Chell sunk to the floor of the elevator breathing heavily, tears running down her face. The scare with the turret opera had almost been too much for her and the beauty of the song had driven her to tears. Everything hurt, wounds, muscles, and her head. She pushed her face into her palms, just trying to banish everything that had happened. GLaDOS still hated her, Wheatley was in space. The tears didn't stop. It was embarrassing. All this time she spent trying to escape had led to this moment and she didn't know what to do.

The outside world was unknown to her. She knew what things were, like jobs, cities, and cars but had no real memory of anything. She wasn't sure of any life she had before, or what led her to Aperture. She wasn't even sure if she was an orphan, she hadn't known anything of the sort until GLaDOS had mentioned it. And that might have been a lie.

The elevator came to a stop and she staggered to her feet before stumbling out into a wheat field on a sunny day. The door slammed shut and she spun around to see that the above ground Aperture was only a shed. Glancing around she felt despair kick in as she realized sh didn't know what direction to go in. There was only wheat everywhere. Wheat. Wheat-ley. Curiosity. Rick. Personality cores she barely known but she had been the one to cause destruction in their lives. She hadn't even realized they were sentient when she killed the first four. And when she made that connection she had broken down crying in front of Wheatley during their search for the neurotoxin generator. She felt so guilty.

A rumbling noise came from the shed and her eyes locked onto it, adrenaline suddenly shooting through her, preparing for fight or flight. The door swung open and a cube popped out. A companion cube. Her companion cube. She staggered forward and immediately latched onto it finally smiling, GLaDOS. She mouthed thank you toward the shed. Then she turned to face the world. And watched in horror as it cracked and fell around her. The sky seemed to be shattering while the wheat just withered away. And she spoke for the first time in 999999- or actually, she screamed.

OOO

And didn't stop screaming as her eyes shot open. A dark familiar laugh met her ears. "Oh test subject name here you didn't think I'd let you go that easy?" She struggled against restraints and strained her eyes to adjust to the strange lighting.

"Hey! Don't do that! You're frightening her! Just ignore her love, everything's all right." What's going on? Chell was terrified, and the familiar English accent wasn't helping.

"Oooh! Welcome back! How was it? How'd you do? Did you see me? What was it like?" More voices joined the sudden rush of noise but it was all quieted by one which angrily yelled for silence.

"He's right, shut up all of you. Fact: Brain damage risk is brought up 37% when frightened immediately upon exit from Aperture." Chell's eyes adjusted and she realized she was face to face with the man who had just spoken. A thin, short guy with dyed black hair, pale skin and pink eyes that were shining worriedly behind glasses. A few feet to his left was a boy who looked too young to be wearing a lab coat and working at anything other than a high school summer job. Clinging to him was a slightly older woman, probably in her early twenties, who Chell guessed had asked all the questions a moment before. More people were behind them but she was distracted by the pink eyed man who smiled.

"Welcome back, we just need to go through a few tests to see if you're okay." She flinched at the word tests and suddenly a hand was on her shoulder. She glanced back quickly and found the hand belonged to an extremely tall man with shockingly blue eyes.

"Hey, it's fine, you're back. Don't have to worry about bitchy Grace testing you anymo-Ow!" He immediately pulled away to rub his arm where an almost equally tall, thin woman had punched him. Her face was set in a scowl. Chell's first observation of the woman was how her young face didn't match her white hair.

"More like, 'it's fine, you're back, you don't have to listen to my annoying rambling all day'" She crudely imitated his accent before turning to Chell with a smile. Chell stared back with wide, shocked eyes. The only thing going through her mind was the intense similarity between the woman's voice and the one that belonged to GLaDOS.

"Was that supposed to sound like me? That was ridiculous!" The tall man sounded furious.

"Sounded pretty accurate to me."

"Shut up Rick, stay out of this."

"If I don't distract you, I'll end up cleaning your blood off the floor from when Grace snaps."

The tall man retorted but their argument had faded to the background as the pink eyed man brought her attention back to him. "Ignore them Chell. Just look at me. Okay, follow this light." He held up a tiny pen light and moved it back and forth slowly, watching Chell's eyes follow it. "Okay now, the most important thing to confirm when you come out of Aperture is to make sure you still have your memory." He was explaining things slowly like he was speaking to a child. She nodded shakily. Things were starting to seem vaguely familiar. "Can you tell me my name?"

She closed her eyes and shook her head. "Come on Michelle, use your voice," he said with a smirk.

"Chell," She responded hoarsely.

"There we go!" He was having too much fun with this, "Now tell me my name,"

"Advanced algorithms decided the best name was Craig." It seemed so hard to use her voice.

He chuckled. "Yeah, yeah, that. And can you tell me about him?" He pointed at the teenager who waved.

Chell waved back. Talking had stopped and everyone in the room had brought their attention to her. She suddenly realized that memory loss was probably a big deal and very possible. She closed her eyes again, everything was so fuzzy and now she was worried.

"T-that's Neil." Then she chuckled, "The space case."

Neil groaned and rolled his eyes, "Sure you remember that. Uh, talk about someone else." He waved his arms vaguely.

She went around the room naming people. Her coworkers. Her friends. Craig the know it all, Rick the adventurer, Neil the space case, Caroline the peppy assistant, Catharine the one who never stopped asking questions, Aaron the baker, Cole the perpetually angry, Maurine the voice of reason. All of them and herself scientists. There was a sort of collective sigh of relief. "Can you imagine," Aaron groaned, "If we screwed up and she lost her memory. No amount of cake would save us from Cave."

Cave Johnson, head of the department, and her overprotective, adoptive, brother. It was all so surreal. She tilted her head up to where the two most familiar faces were looking down at her with smiles. She pointed her now unstrapped hands at them individually. "Grace, Wheatley,"

"Yup, that's right love, it's us. The crazy computers." He chuckled. "So how was it? You do know you're the only one to make it to the end. Everyone who was a part of this first round of testing died on the track at some point. Rick made it pretty far but he screwed up really stupidly." He laughed again.

"Hey I'd watch who you'd call stupid 'Intelligence Dampening Sphere,' you're part of round 2"

Chell suddenly realized that all the other wired chairs in the room were empty. She really was the last one left.

"It is pretty impressive. But we were supposed to close up two hours ago. Such a shame because I had planned dinner reservations for us all to cheer you up when you failed but we've missed them now." Chell could only grin at Grace's familiar attitude that had so flawlessly been copied in the script of GLaDOS. "I'm sure I can work it out with the restaurant somehow, after all this was a triumph."

Suddenly a voice came over the intercom. "Cave Johnson here, Atlas and Peabody are the first ones to complete the cooperative testing initiative without dying so Craig should stop slacking off and reintroduce them to the world around them."

"What?" Craig called out in frustration before grumbling some fact and moved into the next room followed closely by Rick and Caroline.

Chell was helped out of her chair by Grace and Wheatley at the same time, still feeling dizzy and disoriented. As she leaned heavily on her help she smiled. Only a few minutes ago she had thought her life was screwed. But now in an instant she had everything handed back to her, and she was happy.

Well, I'd like to apologize for posting under the influence of lack of sleep. 'Cause somewhere in my sleep deprived brain I decided I'd post a story without reading over it even once. Yeah. I know. I'm not kidding you. I think I was programmed for bad decisions. It still isn't a great story but I liked the idea too much to let it be. I'd like to thank the unfortunately mystery reviewers who were kind enough to point out my multiple typos and mistakes etc. etc. Please feel free to leave honest reviews if you catch any more mistakes :D Thanks so much!

Here have a mini Epilogue. A scene I liked but didn't fit into the story.

Chell sighed and her hand met her face.

"No, no hear me out!" Cave waved his hands excitedly from across the dinner table. "Just imagine, they sign a waiver thinking they're going to be doing some simple mind tests but when they wake up in the simulation they're convinced they've been thrown into dangerous testing that seems so real it even hurts. Then there isn't any risk of memory loss when we don't introduce the mute, memory suppression. Just imagine the reactions we'll be able to study when people think they've really been forced into this!"

Caroline giggled while excitedly nodding her approval as he continued.