-2-
track two
Science is Fun Portal 2 OST
I will say, though, that since you went to all the trouble of
waking me up, you must really, really love to test.
I love it too.
At last.
The lights came back on, with a few brief moments of headache inducing strobing in the darkness, as if they were reluctant to wake up again after the sabbatical they'd just taken. There had been scarcely any movement in their absence on which to report, the chamber just as they'd left it, the red switch, the single cube, the three buttons all so far impossibly apart but the door wide open none the less. She was still there too, despite this last fact, in the high alcove sitting wedged against the pristinely white wall, disappointingly listless with all three of her eyes shut and her processors in hibernation mode.
It wasn't the dark that had caused her temporary shutdown, that didn't really affect her. Her third eye offered up a decent enough light providing you didn't mind things all a bit blue, and she had the handy ability of generating a kind of blue-print behind her optics, mostly stats and charts and handy little diagrams for efficient testing. But it made a decent makeshift night vision as well, if it came to it.
No, the dark wasn't the problem. Nor the silence, really; the Voice had spoken in irritation for a while before it had disappeared.
"What are you doing? Continue testing." But she hadn't, she'd simply sat, her brown eyes flicking without focus, skipping hurriedly over patchy, static filled visions of something somewhere and somewhen else.
"I thought I built you better than this, but, I suppose that's why you are precisely the way you are. Not quite programmed. Always a way to surprise. And this is a surprise, you see, I didn't expect to be so disappointed."
Nothing. Silent grip on the white, hand held device and not a single movement beyond the eyes and the occasional distressed roll of the large blue optic.
"I'm not going to just open the door for you because you're having a sulk, you know. Oh, all right, there you go. Look at that, door opened just for you. You didn't even have to work very hard, did you? Continue testing."
Nothing.
"Continue testing."
Still nothing.
Somewhere, far away from the lonely chamber, a dull frustrated screech that may or may not have been coming across the comms system at all. What had followed were an hours' worth of thinly veiled insults, shallow bargains, something almost a plea, a final angry snap, and then nothing.
- a final snap -
- the ringing of gunfire, still in her head like the bullets themselves were rattling around in there still -
- a high little voice, lost sounding, are you still there? -
- and another voice, different, louder, not so synthesized but far less intelligible. an awful wailing, like a something broken, and-
- help me -
"Oh, you're still here."
With the returning lights, it seemed the Voice had come back as well.
"You even had the choice of leaving, straight out that door I so generously opened for you. You didn't even look to see where it lead. It might have taken you to a wonderful new testing track, full of wonderful new ideas. It might have even lead to the tree."
This seemed to illicit the tiniest of responses, and it was enough. It meant that she was still capable of listening, of moving, of reacting, and most importantly, of testing.
"But you didn't look, so clearly you're just not that interested. Don't worry, I wouldn't be interested either, who needs a tree when you can have Science?"
The door ground shut with a heavy, final sounding thunk.
The figure, female of course but caught somewhere between the insecurities of humanity and the calculated programming of mechanics, slumped a little again against the wall. Whatever tiny spark of curiosity that had caused the back to straighten and the eyes to focus however briefly on the open doorway had left her body and all the muscles and joints and artificial synapses relaxed again.
"It may have been a mistake to bring you to this chamber. A slight oversight, on my behalf. Those don't happen often, I've got it all under control again now. But it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I wanted to see if you might be clever enough to figure it out on your own, and solve an unsolvable puzzle. At least we answered that question. And, I wanted to see what you'd do. That's what testing's all about, after all."
Down below, there was a whirring noise coming from one of the panelled walls. The hydraulic arms behind the scenes were moving, grinding together with a thin whine of protest at all this movement after all this time. Inevitably, they were moving apart. A gash in the wall opened up, several panel-lengths tall and almost half a panel wide.
All in all it was enough to bring her crawling - an awkward forwards movement on her hands and knees, something she wasn't too sure she'd done a lot of before - to the ledge of the alcove for a better view. Through the crack she could see something totally foreign, but not entirely unfamiliar. The black, smooth arms that moved and shifted the panels took up most of the space, their blinking lights flicking between a pleasant third-eye blue to a hassled red - red - and beyond them something in the darkness. An undeniable sense of space, lost out there, out of sight and out of mind, rusting away beyond the eternal essence of the testing chambers. Dusty. Wild.
A little bit free.
"I see you are interested now. That's, well, interesting."
Her knuckles were going an odd white shade where they were gripping against the edge, something long forgotten stirring down deep inside her, below and behind her blue eye and its pin-prick of shocked optical-zoom focus on the gash in the wall.
"Here's something else interesting. I have a surprise for you. A real surprise. Just for you. You see, this has been a fun test, a little foray into speculative science, but I'd like to get back to real testing now."
There was definitely something else. A noise, through the hole in the wall, hollow and clanking and uneven, un-moderated. It reminded her vaguely of the sound of the weighted companion cube missing its mark when she'd drop it from a height, and it bounced harmlessly, but frustratingly uselessly, skirting the edge of the waiting portal and clattering around inside the pit. She'd have to go and get it, again. This was similar to that, but a little different.
Whatever was making it didn't sound like she was going to have to go and get it.