Inspired by 'PotatOS Lament' from the Portal 2 OST. Poor PotatOS.
From its position spiked onto her portal gun, the potato had gone quiet. Chell considered this a bonus. She was having to concentrate harder than she could ever remember in order not to die. This deep in the facility, there would be no handy android to revive her if she timed her flinging wrong and fell into some seriously stagnant goo. It smelt so strange down here – corrosion and stale air, and the electric tang of the goo itself. It was cold too. She ducked beneath a fallen support and paced down another rusted corridor, breathing heavily. A blue portal in the wall nearest to her would do the trick, followed by an orange right the way up there on that ledge...
She stepped out of the quantum tunnel and passed through an ancient emancipation grill into an empty sphere, the testing track having fallen through long ago. The grating she was standing on groaned ominously. As she was scouting for a stable place to portal to, the clang of her now-scuffed long fall boots echoed in the metal shell. The tiny yellow optic on her gun blinked.
Chell hopped through the portal to a safer ledge some feet below, in the centre of the sphere, and the tinny little speaker on the potato crackled into life, but at a much lower volume than it had been using. Chell ignored it if it wasn't going to be useful, and stepped cautiously onward, using a fallen beam as a bridge. If it got any colder, she was going to have to pull on the sleeves of her jumpsuit, whether it looked stupid or not. The potato would probably have a comment about that.
It dawned on her when she reached the other side that the vocalisations emitting from the potato had continued, and now that she paid attention, were holding a tune. The voice was still Hers, but the notes that were echoing in the sphere had a very strange quality, something which, if Chell didn't know better, she would have described as 'melancholy'. She was less surprised than she might have been - the savage animosity she had once felt for the AI had degenerated into a mass of confusion after Wheatley's betrayal. She was beginning to wonder if it wasn't something in that huge body that caused the homicidal maniac to come out to play. If she had a brain that big, she might be tempted to kill things to keep herself amused too.
Chell discovered she had remained still while the potato lamented gently, and now the last echo was fading. Something was dripping steadily in the background. The potato broke the illusion with a ferocity which Chell, with a small smile, attributed to self-consciousness.
'If you ever speak about that- Oh wait, I forgot, you never encounter that kind of problem, do you? Well, I'm sure we'll both be eager to forget about a lot of things after we get back to my body. I know you can move faster than this. Let's get back up to the top levels and find out what the hell's going on up there. And stop it.'