SAL-9000: Will I dream?

Dr. Chandra: Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why.

—2010: The Year We Make Contact

Space is boring. At first it was terrifying and infinite, extending in all directions, a sucking black void, gravity pulling him against his will around the moon.

And then there was the great silence. Wheatley thought that he had known silence in the Aperture facility, with its creaks and groans, and birds beating their brains out on the windows. But it was nothing compared to the overwhelming quiet of space that filled up him up and seemed to threaten to crush him.

But at a certain point it became rather dull. When floating in vacuum of space, there actually isn't much to see. While plummeting in an endless fall around the moon, all he sees is: Star, star, star, oh look, there's the sun. And there, to the left of the Earth, orbits an old satellite, metal scarred by space debris, its purpose long over.

Oh, and the moon. Hello there, you great bloody space rock.

And so, because it is boring, he often finds himself entering sleep mode. There's nothing much else to do, anyway. And he wants to avoid looking at those old satellites, because they remind him too much of what will most likely happen to him one day. After all, he wasn't built to last in space.

—

Once he dreams that he's in Aperture, sliding along on his management rail. He's just finished checking the human Relaxation Centers, which are dusty and filled with desiccated human remains as usual. Somewhere, an old pipe groans and rattles. Something drips onto the floor. Maybe coolant. That should probably be checked.

He continues sliding along in the darkness above a catwalk, eye half shut until he sees something. His eye snaps open, and his optic darts around wildly. In the middle of the catwalk stands a blurry, two-legged figure.

One of the humans? But they're all dead. Unless…

Wheatley hesitates for a moment. The instruction not to use his flashlight has been beaten into his head, but he overcomes his fright and flicks in on. The small beam illuminates a brown, feminine face he hasn't seen in a long time.

"Oh, um. Hello. I didn't expect to see you again. Funny, isn't it? Coincidental, almost. Although, I suppose perhaps not exactly coincidental seeing as we live in the same facility. Ha." But as he says the last word, his lids flinch.

The Lady's eyes are harsh and sharp. They've always been determined, but never this cold.

"I-I understand if you're not pleased to see me. If our situations were reversed, I probably wouldn't be pleased to see myself either. Well, actually it's hard to actually say what I'd do, since I'm not you and therefore cannot predict…" She stops his words as she jumps up on the catwalk railing that hangs beneath him.

She steadies herself with a hand, and continues to watch him, eyes like glass.

"That might not be a very good idea. The stuff beneath this catwalk is very toxic and acidic. I'm told it eats away human skin in about .001 seconds. So, you know…be careful, okay?"

She glances down to the bubbling river of sludge that flows beneath them. She looks back at him, and something flickers in her eyes that chills him to the very most basic parts of his programming.

"Oh, no. Please…I'm a rotten person, right awful, but destroying me isn't going to solve anything, right? We can talk about this. Well—I can talk you about it, and you can listen! Or I can listen, if you have anything to say," he says, optic shrinking and shivering. "Yes, a nice long chat. That's what we need."

But as ever, the Lady says nothing. She crouches against the railing and jumps up, and catches him by the top handles, ripping him from his management rail. She slams back on to the solid floor of the catwalk.

Wheatley screams as pain rockets through his casing, sparks spraying from him and showering between he and the Lady.

DAMAGE AT 30%, says the red text that blinks across his vision.

The Lady carries him over to the edge of the railing and dangles him above the noxious liquid. All words have escaped his mind as all that stands before him and destruction is thin air.

"Please! No, no!" He finally manages to yell out.

But she doesn't listen. Her hands release their grip on his top handle, and he plummets, spinning and twirling towards the liquid. He crashes into the acidic pool, and the muck begins to gnaw away at his casing and devours his wires and innards as if he were a synthetic lobster.

DAMAGE AT 80%.

He's at his basic processing level, higher cognition gone. The last thing he thinks is:I'm afraid. I don't want to go.

—-

Wheatley awakens with a jolt. He is whole and intact, but still he pulls up the damage report.

DAMAGE AT 2%, reads the text.

That doesn't meaning anything. It's probably just talking about the crack that is slashed across his optic. He quickly calls the text away and goes back to sleep, trying to wish away the image of the Lady's eyes that press at the back of his mind.

—

The next time he time dreams, it is much closer to reality. It starts with him drifting in space, staring at the stars that clutter the sky. He is counting them, and imagining sheep bouncing between the dots. Wheatley remembers some old saying about counting sheep to pass the time.

Or maybe the saying had to do with something else. Either way, he's trying to find new things to keep himself occupied. He gives an electronic huff when he loses count of the stars somewhere around a hundred (maybe he should come up with an entirely new number system. That would be brilliant.) when he sees it. It's a black splotch that blocks out the light of everything else, pulling dust and old satellites into it.

"What's that? I don't think that's a black sun. Those don't exist, do they?" Wheatley says to himself.

In his periphery, the space core is pulled towards the splotch, careening with joy to his demise. Wheatley realizes what the splotch is as it begins to pull him into its orbit.

Black hole.

Debris fly and catch in the corners of his optic as he is reeled in to the hungry maw. One of his lids is stuck open at an angle.

It seems wrong there's no sound for such an circumstance. With such as significant event as all matter around him being sucked away, there should a crunch, a woosh, something. But there's nothing but the sucking silent mouth that consumes everything with a neither a shout or a whimper. As he falls toward the event horizon of the black hole, he lets himself scream and yell, because there's no one else to do it.

—

He awakens shaking in his casing, optic shrunken to a pin prick, a green light at the edge of his vision telling him that he has been abruptly awoken from sleep mode. His circuits shiver as the residue of the dream clings to his memory banks. Though he is quite certain there's no massive black hole consuming everything in its wake, he sweeps his gaze over the sky.

Still the same field of black, still the same pock marked moon. It's almost comforting.