A dull boom shook the dust off the walls of the massive concrete room. Another one was much closer, and a few panels fell. A third explosion ripped a hole in the ceiling, and daylight burst into the wide chamber. Cement and metal fell in heaps, and crashing sounds echoed for minutes. Finally, the vast chamber fell silent.
"Is that it?" said a nasally male voice, impatiently.
"Yes, Teach," said a frustrated female voice.
"Wait, really?!" The nasally male voice, Teach, didn't think these ex-military jocks would really be able to do it.
His head peeped over the edge of the hole.
"Holy shit," he breathed.
"Need your inhaler, doc?" said a husky, deep male voice.
"I don't have asthma, Jason."
"Whatever." Jason looked into the chamber as well. "Holy shit." His voice bounced around for what seemed like an eternity.
"What's it look like?" asked the female voice, named Heather.
"I need more light."
Heather handed him a powerful flashlight. Teach was almost drooling with anticipation. He shone it into the chamber for a few minutes. The other three members of the team waited. Finally, Teach spoke.
"There's only so much I can see from up here…This light doesn't even go all the way to the bottom. We must be on top of…" He considered being candid with his teammates. It wasn't a hard decision. "…an especially tall chamber."
The leader of this small team reached over the small hole. Someone standing below them would have seen a hand in a fingerless glove offering a bouquet of glow sticks.
"You didn't tell me you had glow sticks!" Teach said bitterly.
The leader didn't respond.
"Thanks," Teach muttered. He tried to snap the glow sticks all at once, but he wasn't strong enough. Jason tried not to laugh. Heather didn't even try. She grabbed them, snapped them all and gave them back. Teach bitterly took them and dropped them into the hole.
"Can we please try to not be so rude?" Teach snarled. Heather smiled and shook her head.
Out of the five glow sticks, four hit the ground with a light "thump." But one hit something relatively small—the size of a basketball, maybe—and a metallic clang echoed up through the chamber and into Teach's ears.
"Oh God. That took a long time. Wait…" Teach consulted his map.
"Well?" asked Heather. "Is it safe to go down?"
"Just give me a second!"
"Are we at Aperture?" asked Jason.
"W—Yes, of course we're at Aperture, but…a very, very tall chamber. I don't know about this…I've been dreaming of it for years, but now that I'm here…"
"Scared?" Heather asked.
Teach, who had given up insisting that he was to be called "Dr. Teach," looked at her gravely, with a seriousness that all the legendary former employees of Black Mesa carried with them. "You have no idea what's down there."
Heather sighed and took a rope out of her backpack.
"You're going to climb down?!" Teach shouted. He clasped his hand over his mouth, then whispered, "You don't know what's down there!"
"It's been sealed for decades," Heather reassured. "What the hell could be down there?"
"Radiation! Robots, almost definitely there'll be robots. Even Combine, maybe."
"Oh, come on."
"We don't know what happened, Heather! We don't know how those scientists died! Could've been, I don't know, nanobots, poison gas, genetic experiments gone wrong. And that rope's not going to be nearly long enough. We need to go back to base, regroup! I need to tell people what we—"
"Not an option. Base is three days away, and it's probably ashes by now. You are right about something, though. Everyone, give me your ropes."
The team, except for Teach, proceeded to do so. "Please, Heather! We at least need to make camp, do research!"
"How long?"
"A-A week, at the very least!"
"Hmm. No."
"At least—Adrian, give her one of your gas mask things."
"Sorry," said Adrian Shephard, who was sitting opposite the two. "Only have the one."
"Well then you certainly have to let this chamber air out. Adrian, you know something about repelling into scientific facilities."
Jason put his hand to his mouth. Heather looked down at her ropes.
Adrian leapt right over the hole, standing right in front of Teach and towering over him.
"Black Mesa was different. There are no fucking aliens down there."
"But—"
"The Combine haven't found this place, which means it might be the last place on Earth untouched by them. I'm not going to sit here jerking off when I could be exploring miles of free planet."
"But it could kill you!"
"I don't think you heard me, nerd. It's free."
"Finished," Heather announced. She tied the tip of the rope to a piece of rebar jutting out of the surface rubble and threw the rest down the hole. "I'll go first."
Adrian shook his head and put the gas mask attached to his (once standard issue, now heavily modified) Powered Combat Vest back on. He tapped his lenses, to remind her about the PCV's night vision feature. Heather nodded.
Adrian Shephard slid down the rope towards the glow sticks. A minute after he dropped out of sight, he blinked his flashlight three times, signaling a go-ahead. Heather immediately went down after him. Jason gestured for Teach to go before him, but the scientist shook his head.
"Um, Teach. You kinda have to go down. It's kinda the only reason you're here."
"I don't think we're in a good place," he said. His voice was shaking. "I-I never thought we'd go down so soon…"
"Where are we?"
Teach ignored him and looked down the hole.
"You guyys coming?" yelled Heather.
"Shine the flashlight! Let me see what's around you!"
Heather and Adrian looked at each other. Adrian shrugged. Heather scanned the area for Teach's benefit.
"Uh, very tall, like you said. Looks…octagonal, I guess. There's a door on the far side here."
"D-Describe the door."
"Um, there are two of them? It's a two-door door."
Adrian said something, but it was muffled by his mask.
"A double door," Heather shouted up to Teach. "No one can hear you," she said to Adrian, grinning. "Why bother talking at all?" Adrian laughed at that, again muffled.
"What's…" Teach sounded out of breath. "What's by the door?"
"What?"
"WHAT IS BY THE DOOR?!" The yell reverberated throughout the chamber.
"There's a…table! And a phone. Jesus."
Teach was breathing loud enough now that Heather could hear him. Adrian seemed distracted by something.
"What…color…is the phone?" Teach managed to say.
"Red," Heather answered. "Teach? What does a red phone mean?"
Teach began screaming. He stood up and began running, but Jordan dove and grabbed his ankle. Teach fell on his face.
"Let me go!" he screamed. "Get out of here!" He ran to the hole and screamed down, "Get the hell out of there!"
"Jordan, detain the scientist!"
"Got him," Jordan grunted. He had Teach kneeling with his hands behind his head. His Marine training had removed the need for a gun to achieve this. He drew his Desert Eagle pistol now, though.
Down below, Adrian mumbled something behind his mask.
"What?" asked Heather.
"Please," Teach begged. "You have to get out of there."
Adrian mumbled louder.
"What are you saying, Shepherd?"
"Why?" Jordan asked Teach. "What's down there?"
Teach stuttered.
"WHAT IS DOWN THERE?!" Jordan screamed in the scientist's face. Teach started crying.
"I said," Adrian ripped off his mask, "do you hear that god damned beeping noise?!"
A rocket shot out of the ground and hit Adrian Shephard in the chest. He flew back until he hit a wall twenty feet behind him and thirteen feet in the air. He slid down and purposefully landed on his back, focusing the ground's force on the center of the PCV's padding.
"SHEPHARD!" Heather screamed. She ran towards him. His body rested on the ground and seized up several times before she got to him. She tried to rip off his vest to give him CPR but, with a trembling hand, he pushed her away. A low hum was coming from the vest. Adrian's body seized again and he started breathing again. "Sorry," said Heather. "I should've—"
"No," Adrian wheezed, "forget about it."
"You gotta get me one of—"
"LASER!" warned Jordan from above.
A flickering blue laser came to life and had just targeted Heather, who leapt off Adrian's body, which rolled out of the way. He felt the heat whiz past him and heard the rocket shoot the wall. While the turret retargeted, Adrian threw a grenade at it. The rocket turret exploded, and the room was briefly illuminated in its entirety.
It was clear that the ceiling had already sustained some heavy damage, which is probably why they had more luck here than they had in the rest of Aperture's grassy roof. In the explosion's flash, Heather thought she saw something else, but she couldn't make it out.
After the echoes once again retreated into the dark and the ringing in her ears ceased, Heather pointed her flashlight towards the top of the chamber.
"Adrian?" she asked.
"Yeah, I'm fine," he said, dusting rubble off of his body.
"No, not that. What'd your night vision see when you came in here?"
"Not much, really. Some vines. Place looked trashed."
"Did you look up?"
"I was more concerned about where I was landing."
"Well…Adrian…look up."
He did.
Heather's silhouette faced a giant tower of interconnected parts that hung—or rather clung—to the ceiling. Black cords dangled lifelessly, some with white metallic parts still barely attached to them. They reminded Adrian of a tooth right before it fell out, when it's only attached by a deep, deep string. They also reminded Adrian of things he'd seen at Black Mesa. He looked away and rubbed his eyes.
"You okay, man?" asked Jordan, placing a hand on his shoulder. Adrian screamed and backed away. So did Jordan, wide-eyed.
"Sorry," Adrian said. Apparently Jordan had "convinced" Teach to finally come down while Adrian was occupied. The nervous (and irrevocably douchey) scientist was staring wide-eyed at this hulking former machine. Shephard could recognize a panic attack when he saw one, from the Black Mesa Incident and the Seven Hour War. His experience also taught him that reassurance could come later. Right now, Teach was an expert aware of a catastrophic danger, and he needed to be questioned and the risk needed to be dealt with.
"What is it, Teach."
"There she is," was all he could say. "There she is…"
"She?" demanded Heather, who'd fought with Shephard during the War. "He thinks that upside-down shitpile is a she? Doesn't even have a face!"
"Who hurt you?" Teach asked.
"Oh my God."
"Shephard. Give me your mask."
"It's attached to the vest, Doc."
"Then give me your vest, dammit."
He laughed. "Yeah…that's not happening."
"Look around the room, then, for a…well, it'd probably look like a camera, in a thin, white, metal shell, a bit larger than a shoebox and shaped like a thick crescent moon. And everyone else, flashlights on." Their flashlights were, of course, already on, but Teach was too enraptured with his new broken toy. "Look around for anything with the word 'GLaDOS' written on it. That's with a lowercase 'a,' everybody."
The team collectively rolled their eyes, but did what he said anyway. Which was a pretty good description of the way that this team worked. It was Heather, not Adrian, who found the object Teach was looking for; it was the object that the fifth glow stick had hit. She lifted it with surprising difficulty.
"Teach? What do you think of this?"
"My God. That's her head!"
"Cool."
"No! I mean, yes, 'cool.' You have no idea, Heather, no idea at all. Um, gather around, everybody!" They did. "Heather is holding in her hands…the brains of this whole operation."
"I don't understand," said Jason.
"GLaDOS stands for Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System, hmm? She was in charge of this whole place for…well, nobody really knows how long. At the very least, 16 picoseconds." He chuckled to himself. Hearing no other laughs, he looked around and saw only confused, slightly annoyed faces. And one gas mask.
He sighed. "That's how long it took for her to begin filling the facility with neurotoxin."
Heather gasped and dropped the head.
"CAREFUL WITH THAT!" Teach barked.
"Like how you were careful with OUR LIVES?!" Heather barked back.
I told you to let it air out!" Teach continued. "Anyway—"
"Adrian, what does the scanner say about the air level?" Jason asked.
To someone who didn't know him, he would have appeared to be staring off into space. Really, he was looking at the HUD appearing on his lenses, analyzing the air quality as it passed through his filter. It seemed to be devoid of neurotoxin, and he explained as much to his teammates using military sign language. Which he had to repeat two or three times because people kept accidentally taking their flashlights off him.
"So it's clean?" asked Heather. Adrian nodded.
"But you still wanna keep that mask on. I get it," said Jason.
"Well, I wouldn't blame him," said Teach.
"Why," said Heather accusingly, "didn't you fucking warn us?"
"I did. I told you to let it air out."
Heather whirled around to Adrian. "Okay, Shephard, now that we're here, can I please shoot him?"
Adrian shook his head frantically, which Heather sighed at. She sighed a lot, which, given her circumstances, was not uncalled for.
"If you could just listen to me for once, please?" Teach started up again. Heather especially sighed at this. "Inside of her head, we will find our answers. To what happened in here before everything went down. To what happened during. And maybe even, what happened after."
"After?"
Teach shrugged. "You never know."