Oh, this newest chamber. What brilliance.
It's a right masterpiece, if he's honest. Bottomless pits, excursion funnels, buttons, lasers, aerial faith plates—he's thought of everything. If this test doesn't kill her first, its completion will surely make the euphoria come back. It has to with a test this difficult. He's put all his genius and even bits of Her own pre-existing designs into this deviously profound puzzle; this is a true Frankenstein monstrosity of a test with all the lovely threats of death and danger lurking in its construction. Really, there is no feasible reason why the euphoria shouldn't return. It just has to, what with all the sciencey stuff involved. He's confident it will.
But if it doesn't…
Well.
He would rather not think about that.
The lift plunges down, down, down with her in tow. Wheatley diverts some lingering rubbish into other avenues as it rockets through its tube. When it comes to an abrupt stop at its designated floor, he can get a proper glimpse of her through the ever present cameras: she steps out beyond the sliding door, stoic, strong, muscled, lean. Her demeanour is as cool and determined as it always is (truthfully, she is never anything less), and that shapes her movements with the same sort of perfunctory swiftness he has witnessed before, the sort he comes to expect.
Wasting no time, she ascends the stairs from the lift corridor and enters the chamber proper where the newest creation of Wheatley Laboratories lies before her, ready and waiting for her perusal. This area brings her one step closer to the heart, the centre, the swirling nucleus of it all—closer to the end of the line.
Closer to him.
"Ah, hello," he says, projecting his voice into the chamber. "Nice ride, was it? Travelled smoothly? Good. Yes, good. Right. Well, glad to see you've decided to accept the truce. You haven't said much of anything since I mentioned it, so I'm just going to take your silence as a yes. I mean, you'd probably let me know if it was otherwise. Probably."
Wheatley slumps back into his black leather upholstered chair and laces his fingers together, watching her on the monitors. The sharp inhale of pleasure at the way her posture straightens at his voice is entirely involuntary, but he does his best to tamp it down.
"It's a—a brilliant decision, really," he says. "You won't regret it. Not that you had much choice in the matter with me funnelling you in here as expertly as I did. Oh, but just to assure you, all that killing nonsense? Water under the bridge. All forgotten. No bad blood here. Good old friends, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah, of course we are. Right. Right, now, if you'll have a look at this new test here, I'm pretty sure you'll find it up to your expectations. And mine. Mostly mine, actually, but you're going to solve it, so it'll be great. Go on. Have a look!"
Her eyes dart toward the rest of the chamber for the smallest of moments, but she makes no move to comply.
"Well, go on. What are you waiting for?" Wheatley nods his encouragement at the monitors. "Oh, don't be shy. It won't bite. Well, it might sting a bit if you touch those lasers over there, but you're a clever girl, yeah? So don't touch those."
Or do. He bites at his lower lip, his tongue tracing the inner edge. Yes, or do.
After another moment of studying the camera, she glances about and begins to cautiously move across the floor panels with purposeful steps. A chasm stretches out into nothingness before her, yawning wide. The soft blue glow of two excursion funnels cross-flowing along the ceiling scintillates off the walls. Wheatley wrings his hands as she tracks down the positions of the frankenturret cube dispensers and begins her pre-test protocols of figuring out what everything does and where each device leads.
And, as per his advice, she takes care to avoid the burning kiss of the lasers by the funnels.
Seconds tick past, and although it's faint, he can hear the rigid scrape of Her voice. She talks to her as they step over a faith plate's panel and launch clear across the room. He can hear Her as she pops a portal into the face of the wall and sails straight through, almost clipping the red edge of a laser, landing in the gravity-defying safety of a lazy blue current. He can hear the whispering, the plotting, the scheming, and a hot lance of anger floods every active process.
Truthfully, he doesn't know why. He should have expected this. Of course they're going to talk of revenge. He tried to kill them both.
If you hadn't done it to begin with and just let her go to the surface—
Shut up, shut up, shut up. No one asked you. Just be quiet.
He's going to have to do something about Her, he thinks, and soon. Especially if he wants this to work. Can't have Her influencing his only human test subject against him, now, can he? No, that won't do. And it's obvious She's already trying persuade her not to help, which is simply unacceptable. Having her stop testing is not an option. It's just not.
The feeling, the Itch, crushes another debilitating wave down his back. He clenches his jaws as it drags and drags and drags, plastering itself through every little artificial nerve.
God. If he can't get another dose of this euphoria, he doesn't know what he's going to do. The breaking point is fast approaching. He can barely stand it as it is.
Yes. Yes, he's got to separate them somehow. Keep them apart. Keep them from pulling another stunt like popping off into the back areas of the facility where he can't reach. That can't happen again. He hasn't got the resources to deal with that sort of thing right now. His processors are already straining to maintain constant regulation of the facility in addition to overseeing manufacturing and countless other menial tasks; he can't add any more to that workload.
Separating them means he has to interfere personally, though, and that's… well. Interesting. Plausible, definitely. A bit risky. He'll have to dwell on that. Preferably when it doesn't feel like his insides are overheating.
Wheatley continues to watch as she performs her usual tricks. The Itch persists in its leisurely crawl along underneath his skin, slinking over synthetic sinew and burrowing below alloyed bone. He swallows, staring at the wall of monitors with marked interest. Each hand clenches into a blanched fist. The cables that feed from Her chassis have fastened into their respective ports, tailing tail in pairs from the back of his skull down to the end of his spine, and a nearly endless amount of data flows from each one: diagnostics, maintenance, jobs, tests, fuel, want.
It isn't long before Wheatley finds himself shaking with incomprehensible need. It reduces him to a quaking, curled form in the body of his chair, teeth sinking into the lower flesh of his lip. And it's pathetic, really, that he has no choice but to suffer this. He wishes he could find another way to sate it because it's—
Well, it's awful, isn't it? Truly awful. Like a virus. It injects itself into every thought, burying and burying through countless lines of code until it can replicate, copy itself, multiply, and then it's consuming and devouring and hollowing him completely from the inside out with all its endless instances until all that's left is It, that hot and hammering need, the repetition of more more more MORE.
"Hurry up," breathes Wheatley, rerouting the sound of his command into her chamber. His voice is husky and jagged, and he clears his throat to flush the vocal units inside his chest. "Go on. Finish the bloody thing. I know you can do it. Just a bit more. You're not far off. Just a bit more for me. You're so close." One trembling hand runs down his chest, smoothing the thin material of his white-blue bodysuit. Everything seems to pulse. "Please."
The look she gives the camera nearly makes him writhe. Her eyes are confident and composed, drops of cool slate, her body the epitome of human health and physique. Wisps of dark hair stick to her temples with sweat, and the way she holds her back rigid and her head high makes him grind his teeth.
Breathing deeply, Wheatley adjusts his posture and tries to sit straight. He refuses to succumb to this whilst under her sharp scrutiny.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" he asks, settling into a glare. "Go on. Solve it. Don't let me keep you. Was just offering some friendly encouragement to help speed the process along. If you don't want encouragement, that's fine. Completely understandable. But it would be great if you could just, you know, solve that test right there. Because all you really have to do is—no, no, not falling for that trick again. Not going to get that bloody awful shock a third time."
He shakes his head, doing his best to ignore the Itch as it pools in a heavy syrup down below his belly. It is so much more difficult than before.
"Right," he says. "Right, no more talking. Solve it. I know you're plenty capable. So do it. Now."
Several more minutes pass as she floats and jumps about the room. Dodging lasers and rearranging portals, she sends the frankenturret cubes in soft blue currents toward their proper places on the switches by the exit door. Wheatley soon leans at the edge of his seat, hunched close to the monitors, watching intently as the last cube is carried slowly toward the last red-coloured button. His palms feel oddly damp and the material of his suit is bunching around where his fingers dig into the meat of his thighs.
It's so close. Just a few more seconds. Almost. Almost—
And then his throat tightens, and he can feel all of his insides twist. For the briefest of moments, not even an entire second, pleasure whips in a lance straight through his body. His jaw slackens and he slumps forward with a shuddering sigh, his head hanging between his knees as his fingers draw up the thin lengths of his calves. The shock of thrill is so brief, so small, that he's soon left gasping, sucking in short breaths between his teeth, wanting and desiring and needing but not at all satisfied.
Wheatley then bolts upright in his chair. He tenses as the cables press against the column of his spine. He wants more, more, but he's not getting it; it's just these tiny little shocks, so stupid and insignificant and just not enough, and this feeling is driving him absolutely insane as it scrapes at the underside of his skin and at the casing of his skull and it's seated so deep that it's becoming a part of him, melding and entwining and eating and the noise in his head is swelling, swelling, static and claws and—
"It's all right," he murmurs to himself, running his hands through his tousled mop of brown hair. Pain whispers into his receptors as he clutches each fistful at the roots. "It's all right. It's fine. Time for another plan. Got to get rid of this. Need to get them apart. Can't have them plotting. Need her. Need her."
He draws his legs up into the chair, wincing at the heat knotting between them, and he curls into a foetal position, pivoting all his processors' work into formulating his next course of action. He can feel the facility groan, the plates and the pipes and the walls and the ceiling shifting, straining.
It's not supposed to do that. Please, something isn't—
No. No, he's the one in control here. Understand? Wheatley is in control. Wheatley is. Not Her, not her, not you, and no one is going to tell him what to do. Everything is perfect. It is. The facility is fine. Much improved, to be honest. No wonder They never wanted to let him in charge of the place. He's doing brilliantly. Just imagine what it could have been like if he'd been the boss from the very start!
"Yeah," he says, breathless. "Yeah, I'm the one in charge, aren't I? I'm the boss. Not you. Not her. Not the bloody potato. It's all me. I'm the great godface who can do anything He wants. I'm the one with all the power."
Wheatley peers up at the monitor wall just as the exit door closes. He can snatch an orange-white smeared glimpse of her headed toward the lift as the door halves slam shut. His eyes then flick to the other monitors, searching for her amongst the tubes and the stagnant, empty test chambers.
"Well, most of the power," he amends. "But it's not like that can't be easily fixed."
His hand strays down the front of his bodysuit.
"Lady, I think it's high time you paid your boss a visit."