Tomorrow
On her first working day, Caroline was overwhelmed with activity.
Illusions had never been an habit of hers; all along, in between the internships and the extra courses, she had guessed. She knew way before crossing that doorstep as an employee, for the first of countless times to come — no previous experience in the world could have fully prepared her for Aperture Science.
The place was already enormous, yet not enough for its ambitions. She had to notice, with attentive eyes, the tiniest details that fell under her gaze. She followed the unraveling of a vast net — it was made of lies and truth, of balance and mistakes, so fragile that it could be torn anytime by a single breath.
The good impression she left behind at work could not spare her nerves. When she met the sight of her home in the evening, it felt as if whole years had passed — she was a different person, tired in an entirely different way.
She stared at the darkness, swimming in a tangle of thoughts. She was sure about very few things — her fear and her doubts, or the thrilling perspectives for her future in science. On the other hand, there was the fresh touch of Aperture. It was obscure, thrilling, full of questions. She sighed.
She would start asking a few of them tomorrow.
Sometimes she thought of her job, and its resemblance with sleep was striking.
It swallowed her early in the morning, and she was hopelessly gone until late night. There was no awakening from Aperture's limbo, the vortex of paperwork, complaints and ever unsolved problems. She was eventually freed when she could no longer think; with a dazed mind, too weary to even feel disappointment, she collapsed on her bed.
Then, there were the other days. Those were the ones in which the sheets blurred in between her eyes, and the clatter of the keys turned into white noise. She typed on, mechanically, with that empty space on her mind — a hole filled with so many words, all of them joined in one. Caroline wondered why.
She had ideas — too many for their liking. She had long silent spaces where all she could do was listen, while, in secret, she filed her unheard opinions in vast and deep archives. She had dared voice a few, when the layer of ice she constantly tread on was thicker. "That will lead you somewhere", one of them had said, and her guts had twisted in ambition and fear.
There was so much she wanted to know. There was a treasure chest of human secrets, carefully aligned with those lying dormant in the labs. This place and its people were as vast and mysterious as the strings of protein, as space, time and quantum fields — and Caroline knew that, one day, she would no longer be imprisoned by the weight of her workload.
Tomorrow, she swore, she would try harder.
She, too, had gotten old and tired.
All Caroline remembered of the past years was a war. For so long she had fought, restless, against the unknown — yet, her victories had only led to finding more of it. Each door she had opened, with immense sacrifice, had disclosed a thousand bolted ones.
There was one particular truth, one she had too often needed to ignore, which made all her efforts feel in vain. It was the one she thought of when she watched the gallons of conversion gel, flowing from an old useless pipe and going to waste for a non-existent tomorrow.
She had so gotten used to Cave Johnson, she couldn't remember her life without his presence; and yet, she realized, she had never known one thing about that man.
Countless nights had repeated themselves with the same dynamics. Their discussions, one-sided, always found him engulfed in his greatest merit and mistake — it was his driving force, the abiding faith in himself. She had always done her best to guide him; sometimes, a few times, she had succeeded. Still, there was no way to change that man, and most of her words kept sliding down his convinctions, like rain on old, aging stone.
At first, she had never dared to ask. With the passing years, she had learnt there was no point in trying — he would always travel his way, like steel cold rails laid down by destiny. Yet, in her last wakeful seconds of nearly every day, she gave in to the oath; she would try again, tomorrow. She would ask, listen, struggle to understand — tomorrow, in calmer waters and different moods. No matter what, she always found hope in the day to come.
Today, she felt defeated. It had been a tough day — tough like many others, spent listening to the immense strain of his breath. She felt defeated as she looked inside, on another doorstep she was used to crossing. There was no sound coming from his bed, no note of agony.
She had put off the questions for over thirty years, and now there was no tomorrow to abandon them to.