The young woman sat on the park bench with hands clasped on her lap, her posture straight and stiff. She observed the vivid life of the world around her with a cold scientific gaze. She saw children playing in the hot midday sun, shrieking and laughing as they chased each other around the gently rustling trees. She listened to the chirps of birds as they swooped in a graceful dance, diving and climbing, twirling around each other as one. She heard the soft conversations of the townspeople around her, bubbling and swelling until individual voices seemed to merge, as if the entire town was speaking at once, surrounding her with cheerful sounds of life. Chell sat at the centre of it all, like a rock in the middle of a vibrant lake, cold and still and silent.

Suddenly, her head twitched up as she caught sight of something beyond the trees. Oh no. It was that man again, the one with the irritating laugh and the strange odour. Chell grunted in exasperation as the man smiled in her direction and began to make his way towards her. What would it be this time? Another request to spend more time together outside of their work on the farm? He'd tried that one a few times now. She was perfectly satisfied with the amount of time they already shared: the two minutes it took her to carry the harvested wheat into the barn, hand it to the guy and stalk off again, scythe in hand.

As Barn-Man drew ever closer Chell decided to make a swift exit and sprang from the bench like a cat. She drew her grey hoodie tightly around her and marched off heading for the centre of town.

"Chell! Chell! Wait, come back! I-I just wanted to ask…"

That name was all that he knew of her. She intended to keep it that way.

Chell's colleague was not the only frustrating thing she had encountered while living here. It seemed to be that every person she met in the town of Maple Hill confused or irritated her in some way. Why did some people smile at her and not others? They had been so inquisitive and welcoming to her when she first arrived here six months ago, but now Barn-Man was the only person who attempted any sort of communication with her. What bothered her most of all was the nagging thought that she was supposed to feel at home here, surrounded by a community of humans after a lifetime spent in the cold company of robots. But she just didn't, she only felt irritated and isolated.

Chell sentimentally thought back to the life she was familiar with: a life of Testing. Of leaping and falling and flying through space; defying the logic of physics in an endless series of deadly puzzles. She thought of Aperture Science: the lab that was both her prison and her home. The lab that had gained a life of its own, and a corrupted intelligence to single-mindedly test her; to push her until she broke. But she never did. She alone out of all the test subjects had overcome the deadly trials, survived countless attempts to eliminate her after outliving her usefulness and had forced the very facility itself to admit defeat to her. The AI mistress of Aperture Science – GLaDOS – had finally accepted her as a threat, an equal adversary, and granted Chell the freedom that she had been fighting for.

And this was where that freedom had brought her. Maple Hill. Gentle, quiet, safe Maple Hill. Life here was tedious and she was bored. Recently Chell found herself reminiscing of Aperture more often, but however proud she was of her triumphs she knew that her memories of the laboratory were not really fond ones. She still had her scars: the bullet wounds she'd received from turrets; a broken wrist that had never completely healed; burns from various sources.

And there was one experience of Aperture that she would never be able to see through rose-tinted glasses. One person she could never stop having nightmares about. Wheatley. The betrayal of Chell by her robotic companion had hurt her more than any injury sustained during testing. He had told her that he needed her help in order for them to escape together. And she'd trusted him. She'd never trusted anyone before. He'd guided her through the dark corridors and cavernous passages of the facility. He'd protected her from GLaDOS, kept her safe, kept her spirits up. She had begun to enjoy his cheery company and found herself missing him when they were separated. She'd almost broken her self-imposed vow of silence, just so that she could speak to him and share with him her thoughts and experiences. Then he turned on her. He tricked her into helping him take over the facility and seize absolute power from GLaDOS. Then he forced her to Test for him. His taunts and jeers had cut her far more deeply than the passive-aggressive comments of GLaDOS ever had. She could still hear his voice in her dreams: that deceptively human, cheerfully friendly voice. She heard his voice taunting her, laughing at her, angrily commanding her. Telling her to give up. Telling her to kill herself. But she hadn't given up; she had risen to the challenge, defeated him and excised him like a tumour from the body of Aperture Science before casting him out into Space where he could never hurt her again.

As her mind swarmed with painful memories, Chell scolded herself for the warm thoughts she'd had earlier towards the laboratory. How could she ever think fondly of that place? She didn't belong there - she had narrowly escaped death in that hellish lab and finally won her freedom! She couldn't admit defeat to her fears of life outside Aperture - she needed to understand this new world and learn to live in it! Unfortunately, she was aware of how challenging this task would be, and that it was not something she could achieve on her own. As much as she hated the idea of relying on another person she accepted that she needed someone to teach her, and there was only one place she knew in Maple Hill where she could find such a guide. As she turned onto the main street she caught sight of it – the town's community college. Chell approached and stood at the foot of the steps leading to the tiny college, staring up at the sign above the entrance. The lettering was old and faded but she could just make out: "Maple Hill Community College – Your New Life Begins Today!" Hesitatingly she climbed the steps and creaked open the shabby front door.

***

"A potential student here to see you, Mr Deblovski".

"Ah, excellent! Thank you, Maria," came the gravelly response from within the office. As Chell was ushered through the door she saw that the voice belonged to an ancient man hunched over a large wooden desk. With a smile, he beckoned across the office to Chell.

"Yes, come in, come in! Go ahead, take a seat."

As Chell walked forward uncertainly she heard Maria close the door behind her and the woman's heels distantly clacking back to resume her position at the front desk. Mr Deblovski hoisted himself out of his leather chair and raised an expectant hand to Chell. She stared blankly, brow furrowed, before tentatively reaching over to grip the old man's wrinkled hand. He paid no attention to her uncertainty and smiled encouragingly.

"Now then, what can I do for you today?"

He hobbled over to the cupboards lining the walls of the cramped office and opened one to reveal a well-stocked drinks cabinet. "Can I get you a little something?" he grinned mischievously. Chell responded with a jerky shake of the head, her eyes still tracing the walls of the room.

"No? Well, if you don't mind I think I'll help myself to a cheeky wee whisky while we chat". He poured himself a glass from an almost-empty bottle and took a slow, savouring sip.

"Mmm, lovely. Sure I can't get you anything, my dear?" he asked; hand poised on the cabinet door, eyebrows raised with hopeful expectation. Chell shook her head a second time and cast her hard gaze across the man's grand desk. A small brass plaque politely introduced the desk's owner: Eugene C. Deblovski - Academic Dean.

"Now, what brings you to my office today?" he asked for a second time as he settled himself back down into his faded leather chair, ice chinking in his drink.

Chell pulled a dog-eared notebook from the back pocket of her jeans and, taking a fresh page, began to write her request. Finished, she slid the notebook across the desk to the man opposite her and stiffly sat back in her chair, hands clenching at her knees. Dean Deblovski's eyebrows rose as he read the note.

"You want to learn… everything?"

Chell jerked her head in confirmation. The Dean gave a deep, raspy chuckle.

"Well, we sure don't have anything like that on our list of courses! What would that be called anyway, Life 101?"

He chuckled again at his own joke before trailing off, deep in thought.

"Hmm… Perhaps there is something I can do for you, my dear. As it happens, I don't run this place for any kind of financial motive. No, no, I run it as a sort of hobby – a service to the town, if you like. Everyone has a hobby, yes? Some people enjoy collecting things, or -I don't know- growing things. Myself, I like teaching farmers about philosophy. Or housewives about history. Anything that they want to know, anything that will fill up their minds with knowledge and feed their hungry curiosity, that's what gets me out of bed in the morning! So I will do my very best to teach you about life, my dear, as best as one person ever could anyway. A little philosophy here, a little history there, biology, psychology, social studies… It'll be like a greatest hits of all the courses I offer!"

He chuckled again. Chell stared blankly.

"Yes, well, anyway." He coughed, "I always pride myself on the quality of the education I offer over the number of students I have. I've been running this little school for over fifty years now and the names of every student I've ever had fit onto that one board over there."

He gestured beside him to a large, carefully-polished wooden plaque hanging in the centre of the wall above the drinks cabinet. The plaque was covered in rows of names and dates engraved in a neat, ornate lettering. Chell could see that just one student was listed for this year, 2027, as well as for the previous year and the year before that. In fact, on closer inspection the school rarely had more than two students in the same year. The names of the alumni were listed as far back as the 1970s – something caught her eye. A name. Wheatley. Enrolled 1972. Stephen Wheatley. Chell struggled to control the panic that shot through her. It was a coincidence. It had to be. It might be a common name, for all she knew! It couldn't be any connection to the Wheatley she knew, could it? The Wheatley she knew was a robot: a small, metal, lying, treacherous robot. He'd been manufactured deep inside the laboratories of Aperture, hadn't he? Why would the name of an evil little robot be written on the wall of a 1970s community college? Taking a deep breath she attempted to calm the battle between her horror and her desperate desire to know more. She steadied her hand and carefully worded a question to the Dean that barely scratched the surface of her curiosity.

The name Wheatley seems familiar to me. Does he live in Maple Hill or does he have family from around here?

As he read her question a slow smile broke out on Dean Deblovski's wrinkled face, his eyes shining with remembrance.

"Ah, Wheatley… Now there's a name I have not heard in a long, long time. I'm surprised you know the name, actually, I don't know where you would have heard it from as there's no-one in Maple Hill with that name now. The young man I knew by that name hasn't lived in Maple Hill for, oh, must be fifty years now. And as for any family, well, he wasn't originally from the area, wasn't from Michigan at all actually. He was English, came over here as a young man."

Seeing Chell's look of confusion, the Dean added, "Ah, well, England is… it's a country on the other side of the ocean from the United States. It's a long way away; I think I've got a map around here somewhere…"

He rummaged around in a drawer as Chell quietly boiled with impatience.

"No? Must have taken it out. I would need to show you on a map. That can be your first geography lesson!"

He gave a throaty laugh.

"Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Wheatley was just out of high school when I met him. This was back in 1972 and I wasn't long out of college myself. I thought I knew everything about the world but I had no idea at all what I wanted to do with my life. Wheatley was quite the opposite; he had this grand ambition to work for a laboratory that used to be in the area. Aperture Science, I think it was called."

Chell tried to hide the grimace that flashed across her face. So there was a connection.

"He didn't have any kind of qualifications and they wouldn't let just anyone in. And so he came to me: the one person in the town closest to Aperture Science who had been to college. He asked me to teach him all about "Science and things", just so that he could work for Aperture. I don't know why, but I just wanted to help him out however I could. There was something about the passion in his voice when he talked about his ambitions, about how he was going to build all these wonderful inventions and help people and save the world. The way he used to talk, it made me feel like - like even though I didn't have any ambitions myself I could at least help someone else with achieving theirs."

The fondness of the memory was plain to see on the Dean's face. Even Chell could not mistake the glow across his features that gave him the appearance of a much younger man.

"I said that I would teach him what I knew and help him to get a job at Aperture. Now, I didn't know the first thing about Science back then so I couldn't help him there, but I had just graduated in accountancy so I said that I could teach him how to be an accountant. Every company needs accountants, I told him! He was the reason I set up this little college here: I did everything by the book and got registered as a real college so that the qualifications I got him here would mean something to the folks at Aperture. He was my student for two years and he graduated in… hmm, that's right, 1974."

He chuckled again to himself.

"I still remember how jittery he was the day he went for the job interview at Aperture, remember it like it was just last week. And how happy he was when he got the job too, like a little kid at Christmas, all excited and sick with nerves. What was the job title again? Something like… Junior Assistant… Supporting Accountant, one of those lowest rung on the ladder sort of jobs. But it was at Aperture and that was all he wanted, his dream was fulfilled just like that."

The light began to dwindle from the Dean's eyes as his smile faded.

"I didn't see much of Wheatley after that. He would call sometimes, and there was the occasional weekend that he'd make the two hour drive and come visit. He'd tell me all about Aperture and his work and colleagues, he sounded happy there and I enjoyed catching up with him. But after about a year or so his visits slowly became less frequent and eventually he stopped calling. And that was that, I haven't seen him since. I don't know what happened to him, whether he couldn't keep in touch or just didn't want to. But I would like very much to know what happened to him, he meant a lot to me."

Dean Deblovski suddenly seemed to remember Chell sitting across from him. He jumped with surprise and shook off his nostalgia.

"Oh, I'm sorry my dear! I've been talking away and got a little lost down memory lane there. You'll forgive an old man, won't you? Now then, what were we talking about? Ah yes, your lessons…"

***

Weeks passed. Chell spent the majority of her free time in one of the college's tiny classrooms absorbed in Dean Deblovski's lessons. He taught her the basics of science and geography, of history and culture. On warm days they would sit together on the grass outside and he would point out the subtleties of the town's society that had escaped Chell's notice. He attempted to explain the interactions of its residents, interpreting body language, hand gestures, eye contact: all of the mannerisms that had baffled Chell for months. Each day new facts and concepts began to populate her knowledge, and her mind was slowly opened to a world unimaginably larger and more intricate than either Maple Hill or Aperture. She gradually began to relax and found herself enjoying the Dean's company as he lectured fervently about a topic he felt would interest her. Occasionally, he would try to satisfy his own curiosity for Chell and attempt to prise open the wall she had built around herself and her secrets. His questions varied from simply asking what her favourite colour was, to more probing queries about herself: where she had come from, her childhood, any friends who might be out there looking for her. All of his enquiries were met by the same response from Chell: her eyes would immediately drop to the floor and her body physically recoiled, as if the question had been an arrow piercing through her. The Dean quickly learned to avoid direct interrogation; he hoped instead that she would slowly open up to him over time.

While these lessons satisfied Chell's immediate thirst for knowledge the topic of Wheatley posed a far more intriguing and intimate subject to her. From the moment the dust had settled after defeating Wheatley and leaving Aperture Chell had craved a better understanding of her betrayer. Had he ever thought of her as a friend? Had he ever really cared about her at all? Or had he planned to betray her right from the start? Now that she had stumbled across a possible link to Wheatley's past, she wondered if she finally had the opportunity to get answers for the questions she had and discover the truth about him. This tantalising possibility occupied her thoughts to the point that she could barely concentrate on her lessons with the Dean, wondering and worrying to the point of obsession.

Over time her chaotic ideas and speculations sorted themselves into two theories. The first was that the man called Wheatley had somehow been involved in the creation of her Wheatley – she hated that she kept using that term! – and the core had been named in his honour. This would mean that her Wheatley – robot Wheatley – was entirely artificial and had simply been obeying its programming when it turned on her. This was somehow easier to stomach: there had been no decision-making process against her and no malevolent intent towards her personally. Chell tried to reassure herself that if this theory was correct there was no reason to continue bearing a grudge. With enough time she could put it all behind her and begin to trust again.

However, this optimism was put in doubt by her second theory: that the robot's seemingly-artificial intelligence had in fact been extracted from the human of the same name, similar to the method by which GLaDOS was created. The idea of this deeply unsettled Chell as it implied that Wheatley had not been programmed to be inherently evil, but instead had a human consciousness and had deliberately chosen to exploit her. He must have plotted how to gain her trust, and how he could best manipulate her… anger surged through her just thinking about it. How could she trust anyone again when the only person she'd ever relied on had done this to her?

As her obsessions weighed ever more heavily on her mind Chell realised she could no longer keep them to herself; she wanted badly to discuss her speculations with the Dean. She found her moment at the end of a particularly fiery lecture that Chell had struggled to pay attention to. At the stage where she would usually thank the Dean with a small nod, she instead caught his attention with jerked wave of her hand. Seeing the worry etched across her face, the Dean turned from cleaning the board and sat opposite Chell.

"My dear, what's wrong?" he asked with a look of concern, "It's alright, tell me what's on your mind. I'll make us some tea."

As the kettle boiled in the staff room next door, Chell found a fresh page on her notebook and began to unburden her pent up anxieties. With a tremor in her hand, she began to describe her life before she arrived in Maple Hill. She wrote of Aperture and GLaDOS and testing; of turrets and burns and scars that would not heal. She wrote about the robot that had befriended and betrayed her, before revealing his familiar name. She then summarised her theories about Wheatley's fate, explaining to the Dean that the student who still meant so much to him may be the robot that haunts her nightmares. She passed her note, spread across two full pages, to the Dean and released a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding. She felt different, as if a tight band had been removed from around her chest. Chell unclenched her muscles and began to relax into her armchair. The kettle finished boiling, left forgotten about as the Dean read Chell's story with dismay etched across his face.

"I-I'm so sorry. The things that have happened to you in your life… Frankly, I'm amazed you've kept it together as well as you have, I think a lot of people would have been broken by what you've experienced. And our lessons together, they- they're a way of moving on, aren't they? Quite right too, that's something I can absolutely help you with! Not just the lessons, my dear, although I do enjoy those immensely. If there's ever anything you need, or even just someone to talk to, well, I'm here for you for anything at all."

Chell smiled, a brief flicker of happiness at the Dean's kind words.

"Although…" he continued, "I really hope that you're wrong about Wheatley, my dear. He was one of the kindest people I've ever met and I can't imagine him ever hurting anyone. In fact, I remember that he couldn't even kill spiders when they came into the house, he would always try to sweep them out the door. I think he said he would feel guilty for the spider's family and friends, and thought they might come after him for revenge. Now, I'm aware that the robot who tricked you was named Wheatley, but it can't possibly be anything to do with the man I knew, I assure you of that!"

Chell frowned and reached across the desk to retrieve her notebook before writing a new message.

I'm not so sure, I need to find out for certain. I'm going to go back to Aperture Science and learn what happened to the man you knew after he joined Aperture. I need to know if he turned into the robot who hurt me, or if that robot was just following its programming. I don't think I can't trust anyone again until I know. I think the word is closure? I need closure.

The Dean's eyes widened as he read her abrupt statement of intent.

"But-but you can't go back to Aperture, it's far too dangerous! You just finished telling me that there was an evil AI watching over the whole building: she'll find you and she'll kill you! Or-or worse, she'll trap you there and make you into one of her experiments again, you can't go back there!"

Unfazed, Chell wrote her reply to the Dean's concern.

I'll find another way in. I'll go directly to the old laboratory underground. There has to be a passage somewhere, limos and trucks used to drive in. GLaDOS has no authority in the old laboratory, she wouldn't be able to see me there. It will be safe.

The worry did not leave the Dean's face but he was eased a little by Chell's determination.

"Well, if you're sure… I'm not happy about this at all but if you genuinely feel that this something you need to do in order to move on then, well, I'll support you. I suppose if anyone could make it into that place and back out in one piece it would be you, my dear. And besides… I could perhaps benefit from a bit of closure myself when it comes to Wheatley. If you can find out what happened to him after all these years… well, it would really put my mind to rest. So go and do what you need to do, I'll be here waiting for your return."

Chell added to her message:

Actually, there are some things that I need your assistance with.