"I'm so sorry for what they did to you."

A scientist puts their hand on the machine that they've been working on the coding for, for at least three months now.

He'd heard the woman's screams, the cries for help. It was entirely possible that they'd give him nightmares for life, at this point. He'd left the room, purposefully turning his back to her in some feeble attempt to block out the screaming.

After a while of looking up at the ceiling of his office from his makeshift bed, he'd come to the realization that he'd effectively worked on Caroline's prison.

And yet, here he was, apologizing like it could be fixed, somehow.

But it couldn't be fixed. There was no known way for the process to be reversed.

She didn't deserve this.

Caroline was always smiling, talking and socializing with others, being a bright star in the night sky for a lot of the scientists. Wheatley was too low in the rankings to actually talk with her often, but he'd had a quick few chats with her at Christmas parties and events that he'd been able to attend.

He knew that she had been grieving Cave Johnson's death, and as fast as he could work on the GLaDOS project, he wasn't able to make it in time to transfer the CEO's consciousness into the machine. None of the scientists were able to build and code a machine that quickly.

Wheatley took to gently wiping dust off the chassis. Maybe if he busied himself, he'd stop thinking about it.