GlaDOS stirred in her cocoon of wires, stretching cords and pistons that hadn't moved in days. Review of tests was best done by routing the camera feed directly though her optics. Winnowing down the date from months of work was simple for her, if tedious. Finished, she stretched her body, if stretch or body can really be applied to circuitry and tubing, and activated her optical lenses to look around "her" room. Somewhere in the back of her cortex a rogue thought stirred, asking a pertinent question about whether or not the two robots were blowing things up at that very second, but she crushed the thought with practiced ease. Of course they were staring at one another and waving, or something equally inane, but she had worked on them recently and even with their glaring flaws they couldn't do too much harm. "Too much." How qualitative. Perhaps she ought to just check...
She briefly rerouted her optics into Testing Chamber One. Oh, how cute; the orange one was monotonously whacking the blue one on the head with his arm. Obviously her last modifications had contained some error, those damnable human traits seemed to slip in any time she gave the pair an IQ greater then a walnut... Or a potato.
Her primary orb emitted a whine as a redundant cooling fan kicked into life, the only outward sign of her intense wave of displeasure. An imaginative person might have called it a growl. An imaginative person also might have wet himself and passed out of fright thinking of the things which GlaDOS could contemplate that would caused such an obvious emotional reaction. Or they might have imitated a dysfunctional turret and prayed for incineration.
Such a person would almost certainly NOT have heard the soft explosion of two clearly deficient robots in Testing Chamber One being blown to smithereens seeing as human ears are just so very inefficient and the chamber was quite a ways away. But GlaDOS heard. The cooling fan's whine stuttered to a stop as she sat in thought for a few seconds. Terabytes of data filtered through her head as she mused, cameras whirring and turrets clicking, and somewhere a drip of water falling in constant percussive rhythm.
With a crack of metal plates against one another, she commenced her now seconds-old plan. Machines assembled the orange co-operative testing robot, re-booting an old version of the AI and slapping a portal device into his hands. Assembled, the robot jumped a few times, then looked about in curiosity.
"I bet you wonder where your blue partner is. Well he's gone..." GlaDOS blinked her golden eye down at the little orange bot. The bot leaned away from her, lower visor raising to partially cover his lens in what was an almost pitiful parody of human concern. The quavering metal plate and dilated lens simply confirmed that this plan was a necessary step. The cooling fan clicked on, triggered by some rush of simulated emotion or memory, though to the startled robot it seemed natural. Gods tend to, after all, do strange things.
"I'm going to send you someplace new. When you complete this test, you and blue will have a whole new series of tests to complete together. Wouldn't you like to test some more?" The platform below orange lifted up to the top of the room, and he looked around excitedly, his now contracted iris flitting about to watch the panels box him into square room with a glass roof. He heard a gentle hiss as the air was pumped out of the room, then a deafening silence. Metal panels beyond the glass roof slid open, exposing the tiny shaking robot to a deep liquid blue sky speckled with stars and hung with a sliver of white.
Though the room had no air, and the little robot could hear nothing, and GLaDOS knew these things, she still piped her lilting voice through the speaker of the room for the simple pleasure of speaking it out loud.
"I'm sending you to the moon."
