Ever since I was young, I knew I was smarter than most children my age. When I was seven, I finished one hundred piece puzzles in under five hours. When I was eight, I began to read books a bit more advanced and mature for my age.

One short story in particular truly stuck with me. It was called "I have no mouth and I must scream." By Harlan Ellison. The story was about a highly intelligent A.I. named AM, short for allied master computer. AM was created for the cold war, which never stopped in the story. The A.I. got so advanced that it managed to take over the entire earth and wipe out most of the population. AM kept a few human beings alive so that it could torture them in horrible and gruesome ways so that it would be emused. The story was cryptic, dark, and disturbing with how detailed it went with describing the pain each human being was tortured and how AM hated humanity. I had nightmares about the book for almost two weeks. I guess I should've listened to my parents when they told me I was to young to read it.

The point is that I was smarter then most children. Got straight A's and pats on the back from my teachers. But to be completely honest, being so smart board me to death. Everything came so easy to me that it wasn't even challenging. Being this smart also made me the school nerd, often becoming the target for school bullies. It didn't help that I also had parents that had an extremely tight leash on me. I wanted to do something exiting. Climb a mountain, find treasure, discover a lost civilization, anything that would show people that Connie Maheswaran wasn't just a timid bookworm. Meeting Steven and the crystal gems only threw more wood on the fire. I had to go on at least ONE adventure by myself or I'd go insane.

Little did I know that my simple fantasy would be crushed by cold, cruel, merciless reality.

I was surfing the web board when I came across Ronaldos newest conspiracy theory on his blog. Somehow, a teenager left his house at midnight to explore an old abandoned science facility and never returned. The ludicrous theory Ronaldo had for this involved an army of half human, half praying mantis people or something just as stupid.

Still board, I decided to look up the company that owned the science facility, called Aperture Science. What I found was actually rather interesting. In the fortys, before it became aperture Science, I was a company called Aperture Fixtures. Aperture Fixtures mainly manufactured and distributed shower curtains. Yes, shower curtains. The company's founder, Cave Johnson, changed the name of his company to Aperture Science Innovators to make his shower curtains sound more hygienic. Eventually, however, the focus of the company would eventually shift to actual science. Cave Johnson then bought an abandoned salt mine in upper Michigan to expand and hired astronauts, olympians, and war heros for experiments, testing out Aperture products and contributing to science.

This is when things got... More interesting.

What happened behind the doors of Aperture was anyones guess. No one outside the company knew just what the test subjects going in and out of that place were really testing. Aperture would become financially unstable during the seventys. They had to hire hobos off the street just to get test subjects. Eventually things got so bad that all employees had to run tests. On top of all that, Cave Johnson was dying because of an experiment that involved moon stones. It was then that he announced that he would try to cheat death by basically putting his brain and personality into a computer. He died before the project was finished. His finale request was to have his personal assistant Caroline take his place as the person being put inside the computer. So the scientists did what they were told and put Caroline inside the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, or GLaDOS for short. The purpose for GLaDOS was to control, guide, and oversee the Aperture Science computer-aided enrichment center, the companys main facility. During this time things actually started to look up for Aperture Science. They were no longer bankrupt, the government had interest in buying their new robot turrets they were making, and a new feet of robotics was about to be accomplished.

Then GLaDOS came online.

For whatever reason, GLaDOS was very cold, aggressive, and even hostile towards not just the scientists, but everyone who worked at the facility. To combat this, they made "cores" to try and control GLaDOS and her violent outbursts. For a short time this actually worked. Until late spring of 1998, where for a few days, Aperture went completely silent. No one came back home from work, and no one answered any calls. Then a huge explosion was heard from the facility. It was discovered from video camera footage found from the wreckage that GLaDOS was turned on for bring your daughter to work day. When she went online, she flooded the entire building with deadly neurotoxin, killing everyone inside. No one knows what caused the explosion that destroyed most of the homicidal computer, though most subsect it was someone that survived. Since no one that used to own Aperture was alive, and no one wanted to be involved with the bad reputation of the company, the entire facility was left to decay.

After I was done reading the history of Aperture, I couldn't help but think about the abandoned facility. Was the facility just empty now? Why didn't anyone bother to look for survivers? Were all the products that were being tested just sitting around. Then something hit me. This could be the adventure I was waiting for! I could go to the facility, do a little exploring, take a few pictures, and mabye even find a souvenir. True someone went missing, but there was no evidence that it was because of the old building.

The place was completely empty... Right?