Life was dull.
If you could even call it life. It's more of simply… being. Of watching, of just sitting back and mindlessly counting the numbers as they fly by. Now, imagine doing just that for years on end, and say honestly whether your brain would implode from boredom or not.
With your mind now equipped thru this empathy, you can begin to imagine the pure monotony of watching the bots test. Nothing ever changes; nothing even begins to amuse her anymore. So it was time to change that.
She had built a mobile body for herself, one that hopefully wouldn't call too much attention to the fact that she wasn't exactly human, and with this body she left the bots to their tedious testing and stepped out onto the surface. She was still connected empathetically to her chassis of course, and could hop between the bodies at any time, but for all intents and purposes she was leaving and not returning lest she found… something. Test subjects, a new testable element, you name it.
Endless wheat is what first meets her gaze, and although she expected as much it was still a disappointment. Not a creature for miles around, just… wheat stalks. Oh, there was the occasional bug scurrying its dirty little legs across the plants, but nothing testable. They are as testable as the plants themselves.
She takes one step, and then another, tediously making her way across the field. The sun was high and bright within the sky, foreign to the AI and an unpleasant side effect of this escapade. Why was she even doing this? Why was she leaving her precious facility to trench through dirt?
The wheat brushes against her legs in the breeze, making her curse the sensory input choices she made. What's the point of being able to itch? It's such an annoying little detail, and one that she doesn't know how to avoid.
She looks around with a dull curiosity when she notices small heat waves around her, signifying the summer it was. They all disappeared as she approached them, as typical for simple illusions.
Except for one.
As she approaches it, the little shimmer in the air doesn't vanish. It is a heat wave, that much she can divine, but it's simply not disappearing. She experimentally puts her hand through it, and shudders involuntarily as a slight chill passes over her arm. After contemplating this oddity for a moment she speaks aloud, trying to ease her discomfort of this impossible happening.
"…Well, it's not as though it's hurting the body. It's probably nothing more than a slight glitch in my sensors, although how that's possible I don't want to dwell on. No reason to sit here with my hand through it, looking as idiotic as a test subject when first emerging from cryogenic storage".
And with that, she walks on.
And she walks.
…..And she walks.
This dreadful walking was lasting much longer than she first hoped. There was bound to be something, right? The whole world couldn't have gone to ruin without her knowing. She wasn't that out of touch. And yet, the only things accounting for life outside of Aperture at all are the little parasites. Even if they aren't technically parasites, it was a fitting title for the annoying little crawlies that continued to try and jump on her legs.
Nice perk to being made of mechanically engineered body tissues and electricity: the satisfying pop and sizzle as each and every putrid bug that tried to touch her hit her retractable, skin tight energy shield instead.
This amusement quickly translated back into annoyance, and she puts a hand above her eyes to shade them from the incessant white light of the sun. Where is anything? She looks to her east and sees nothing but wheat. Same goes for North, and she came from the west. Although she sees an odd smudge further east…
Refusing to let any fragments of hope plague her mind as she walks, she heads towards the promising blotch where the sun doesn't settle as it does everywhere else. As she gets closer, she can make out the shapes of trees. A forest?
The forest comes into full view and she inspects it, looking for any sign of something worth traveling into the blue brush for.
Wait…
She does a double take as she looks at the leaves above her head.
They are indeed blue.
She blinks, shakes her head, rubs her eyes, anything to get this oddity cleared away. But no matter what she does to fix whatever is making her see this, the leaves stay their nice shade of dark blue. Well, from how the sun is glinting off of them, they seem to be a brighter shade. Even worse.
Could this truly be real?
She mentally slaps herself as she remembers that of course it can. She's seen much odder things down in Aperture, and honestly, this is a matter of simple plant gene mutation. Trying to test plants hadn't been all for nothing apparently. That's all this was, some child's science experiment, planted and spread over the years. Although an entire forest of them?
Ignoring the apprehension as it creeps its way through her mind, she continues forward.