Reason why I'm uploading these so quickly - I've written some of it so far.
Chapter 3: Aperture Science
He was in a dark room, with different coloured lights staring at him, blinking away, some sadly, most happily, or some had an absense of the blinking altogether.
His eye adjusted, searching and scanning his enviroment, he appeared to be seated on a bench. He wanted to walk, leave... See sunshine again...
He flexed a leg experimentally, to find nothing had occured, He blinked twice, before trying again. Still nothing.
He ran over his control over everything, what he could control freely. It was as if someone had re-arranged his mental control, and then removed it.
He shuddered, and heard a clank. He then noticed, finally, that on the bench in front, it seemed to be illuminated with a dim, blue glow. He looked around, still scanning his surroundings, and noticed the light followed where ever he looked.
Finally, some overhead lights came on, and lit the area. He could finally see where the lights were coming from. They were coming from metal spheres, with a round, black screen in the centre. They were all lined up on shelves, packed in tightly. They each appeared to have an optic of some kind on the screen, which was either relaxed, or darting around.
He looked around, and noticed there were many spheres next to him. They were more or less copying the rest of the spheres. He looked down at himself, and froze at the sight.
He was one of the many spheres.
He stayed silent in shock, staring down at himself, and checking everything. He began to shake violently, as a chatter uprose from the spheres.
He couldn't tell what they were saying, but they all appeared to be ranting about something.
Space-ohwhat'sthat-justanotherdayontheassemblyline~hiwhatsyourname-hehehehdoyouwanttohearajoke
He looked around at the mindless creatures, and thought to himself,
"I'm one of them..."
He started shaking more violently, but stayed silent, knowing his cries would be lost among the mad, mindless, yet dead uproar.
A robotic claw came down from the ceiling, and plucked a sphere from the shelf. The claw then reached into a hole in it's back, and pulled out an extension, before placing the extension on a rail hanging from the roof. The sphere would then trundle off somewhere.
One by one, they all went under the same process. He was one of the last.
On his rail, he followed the path that many of his new kind had taken, all ranting mindlessly. He wondered how many had fallen off the rail and smashed already.
On the rail, he left the room through a hole in the wall, into a larger room. The rail seemed to split into multiple paths, although most had been broken. He looked down, and the white, almost polystyrene floor seemed to be lazily carpeted with the spheres, still spazzing about and ranting. If he could cringe, he would.
He went back, nearly bumping into another mad sphere, and dashed off down one of the rails, going as fast as he could to escape the asylum. This track lead through a hole in the wall, and lead him into a corridor, it was pitch black except for his blue optic lighting the way. Now feeling somewhat safer, he began to creep through the corridor, glancing at the walls occasionally thinking he saw something move. It would usually be a spider of some description.
After a short time of travelling down the corridor in silence, the mad rambling of the other spheres disappeared from his hearing. He whispered to himself, not wanting to remind himself of the madness,
"What happened?"
He had seen a mirror of himself in the other spheres, except his small optic was blue. He wanted to cry, but he couldn't. Instead, a crying noise came out of a speaker somewhere in this body. Over his crying, he heard a sound, not like the dripping sound of water, or the chirp of a bug, but the sound of someone coming closer on the rail.
He flinched, before deciding they couldn't do anything, and waited. This sphere wasn't rambling, they were silent.
Finally, a turquoise glow caught his eye, shining on the ground, next to the blue light he was giving out.
He looked up, and noticed a sphere. It's optic was light blue lines pointing towards a black optic centre, and outside of that, a larger, and deeper colour ring with dark blue triangles on it.
"Are you sentient?" it asked with a feminine voice.
He tilted his head in confusion, he was sure he once knew what it meant, but no longer.
"Yes? Well, uh, I have feelings... And I'm feeling quite down about this, but someone is here who isn't insane, so that's..."
"Sentience?" the other sphere replied.
"...Sentience, yes... I guess?" he said.
The sphere gave out a simulated sigh, before whispering,
"Yeeeesss..."
He then asked it,
"You alright?"
The sphere looked up at him, and then said,
"My name is August. I'm one of the only spheres in this facility that survived the transfer with her memories, and sentience intact. Your name?"
He looked at August, desprately trying to remember his name, but it seemed to have buried itself deep in his memory.
"I don't remember, miss. Apologies." he said.
August looked sad, before replying,
"It's fine. Most of us didn't survive the transfer to... this... You're lucky to even be sentient and alive at all."
"There is, one thing I remember..." he offered.
August cheered up slightly, and with an excited tone, she asked,
"What do you remember? Tell me everything!" August squealed.
He brought his memories up to the surface without any trouble, and told her.
"I was 14 months old when they shipped me to a... facility... and I stayed there for a bit, and then... They killed me, I think? And then I spent 40 years in a room... and that was boring... And here I am now!"
August smiled, and said,
"That's nice, but what did you look like?"
He immediately remembered his appearance in the room.
"I was blonde? Oooh! I'm pretty sure my eyes were blue too."
August laughed, and then said,
"Short, I assume?"
"Short? Well..."
August stalled, and hummed.
"OH! Your name was Wheatley! That's it!" She chirped quickly.
"Wheatley?" Wheatley whispered; before squealing in excitement and swinging around on the rail as best as he could. August laughed, and smiled.
"I guess you might want to explore the place..." August said.
Wheatley stopped swinging abruptedly, and froze, remembering his desire to explore the place further.
"I guess, I'll go then." He said.
"You'll have to go the opposite way and head back to the intersection. Stupid one way rails."
The two rushed to the intersection, and Wheatley let August past, and she continued to follow a rail heading in the opposite direction.
The facilities insanity seemed to have died down completely, with the only sound being the occasional insect chirp, or something falling into a puddle.
Wheatley continued along the path, faster this time, not stopping to check his surroundings, but his eye focused on the rail above, making sure he had enough time to stop if it suddenly came to an end.
Wheatley, after progressing through the corridor for quite a bit, noticed it split off into a small room. He entered the room, and found that the rail went in a circle. It hung over a deep puddle, with moss growing at the sides. To his surprise, there was a core hanging there over the puddle, umoving.
Wheatley had assumed that all of the other cores had made some stupid mistake and died, but apparently this one had shut itself down.
Wheatley moved towards it slowly, and gave it a quick knock with his handle. The sphere immediately woke violently, and it threw it's handles everywhere, trying to defend itself from the "attacker".
Wheatley zipped back, and coiled away from the sphere of supposed insanity before him. It had three yellow rings as an optic, which rotated slowly, and grew and shifted with his thoughts.
The sphere opposite him stopped flailing, and peered at him, his expression. Every twitch. Wheatley gave out a hoarse, quiet squeaky sentence,
"You... You're making me feel rather... uncomfortable there..."
The sphere growled.
"My name is Ben... What is my name?"
"Uh. Ben... You just said it was, mate."
Ben's expression softened, and lifted a metal plate from underneath his optic to cover the bottom half of the screen, which created what Wheatley interpreted as a smile.
"You're sentient." Ben chirped out, almost sounding as if he was restraining a great excitement that would burst out of him any second.
"How'd you know that? I mean..."
"You- You have memory! Cores that aren't have no memory. They don't think. They don't feel anything. All they do is obsess. Obsess over the singular thing that has been programmed into their tiny, stupid hard drive."
Wheatley readied another clip to play through his speaker, when Ben continued to talk.
"We're all part of an experiment... I don't know what, but they killed us all and turned us into... these."
Ben's brief explanation brought a thought to what remained of Wheatley's mind, taken directly from his human skull and shoved crudely into the sphere.
"August! Have you met her?"
"August? Oh, her. When I found her, she was utterly unconsolable, and ranting on about ice or something. I had to bring her out of her programmed shell... She told me about the experiment though."
Wheatley and Ben continued to talk for a while, neither of them with anywhere to go except wander aimlessly around the facility, reassuring themselves and talking to themselves.
Eventually, the dark of the facility faded to an even deeper darkness, lit dimly by the two optics, casting juddering multicoloured shadows which did not fit the atmosphere at all, talking in mechacholy tones about their state.