"So, tell me about the human you were trying to save." I was sitting at the table talking to Wheatley. Tails was in the back room working on some sort of propulsion system for the personality core. I had nothing better to do at the moment and it was time we actually caught up with eachother's lives.
Dad had given me a short summary of what happened, but I wanted to know more. A command prompt appeared on the computer monitor. "Um, one moment." Wheatley said, before entering the command 'access memory banks'. A whole slew of file names popped up, and he entered another command. 'File search keywords: Chell, Corruption, Potato Battery, Apology'
I watched as some of the files vanished from the list, leaving only the ones with those keywords somewhere in the file tags. Before Wheatley started playing one of the video files I managed to read the file names. 'The Courtesy Call, The Cold Boot, The Comeback, The Escape, The Switch, The Corruption, The Apology'. Those were some odd names.
The first file started to play. It was from Wheatley's point of view. There were lots of rooms all stacked rather haphazardly, and the rail Wheatley was moving across split to lead into all of them. He seemingly chose one at random, muttering to himself along the way. "This one better be alive." He said to himself before approaching the door and knocking himself against it. "Hello? Anyone in there? Hello? Are you gonna open the door?"
He started rambling about needing the person on the other side to open the door, and that it was urgent. He was about to turn away when the door swung open. A human girl was standing there. She was wearing an orange Aperture jumpsuit and had a pair of white boots on with a metal prong from the cuff serving as the heel. Her skin was dark,as was her hair.
She gave Wheatley a confused look before he entered the room, going across his rail. "You look terr-uh, good. You look good actually. I'm absolutely sure you're fine. There's plenty of time for you to recover." He said, moving to the end of the rail. The girl looked confused, but she did everything he said. She held on to the wall of closest when he told her to, she tried to speak when he asked her to, she even went into the chamber to find the portal gun simply because he asked her.
The video paused as the girl fell when the glass below her and the stand where the portal gun used to be shattered. Wheatley closed the file and said, "She was the only human who hadn't become a vegetable when the reserve power ran out. She didn't even know me, and she did everything I asked."
I felt a connection right then and there. I had done the same thing most of my life, doing whatever mom told me to do in the test chamber. I remember the deadly test chambers were what caused my fear of water. Toxic water in the chambers. Now I'm scared of any water, even though I know it's not toxic. Just a subconscious fear I guess. "Like me with mom?" I asked, hoping he saw the connection too.
Wheatley nodded. "Exactly. Except I was nicer than she was to you. We became friends. She never spoke, so I only know her name from the jumpsuit she wore." The next file, labeled 'The Cold Boot' started playing. Once again, it was like looking through Wheatley's eyes. Well, eye.
"Okay, plug me in and I'll turn the lights on." He said. It seemed that he was being held by the portal gun's tractor beam. The girl, now having apparently folded down half her jumpsuit and tied it around her waist to reveal an Aperture tanktop, disengaged the tractor beam and Wheatley fell into the computer.
"Let there be light. That's God. Was quoting God there." He said as the lights kicked in. I smiled. He could be so odd at times. Wheatley skipped ahead in the video to a point where mom's body was rebuilding itself. For a moment I thought I would be sick, seeing her head disconnected like that. Yeah, I know she's just a robot and I've seen broken robots before. I break them all the time. But that? Crazy or not, we had a connection. Even though she went insane, to this day I still call her mom.
"Powerup initiated." said a male voice. Wheatley started freaking out, evident by the camera gaze shifting everywhere very fast. His panicking didn't hurt that assumption either. "Okay, don't panic! I can still stop this! There-there's a password. I just need to hack it."
Seeing my reaction, dad paused the video. "What?" he asked. I looked at him, a look that he knew well. Confusion, interest, a bit of sadness. "When did mom get so broken?" Wheatley sighed. I knew he didn't like talking about GlaDOS but I had to know.
"Six months after you left. She needed a tester, so she searched the stasis chambers and found Chell. They didn't get along. She tried to burn the girl to death in the last chamber. Instead, Chell found an escape route and made her way to the main chamber. They had an all out battle and Chell won." Wheatley explained.
So the human dad had tried to save, killed mom. Then dad brought mom back, but acted like it was an accident. I had mixed feelings about this, but I didn't voice my opinions. "So, how long a gap until she was rebuilt?"
Wheatley was silent for a moment before saying, "Three and a half years? I think that's about right." I was about to ask just how long he had been in space when an explosion came from the back room. The room Tails had been working in. This was common, so I sat there for a moment waiting for him to call out, 'I'm ok!' like he usually does. He didn't. That's when I got worried.
Author's Note:
Yes, I had to shorten the time gap between Portal and Portal 2. In the Portal-verse, it's been about 200 years. But since Sonic left Aperture 5 years ago, and he left just after GlaDOS went insane, and when Portal 1 started she was already insane, that means the events of Portal 1 happened just after he left. Portal 2 just finished, so I had to shorten the gap quite a bit.
The names of Wheatley's files are what I think he would've called the different chapters of Portal 2. No, I didn't give Wheatley a file for chapter 7, The Reunion. This is because he has no idea what happened after Chell fell into the old Aperture, so he wouldn't have a file in his memory banks for it. All he knows is that she fell with PotaDOS (potato battery GlaDOS) and came back up with her a while later.
