Chapter Four

Surprising GLaDOS

After the others were safely hidden, I had some more time to contemplate. This was all so utterly bonkers I was surprised I hadn't pulled a Jovert already and fallen singing off my management rail into the depths of the facility. Since I wanted to avoid this, I tried to make sense of all the information that had just been stuffed into my head.

Number one: my sister and I had been zapped into my favorite videogame. She was Chell and I was Wheatley.

Number two: the only way to get out was to play the game it was supposed to be played, which involved betraying, testing, and eventually trying to kill said sister in above, hereafter referred to as 'Lauren'.

Number three: Kay was pretty.

Number four: I would be hooked up to a system that would do its best to corrupt my mind and change me into a diabolical maniac whose only goal is to make himself feel good.

Sigh. Where had my life gone so wrong?

The sound of a door hissing open delayed my musings and I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of Lauren. The presence of GLaDOS had withdrawn, and for a moment I wondered if it was really Lauren down there.

And then I heard the sound of a launching Aerial Faith Plate.

Lauren shot up into the air, unfortunately looking the wrong way. "Lauren!" I called and she swiveled in midair, trying to see where my voice was coming from. "It's me! I'm okay!"

She fell again, only catching a glimpse of my position as she plummeted. She looked startled but hopeful. I waited for her to rise again.

The presence of GLaDOS arrived, almost overpowering me, and so close that I shivered. "Well, I'm back," she said smoothly. "The Aerial Faith Plate in here is sending a distress signal. You broke it, Didn't you?"

I clenched my teeth. The hatred in GLaDOS' voice was apparent, and my heart ached to think what she had been saying to my sister. Sure, it was all fun and games when it was in a videogame, but as soon as it was actually you she was talking about, well then, things became a lot more personal.

"There. Try it now."

Again that launching sound. Lauren's head appeared and I spoke as fast as I could, "I found some others who can help us. We're going to get you out of—"

Too late. Her ponytail floated in the sudden reversal in direction and she dropped again.

"Hmm. This plate must not be calibrated for somebody of your… generous…ness…" GLaDOS drawled. "I'll add a few zeroes to the maximum weight. You look great, by the way. Very healthy. Try it now."

"Just keep going," I encouraged as Lauren appeared once again. "Keep testing. We'll get you out."

"You seem to have defeated its load bearing capacity," said GLaDOS as Lauren landed below. "Well done. I'll just lower the ceiling."

My peek-slot was closed and the darkness became complete. I sighed and the sound echoed off the inside of the metal.

"Well, that's done," said Dan as if he was checking an item off a list. Kay joggled his elbow with a frown as she passed him.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm fine," I said, squaring my shoulders and turning to her with what I deemed to be a determined expression. "What do I do now?"

"What is your plan?" she prompted.

I rolled my eyes upward in thought. "Take out the turret production line," I said, "take out the neurotoxin, and then we'll be ready for the c—"

Nope. Wouldn't let me speak.

"—Running the whole machine," I spouted after flailing for a minute.

Kay's smile broadened and her eyebrows lifted incredulously. "You've seen 'Portal 2 the Unauthorized Musical'?" she asked.

"You have, too?"

"Only about a million times!"

"Me too!"

"Would one of you weirdos please explain what you're blabbering about?" demanded Dan.

"Portal 2 the Unauthorized Musical is a play put on by the Geekenders," explained Kay, swiveling toward him. She looked very pleased to hear that I knew about the musical. She probably didn't have enough Portal geeks in her life. "They take songs from other musicals or movies, like 'Friends on the Other Side' from Princess and the Frog and they change it to fit into Portal: 'Running the Whole Machine'. You can find it on Youtube, if you want."

"Yeah, I'm never, ever watching that," said Rick, shaking his head. "Sounds dumb."

"It is a little cheesy," Kay admitted, "but it's awesome! Ooh, Wheats!" She turned back to me. "What's your favorite version?"

"There are two versions?" groaned Rick.

"Yup," I answered. "One made in 2015, the other in 2017. And the one in 2017 is by far the best."

"Aw… but what about the 2015 Wheatley?" asked Kay, making a pouty face.

"Granted, he is good, but…"

"Oh, please," Dan interrupted loudly, "just get on with the plan!"

"Alright, alright!" Kay glared at him and turned serious again. It was too bad. I liked seeing her smile. "So, take out the turrets, destroy the neurotoxin. Sounds good, but first you need to get your sister out. How are you going to do that?"

"Well, I'll just hack the panels in the right place, and—"

"How?" Kay interrupted.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"How are you going to get the panels hacked?"

"Um…" I thought it through. It was easy enough to hack the secret panel back there in The Courtesy Call, but then the numbers had popped into my head. I already knew the password, somehow.

"If you don't have the proper code, you can't get in," Kay reminded me.

"Alright, so how do I get the proper code?" I asked.

"The nanobots have all the access codes to all chambers," said Dan. "They're sent in for maintenance."

"I'll get myself registered as a nanobot!" I exclaimed, enthusiastic about this plan. "Let's go right now!"

"Hold on, cowboy." Rick grabbed my arm before I could rush off. "It's not time yet."

"What do you mean?"

"Wheatley," said Dan gently, "you don't look anything like a nanobot."

"Wheatley got hired in the game," I argued.

"But then he probably got himself fired when they realized that he wasn't one of them," he explained. "You need to get hired and stay hired for as long as it takes to get the codes. The longer you wait, the greater chance there will be."

"Plus," added Rick, "there's one more peek opportunity up ahead a bit. I mean, you don't have to – it won't glitch out the game too much if you miss it – but…"

I didn't want to miss an opportunity to see my sister again. "Okay," I said. "Let's go there, first."

"I'll lead," offered Rick. "But just so I don't have to listen to you Portal nerds."

"Hater," I called after him. He didn't respond.

We watched Lauren discreetly as she made her way through the test chambers. She did very well, overall. I knew she would be great at puzzle-solving games! I could have solved them faster, of course, because I had played before, but for a first time player she did admirably.

When we got to the next 'peek' area, the others hid and I waited for GLaDOS to arrive. She did, but all her focus was concentrated on Lauren. She didn't notice me lobbing bird eggs from a nearby nest into the door mechanism. GLaDOS went away to fix it and I tapped on the glass separating me from my sister.

"Hey, Lauren, up here," I called. A smile as bright as daylight flashed across her face as I waved down at her. She waved her portal gun back. She was still smiling. That was a very good sign.

"I found some bird eggs up here and dropped them into the door mechanism," I told her. "Shut it right down. Now listen, I—What the!?"

The bird, bent on revenge, made its return and divebombed my face. I was expecting it, but the sudden attack was still startling. It circled my head like a mini vulture, whacking me with its wings, raking at me with its claws. Its beak was sharp, and it used it to its advantage.

I didn't exactly do the thing that Wheatley did in the game, which was scream, "Bird! Bird! Bird!" but I do admit that I flailed a lot and yelled incoherently. As I ducked to the side, the bird abruptly gave up the fight and went to find another core to terrorize.

I picked feathers out of my synthetic hair as I went back to Lauren, who was unabashedly giggling. "That's the bird that laid the eggs," I said wisely.

Well, duh, Lauren mouthed at me, still looking amused.

"Alright, back to business. I've found some friends who're going to help me get you out. It might take some time, though. I'm not exactly sure how long – I haven't memorized the game, after all – but I'll see you soon enough, okay?"

I could feel GLaDOS coming closer. She was rather like the eye of Sauron, in a way. Sure, she had her minions, but she could only truly focus on one thing at a time. And her system was like the Ring! Once you had it, it gave you the power, but the more you used it the more it corrupted you…

You became more like Sauron…

Like her…

Oh, wow. I might need to write a Portal/Lord of the Rings Crossover when I got back home!

"She's coming back," I said, drawing back into the shadows. "I'll see you later. You never saw me. Okay? Never saw me."

GLaDOS started to speak just after I got out of range. Rick grabbed my arm. His grip was almost painful. "That was too close," he whispered warningly.

"I know, I know it was close," I hissed back, prying his hand off my arm. "It won't happen again, okay?"

"It better not," he said warningly.

"Calm down, Rick," commanded Kay. "Dan, where to now?"

"Nanobot headquarters," said Dan, jerking his head and turning on his rail. "Follow me."

"I was Jerry the head nanobot my first time through," Dan informed me. "Kay was Chell and Rick was Rattmann."

"Rattmann's in the game?" I asked excitedly, peering around as if I could catch him skulking.

"Occasionally. Probably not this time around, and if it is, he has the sense to stay hidden. Rick broke the game by revealing himself."

"I found him inside one of his dens," said Kay. "He started talking to me, but then GLaDOS found us, and… well… that's not supposed to happen."

"Being Rattmann was the worst," sighed Rick, pushing up his fedora, which – due to the management rail's position – nearly grazed the ceiling. "He has a sort of mental disorder thing, so everything was all tinged and hazy and I couldn't really figure out what I was doing or where I was going or… who I was, really."

"But… I've used the 'noclip' cheat to go through all the maps in the game," I said, thinking it through. "I haven't found Rattmann anywhere. How does that work?"

"Well," Kay rubbed the back of her neck, "we're not specifically in the game, per se. If we were just in Portal 2, just perusing through the maps, things would be… different. We'd have to go through a lot more white areas where the maps never connect. This is more the world of Portal 2. I'm not sure how it works, or how we got to it, exactly, but…"

"The multiverse." Dan stopped rolling along and we all nearly crashed into him like the seven dwarfs. "The multiverse is an infinite collection of universes, each with an infinite number of Apertures." He clutched his head, eyes pressed shut. "Ow," he said weakly.

"What?" I asked. "What was that?"

"Corruption at thirty-one percent," Dan said softly, but then, recovering himself, motioned us forward. "Let's keep going."

"Wait, wait," I bypassed Rick on an adjacent management rail and grabbed Dan by the shoulder. "I want to know what just happened."

Dan tried to shrug me off.

"Let him know, Dan," said Kay. "He deserves to know."

Dan stayed stubbornly silent.

"Fine," snorted Rick. "I'll tell him, then."

I turned on my rail so I was facing them all. Dan's expression was firmly rooted in denial. Kay was looking down, her arms crossed over her chest. Rick was the only one who met my eyes.

"Listen," said Rick. "Remember when we told you that the farther you go into the game, the more like the character you become?"

"Kinda hard to forget."

"Well, with the corrupted cores…" Rick looked from one downturned face to the next and shrugged. "There's a reason."

"We contract corruption halfway through the game," said Dan, snapping from his contemplation.

Rick nodded solemnly. "The farther on we go, the worse it gets. By the end, we are one hundred percent corrupted."

"Which means…?" I prompted, not really wanting to hear the answer.

Rick nodded to Dan, Kay, and himself in turn. "Fact. Space. Adventure," he said. He let out a sigh. "No way around it. We need to be corrupt for the end to take place."

"I was the space core the last time around," said Dan. "I know from experience that the transition isn't pleasant. And I never even got to a hundred percent," he added. "Just forty-five."

"That's horrible," I exclaimed.

Nobody tried to dissuade me. Dan turned back to his trail and we followed him silently for a few minutes.

"So, what I was going to say," he continued, "was that if there is such a thing as a multiverse for Aperture, the cheat code we used must have been able to transport us into the multiverse. Or, specifically, a universe with an Aperture that is designed for us as characters."

"How does that even work?" I wondered.

"Who knows?" Dan shrugged. "Maybe we live in our own multiverse with an infinite number of earths and the universe we live in just happens to have a cheat code that is linked with this universe of Aperture. Stranger things have happened."

"We built the multiverse," murmured Kay from behind me.

"What?" asked Rick.

"Sorry, I was just thinking. Have you seen the number of Portal fanfiction on the internet? It's… enormous. So, what if each fanfiction, be it set in Portal's past, its future, or an alternate universe with very loose skews on the characters… it's all part of Aperture's multiverse, isn't it?"

I put my fist to my mouth in thought. "Each one of those stories is…"

"A different universe!" exclaimed Kay, and although my back was turned I could hear the intensity in her voice, the awed spark in her eyes. "A new timeline for the same story, seen through the eyes of a different author."

"So, the game is Aperture prime," added Dan, becoming excited as well.

"And every new story is a new universe," I finished.

"Just think of it." Kay's voice was reverent. "Every time an author writes fanfiction for Portal, every time they make a story with Chell or Wheatley or any of the characters, every time there is even a slight deviation from the actual story…"

"They add to the multiverse," I whispered.

"You are breaking my mind," laughed Dan, clutching his head.

It was like we had accomplished a breakthrough. The corruption forgotten, we all stared wide-eyed at each other, no doubt remembering our favorite Portal fanfiction stories, linking them together with the land we were in now. Forget the fact that this information was completely irrelevant. Just having a clue as to why we were here was relieving. A major accomplishment in a minor way.

While we were hanging there, lost in thoughts, there suddenly appeared a swarm of small black… things. They were as small as midges, and seemingly came from the walls. I swatted at the swarm, but Rick shouted at me, "Don't hit them! They're the nanobots!"

"These are the nanobots?" I asked, trying to catch one. I got a quick view of a black speck, no discernable features, and then it was gone. They all were.

"We're getting close," said Dan, and he started up again.

"What was it like being Jerry?" I asked, speeding up to stay close.

"I was dealing with the whole 'I'm in Portal 2' thing at the time, so I spent most of the time being confused," related Dan. "But, you know, it was okay. Nanobots are really small and a bit dim, but they can go anywhere they want, pretty much. I did a lot of maintenance, flew around, spied on Chell and Rattmann… yeah. It was cool."

"You really think he'll hire me?" I asked dubiously.

"He's a game character, programmed to hire you at the right time. Of course he will."

The number of nanobot swarms grew progressively longer until we were standing in a circular hive so thick with nanobots I could feel them pinging off my skin. Kay looked incredibly uncomfortable with this and told us that she would wait outside.

"Betcha she's the kind of girl who doesn't like bugs," said Rick.

"Meh, don't blame her," I said, glad of my protective lenses. "This group of nanobots is rather overwhelming!"

"Don't be a baby," said Dan. "Here, go to audio settings and set your left ear default to fifty thousand hertz."

"Why?" I asked.

"Nanobots speak at a different frequency than us," Dan explained impatiently. "The human ear can only hear from twenty to twenty thousand hertz. If we don't change the default settings, we can't hear them."

"Why should I change the left ear?"

"Because if you change both ears, you can't hear me. Now stop talking and change the settings already."

I did as I was told, and suddenly the air was filled with voices, all intelligible, lost in the humming masses.

"Jerry's over there," I could hear Dan say out of my right ear. He pointed into the thickest knot of nanobots. "Let's go." Practically wading through the assembly, he made his way over. I followed him, trying to ignore the pinpricks of nanobots.

"You must be Jerry," Dan said into the nanobot cluster.

"He is," I could hear tiny, soft voices say. "He is, he is, he is."

"That is me," said another voice, separate from the others. "I am the Jerry. What is it you want? I take orders. I take orders and I give orders. She gives me commands and I fulfill them. Fix the facility, bring it back. Yes. That is what I do."

"I have another worker for you," said Dan, grabbing me and bringing me forward. "This is Wheatley, a new nanobot. The Mistress wishes for you to take him under your command."

"New nanobot?" the swarm sang excitedly. "New nanobot? New nanobot?"

"He will work for me," said the voice of Jerry, sounding pleased. "He will work for me well and succeed, or he will work poorly and fail. Yes, new nanobot. Yes, you will work for me. The Lady's will be done."

"Good luck," whispered Dan, and Rick gave me a thumbs-up. They quietly exited the room.

"New nanobot Wheatley," said Jerry's voice, "tune your internal radio to frequency 110.7. You will do maintenance with the other nanobots. Prepare to receive the codes."

And that's how I became a nanobot.

Granted, Jerry must be incredibly dim for assuming that I could be in any stretch of imagination a nanobot, but there's something to be said for leadership. He controlled them all with a steady stream of commands over his built-in radio, which must have been truly miniscule, sending us all out to do what GLaDOS wished.

I didn't really know how to do any type of maintenance apart from minor computer repair work, so I mostly pretended to be busy fiddling around with stuff as the true nanobots did the real work. I turned my left ear back to default settings because their tiny, tinny voices really started to grate after a while.

On the plus side, I got the codes to the rooms! The codes themselves were lines of numbers to input into the different mechanisms of the chambers. There were separate codes for each panel, each light bridge. Each and every apparatus had its own unique code. It was complicated, but I loved it.

Finally I caught a glimpse of Lauren getting into an elevator and followed her down, breaking away from the rest of my 'team'.

"Hey, sis!" I greeted her. "How're you doing?"

She waved her hand in a 'so-so' gesture.

I winced. "Sorry. I managed to get on a nanobot work team. Their brains are really tiny, because they haven't figured out that I'm the size of a planet—"

"Nanobot Wheatley," Jerry's voice came shrilly through my radio. "What are you doing?"

"I'm taking a break," I said, holding up a 'please wait' finger toward Lauren. "I need a break."

I wasn't paying attention and a metal beam clunked me on the knees as I descended. It broke loose under my weight. "Ow!" I yelped, glaring balefully as it spiraled into the distance.

"Nanobot Wheatley is breaking the worksite," Jerry chattered. "Bad, bad job. I should let you be fired."

"What? You can't fire me for that!" I felt outraged. "Maybe you should be the one fired! You're the one who hasn't accommodated for a nanobot of my size! Thanks for the hate crime, Jer! See you in court, mate!"

It was a brilliant Wheatley line. I didn't want to waste it.

I had done my best to slow down the lift carrying my sister, but even so she was still disappearing. I waved aside my radio and called down to her just as her head passed from view, "Hang on for five more chambers, alright? I'll get you out then!"

And she was gone.

I thought I was going to get into trouble with Jerry. Yes, I had annoyed him, and yes, then I had yelled at him. Maybe I even deserved to be fired. But either Jerry was very forgiving or needed a lot of help, because as soon as I switched the radio back on he called, "All nanobots to test chamber twenty. Building and maintenance. Codes distributing. Walls and ceiling. Panels and floor. Toxic water. Cube chute. Hard light bridge and lights. Codes distributing now."

Do you know what it feels like to receive an email in your brain? No? Well, I don't know any other way to describe the feeling. Suffice to say it was not unpleasant, but it tickled a bit.

The 'email' said I was on lights and hard light bridge duty and gave me the codes to activate them. My fans began to whirr in anticipation. This was it. This was where I got Chell – I mean Lauren – out!

A/N: Sorry that these chapters aren't very interesting. The next one's going to be better, I promise. Also, sorry for the huge Portal Musical Add in the middle of the chapter. I just love the unauthorized musical and want everyone else to see it. Watch 'em both! They're great for the whole family (but not for people who haven't played and/or don't know the game). Slight language issue (Cave Johnson, after all) but clean for the most part. Okay, I'm done.

Stay tuned for the next chapter.