Hill Town Hospital. The name had a nice ring to it, Caroline thought. It sounded like something out of a kids' television show that went off the air after one episode. They had moved her here from the Aperture medical ward because, they claimed, the safety and sanitation procedures were not up to date and they couldn't let their own CEO risk compromising her health in that way.
If she was more likely to die there than in this parody of a hospital, then there was something seriously wrong with the laboratory's standards. In fact, she knew there was. There had always been. How many test subjects had died in the last too months? She didn't care to count. She felt sick just thinking about it. She was almost thankful that she would most likely die of leukemia within the course of the year. But then there was the slight possibility that there would be a miracle of modern medical science and she would live to be a useless figurehead another day, or that the monkeys at Aperture would succeed in turning someone's mind into a microchip and the process could be repeated on her, god forbid. In fact, her daughter was working on that right then.
If anyone found out that Chell was her biological daughter, she wasn't sure what she'd do. Because that meant Chell would probably inherit the company from her, like she had from Cave when he died. And though Caroline knew she would go down in the history books as a facilitator of what was possibly the most dubious science laboratory since some alchemist tried to mix human intestines with gunpowder to make gold, she didn't want Chell to meet the same fate.
It's why she had put the girl up for adoption when she was born. But the smart little peeve had found her way back, unfortunately, and now the seventeen year old child was pretending to be twenty-six under a fake name, working as an Aperture executive, just so she could see her mother. Clever little fucker. She had hoped her girl would be complacent and accepting so that she didn't end up living a life that consisted of watching other people waste their lives testing, but that didn't work out.
What exactly was Aperture even testing for anymore? First came the gels, then the military grade weaponry, then the portal technology. And all of them were successful products that needed no further-she hated the word-testing. Yet Aperture kept churning out these hellish rooms, these vast, complex puzzles that were supposed to reveal something, as Caroline had ever so vaguely collected, of technological as well as psychological significance. How she would love to put her late husband in one of those rooms, the hardest, most perilous of them, and watch him struggle with it for hours. And when he emerged, she would read him the results: "You're a terrible person. That's what it says. You're a terrible person. And we weren't even testing for that."
She realized, all too late, that she had said it aloud, and that a passing nurse was giving her strange looks. "That's right," she said, deciding to roll with it. What did she care what people thought now? "You're a terrible person. You should go home and kill yourself." The nurse continued to consider her, baffled. "I bet every patient of yours hates you. I bet they wish you would kill yourself. Because I certainly do." She realized how childish she was being. How childishly cruel, in a way her sweet little self twenty years ago would never even think of. Yet she continued. "All those poor people you wake up at one in the morning to check if they have a heartbeat or whatever. They hate you. All the-"
She was stopped short as the nurse gave a little exclamatory sob. She tried to regain composure, but it was hopeless. Crying, she fled from Caroline's sight, abandoning the cart she was pushing behind. "I didn't mean it," Caroline called. But it was too late.
She remained silent and relatively thoughtless for the next couple of hours. It shocked her just how volatile people could be. Sometimes she wondered if everyone in the hospital besides her should be moved to the mental ward. But then, she thought solemnly, there wouldn't be anyone to wake her up at one in the morning to check if she had a heartbeat. It was really important that someone was there to check. I mean, what would she do if she just forgot to keep it beating?
Luckily, a nurse, one that didn't have tears streaming down her cheeks, walked in before she could drown in her own brooding solitude. "Someone's here to see you," the nurse said in her dull voice.
Caroline gestured nonchalantly. "Let her in." She knew who it was. Sure enough, her daughter came bouncing youthfully in. "Can we have this door closed?" Caroline asked the nurse, not bothering to say hi to Chell first. The nurse, not even fazed by the patient's lack of hospitality towards her guest, complied so that the two could talk freely. "You have to stop seeing me so often. They keep a list of who comes to see who and-"
"Shh," Chell reprimanded softly. She sat down on the side of the bed. "You wouldn't believe who I met today."
Caroline was tired of hearing these stories. Aperture would always pick who they believed to be the scum of society to be there lab rats for the AI transfer. There were so many people who had been turned into corrupted cores: the homeless, the mentally ill, the Taco Bell workers.
"I met Wheatley Collins. John Collins' son. He was a complete idiot."
"Well, I'm glad to hear you're hanging around good company. What was he arrested for, anyway? John was supposedly too embarrassed for his family name to say. It's become somewhat of a town legend, but I'm sure he must've told you, if you were trying to do what I think you were trying to do."
A little smile planted itself on Chell's lips. "Jaywalking," she said. "And yes, I was trying to see if he wanted to fill the next core. Kind of depressing, that someone so entertainingly dumb should be turned into . . . well, you know."
Caroline was dumbfounded. "He's been sentenced to death for jaywalking?"
"Hey, John said he'd be tough on crime."
