Target Acquired
Ever since he first came online, silence was the enemy. – Oneshot, complete. Aperture Labs from a Turret's point of view.
Target Acquired
Ever since he first came online, silence was the enemy.
Turret 898-b3's earliest catalogued memories were of sound. The assembly line, always moving, always ferrying him off to one platform or another. Mechanical whirrs and delicate clicks and heavy thrums of machinery, it was all beautiful and measured and constant, like the ticking of a clock. It never seemed to lack purpose – he was always being taken somewhere, being tested for something.
He heard the hum of the assembly line. The cries and screams of defective turrets as they were flung into incinerators. The steady clicks as he, and fellow turrets, were rushed onward after they passed quality testing.
The clack of turrets being loaded onto mounted cages. The thump of being dropped into a box. The scrape of cardboard as he was being packaged. The smooth, melodious voice of the Goddess, GlaDOS, as she read out his serial number and station.
But, never before, silence.
Now, he waited in the abandoned corridor of Aperture Science for a sound, any sound. His superiors told him that once, there were testers – many testers that rounded the door and fled, or bled, or died. The rattle of bullets, the scream of a human, it was glorious they said; a relief from the horrid, empty silence.
But that was long ago, and aperture Science had long since lost its human testers. Without them, their world just seemed… empty.
The other turrets taught him to sing, to ward off the quiet. He did so often. It didn't help.
Then, one day, like a miracle sent from the Goddess herself, he heard the ghost of sound, something he had not heard in ages.
Footsteps.
And just when 898-b3 thought he was hallucinating, or had finally gone raving mad-defective, his sensors woke him from the dream-stasis he'd been stuck in for so long. And there, as clear as day, was the woman with the portal gun, rounding the corner unaware. This was it. This was his moment, the moment he'd been dreaming of since he was first dropped down into this silent Hell.
For the first time, gleefully, his lens lit up and his guns propped into place.
"TAr-get ac-QUI-red."