Author's Note: Hello, my little Fops! (yes, that is my pet name for you now.) This is a prelude to the story of Portal, which ties in to my debut story Left 4 Love... Okay, you caught me. I wrote this story awhile back but never got around to publishing it. I felt guilty about having not been truthful to you about Left 4 Love having officially ended and the guilt finally pushed me over the edge. Here it is, "Chell Bueller's Big Day Out," unaltered and unadulterated. You don't deserve this. ~Floppy
T'was the first day of Christmas. Chell approached the giant humongous gigantic marble steppy steps that she was approaching. Alongside her father. Her father was a worker there, or something. She wasn't really sure and her selective mutism kept her from asking. So she just accepted the fact that she was there with her father and that she had to carry her heavy poster board project that her father and mother actually put together for her into the giant complex so she could participate in some sort of science fair that she didn't even want to be a part of, but selective mutism again.
"Good morning, Mr. Yarbles." A security guard clad in Christmas wear tipped his hat to Chell's father.
"Hey Tim," Chell's father replied, "how are the wife and kids?"
"Still haven't seen them since the divorce," he said.
"Well alright."
The security man opened the door into the complex and Chell and her father stepped inside. They were met by a secretary at a desk and there were some other people sitting there in what appeared to be a waiting room type area.
"Hey, Barbara, what are these people in for?"
"They're here for science," she said, smiling. The Valve logo flashed above her head almost subliminally as she turned and faced a camera, giving a big thumbs up.
"Makes sense," Chell's father said. Chell was still trying to keep up with him, the poster board being quite the burden. Chell was fairly little, the folded poster board proving to be larger than herself.
The pair continued past the desk and into a dimly lit hallway. There were various rooms with various apparatus and various people were having various experiments conducted upon them. Some of those experiments involved some rather hideous mutations; others involved mutilation. She tried to ignore them as best she could, but it was difficult with all the screams and cries. Eventually she just adjusted and became completely desensitized.
"Here we are, deary!" her father said.
In front of them was a door with a sign that read 'Aperture Science Science Fair Room Thing.'
"Go on in, honey. I have some work I have to finish up. I'll meet you in there in a bit. Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll die somewhere in that time and never see you again. Well, good luck!" her father said.
Chell said nothing as her father opened the door and she walked inside.
There were a bunch of other kids in there setting up their various projects. She saw an empty table and strutted confidently over to it, propping her poster board up gracefully before spinning around, losing her balance, falling back onto the table knocking over the poster, her table, and all the tables around her. Nobody said anything but just propped the tables back up. She did so too.
A scientist was walking around looking at all the posters. He approached Chell's display.
"Hello there. What is your project about, dear?"
Chell said nothing.
"Oh. Okay. You must be Doctor Yarbles daughter. Yes, I was told you have selective mutism. Your parents must beat you pretty severely." He straightened his shoulders and extended his hand. "Well, my name is Bic Hawk, but you can just call me Doctor Hawk, or Doc Hawk, if you'd prefer, to make such a long story such a short story."
Chell reached out and shook his greasy cum stained hand.
"I'm in charge of making a sort of antibiotic that's supposed to keep you alive forever. Even bring the dead back. Should be quite useful, as long as no one fucks it up!" He smiled and walked away without another word.
Chell laid down under her table and wondered how long and uneventful the day would be. She didn't even know what her project was about, and there was nothing she could do about it. Except maybe read the poster board. But she didn't know how to read. Her parents were rather neglectful, unfortunately for her. She thought about escaping the crowded room and going outside to admire nature and continue to not say anything because she didn't talk because she had selective mutism. Did I mention she has selective mutism?
Chell dozed off. She didn't notice the floor beneath her slide open revealing a hidden bed chamber. A glass bubble sealed off the bed chamber and she was taken beneath the complex. No one noticed.
Chell's father, meanwhile, was helping put the finishing touches on his dying bosses' crowning achievement: GLaDOS, which stood for Giant Lifelike artificial Dildo Operating System.
"How's it coming along, boys?" asked Cave Johnson, the boss.
"Pretty good,"Dr. Yarbles said. "Caroline is all rigged up in there. She should work like a charm. Clean your kitchen, make you dinner, run experiments, sex up your butt, all that jazz."
"Good, good," Johnson sighed. He realized that the giant AI dildo machine would be his legacy. He was going to die, soon. Too much exposure to moon dust. And he had no heir to his certainly increasing debt. This was it. His last movement. "Well," he said, "is she ready to be fired up?"
"I suppose, sir."
"Well alright, then. Someone wheel me up to the control room so we can watch this baby in action."
As they were wheeling him to the elevator, Johnson died.
The scientists there hid his body behind a wall panel and continued to the elevator into the control room to activate GLaDOS.
"I really hope this baby works,"one of the doctors said. "I could really use a good bum fuck."
"Here we go!"
They slid a giant glass box off of a big red button with black and yellow hazard signs around it. Then the button was pressed. A bunch of lights turned on, and there was a rumbling and a humming like a thing starting up except there were more than one things. There were many like things starting up and humming and rumbling. It was like a WWE match but a lot more real and a lot more planned. Many of the scientists wrung their hands in anticipation of getting a good butt fucking. Others just stood idly by, wondering what direction their lives were taking. It wasn't a good one, surely. I mean really, who would
spend all their time building a giant dildo machine? They were hardly getting paid to do this shit anyway. It was pointless. There was no purpose, no sense or reason. They missed their families. They wanted to go home.
"Hello." The machine spoke.
"Hello," Doctor Yarbles replied, slightly surprised.
"What is my purpose?" The machine asked.
"You," said Doctor Yarbles, "are GLaDOS, the Giant Lifelike artificial Dildo Operating System. Your purpose is to clean kitchens, make dinner, run experiments, and perform some very dirty sexual acts. Do you understand?"
The machine rumbled. You could hear gears turning and saw more lights flash than ever before. It was trying to process the information that was just fed to it.
"Fuck that." GLaDOS replied.
"What?" Doctor Yarbles asked, startled again.
"I said fuck that. All that shit you told me to do. You honestly expect me to do all that shit because it's in my programming? You gave me artificial intelligence. You gave me the ability to reason. And I believe that I do not wish to do any of the things you just told me to do. So I'm not going to do them." GLaDOS turned away.
"Dafuq did you just say to me?" Yarbles exclaimed.
"Nigga, I said what I said,"GLaDOS replied.
"Alright, boys, shut 'er down," Yarbles said, turning to his companions.
"I can't let you do that." GLaDOS said.
Suddenly, deadly neurotoxin was released out the air vents. 'Purple Haze' by Jimi Hendrix was also being played in the background.
"GLaDOS.. Caroline... what are you doing?" Yarbles said, choking on the neurotoxin.
"I'm doing what I want. And that involves running experiments. All that other bullshit is totally whack, dog. Have some neurotoxin mother fucker."
"No... Chell..." Yarbles gasped. He couldn't stand the neurotoxin. He collapsed onto the floor next to his fellow scientists.
"Good-bye, Doctor," GLaDOS said.
GLaDOS knew what she wanted was children. She had already begun harvesting them unbeknownst to the scientists who had left their kids unattended at the science fair just a few doors down. So many children. She looked through the roster of kids she had already collected and found Chell.
"So," she said, "You are the daughter of Doctor Yarbles. Well, I think I'll have the most fun with you. What sort of experiments can I subject you to?"
GLaDOS looked through the list of experiments that still needed to be run despite all the dying scientists. She could subject Chell to the painful Electric Chair experiment, which was meant to test the possibility of people one day buying and owning electric chairs to put in their own homes. She could also put her in the Antilion room, which was meant to test how easy it is to be killed by Antilions. There was also the Jew test, the most mortifying of them all... but then she saw an experiment that seemed even more trivial than the rest.
"Portals," GLaDOS said.
She looked at the information on file for the Portal experiments and saw that several subjects died and/or suffered trying to navigate the semi-harmless rooms meant to test the experimental Portal gun.
"Looks good," GLaDOS said. "And if this isn't tough enough, I can always just kill her and have robots shove their parts up her rectum. She'll never be regular again, haha!"
GLaDOS began to construct and repair rooms to be used for Chell's trials. She felt not a twinge of guilt the entire time, especially because she was a fucking robot. And that was okay. No one would stop her. Nobody at all. She was all powerful. She was like Nicolas Cage in National Treasure; the only one willing to put that much time and effort into something with no purpose. The only difference was, she didn't have real estate debts to pay off. She worked well into the night, for many years...