Mike Morasky, 2 1/2 year employee of Pluot Electronic Technologies Incorporated, spent that stormy night the same way he did every night: watching a screen.
It hadn't always been like this. Back when he'd first joined up, armed with a Master's Degree in computer science from Freeman University, he'd been honored to work at Pluot. But three months in, he'd been transferred to the boss' pet project: Aperture.
Johnathan Coulton was the sole reason for Pluot's success, he had bought the struggling startup and singlehandedly transformed it into the leading tech giant it was today in just 14 years! The world knew him as a visionary and a genius businessman, but inside his company he was most famous for his obsession with the defunct facility.
Mike didn't understand it. No one in living memory knew where Aperture was, and after decades of neglect, the place was surely scrap metal, yet here he was, still watching this screen.
"Hey Mike, my shift yet?"
"Yeah." Mike said as his coworker, Geoff Keighley walked in. "You know, sometimes I'm just tempted to smash this stupid thing and be done with it."
"I know, right? But then we'd lose "years of research.""
Mike chuckled at the memory. Back when he and Geoff were first assigned to this project, their manager, Erik Wolepaw, had informed them that this dingy radar was attached to the most powerful satellite array in Michigan, and calibrated to some arbitrary parameters he'd pulled from a massive antenna hijack 14 years ago. Everyone else knew it was just some kid trying to cause a panic, but Erik insisted it matched up with some classified document he'd dug up, and that it just had to have something to do with Aperture.
Mike sighed in annoyance. He could have stayed in school and gotten his PHD, but instead he was wasting his life watching this screen."Hey Mike?"
Mike turned around at the door, he figured Geoff was going to ask for a quarter, or a not-really-5-minute bathroom break. After 2.5 years of nothing, he was totally unprepared for what Geoff said next:
"We got a blip."
Five minutes later, everyone involved with the project was buzzing around like antlions, trying to trace the signal.
"Got it!" said Kim Swift, a recent transfer from Faucet Tech. "Whatever it is, it's contacted a secure server somewhere upstate. How are any of their computers still working?"
"I have no idea," said Chet Falizek "but I can't seem to hack it. The system is learning from my every attack!"
"Oh," said Erik, just walking into the room, "its Her."
She was Aperture's biggest project, and also it's last. The day She was activated was the day all of Aperture's employees disappeared, and the day the facility was locked down forever. Of course, no machine could be truly sentient, but this thing was supposedly pretty darn close. One thing was for certain: if GLaDOS was still active, there was no way they could ever hack Her.
"Its no use," Erik told the boss over his pager. "Someone will have to go there and shut Her down from the inside."
"It's not a her," Johnathan replied sharply, "it's a computer."
"A very powerful supercomputer in complete control of the entire Enrichment Center." Erik shot back, "We can't hack her from the outside."
"What if they don't make it?" The boss asked, "If the world finds out we got our employees killed, we'll be ruined!"
"Uh..."
"Wait, where did the homing signal come from?"
"Oh! Uh, a little town called Eaden."
