That's What I'm Counting On – 10
I'm on another marathon typing spree. I'll be working on the next chapter immediately after submitting this one.
Oh, and be forewarned, there are some gruesome details in this chapter. Should I up the rating? I only have a gruesome depiction, no violent actions. Screw it, I'm upping the rating. Better safe than sorry.
I've never seen the testing chambers so dark before. I can barely even see my hand only inches in front of my face it's so dark. The white panels did nothing to reflect any light around the room either, which made my situation…impossible. Unless I crawled around and felt for potential pit traps or levers or elevators, I was blind. And the worst part of it all? The portal gun wasn't working, its lights flickered and its body sparked so terribly I couldn't hold it without risking burning myself. There was nothing I could do, so I allowed myself to fall on my side on the floor to at least let myself rest.
"Bloody hell, looks like the portal gun will have to be repaired." A voice rang out around me. Was that Wheatley? "Can't have you lost in the dark forever, eh Chell? Don't worry, I'm on my way. I'll find you!" Yes! It was Wheatley! I haven't yet been so happy to hear my round robotic friend.
"Wh-Wheatley?" I asked hopefully as a soft whirr sounded behind me and a soft grind of metal on metal signified he was on his rail. Soon a soft white glow came around the corner and blinded me for a moment; he had his flashlight on at full blast. "Wheatley, pl-please turn your light aw-way. It's t-too b…bright." When the light continued shining in my face I spoke again and shielded my eyes from the light. "Wheatl-ley? T-turn the light-"
"It seems you aren't as clever as you think you are, luv." I heard him say as the room lit up around me. I was in his chamber again. He hovered menacingly from the ceiling, twice the size I had seen him before and his optic glowed an icy blue while the panels and wires on his "body" glowed an ominous, evil red. "You're just a tiny, insignificant testsubject in the end, aren't you? No friends, no family…heck, your real parents even abandoned you. You're pathetic." This wasn't the same Wheatley I'd become friends with, not even the same Wheatley that plunged me into the depths of Aperture…and it terrified me. I backed away quickly, but stopped as something bumped into me from behind.
"You've doomed us all…not even an AI can survive in this place for long. What made you think you could?" A voice said behind me, it was GLaDOS's voice, but when I turned around, I felt sick. Before me lay two pieces of a woman; her body, dressed in an Aperture Science test subject's uniform, was near the far side of the room, sprawled in a painful and twisted position, her body black and blue and, most of all, red. "You are a horrible person, Chell." The dismembered head whispered in a distantly familiar voice; her eyes were accusing and guilty at the same time and her bloodied teeth were revealed as the mouth snarled. Her head was laying on the left side, her neck was shredded with a trail of blood leading from in between the woman's shoulders to her dismembered head. Her mouth and nose oozed lumpy and fluid dark red blood, mixed with mucus and saliva. I didn't recognize the woman at first, but her dark ragged hair and pale silvery eyes told me who she was. My eyes widened and I found myself incapable of breathing, my throat felt constricted and raw and I felt sick. Unbearably sick.
I realized I was staring at my own corpse.
A scream violently ripped its way through the ancient Aperture Laboratories and scared me out of my disturbed slumber. I felt around my neck and started to slow my racing breath and heart rate; I was alive and it was only a nightmare. At some point in my sleep, I had rolled off the couch and landed on the colder linoleum floor and judged that the sore spots on the side of my head and arms were because of the tumble. I remembered my dream and gave a choked sob, my stomach flipping, and wrapped my arms tight around myself as I curled into a fetal position. There was no way that dream was real, but it was the scariest dream I had in a very long time.
"N-not real…" I whispered to myself, "It wasn't r-real…" but it felt so real. And that scream was real too, it continued echoing in the distance and I'd wondered if it was one of those recordings. I choked out another sob and lay on the floor for some time; I knew the scream was my own, but I never wanted to admit that I was that scared. First, though, I'll calm down and try to forget this nightmare.
It was several hours before I'd moved on after my nightmare. I had no appetite and so saved my squished potatoes for when I felt like eating again, currently however, dropping from great heights and sailing through the air had left me uncomfortable. I flipped two switches, one blue and the other orange, and triggered two pump engines to start; I knew one held the repulsion gel, but I wasn't sure of the second one. Maybe Cave had another type of gel developed in Aperture's fossilized structure and if he did, I wonder what it was. When I walked through another door, I paused and studied the massive room around me. High above was a gigantic metal sphere surrounded by metallic supports and…an elevator sticking from a part of the structure, which meant that if I wanted to go up, I had to get to that elevator…somehow. The walls around me looked ruined. Not untouched and old as the last parts of Aperture looked, but ruined as in battered and damaged before growing old. Part of it looked to be structural problems, so that might've been it.
"Greetings friend. I'm Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science – you might know us as a vital participant in the 1968 Senate Hearings on missing astronauts." I silently thanked the recordings for continuing to play; they would help me get my mind on track, but it troubled me when he mentioned "missing astronauts". I vaguely remembered hearing something about missing astronauts, but I was a little girl then and it's been a long time since. "And you've most likely used one of the many products we invented, but that other people have managed to steal from us. Black Mesa can eat my bankrupt–"
"Sir, the testing?" It was Caroline again, but she sounded different. Older and maybe a little more tired; maybe she'd grown a few years older? This part of Aperture must have been built quite some time after the first part, because though only a little had changed in Cave's voice, he sounded a bit more irrational.
"Right." Cave's voice continued as I used portals to get myself to a very high catwalk, "Now, you might be asking yourself, 'Cave, just how difficult are these tests? What was in that phone book of a contract I signed? Am I in danger?'" Yes Cave, do tell. I don't remember ever signing a contract, but if anyone were to ask, I would be able to detail every test thus far and maybe even reveal how they are all solved. "Let me answer those questions with a question: Who wants to make sixty dollars? Cash."
'Sixty?' I thought bitterly, 'I wouldn't do any of this Aperture stuff for less than six thousand. Make that sixty thousand.'
"You can also feel free to relax for up to twenty minutes in the waiting room, which is a damn sight more comfortable than the park benches most of you were sleeping on when we found you." Park benches? Cave was using hobos for his tests? I shook the thought from my head and placed an orange portal on the ground below me and a blue portal on the right side of a pipe on a slanted wall. This would carry me to the control room to my left, at least I think it would, and maybe I could find a switch or button that would get me to that elevator across the way. "So. Welcome to Aperture. You're here because we want the best, and you're it…Nope. Couldn't keep a straight face." Well, that sounded mean. "Anyway, don't smudge up the glass down there. In fact, why don't you just go ahead and not touch anything unless it's test related."
'Somebody had a superiority complex.' I thought as I stepped off the catwalk, fell through the portals and flew over to my target, the control room. Everything in the room seemed quite average, until an unrecorded voice rang out.
"Oh hi." Oh no, "Say, you're good at murder. Could you – ow – murder this bird for me?" It was GLaDOS and my eyes turned towards a glass cubicle to see a large black bird staring at me. I stayed still and the bird returned to pecking at GLaDOS's potato body, inciting an "ow" from the AI every time. I sighed and weighed my options: save GLaDOS and potentially make an ally out of an old enemy, or let her be pecked to death and have to face off with Wheatley without a reasonable AI to take over and somehow make my way out before Aperture blew up. The former option sounded more pleasant, not to mention more likely. I jogged into the room and shooed the bird away, it cawed in annoyance and flew off, leaving behind a pecked and battered potato GLaDOS…ha ha…POTaDOS. "Oh! Thanks." She said, a quake and a loud rattling resounding through the large space, "Did you feel that? That idiot doesn't know what he's doing up there. This whole place is going to explode in a few hours if somebody doesn't disconnect him."
"A-and that would-d be m-me." I said, folding my arms in front of me and leaning back against the glass wall. She paused for a moment and I imagined her giving me a dull "of course, what else was I insinuating?" look.
"I can't move. And unless you're planning to saw your own head off and wedge it into my old body, you're going to need me to replace him." My hands tightened and my heart rate increased as I stared at the spud before me, the image of my decapitated body in Wheatley's chamber…I shivered and looked away from GLaDOS. "We're at an impasse." It was some time before I responded, but I took a breath and stepped away from the wall, unfurling my arms and putting the dream back down in my subconscious. GLaDOS hasn't seen me panic before, and her seeing it in this time and place…she'd never let me live it down.
"N-no." I said quietly.
"What? I can't hear you." She said, "Speak louder. this potato battery makes it hard to hear."
"We are n-not at an imp-passe." I said louder, a little irritated at the AI-turned-spud, "You n-need me to c-carry you. I need y-you t-to take Wheatley's p-place."
"So, we're a team now?" GLaDOS asked, understandably skeptical. When I nodded a yes, she sighed and resumed speaking, "As much as I hate to admit it, we have to be a team. Fine, you carry me up to him and put me back into my body and I stop us from blowing up and let you go." I scowled down at her and she looked blankly up at me. "What?"
"Y-you've lied bef-fore." I said, "Wh-what's keeping you fr-from lying now?"
"I am a potato battery," she began, "and in case you don't know, potatoes aren't particularly powerful for transmitting energy. Currently I am operating at 1.1 volts of electricity, so I literally do not have the energy to lie to you." I knew the potato was a weak electrical conductor, but strong enough to apparently keep GLaDOS alive. I weighed my options again, but the option of taking GLaDOS with me to replace Wheatley still outweighed being blown up in a reactor explosion; even if I would test for a long time after, at least I would be alive. I sighed and nodded, reaching out to grab POTaDOS and causing my fingers to scrape against an oddly smooth surface beneath her. When I pulled her up, I looked at her and decided to have a little revenge before moving on. "OW! You stabbed me! What is WRONG with you?"
'I feel a little more even now.' I thought with a grin as the AI was skewered on the top claw of the portal gun. I glanced at the button GLaDOS was resting on and found it labeled "elevator control". How convenient. As I looked out at the large chamber, I saw a stretch of catwalk rise and attach to the elevator high above. I might be able to reach it if I flung myself through the portals.
"Hold on. Do you have a multimeter? Nevermind. The gun must be part magnesium…" GLaDOS said, more to herself than to me, "It feels like I'm outputting and extra half volt. Keep an eye on me: I'm going to do some scheming. Here I g-BZZZT" I stared at the spud as her yellow optic had dimmed and turned grey. Huh, she must have been thinking too hard. I carried her back out of the control room and got back up onto the high catwalk. My orange portal was still far below me on the ground and my blue portal was now high above me, hopefully high enough to fling me onto the elevator's catwalk otherwise…I would plunge into the grey dim pit beneath the testing chamber.
'Wish I had some adrenaline to make me jump quicker.' I thought with a sigh, 'I'm starting to get sick of these types of jumps.' Before I stepped off, however, GLaDOS sparked back to life, apparently having recovered from short-circuiting herself.
"Woah! Where are we? How long have I been out?" She asked, sounding confused and, dare I say, scared, "That extra half volt helps but it isn't going to power miracles. If I think to hard, I'm going to fry this potato before we get a chance to burn up in that atomic fireball that little idiot is going t-bzzpt." And again she was out. I concluded that thinking too hard and emotional reactions could trigger the potato-powered AI to short out and be silenced for a while. How long? I had no idea. I decided to step off the catwalk and sailed through the portals and the air before landing heavily on the catwalk leading to the elevator. I stepped into the lift and the doors shut behind me. I was carried into the test chamber and prepared myself to play my way through another set of tests to ascend to the newer testing chambers and, eventually, to Wheatley.
'I just hope he will change back…' I thought sadly; I didn't want to leave him behind. Even if he put GLaDOS into a potato and cast her and myself into this primitive Aperture facility…he was my friend. I wanted him back to the way he was before.
Oh dear that beginning…I never had a dream quite like that one, but I imagine even the mighty Chell would be disturbed by her own corpse cursing her in GLaDOS's voice.
But yes, that's this chapter. Please remember to leave a review before you take off.