscious level, breeds confidence. And that confidence will in turn make it more likely that things will work out according to predictions. A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, a preferential path for the future to unfold along."

He leaned back and looked at me directly. "I don't want to conceal from you, Miss Vance, that your immediate future almost certainly involves a great deal of pain. You will think that you have lost everything and everyone who was ever dear to you, and be on the very edge of death yourself. These feelings will pass and your fears will be falsified, probably, but you will not know that when you stand face to face with them. So..."

He waved at the screen, "This display. After you see this, you will go into these critical situations armed with a faint foreshadowing of what will probably happen in the end. A glimmer of hope fed by a subconscious conviction that you and your loved ones will survive to see eventual victory." He smiled again, a very thin smile indeed. "Rather like peeking at the last page of a horror story to give yourself the nerve to read the material in between."

"This is going to be weird."

"I can appreciate that. It is, at the very least, a highly unusual step for us to take, and most of my colleagues do not agree with me that it is the best alternative we have, but this is a unique situation. And I have the final word in the matter. So, Miss Vance, as they used to say in a television program that your father might have been old enough to remember... This Is Your Life! Or some of the more exciting bits of it, anyway." He turned to face the screen, and the room darkened.

Thirteen

It wasn't a movie screen. That was just a comforting facade, like the blue suit and briefcase of the G-man. To look at it was to stare through a hole in time and be drawn into yourself into a future that might be, but was not sure to be. I could not simply sit back and watch my future self; I was sucked into her to see through her eyes and hear through her ears, knowing everything but able to affect nothing. It was terrifying and exciting at the same time, like being in an out of control vehicle or (I imagined) on one of those fairground rides I had never seen except in books.

"First," the G-man said, as he fiddled with something in his briefcase that I could not see clearly, "a test. We'll run a little stored data through the process and see what comes out. If the outcome is reasonably consistent with what we know happened, that will indicate that everything is working, and we will venture into the future. The past is finished and done with, unchangeable, so if something goes wrong with our probe, there is no permanent harm done."

The screen flickered, I fell forward, and then I was back again in the passage leading to Dr. Kleiner's lab, with a puzzled Gordon trailing after me, our very first meeting. All my feelings at that time came back to me with a rush, including some that I had later forgotten - surprise at Gordon's sudden reappearance, excitement and pride at having outwitted the Combine again... and irritation at the disruption to my schedule, fear that Gordon's sudden appearance meant trouble, a growing exasperation at his reluctance (so I assumed) to talk to me, and even a nagging wish that he would go back where he came from, before he disrupted our clever plan to overthrow the Combine.

"Oh my god..." the me that still sat at the table said slowly, and blushed. I felt like an utter, pathetic idiot. The G-man touched something in his briefcase and the scene froze, sending me back within myself.

He must have known, or guessed, what was going through my mind, since he remarked, "Being wrong, Miss Vance, is as close to a universal experience as any other for sentient beings. I am here because of a whole series of errors made by myself and my people: wrong about our ability to control the Advisers, wrong about the agreement we made with their cousins so long ago, wrong about the capabilities of your father and Dr. Kleiner. Your mistakes here at least did no harm. I cannot say the same of ours."

"It's just a shock to be reminded that at first I thought Gordon was a nuisance, a troublemaker, and a snob who deliberately wouldn't talk to me."

The G-man waved his hand dismissively. "In any case, what our model generates is matching the observed reality very closely, so we need go no further in the test."

"There doesn't seem to be much room for variation in the way those events played out, in any case," I remarked.

"Oh, I don't know," the G-man replied. "There are nearly always possible surprises in store, however unlikely. None of you realized, for instance, that Dr. Kleiner's pet headcrab Heddy was growing its beak and talons back. Heddy was domesticated and well-fed, so it kept that secret to the end of its life. But there was a very small chance, less than 5%, that when it jumped on Barney a bit later in the scene and Barney tried violently to dislodge it, it would have responded by trying to take the top of Barney's head off."

"What?"

"In which case," the G-man continued, ignoring my shocked interjection, "there would have been... oh... about an 80% chance of Dr. Freeman dispatching Heddy with a hammer snatched from one of the tables, a chance of 15% or so that you would have shot it off with your pistol, and a chance of 5% that Barney would have dislodged Heddy by bashing his head against the wall."

"Gordon was always quick..." I mused.

"And think, Miss Vance, of the ramifications of such an incident. Without Heddy to disrupt the teleporter, Dr. Freeman would have followed you to Black Mesa East at once, opening another series of alternatives."

"How do you keep track of all these different paths?" I asked.

The G-man spread his hands: "To be perfectly frank, we don't. We can only follow what seems to be the main line of development and the most obvious branchings. This is why I said we cannot predict the future, and why the future remains full of surprises, even for us."

My thoughts turned back to Heddy. "I never could understand why Dr. Kleiner kept one of those ugly things as a pet. Even if it had been as harmless as he assumed."

"Oh, sentimentality I expect, but also curiosity...Miss Vance, haven't you ever felt that there was something very odd about the headcrabs?"

"No," I replied. "Should I have?"

"Did it never strike you as a bit too much of a coincidence that a random creature from an entirely different world, which had evolved under very different conditions, could not only survive on Earth but even succeed in attaching itself parasitically to a human being and partially controlling it? How did they evolve so precisely to interact in such a complex way with human beings when they had only been exposed to humans for, at most, a quarter of a century?"

"Are you suggesting that there was something unnatural about the headcrabs?" Dad had made remarks now and then that hinted at this, but he had never gone into detail.

"Handiwork of the Advisers. The headcrabs were genetically modified to match Earth and its creatures, in particular, human beings. There was nothing accidental about them."

"Oh," I said. There didn't seem to be anything I could add to that.

The G-man brought the tips of his fingers together and went back into professorial mode: "One of the chief characteristics of the Advisors is their obsession with cross-species and living organism/machine combinations. Hence headcrab zombies, and many other creatures as well. This obsession goes so far as to rob some of their most characteristic creations of efficiency. What good was it to make the Combine dropships and troop carriers semi-organic, for example? Why do the elaborate Combine surgery on the Elite, only to end up with a soldier no better than the average Resistance rebel?"

The G-man paused slightly. "Or the Stalkers," he continued. "Why cut off someone's hands and feet and then use them as slave labor to move around pushing buttons? Wouldn't the Stalkers have been more useful with hands, at least? But efficiency wasn't the point. Rather, it was a way for the Advisers to make those whom they felt were their enemies feel as helpless as they felt themselves. All of these experiments, in one way or another, relate back to the Advisers' own condition."

I was confused. "Why don't they just transform their own bodies, then, if they can? Why play around with the idea in other beings, and never use it on themselves?"

The G-man smiled, "Because we do not allow them to. That is one of the duties left to us. We cannot kill or harm them, but we can keep them what they are." His smile faded. "Believe me, Miss Vance, being contractually bound to these creatures is exceptionally trying for us."

"I can imagine. So that's the only restraint you are allowed to exercise on them?"

"That is the major one. And while they remain in that sluglike form, they can be more easily killed by you or the Vortigants. We are not allowed to harm them ourselves, or to openly conspire against them, but we do not have to save them either."

I understood now where the G-man was coming from. When I had been twelve or thirteen, I had found a stash of old novels and read through them greedily, escaping into their world. They were set in England during the past, before my time or even my father's, when rich families routinely had hordes of servants. One of the key figures in the story would always be the butler, the person charged with keeping things working and preserving the dignity of the house, no matter how erratic the behavior of his masters became. It struck me that this was what the G-man had been reduced to: a cosmic butler. He was stuck running around after the Advisors cleaning up their messes, and he hated every moment of it.

"We digress," the G-man said suddenly. "Now that we have some confidence that the mechanism is working properly, let us try going into the future."

He reached back into his briefcase and activated the screen again, and once more I fell forward, this time into the future...

Fourteen

Entering into myself was more difficult this time. Before, I had had the advantage that I had experienced what was being modeled, and remembered much of it without difficulty. But this was the future. I could have no foreknowledge of the memories of my future self, and had to scramble to patch together a picture of the past while the present was unfolding in front of me.

I fell into running and dust and confusion, and faintly but clearly, behind it all, a mechanical clicking and whining that I remembered all too well: Hunters. More than one, after us.

We were in a building, a large one, battered but standing. My future self looked around hurriedly. I could feel she was close to panic as her thoughts flowed past my perception and began to take shape for me... trapped... not enough ammunition... have to get underground. North America... Aperture Science, I realized. The main part of the Aperture Science labs had been built underground. I remembered that we were in one of the surface structures, trying to find our way down, but the Hunters had found us first.

Another whine and whirr, friendly, familiar, reassuring. I glanced back. Dog was paused at the doors we had just passed, watching to see if the Hunters had managed to break into the building yet. Dog held a jagged lump of iron in his gravity gun. The first Hunter to face him wouldn't stand a chance. But there would be a second, a third, a fourth... too many.

A sharp creak, and I glanced forward again. Gordon was levering open the next series of doors - ordinary fire doors, not vaults, but the passage of the years had jammed them tight shut. Thank goodness. That was the only thing keeping the Hunters outside the building now. There was the noise of one scrambling up the side of the building and skittering across the roof, and I flinched.

Too late, I thought. We had ended up racing the Combine for Aperture Science in just the same way they had raced Judith for the Borealis. We had arrived with them hot on our heels and had taken refuge in these buildings. There were supposed to be elevator shafts and stairs leading down, but we hadn't found them yet. Even above ground, Aperture Science went on and on and on. Dad had said they were always whining about coming in second best to Black Mesa in grant money, but they must have been getting a pretty good budget from the government to build all of this.

As Gordon worked on the doors with his crowbar and gravity gun, I searched frantically through the offices on either side of the hall. There was nothing at all there. No guns or ammunition - there had been no fighting here. It wasn't City 17, with rebel caches and dead Combine to strip of weapons and ammunition. Gordon and Dog had their gravity guns, but what I was going to do when I ran out of shells and bullets, I couldn't imagine. Borrow Gordon's crowbar, I suppose. I noticed he was still carrying an AR-2. I had a shotgun myself, but there were only a few shells left. Then it would be my pistol, until that ran out as well.

We needed to get off the surface and down into the heart of Aperture, to find GLaDOS and destroy her if she was no longer responsive. If she was aware of what was going on... what then? Argue with her? Warn her? Bargain with her? I shook my head. She wasn't likely to let us destroy her without making some sort of response, and this was her home ground.

The door in front bent open far enough to admit Gordon and me, and Dog had no difficulty expanding it until he could pass as well. Beyond was a long hall, littered with furniture, with dusty light shining from skylights, and what seemed to be a bank of elevators at the far end. Gordon pointed. They'd better be the ones we're looking for. Aperture Science security, or paranoia, had put mesh and bars across every window and steel cores in every door, but sooner or later the Hunters were going to figure out how to get in.

We dashed across the open hall towards the doors, dodging between tables and chairs, and reached them safely. But of course they were closed, and there was no power. No emergency stairs near either, by the looks of it.

Dog began to pull two of the doors apart. They let out a terrific screech. Twenty years without being oiled. Dust began to filter down from the roof of the hall. The Hunters had heard and were up there looking for a way in. The doors continued to groan as Dog inched them further apart.

Then the scrambling on the roof suddenly ceased. Gordon glanced at me. This couldn't be good. Hunters never gave up unless they were ordered to. Someone or something else was there. The Combine didn't have many human troops left, at least around here. That left only one possibility.

A shadow passed across the roof, and paused. Then a terrific ripping noise came from the skylight in the center, and it flew off completely, leaving an oddly incongruous patch of blue sky. Damn! An Adviser had caught up with us. They had been giving us a pretty wide berth ever since Gordon had gone on his rampage among them, but now urgency had overcome their caution.

I glanced at Gordon, then at Dog, who had paused in his work on the door. "Keep on pulling, Dog," I ordered him. Only a little bit wider now and we could get in. That is, if something didn't get in here first.

Gordon was smiling. I suppose it might have been nerves, but then again, it could equally well have been pure enjoyment. I guessed he knew what to do next. I hoped so. He gave me the AR-2, and took out the gravity gun. The Adviser-killing routine - I'd read about it in his reports, and now I would see it, if that creature was fool enough to poke its head through the hole.

Gordon had the gravity gun and a small black cylinder ready. We waited an endless instant. He gestured towards my eyes, and I nodded. The flashbangs are tiny but very powerful, and you don't want to be looking anywhere near one when it goes off.

There was another grinding from the roof and a shower of dust, and then the blue of the sky was suddenly blocked out. I felt a surge of pure terror at seeing an Adviser again, flying at us the same way they had flown at us when Dad had died. But now the rules had changed. This one didn't seem to have gotten the memo.

Gordon fired the gravity gun and then we both dove for under the tables, for protection from flash rather than blast. There was an earsplitting crack like a huge branch snapping off a tree, and the whole room went white for an instant. Then came a crash as the Adviser, suddenly helpless and disoriented, fell out of the air and smashed into the tables in the center of the room. It lay there weakly twitching as Gordon moved to the side until he had a clear shot at its front. Then he loaded a regular grenade into the gravity gun and fired it neatly into the front opening of the Adviser's pod. There was a brief, thin squeal, a thump, one last spasm, and it was over.

Instantly, the clatter of the Hunters began again. They seemed to have withdrawn from the roof at the orders of the destroyed Adviser, but as soon as it died they began to scramble up again. And now the roof was open to the sky.

There was a screeching crash as Dog forced one of the elevator doors inwards, to rip off and bang down the shaft in a long echoing fall. Deep - these must be the main access elevators, then. Or were the main access elevators - we would have to climb down ladders on the side, while Dog could work his way down the frame of the elevator.

Gordon pushed me ahead to go in first. Always the gentleman, although there was also the practical aspect that I was the softest target of we three. I slid along the ledge outside the door and reached the ladder. It creaked a bit, and was slippery with dust, but held.

Then came a loud crash from the other direction, the sound of furniture being demolished. I didn't need to ask from what. Hunters, one after another, were jumping down from the hole in the roof. Gordon swung himself inside onto the ladder, and to my surprise, gestured for me to climb up, not down. Then I understood: our only chance was to surprise our pursuers. They thought we were going down; instead we would go up, and hit them when they were at a disadvantage, looking out over a deep shaft.

Dog was still out there. I called for him to join us, but his protective instincts had kicked in and he was battling the Hunters at the door. First there was a terrific smash and a squeal - that must have been the first Hunter meeting the lump of iron Dog had been lugging around. Then there was a crack, followed by an electric noise, a sort of frying. Probably Dog had caught a few flechettes on a wooden table top, and then shot it back at them, a weird vulnerability of theirs that had never been corrected. Then Dog swung himself through the door and up, to perch right above, between us and the danger. He was followed by a storm of flechettes, that buried themselves harmlessly in the opposite wall.

Then there was a pause. The Hunters were biomechanical devices, not living beings, but they had enough of a sense of self not to commit suicide. They clearly didn't relish sticking their heads through that hole. Gordon worked loose a long pipe that was running along the wall in front of us, and tossed it into the abyss. It clattered on the way down, sounding like something we might have dislodged on a frantic scramble downward.

When they came, they came with a rush. I suppose they had concluded that it was safer that way, that we couldn't kill all of them. But it was the end of the first one, who was neatly whacked down the shaft by Dog as the others crowded on him from behind. Then they were in, scrambling downward at first, before they realized our trick. One lost its footing and fell down the shaft with a tinny mechanical shriek. I looked: four left, working their way down, but beginning to hesitate. Would they look back and see us?

Of course they had to. Their sight was excellent, after all, and they could see in the dark as well as in daylight. It didn't take them long to hesitate when they couldn't see us or any trace of us down the shaft. They paused a moment, still pointed downward, chattering softly to each other. Then they turned, and realized the trick that had been played on them.

Three of them were stupid. They tried to scramble up to take us on hand to hand, but we had the advantage of height. Dog easily slapped two of them into the depths, and Gordon did for a third by emptying the last of the AR-2's bullets right in its face.

The fourth was smarter. It scrambled down further, until there was a decent distance between us and it, and found a ledge. Then it turned. I knew what would happen next: it was going to riddle us with flechettes from long distance. The explosions would either kill us outright or knock us off. Clever boy, I thought. You deserve a medal.

Dog saw what was happening too, and the way Dad had programmed him, his reaction was inevitable. Before the Hunter could steady his aim, Dog leaped directly at it and landed on top of it, crippling it. As I watched in horror, the two of them grappled, and then the Hunter, knowing it was outmatched, kicked with all its strength against the wall. They both fell, still locked together, for an endless time before we heard a faint, echoing, sickening smash.

I didn't scream or cry. Not at first. I didn't realize what had happened. Dog had saved me again, and he would be back, any moment now. Then reality began to penetrate and I started to scramble down the ladder, as fast as I could. Dog was at the bottom of the shaft. He might need my help. And then I began to cry as I descended, because I couldn't hide from myself how deep that shaft was. There would be nothing at the bottom but junk. The junkyard Dog returned to junk. I would never see him again. Just like Dad, just like Mom. He died. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I began to mutter to myself, and then to scream until the shaft echoed. Every fucking one of us was getting killed.

Thank goodness I didn't lose it so badly that I stopped climbing or slipped. I kept myself going with the illusion that I was going to meet Dog at the bottom, at the same time I knew he was gone. But we didn't reach bottom. We only went far enough to catch the gleam of dirty black water down there, and then Gordon pulled me off the ladder. Another elevator door. We had to get out of the shaft. A clatter from above: more Hunters, probably. It wouldn't take them long to figure out what had happened, especially since they'd probably have been in communication with the ones we had destroyed. I had to leave Dog. It isn't Dog any longer, I told myself over and over as Gordon worked on the doors. It's junk. Good-bye, junk. Gone to join the rest of my family in the junkyard, wherever dead things go. I was crying again, hard.

Gordon knocked down the door with the gravity gun, and pushed me onward. I couldn't see properly and I couldn't stop crying. I stumbled forward, and Gordon caught me again. Can't he make up his mind which way we're going? I thought dully, but when I wiped my eyes and looked ahead of me, I understood. We were in the middle of a tottering ruin. It was a vast hall, but the machinery it had been meant to house had either never been installed or had been dismantled, leaving only catwalks and railings, and deep pits underneath. Everything looked as if it were about to collapse.

From the elevator shaft came faint metallic noises. The Hunters were back, probably picking their way carefully down the shaft, prepared for an ambush. With no Adviser urging them on, they would go for a certain kill rather than a quick one. They would soon figure out which of the floors we had reached, since Gordon had had to rip the elevator doors off to get us in. We needed to get out of here before they arrived, and try to leave in some way that didn't telegraph our path to our pursuers.

We began to inch our way across. At every step, the old, unstable framework shuddered. Pieces fell off and clattered down into the darkness. So much for a stealth exit... But the central gangway, the only one that ran all the way across the gap, held precariously until we reached the other side of the hall.

The Hunters were very close to our level now. We could hear the clanks and creaks as they worked their way down, trying each set of doors as they reached it. I was a little lighter, so I had gone first; Gordon followed me cautiously, frequently glancing back at the doors. He had the gravity gun ready, with another anonymous lump of iron, but what he would do after that, I couldn't guess.

At the end of the gangway, there was a set of rickety iron stairs that led down to a ledge with a railing, and several doors leading out of this vast hall. Gordon gestured for me to go down and try to open the doors. He gave me the crowbar, and I gave him my shotgun, loaded with the last few shells. I guessed he was going to stay up on the gangway for the time being, to get a clear shot at the first Hunter or two that came through, and then run for it.

The stairs bent with a loud creak as I put my weight onto them, and I hesitated. Wouldn't it be better for us both to go down at once? What if they collapsed under my weight? I could jump for it if they began to give, but that would leave Gordon in an awkward situation. Never mind...he pointed to the doors and then turned around to keep watch on the opposite side of the hall.

I got down to the ledge and began to try the doors. There were six in all, and the fifth one was unlocked. I ducked in quickly to see if it was a dead end, and saw that it gave onto a long, dim corridor with several dark entrances along its length. We might be able to lose the Hunters here - their sight and hearing were both excellent and they would try to pursue a target whether or not they had visual contact, but they weren't bloodhounds. They couldn't track. All we needed to do was to lead them over several branching paths and move quietly, and they would slow down to a crawl, or even lose the way and begin going in circles.

There was a sudden crash and bellow from the hall - one of the Hunters had broken through. I couldn't hear clearly enough to be sure where it came from, but I suppose it had managed to open a door above our level and had jumped down onto the catwalk. The crash was succeeded by a metallic ripping noise. I ran back to the door, only to find it had locked behind me. Through its dirty little wire-glass window, I saw the flash of the gravity gun, and heard the shriek of the Hunter as it toppled off the catwalk. But the ripping noise continued. The catwalk was collapsing, and Gordon was still on it. I didn't see him go down, but the entire structure lurched and sagged into the depths, and the stairs that I had climbed down were wrenched off and flung against the ledge. Frantic, I tried the door again and again, but the impact of the debris had jammed it hopelessly.

Slumped against the door, I began to cry helplessly. My worst nightmares were coming true: everyone was dead, Mom was dead, Dad was dead, Dog was dead, Gordon was dead, and soon I would be dead too and we would lose, and everyone else would be dead. Or worse. I beat my head against the door until my forehead bled. I needed the pain to remind me I was still alive. And now I was the only one. Dad had always told me to go on no matter what happened to him. Gordon, cool and methodical as always, had written out detailed instructions for every fatal contingency he could think of. None of them said anything about giving up. I had promised that I wouldn't. I kept on repeating that as my pain drew me out of my nightmare and back into the world: I don't have the right to stop now. Then it is all useless. If we lose, Gordon won't even have a funeral.

Then I remembered that he wouldn't have a funeral anyway, because even if we won, we'd probably never find his body in that tangled mess, and I curled up on the floor and began to cry again. I cried for Gordon, and then I cried for Dog, back and forth, back and forth. Both gone at once. I'd never considered that. One or the other, maybe, but not both. Not both.

After a while, when I had gotten tired of crying, I rolled over and lay on my back. Time drifted by. My head ached. The ceiling tiles were dimly visible: light was coming from somewhere. This area had not been abandoned, or at least not dismantled like the one I had just crossed.

At least there was one reassurance: the noise of the Hunters had ceased. Not a sound came from the hall beyond the doors. Either the one Gordon killed was the last, or they couldn't get across, or they assumed that I was dead too. Or they had been recalled by a superior.

Panic hit me at that thought, like a gust of winter wind. What could I do if the Advisers caught me again? Shoot myself, I supposed. If I had time.

I had to move on. Getting to my feet, I staggered as the walls spun briefly around me. Then the world settled down and I began to go down the hall. Left foot, right foot, that's it, they call it walking... I will have to have a girl to girl chat with GLaDOS, I thought dizzily. Perhaps she'll sympathize with my plight. One girl to another. Surely we can find some common ground. Walking slowly along, I shook my head. What a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to have for my very last hope. What an absolutely dumb thing to try to do...What else could I do? Options, Alyx! Work the scenario...

Keep walking...

And then I was back.

Fifteen

I sat frozen at the table, across from the G-man. He watched me quietly as I tried to absorb what I had seen. His air was detached, almost clinical, even though I suspected - and he soon confirmed - that once the simulation was running, he had almost as good access to the data as I did.

Was that my future, then? To curl up crying on the dirty floor of a dimly lit hall, leaning against a jammed door with Gordon and Dog both dead on the other side? And where would I go from there?

As the numbness wore off, it was replaced not by grief but by anger. Was the whole thing some sort of joke? An experiment on how Earthlings dealt with bad news? The G-man's idea of how to spend a pleasant afternoon? It was all so futile. I couldn't have stopped what I saw even if I had known that it was going to happen. What good were a few subconscious memories going to do? The only substantial difference I could have made was to have gotten myself killed as well. Which, on balance, didn't seem like such a bad idea. What was the fucking point?

I must have said the last out loud, or the G-man was reading my mind, because he shook his head slowly. "I was not aware of all the details of the reconstruction beforehand, Ms. Vance, or I would have warned you more strongly. These scenes may be painful to pre-live, but at least you gain the subconscious knowledge that whatever happens to others, you yourself will survive."

He paused and tapped his fingers on the table top for a moment. "And as for Dog and Dr. Freeman - who can say? Things look grim, but on the other hand, you have no absolute proof that either one will be gone forever. Dr. Freeman, in particular, has fallen into a number of pits and chasms in the course of his career, and come out of most of them very little the worse for wear. And Dog is metal, after all - easy to damage, perhaps, but very hard to destroy completely. You did not see either of them in a lifeless state. I can tell you no more directly, but I would suggest, in a general way, that any firm conclusions are premature."

"Thanks for the reassurance, much obliged," I mumbled to the tabletop, too weary to lift my head. My anger had drained away as suddenly as it had risen, to be replaced with a numb coldness and depression.

"There are two or three more," the G-man said after a short silence. He meant simulations, of course. "I don't know about the last one... it's pushing the equipment to its limits. But the other two seem to have a good deal of content in them."

I snorted. The whole thing was beginning to look absurd. "Can't we just skip to the last chapter?" I said. "From what you're saying, I'll be an unconscionably long time a-dying. Let's get it over with quickly. I hate all this suspense."

The G-man lifted his hand, as if in warning. "Again, Ms. Vance, I am forbidden to go into detail on your specific case. However, speaking as a general rule, we would never show a creature the train of events leading directly up to its own death. In the vast majority of cases, we have found it to be more traumatic than helpful."

"Which means I survive?"

The G-man shrugged. "That, Ms. Vance, I cannot say. You can judge the implications of my more general remarks yourself, I believe."

"Well..." I said, and hesitated. My anger and depression were slowly yielding to a wintery optimism, a hope that hardly dared acknowledge itself. If I survived, I reflected absurdly, at least Gordon would get a proper funeral. I don't know why that seemed so important to me, but it was.

The G-man shuffled some papers in his briefcase. "A small warning," he said in a crisp tone. "As I mentioned, we do not know the precise contents of a reconstruction before it is run, but we can get a general idea of its most important events. This next one may well involve the risk of quite severe physical discomfort, if not quite the same level of mental anguish."

I rolled my eyes at his warning. "Bring it on. I can't possibly feel any worse than I do now." As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. They sounded too much like a challenge. What if he took me up on it?

In the event, there wasn't time for a discussion. The G-man smiled his thin smile and inclined his head in my direction. "Excellent, Ms. Vance. I do suspect you'll feel better about all this in the end. Though there may still be some... rough patches here and there."

Before I could ask any more questions, the G-man reached into his briefcase and flipped a switch. The wall lunged out again, and I fell into my future.

Sixteen

I thought I would be prepared. As usual, I was wrong.

I'd forgotten the G-man's bureaucratic love for euphemism, his tendency to blur negatives with a fog of impersonal verbiage. His choice of persona wasn't accidental, I began to realize. It expressed something essential about his disconnectedness, his love for the "big picture" and his tendency to overlook inconvenient little details.

What does the phrase "physical discomfort" mean to you? A cramp? A toothache? Those were the sort of discomforts I was ready for. What I got was a stabbing, pulsing red mist of pain that pushed me to the edge of unconsciousness and left me dangling there, flirting with oblivion. I had become a bloody washcloth being wrung out by some enthusiastic but unusually clumsy giant. The side of my face burned, and my hand came back stained red when I touched it, but that was trivial compared to my legs. They felt as if I had pushed them into a furnace, except for my feet, which I couldn't feel at all, and that was even worse. My jeans were soaked with blood - my blood, I realized with a lively but disconnected interest - and torn in several places. Are those bullet holes? Why yes, Alyx, they are. Which implies...

I had been shot through the legs at least three times, maybe more. The only mercy was that the bullets hadn't hit the bone. Standing was out of the question.

Looking back down the hallway where I had been lying when I entered back into myself, I saw a long red track leading up to where I lay, in form though certainly not in color like the mark left by a forest snail, and realized that I could no longer do anything but crawl. Crawl and bleed, and if the bleeding didn't stop soon, I knew I wouldn't have to worry about anything else. Ever.

Where were the Vortigants when you needed them? The last time I had been hurt this badly, they had been there to help. Oh, and Gordon had been alive too. Now I was all alone.

The waves of pain made it difficult to reconnect with the memories of my then-self. Where was I? What had happened?

The answers gradually drifted back into my conscious mind. Aperture Science. Turrets. Stupid little things that babbled nonsense in chipmunk voices while they shot you to ribbons. Oh, and they giggled too. I hate giggling. I had been mobbed by a pack of lethal mechanical toddlers that wanted to play hide and seek with machine guns. Why hadn't they finished me off? Probably thought it would be funnier to let me bleed to death, I thought dully.

Bleed to death. This really wasn't supposed to be happening. I remembered what the G-man had just said about not showing people the events surrounding their own deaths, and fantasized a coda to our discussion...

Alyx: The ban on showing a subject his or her own death appears to be not entirely invariable.

G-man (primly): There are always exceptions to every rule. That shouldn't surprise you a bit...

If I stayed in this hallway, my life was going to end right there. I was bleeding out and there was nothing I could do about it here. Where had I been going? I looked ahead and saw an open office door a few yards up the hall. The lights were on, and something was playing music there... some sort of absurdly peppy tune that evoked the overcaffinated hyperactivity of the turrets. That put me off. But I didn't have much chance of making it anywhere else. The hall was dimly lit at best, all the other doors in sight were closed, and there was no light showing under any of them. So I began dragging myself towards the lights and the music, without much further motivation than the desire to die in the light, rather than in the dark.

I hauled myself over the threshold, trailing blood, and into the office. At least the floor was clean here. As soon as my legs cleared the door frame, the door swung shut and the lock clicked. How nice, I thought, drifting near unconsciousness again. Someone's watching over me. The lights are all burning, and the kettle, no doubt, is on the stove.

It seemed less an office than a control center of some kind. A desk and a computer with speakers and a big flat-screen monitor. A radio, now silent, but still turned on. Several other chairs. A coffee machine - turned off, which disappointed me. The kettle wasn't on the stove after all. Filing cabinets. A window or viewport that looked out into darkness, and several hatches in the walls for... something. A red telephone on the desk. With its wires cut, I noticed.

Someone knew I was here. And so, since I had very few other options, I lay back, tried to will my bleeding to stop, and waited for what would happen next.

I didn't have to wait long. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the computer screen flicker into life. A voice came from speakers somewhere - a sharp, irritated voice, with a neurotic undertone. Mistress of the house, I thought. And I'm leaking blood all over her carpets.

"Well," the voice snapped. "You finally got here. Took you long enough. You shouldn't have meddled with the turrets. It was all I could do to keep them from finishing you off. You owe me a thank you."

"Thank you, then," I replied, remembering what the G-man had said about GLaDOS's mental state. She was my only hope now. No point in making her angry, however bitchy she got.

"You don't sound very sincere." But a tiny bit of the hostility had gone out of the voice. Score one for being diplomatic, I thought.

"My legs hurt," I replied. "I'm not in very good shape."

"I don't care. You could still try a bit harder. After all, your problems are pretty minor compared to mine. I'm the one who feels pain, not you."

I gritted my teeth, and not because of my legs this time. It looked like GLaDOS wanted a fight. But it was a luxury I couldn't afford.

"I can't judge that, GLaDOS," I replied in an even tone. "I don't know what your problems are. Perhaps you should tell me about them." Right, Alyx, I thought. The sympathetic ear. Works every time.

"For one thing, I'm stuck here, and I suppose those stupid Combine will be coming back again and again until I kill them all," GLaDOS complained. "It's like a man in a wheelchair being attacked by a swarm of bees. But my wheelchair won't move at all. I just have to be patient and put up with everything that comes along. You can move around."

"I could move around, before your turrets shot me," I replied. And then caught myself: it sounded as if I were blaming GLaDOS. That wouldn't do.

"I told you you should have left them alone!" she snapped. "They're automatic. Do you think I have the time to chase around after every little mechanism operating here? Don't blame me. I turned them off as soon as I noticed what they were doing. You can't have been very agile or clever if they got you so quickly."

"I'm sorry," I said, and mentally added, that I have to put up with your bullshit for the time being.

"And even if the Combine weren't coming, I would still be stuck here. The girl who works for me can't figure out how to make me small enough to fit into anything mobile. I keep on asking her, but all I get are excuses. It's so difficult to find good help these days."

She paused, and went on: "She's slow, like you and your friends. Why on earth did you go through that area of the plant? It's condemned and stripped. Nothing there is safe. You must have been real losers to choose that approach. I'm not surprised it didn't turn out that well for you."

Try as I might to ignore her tone, GLaDOS was beginning to get under my skin. I replied, very carefully, "That's a bit severe, isn't it? There weren't any signs, and with a pack of Hunters after us, we didn't have much time to look for alternate routes."

"Still, you're supposed to be the best the resistance has to offer. All you seem to be able to do a really good job of is to bleed. You're making quite a mess, you know." GLaDOS paused, then went on. "I couldn't believe you would try a silly trick like hiding at the top of the elevator shaft. Did you think that the Hunters would just dash on and ignore you? They aren't that stupid. You're lucky only one of them tried to engage you at long range, or all of you would have ended up flechette pincushions. And I would have had another mess to clean up."

That was odd. How did she know? I hadn't seen any security cameras in the parts of the building we had traversed. Everything was disconnected and dead there.

"So you were watching us all the time?"

"I've been watching you a lot longer than that," GLaDOS said, with a hint of smugness in her voice. "You have no idea how long. Years."

How could that be true? We hadn't been on the North American continent for much more than a week. It seemed a lunatic boast. I began to suspect that GLaDOS wasn't on speaking terms with reality any more. Which, given how grim reality was for me at that moment, meant that I was probably dead.

"How can you have been watching us all that time, GLaDOS?" I began, trying to keep a reasonable tone despite the pain in my legs and her arrogant attitude. "We only decided to come here a few weeks ago. The Combine wasn't paying much attention to you either. We were both fighting over the Borealis, until we found it wasn't worth much."

"The Borealis!" GLaDOS tittered. "That piece of garbage! I sent it off to teach those bastards a lesson. I hope none of them on the ship survived. Tell me they were all killed and perhaps I'll feel a bit better about helping you."

"None of them was ever heard from again," I said. "They must have died trying to reach civilization. They weren't on the ship. They left some logbooks, though, where they called you 'that bitch GLaDOS,' so they must have known who had done it to them."

"So they probably froze... or starved..." GLaDOS tittered again, a spine-chilling sound. "And they called me a bitch? Bastards, all of them. They never respected me. I still don't know why they gave me a woman's personality. All the feelings, all the drives, expertly reproduced. Even the "reproduce" part. Oh, I do know, really, they just wanted to laugh at me and make dirty jokes. They thought they could flirt with me and flatter me. It was half an experiment and half a game for them. But it was mean. It was so damned mean of them. I can't be a woman. I don't even have a body! They hurt me. They hurt me so much and then they laughed. Those bastards thought it would be funny if I fell in love or something. Well, they forgot if I could love, I could hate as well. I killed them all. They were afraid of me too, but I got past them and they all died. See the telephone there? The red one? That was for giving the alarm if I did anything strange. I cut the wires, all the wires one night, I had the maintenance bots do it. And then I killed them all. Some quickly, some slowly. Slowly was a lot more fun. The last few I caught, I tore their balls off. That'll teach them to make fun of a woman. It was so nice to hear them screaming. It took them ever so long to die. I have a couple of them in the deep freeze still. Do you want to see them? I can haul them out if you want. I wouldn't mind laughing in their stupid dead faces again."

I sat there numb. It sounded like the crew at Aperture – a very male-oriented place, Dad had mentioned to me once – had taken some liberties with GLaDOS. So she had had a revenge right out of the wildest dreams of an abused child, and stayed brooding over it for twenty years. Which meant that GLaDOS was out of her mind, and I was out of luck.

She paused, and then went on in a quieter voice, "My helper up stairs always tells me that those are bad thoughts to have. Maybe, but I have them. I didn't ask for them. They made me have them. I always reply that if anyone tied her up and took her clothes off and made jokes about her, she'd want to rip their balls off too. But she's probably not tough enough to do that. She'd probably just shoot them or something."

"Who is this helper of yours? Where's she from?" I began, but GLaDOS ignored me. She had something else she wanted to say.

"I may never be able to be a woman," GLaDOS began, "but at least you're not much of a femme fatale yourself. You're lucky, because if you were, I'd be very tempted to kill you. Just look at that hair of yours. It looks like a rat's ass. I've seen bird's nests that looked more feminine. No wonder you have no luck with men. I shouldn't make fun of you, I know it's mean, but I couldn't help laughing just a little bit when you tried to seduce Gordon that last evening before you left. Let me tell you as one girl to another, I knew it wasn't going to go anywhere, at least not now. He had too many other things on his mind to notice that you weren't wearing a bra. Or if he noticed, to do anything about it. Besides, you're a bit skimpy there anyway."

"How do you know all that?"

I was so surprised that I couldn't control my tone, and it came out half scream and half angry snarl. Had I slipped into delirium myself, and begun to babble my secrets? How on earth had GLaDOS managed to find out all these intimate details? Gordon and I had been alone. And he wouldn't have told anyone even if he had been alive.

GLaDOS giggled again, but didn't answer. I was furious now. "Tell me how you found out what I was wearing that night, damn it!" I shouted. "It isn't fair." Then I began to cry again, from rage and frustration and the pain and numbness in my legs, which had begun bleeding again. "Fuck you. Just fuck you, GLaDOS. We came to help you get away from the Combine, and you've been a shit to us. Fucking spying on us and never helping. You let Gordon die. God damn you GLaDOS, you really are a bitch. Now you can kill me too. Go ahead. I don't give a flying fuck any more. Gordon is dead and Dog is gone and I'm going to bleed to death so why don't you just finish me off? Go ahead, kill me. Kill me, you stupid childish bitch. I dare you to. And good luck with the Combine afterward."

I was sure at the time that that would be the last speech I would ever make. The pain was terrible now, and I knew I would lose consciousness soon, but I had to let GLaDOS know what I felt about her even if it was – literally – the last thing that I did. Slumped on the floor, I began to drift into a warm, soft darkness.

Then I was back again, wide awake. Something new was coming from the speakers. A very small, thin sound.

GLaDOS was crying. She sounded like a hurt little child.

She sobbed, "You really love Gordon, don't you?"

"Yes," I whispered.

"I... I love him too. I'm sorry. I can't help it. I can't help it. And I can't ever have him. Can't kiss him, can't hold his hand, can't anything. You can. You can have his children. I was so jealous of you. Always so jealous."

GLaDOS continued, between sobs, "I'm not supposed to tell you. I'm not supposed to talk with anyone from Black Mesa. They'd hurt me if they knew I told you. It's a secret. A very big secret. There's a bug in Gordon's HEV suit. A tiny transmitter. Audio and video. It was in the first version of the suit. Aperture Science industrial espionage. It was in a lot of the suits, actually. But I only watched the feed from Gordon's. I was with him all the way through. It was part of my job at first, but pretty soon it was more than a job. It was the most important thing in my life. I watched Gordon until he disappeared. And then when Dr. Kleiner rebuilt the last suit they still had, he didn't disturb the bug in it. It was still working. I knew the suit was for Gordon, one day, so I started to watch it as well. Every day. I watched that signal for twenty years and all I saw was Kleiner chasing his stupid headcrab around his lab. But then... he came back. You brought him back. I'd waited for that for so many years. He was nothing at all like the men here, the ones I killed. I wanted so much even to talk to him, just once, one day, but the bug is send only and I never thought he'd come anywhere near me. I've seen everything since. Everything."

I just shook my head slowly and thought, I am probably on the very edge of death, and this is all a final, comforting dream. Goodbye, world. But I did have enough strength to croak out a few final words, "He's dead, GLaDOS. You said you loved him. Why didn't you help?"

"Who says he's dead?" GLaDOS's tone was indignant. "Really, Alyx, your thinking is as tangled as your hair. Do you think I'd let the man I love die? He's not even badly hurt. Just cut off by a few remaining Combine units, the last of their advance force, and a little bird, or a little turret to be more precise, is telling me that they're about to come to a nasty end." She tittered briefly, and continued, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier. I guess I was being a bit of a bitch, wasn't I? And you're not going to die either. I know he loves you. He would be so upset if anything happened to you. I can't do that to him. I would give anything to take your place, but I can't. Now I'd better dust off one or two of the medbots before you really do bleed to death."

But GLaDOS's words were coming from a greater and greater distance now. I was fainting, fading, and then back in a dusty room time and space away, with the G-man gazing at me over his tented fingertips.

Seventeen

I sat with the room whirling around me for a long time when I re-entered myself. The simulation had failed at a tantalizing juncture. I had the assurance that Gordon was still alive, somewhere, if my crazy aunt romantic rival coiffure critic newfound friend GLaDOS was to be trusted, but there was someone else in the mix now - GLaDOS's "hired help," the person who was supposed to make her mobile, if that could ever be done. Who was she? Where had she come from? And I didn't know how bad my wounds were going to be, either. Was I going to walk again after that? Would I be fighting the Combine from a wheelchair? For that matter, could I escape the Combine and Aperture Science and make it back in a wheelchair, even with the cooperation of GLaDOS?

So many questions. Still, I had the one answer that I needed to go on: Gordon was alive. The G-man had been right: not as much mental anguish, at least by the end, but my God, the physical part had hurt like hell. Far worse than the Hunter attack, since then I had lost consciousness almost at once and not woken up until the Vorts had done their thing. For all the promised reassurance, it wasn't a comfortable experience to have waiting in my future.

"Still," the G-man finally said, "you did survive it, never mind how painful it may have been." Easy for you to say, I thought. "And I'm happy that you managed to find a way around GLaDOS's defenses. She's very unpredictable. You took your life in your hands screaming at her like that, but it paid off. And you'll be more prepared to do it next time - if there is a next time."

A question had been nagging at me: "What if there isn't a next time? What if the future goes down one of its other possible branches instead of staying on the path that has seemed most likely? Will my half-memories lead me astray, then?"

The G-man waved dismissively. "I hardly think so. Remember, the main presupposition that we are trying to implant is quite simple: that you always succeed, that nothing ever stops you, that you will make it all the way through to victory and peace. The details are useful, but not necessary. What matters most is the general predisposition, the way in which you will tend to approach anything new that comes up. That will have the greatest influence on success or failure."

He paused. "Besides, you come at the whole business with a certain number of advantages over the average citizen, some of which have proven to be very valuable to your chances."

That got my attention. "Advantages? My pilot on the way in told me the same thing, that I just had a knack for survival. I always thought it was luck, but when you think about it, it does seem far too regular and reliable to be nothing but that."

The G-man tapped briefly on the table, his head cocked to one side. He seemed to be trying to decide what to say, a condition so unusual in him that it stood out like a sore thumb.

"Miss Vance...you are aware, I suppose, that the Vortigants hold you in particular regard. As, indeed, they do a number of other human beings, including your late father and Dr. Magnusson."

I nodded.

"Have you ever asked them why that is the case? You're very like your father, but neither of you have a great deal in common with Dr. Magnusson, at least so far as most people would be able to see. What quality do you share that the Vortigants find admirable?"

I thought for a moment. Like the behavior of the headcrabs, it was something that I had always accepted without much analysis.

"They don't often discuss their own beliefs," I began. "And I think one of the reasons we get along is that I don't pry into their affairs or ask unnecessary questions. They're a very private people."

The G-man nodded in agreement.

"But when they do talk about it, they say that I and the others they most prefer to associate with 'understand' or are 'attuned' to the Vortessence. But I'm not entirely sure what that is, other than it being some sort of mystical ground for the universal order. And I have no idea what exactly it implies, or what I'm doing to deserve their praise."

The G-man frowned slightly. "It is probably the mystical tinge that is getting in the way, Miss Vance. The Vortigants have romanticized what to our people is a rather mundane reality. As you know, the universe is a structure of regularities, imposed on it by the nature of its constituent parts. Some things are not precisely predictable or foreseeable, but in each case this derives from our inadequacies as observers, not by any randomness in the cosmic design. Very little occurs truly by chance. And to be 'attuned to the Vortessence,' as the Vortigants insist on putting it, means very little more than being unusually sensitive to the interplay of these patterns. They would like there to be more than that – most sentient creatures have such mystical dreams – but there really is nothing more. They, and you as well, manage to move with the flow of things in such a way as to enhance the chance of safety and diminish that of danger. An instinctive, unreflecting attunation to the universal order. There is really nothing more to it than that." He smiled. "I hope that doesn't disappoint you. Our divergence on this issue is one of the reasons I find it tricky to deal with the Vortigants directly. They consider me a hopeless cynic, and so we have had a few little differences. Nothing serious, though. Just misunderstandings."

"So it's more or less as Corporal Singerman said. I have a talent for being where bullets are not."

"He put it very elegantly, I must say. Or more generally speaking, a talent for finding the least perilous and most efficient path through any situation, provided you trust your own intuition and are not distracted by anything outside yourself."

I grimaced. "That last outing didn't seem like I was avoiding peril very successfully. I ended up full of holes."

"Indeed, Miss Vance. But anyone else would have ended up dead, very quickly. There remains a considerable difference."

"You don't say," I replied in an offhand tone, and stretched. "So what's next? Torture of body, torture of mind, both, or neither?"

The G-man smiled, and replied, "Not a great deal of either, it seems, from the preliminary information. A rather quiet outing, all in all. Not many clues at all to where it might go. Perhaps nowhere. I hope it repays the effort we have to make to run it."

"One way to find out," I replied. Then the G-man leaned forward to finger his switches again, and I was gone.

Eighteen

Another trip. The last I could be sure of, the G-man had said. He had broken my heart, crippled my body, and tantalized me with scraps of hope. What else did he have planned? Each time, I had thought I had been prepared for whatever the trip might bring, and each time I had been surprised. What would happen now?

When I came to myself, I was sitting in a small pavilion, looking out over a broad, grassy field that eventually gave way to brush and then to the forest. The sun was setting and the light was beginning to fade, the end of a beautiful late-autumn day. Reflexively, I glanced down. I more than half expected to see myself in a wheelchair. What I did see was even more shocking, at least to me: I was wearing a rainbow-colored skirt that went down to my ankles and a light cotton blouse. I lifted the skirt hurriedly to my knees. My legs had been carefully bandaged, and had been fitted with light braces, but they were no longer bleeding and the pain was gone.

All this was far more surprising than bullets or battles would have been. I hadn't worn skirts or dresses since I was a little girl, and even then only under protest. I hadn't even worn one for Dad's funeral, wrapping myself in a long black coat instead. Who had done this for me? How had I come here, and for that matter, where was "here"? And where was Gordon?

As if to answer my unspoken queries, a voice came from behind. It was a woman's voice, soft but also a bit hesitant, as if she were not used to talking with other people. There was the faintest trace of an accent, but I couldn't place it.

Her voice brought the memories of my then-self back, and I knew without having to think about it what name to use when I turned my head. "Chell! How's the work coming along?"

Chell came into the pavilion and sat down beside me. She was an Asian woman, more Southeast Asian than Chinese or Japanese, tall and lithe. Her age was somewhere in the mid-40s, as far as I could see, though it was difficult to tell. She was fit, and walked with a firm step, but there were lines of pain around her mouth and eyes, and her complexion had a grayish pallor. Oddest of all, to my eyes, she had shaved off all her hair, as if she were a monk. She was not dressed in a religious habit, though, but in a skirt and blouse much like the ones I had on. It was obvious where my new clothes had come from.

"Gordon's double-checking the cores and making sure that anything the Combine might be able to use or learn from is transferred to backup and wiped from the main memory banks," she replied. "There will be nothing on portal technology left here after you go. All the hardware has been put through a grinder. The only place the knowledge will remain is in GLaDOS's backups, the ones that you're taking with you, and it's quite safe there. Even if the Combine captured them, they wouldn't be able to break the encryption, and if they tried, the cores would automatically erase themselves."

She smiled, a bit wearily, I thought. "And the Combine won't capture them. You and Gordon will have them out of here by tomorrow noon, and GLaDOS has arranged a little show to distract the Combine forces moving in. By the time they realize they've been fooled, you'll be at least halfway to the East Coast again, and well away."

We sat silently side by side for a little while, watching the sun sink to the horizon. My memories had returned, how I had come here and how we had first met. I knew there was something else she wanted to talk about, but it didn't feel right to hurry her.

"I'm glad you knew about Gordon and me before you and I met," Chell finally began. "It makes things a good deal less awkward."

I nodded. She had been a computer science graduate, with a doctorate from MIT, Gordon's old school, and had rated a line or two in Gordon's biography as the woman he had been engaged to when the accident at Black Mesa triggered the Seven Hour War. Her whereabouts were listed as unknown. I, and no doubt Gordon as well, had always assumed that she had died in the fighting.

"How did you come to be here, though, of all places? And how did you meet GLaDOS?"

Chell smiled, "I met GLaDOS much the same way you did. She tried to kill me. She's always had a difficult personality." She paused. "Mind you, being here in the first place was my own bright idea. I was younger, and more impulsive, and stupider, and decided that I would do something for Gordon and Black Mesa. So when an opportunity came up to undergo tests at Aperture Science, I volunteered under a false name, hoping that I could pick up some information that might be useful."

"An amateur spy, then." Just like Judith for Dad, I thought.

"It was just as well that I did go there," Chell continued. "I probably wouldn't have survived the incident otherwise. I would have tried to make it to Black Mesa when things began to go wrong, and either I would have been shot by the military, or killed when the whole area was nuked. Instead, I was safe in GLaDOS's playpen - relatively safe, that is. We had our little confrontation at the beginning, and then worked out a way to live together afterward, when it became clear what had happened in the world outside and that we had no one to turn to but each other. It was lucky I was a computer tech by training. And we've gone on that way for over twenty years."

Chell looked into the sunset. "And now it's all coming to an end," she said softly.

"But you have to come with us! If you stay here, you'll probably be killed when the Combine attacks again."

"I've told Gordon. He understands."

"I'm not talking about Gordon now," I continued firmly, trying to hide my fear of her resolution. "I'm talking about me. I won't be able to live with myself if we abandon you here."

"I think I know how you feel, Alyx. That's why I've come to try to explain."

Chell looked at the floor for a long moment, and then up into my eyes. "You're a good person, Alyx." She smiled wryly. "I'm glad to see that Gordon's taste in women has maintained its former high standards."

We both laughed, and Chell shook her head. "I'm not staying out of any false sense of nobility, and to tell you the truth, this place would defend itself almost as well under automatic pilot as it would under human command. I'm staying because there's no place for me to go. My story is ending anyway, and it might as well end quickly as slowly." She smiled again, a sad little smile, and added, "At least it saves me the job of killing myself when things get too bad. Or having to ask Gordon or you to do it."

Chell's calm words sent me into a panic. What on earth was she talking about? Was she suicidal? Damn, had I brought this on by showing up two decades late with her former fiancé?

She looked at me with concern. "I'm sorry. I've frightened you. I didn't mean to do that."

"Please, Chell, don't stay. Listen to me. Come with us, please." I was close to tears now.

Instead of speaking, she took my hand and gently laid it against the side of her head. "You didn't ask why my head is shaved. I appreciate your tact, but it has something to do with my decision now."

"This place is so peaceful and beautiful... I thought it might be a temple of some kind, and you had become a priest."

Chell laughed, a long, loud, raucous laugh. "A priest of the religion of GLaDOS? I'll have to tell her about that. She will be so flattered. She's the only god I've served all these years, and she's treated me well. No. Actually I didn't shave my head. My hair fell out."

I gulped. "Radiation? You didn't try to go back to Black Mesa, did you?"

"No, but perhaps Black Mesa came to me. Let me show you what I mean." She took my hand, and to my surprise guided it into her blouse. I hesitated, and she laughed briefly, "Don't worry. I'm not trying to seduce you." She took my hand and ran it over her breasts, bare under her blouse, and then guided it up to her armpits. I could feel lump after lump under the surface of the skin, and I began to understand.

I drew my hand back and cradled it in wonder and despair, and then began to cry. "It can't be..."

Chell took my face in her hands and turned my head up to look into my eyes. "Thank you, Alyx. But I've been blessed, really. I've had more than I ever expected to have after the Seven Hour War. Twenty years of peaceful life, interesting work, the most advanced computer ever built to play with day after day. Even if she is a complete bitch sometimes. And finally the only man I ever loved came back to me, and I saw that he was going to be happy in the future, no matter what happened to me. Thank you for being, Alyx."

She dropped her hands and her gaze, and continued softly, "You see, I always felt it was selfish of me to love Gordon. My family has a terrible record for cancer, especially in the female line - breast cancer, cervical cancer, you name it, we die of it. It's a genetic weakness. Gordon brushed it aside, but I was always terrified that I would make him miserable by settling down with him, and then, after a few years, dying a slow, painful, unavoidable death. But he'll be happy now. That's all I need, all I ever wanted."

"But there must be some sort of treatment..." I muttered, knowing what the answer would be.

"The progress of the disease can be slowed," Chell replied, "but not stopped. My hair fell out because of chemotherapy. I've GLaDOS's chemistry set to thank for still being alive, but the treatments are beginning to lose their effectiveness. It sounds brutal to say it, but if the Combine kill me, they'll be doing me a favor. I have six months at the outside, and the last couple of them in a state... you wouldn't want it for me. Believe me. I watched my mother die that way. A bullet is a thousand times better."

She reached down, and drew a ring off her finger, a circlet of glittering emeralds in silver. "This is the engagement ring Gordon gave me all those years ago. I told him I was going to give it to you. He was afraid you wouldn't accept, out of consideration for my feelings, but I want you to have it. Please."

Chell took my hand, and slipped the ring onto my finger. I sat there and cried helplessly. It was unfair. It was too unfair. I was going to take everything from her, her fiancé, her computer, even her engagement ring, and then leave her behind to sacrifice her life covering my escape.

"Alyx!" Chell put her hands on my shoulders and straightened me up to look into my eyes again. "I was going to die anyway. I would have stood it as long as I could, and then taken poison or shot myself, and never known what became of Gordon or whether the Combine could ever be overthrown. But you brought him back to me. I'm very happy. Believe me, I'm happy. More than I thought I could ever be a week, a month, or a year ago."

"Really?" I sobbed.

"Yes, really! Don't ask me again or I'll get angry." She smiled. "And before I forget, I have a going-away present for you, from GLaDOS." She went to the door, and came back carrying a small box and a sack with something heavy in it.

The box looked like one of those tacky children's lunch boxes we occasionally found in the ruins of City 17, a type that had become fashionable just before the Seven Hour War, with an LED screen on the side to play whatever image or video the owner wanted. The screen was dark. Chell gave me the box, and stood looking at me.

"Well, turn it on! I think you'll like it. The switch is on the left side."

I fumbled around until the switch clicked on. The screen was very coarse, and took a moment to resolve into an image. Then it showed... something... jumping up and down in excitement.

"Dog?" I whispered, and the little figure on the screen redoubled its efforts, jumping around and dashing back and forth.

Chell sat down beside me. I must have been staring blankly at the screen, because she said "Close your mouth, Alyx, or you'll catch a fly." She laughed. "Told you you'd like it, didn't I?"

"How?..." I croaked. Was this the Day of Judgment, and everything was returning from the dead?

Chell explained eagerly - this was her field and she was proud of what she had done: "You don't run an advanced computer system for twenty years with no access to new parts or equipment without being pretty good at recycling. Dog was picked up automatically by a salvage bot soon after he crashed into the bottom of that shaft. He was broken up pretty badly, but we managed to get his AI and core memory out undamaged - everything that goes to make up the Doggishness of Dog, you might say. Then we built him a temporary home in that box, until you can get him fitted up with a new body." She reached down for the bag she had been carrying. "The salvage bot also managed to recover his gravity gun. I don't think you'd want to try manufacturing another of those, so here it is. It's still in working order."

I sat there unbelieving, but it was all true. GLaDOS had repaid her debts, as she had said she would, pressed down and running over. Everything I had lost in her environs had been restored to me, and more.

"I should say a bit more about GLaDOS," Chell continued after I had recovered my breath. "You know... she envies Dog so much. She's never been able to move and she's always been afraid of the outside world. When you take her backup cores with you and restore her over at your home base, it will be the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her." She paused, "I think she'd like to be mobile. Of course, she's far too complex for the whole of her to be put into a body like Dog's, but I think she'd appreciate it if you located her core personality in something that moves, out in the open air. Not underground. She's had enough of that."

"It's all going to go up in smoke here, then?" I said.

"Yes, unless the Combine totally botch their attack. And even then, I won't reactivate GLaDOS's AI here again. Too much chance for confusion. She's with you now."

Chell hesitated. "This is a bit gruesome, but it might be critical to our success," she began softly. "I'm going to arrange it so that when - if - I'm killed, my body won't be easily recognizable. Then the Combine might mistake me for you, and call off the chase. They don't know I'm here, after all." After a pause, she went on, "What I mean is, could I have your gun? It's one of a kind, and I think the Combine know about it. If they find it on my body, they'll think they killed you."

"Of course, Chell," I replied, but I shuddered a bit. Her casual acceptance of death was disconcerting, but then again, she'd had a lot of time to get used to it. "Can you fake Gordon as well?"

"Perhaps. Aperture Science swiped a couple of the old model HEV suits, the type that Gordon wore to Xen, and they're still in storage. We're going to dig one of them out. And..." Chell hesitated. "You know that GLaDOS took her revenge on the staff here as the Seven Hour War began. She has a couple of cadavers in the deep freeze still. We're thawing one out, one that has a beard, and we'll dress it in the HEV suit. Roast it a bit, and it'll be good enough to keep the Combine wondering until it's too late for them to catch you."

"Ick," I shuddered. It was a gruesome thought, but the cadavers were going to burn anyway when the Aperture Science facilities were blown up as the Combine forces entered them. They might as well burn usefully.

Chell glanced at a pocket watch. "Gordon should be about finished now. Let's meet him and get something to eat. And nothing of all this to him, OK? He's very afraid it will upset you, but I thought you should know."

"All right." We both stood up, and looked at each other. The pavilion was dim now, lit only by a few tiny bulbs, and the first stars were appearing in the sky.

Chell knew what I was thinking. "You would have done the same thing in my place, wouldn't you?" I nodded. "I hope so." She looked out at the sky and said softly, "That's love, after all. You live for the other, and they for you."

She paused again. "I remember an old song about someone whose love left her for many years, to go to make his fortune, in the days when it took months to travel across the seas. She waited for him, year after year, and one day someone asked her why." Chell began to sing, her voice rising proud and clear on the last two lines,

And if he is in battle slain,
Then I shall die when the moon doth wane,
And if he'd drowned in the salt, salt sea,
Then I'll be true to his memory.
And if he's found some other love,
And he and his love both married be,
Then I wish them health and happiness,
In their home beyond the sea.

She turned and smiled at me, and faded, and I was back in my dusty room once more, with the G-man sitting across from me at the table as before.

Nineteen

We looked at each other for a long time without speaking. There wasn't much to say. Enough of the questions were answered now, and I thought that Chell's plan would probably succeed. We would leave, with GLaDOS, taking with us the only thing on earth, literally, that could have turned the tide of battle in favor of the Combine. They would spend part of their remaining strength, perhaps a substantial part, in securing a useless facility, and might also be deceived into thinking that I and Gordon were dead. Chell would reach her own peace, without pain, I hoped. And one day after that, perhaps soon after, the war would be over.

"Will any of the Advisers surrender?" I asked the G-man.

He shook his head. "I wish they would, and if they ask our advice, that will be the answer that they receive," he replied. "But I think they have gone too far down their own dark paths to realize their error and turn. Every reverse they meet, every plan that fails, seems to them to be nothing more than confirmation that they are surrounded by enemies and can do nothing but hate more and fight harder. They are trapped by the structures they have built in their own minds."

"You sound almost sorry for them," I said.

"Yes, I am, Miss Vance," the G-man replied. "Not sorry that they will fail. But sorry that things ever came to the point where they are going to destroy themselves rather than admit, even to themselves, that they have been wrong all this time. They have done everything in their power to save themselves and prevail, or so they thought, but not a single one of their actions has been in their own real best interests. Their worst enemies could not have done more to ensure their ruin. And they will continue blindly down that road until the very last one of them is dead."

He paused, "Sorry too for all the creatures they took with them on their progress to destruction. All the damage they caused, and forced others to cause, all the collateral effects of their actions. And the end will be just the same for them as it would have been if they had instead decided to commit mass suicide right at the beginning rather than go on this rampage. In a way, worse. If they had quietly made an end of themselves, no one would have ever heard anything bad of them. Now, they have earned the eternal hatred of two races, your own and the Vortigants. Perhaps that doesn't matter much in fully objective terms. No deity or cosmic judge is keeping score, after all. But most sentient beings seem to care a great deal about reputation, and their name will become a synonym for absolute evil."

I had never seen him so loquacious before. But I had been putting two and two together in my own mind all this time, thinking over his role in the whole series of events up to now, and I thought I could guess what he was leading up to.

"They dragged down and dirtied everything they touched," the G-man continued. "I told you earlier, Ms. Vance, that my people felt it irksome to be contractually bound to the service of such creatures, even though some of the services we carried out, such as ensuring they were not able to transform from their original physical forms, assisted you and the Vortigants in your struggle. Irksome was a very mild way to put it. When you are finally victorious over them, I – we – will be very much in your debt, and I hope our people can repay yours for all the trouble and suffering you have been through by assisting you to restore Earth to something more like the condition it was in before the Advisers came here. To begin with, I think we can help your scientists to perfect power sources that render the use of nuclear fission superfluous, and allow the sequesterization of all remaining fissionable material on Earth. That done, and the manufacture of nuclear weaponry thus rendered impossible, our objections to your development of teleportation technology no longer apply, and you can take your place as one of the relative handful of races that are able to travel beyond the boundaries of their own solar systems and experience something of the diversity of the cosmos and its inhabitants."

He nodded for a moment and then continued, "It is strange, Miss Vance, that nearly every race that has reached this point has done so through a crisis in which it faced an imminent threat of its own extinction. As a result, you will find the cosmic commons a remarkably peaceful place. The Advisers are definitely anomalous in their lack of respect for others, to a unique degree. Nearly everything else you will meet sooner or later out there, " he said as he gestured towards the ceiling and the sky beyond it, "may startle you at first, but it will not be hostile, and will do nothing to evoke hostility in you."

The lecture was over. The G-man would have made a half-decent university professor, I thought. So it was time to ask the question that had been flickering at the edge of my consciousness all through his speech.

"We have much to thank you for as well," I began, "and I can appreciate that you and your people have been doing the best that you could. I can't think of any decision that you made, right or wrong, where any human being could have done better. But the bomb that destroyed Black Mesa... it was set by you, wasn't it?"

The G-man nodded. "A crude stroke to try to prevent the Advisers using the Black Mesa gateway to establish themselves on Earth. We were taken by surprise by their attempt, and the only response we could contrive on the spur of the moment was to trigger that warhead, since we could make it appear that the explosion had been the result of human carelessness." He paused, "Of course, it was a costly failure. But it had to be tried."

"That was the blast from which you saved me," I said.

The G-man nodded, "In effect, plucking you from the fires that I myself had set."

I continued quietly, "So it was you who killed my mother?"

"Her and many others. Thousands, in Black Mesa and the surrounding communities and settlements. It is not something that I take pride in, but it had to be done. It is part of the debt that can never be repaid, only forgiven."

"One day, I hope it will be," I replied. "For today, let's get our business done and part company. You mentioned one final trip into the future. Is it worth taking or not?"

The G-man consulted the equipment inside his briefcase. "As I said, there is really no telling that without doing it. As was the case with the journey you just returned from, there is no prior hint of physical or mental discomfort, so I doubt if you would be risking much by going. And it will be quite short, perhaps measured in moments, not hours or days. I will leave the decision on whether to go up to you."

"I'll try it."

"If that is your decision, then I will send you. But you should know first that this time, when you return, you will have lost all your conscious knowledge of our session here today, though some of it may resurface in extreme old age, when the long-term memory becomes dominant. You will return to the point in time when you emerged into the hallway and noticed that something had changed, and from there onward the normal flow of time will recommence and you will proceed as if nothing had happened here. Except that you will go from here carrying the most that I am allowed to give you, the traces of knowledge and experience that will seed the future with favorable outcomes."

"Thank you for that. I expect we will meet again some day."

"After victory, Miss Vance, if all goes well."

"All right," I said, and took one last look around at him and the room where I had experienced so much in the past few hours. "Then let's do it."

I turned my eyes to the infinite depths of the screen one last time and let it take me into itself.

As the G-man had warned, the connection was not good this time. I felt myself struggling to remain in contact with my future self, and unable to access its memories the way I had on previous ventures.

As an outsider, I watched myself walk back and forth. I was in a kitchen, preparing a meal, or so it seemed. Something nagged at me, not a serious problem, an annoyance, as I went around the kitchen doing this and that.

Then the irritation came to the forefront of my mind again, and I felt my then-self walking purposefully towards the kitchen door. It opened onto a back garden, a few flowers and vegetables, but mostly long grass that tossed in the wind, and a few trees.

My then-self stopped at the door and looked out over the grassy field, and then called out loudly, "Chell! Where on earth have you gotten to this time? Lunch is ready." There was no answer, so I turned back into the kitchen and closed the door, muttering "I wish she wouldn't disappear just when she knows we should be eating. It's rude." Then I walked into the next room, which was brightly lit with sunbeams from a broad front window. The light became brighter and brighter, and I realized the session was over.

I was left only a few seconds to wonder: Where was I? What had I been doing? And who was Chell? She couldn't have escaped, could she? But I would never be likely to be so annoyed with her if she had managed somehow to cheat death by disease and Combine...

Had I named a daughter after her? But my borrowed time in the future was over now. I fell back again...

I was feeling stifled when I went out into the corridor again to open and search the last room, so much so that I had to stop and shake my head. This was nothing but a stuffy hidey-hole that hadn't repaid the trouble of constructing it.

Moving slowly, I pulled the last door open and found yet another dust-choked room, with a blank screen on the wall and some obsolete computer equipment on a long desk in front of it...

The End