Transitory
Wheatley was transfixed. Disconnected from the mainframe, he felt as lost as a bee separated from its hive. Now his hull was paralyzed, and his sight and sound flooded with information particular to the tenth, fiftieth, and seventy-fourth Hunger Games – high definition, close-up, and in living color. It had been bad enough at the start, when that scrawny boy shoved other children onto bombs and that fierce-looking boy got his stomach hacked open. But when it was Katniss, dropping wasps on pretty girls to turn them into bloated corpses, or Peeta, seizing a young, distracted boy and cutting his throat, it was worse, oh, so much worse. He wanted to push it aside and assure himself that this had nothing to do with him, it was only smelly, messy humans, but he didn't have time. The deaths just piled up, and now Peeta was suffering in anguish, all alone, and now that little girl with the pretty voice was caught in a net and killed and Katniss savagely cut down the boy who killed her –
"Ready."
He was jolted, dazed, confused, panicked. Where was he? GLaDOS' optic, the bright yellow sun of the facility, filled his vision.
Oh. Right. He was here and now. He trembled.
"We are ready," she repeated, her words reverberating in his frame.
He noticed a camera, several cameras, all around him, focused right on him. GLaDOS said, "Wheatley, as you call yourself, why don't you explain to the lovely people out in the dark exactly who you are, and how you met Katniss Everdeen?"
"Um – Uhh? Huh? Um, I'm Wheatley, hello, help me, please, somebody ARRGH! That hurt!"
"It was supposed to."
Twitching, he felt cords and wires, ready to try and pull him apart at the next opportunity. "I'm a, well, as you can see, I'm a robot. Not human, never have been, as far as I remember, but I was supposed to help with the tests—but seeing Katniss Everdeen spinning around in that dress that caught fire – can all humans do that? And when the tests started I thought there was something, I dunno, off, so I woke up – OW, I'm telling it how it happened! And then I found oooow Jesus H. Christ, that hurt! It was never my idea, y'see, it was Ch—AAAAGGH! I'm sorry! I'm sorry I broke into the tests and took out test subjects! I'm sorry for everything! Sorry!"
"Yes. You are sorry. You are a sorry product of science. That will do. For now." She leaned in to his face, menacing and too close, she would crush him with a thought -"Find your allies. Find Katniss and her allies. And tell them to run. And hide."
And she let him go. He didn't know he she did it, but when he opened his optic again, he was on a rail, in a dark passage. He had a vague sense of where Chell and the others were, and Peeta –
He had a flashback, which he had never experienced before, memory not being his strong suit. But this memory came over him so quickly it threw him off as to where he really was: in the facility, or watching Peeta kill a suffering little girl.
Wheatley tried to shake himself out of it. These were nothing but electrical synapses going haywire. Probably something She did to him, just as a last insult.
He took off, hoping desperately that he wouldn't be too late.
Like a rocket he zoomed down the management rail, aware that all was going to pieces and that it was, probably, on some level, his fault. As he went, he became aware of the facility changing itself around him: walls pivoting on an axis, catwalks crumbling away – at one point an entire line of cameras poked their red eyes out of a wall and followed his trajectory.
His terror mounted. What would he say? What could he say? How could he face them? He had failed, he had fouled up the one task he was built to do, and if that wasn't the worst bit of luck –
What would Chell say?
He almost slowed on his rail to think on it.
She would be disappointed. He'd caused a lot of disappointment over the years, so much that he started to become immune to the bad opinions of others. His own opinion of himself was the only one that really counted, right? But she had made him want to help, made him want to think for once outside of his own miserable, mealy-mouthed self. And the others –
The thought of Katniss' fury made Wheatley's optic shrink. She wasn't a replica of Chell, who might at least exile him with disappointment. She would kill him, pull out her arrows and bow and shoot him in his eye –
No arrows in the arena, Wheatley.
Right.
But an arrow to the face would be no less than what he deserved anyhow. If he hadn't listened to Peeta, if the radio signal hadn't gotten beyond him, if he had paid attention to what Test Subject Five had done – because something he had said had riled Her up – it was not, Wheatley realized, entirely his own fault. It was a contribution of little things, some outside of his control. Maybe this was what the humans meant when they said "May the odds be ever in your favor." Luck could be going golden for you, perfectly fine, until you shouted, say, for joy, on the mountaintop of your success, and suddenly you've caused a whole fire – or was it an avalanche? Did shouting cause fires or avalanches?
The elevator Hub came into sight. Wheatley knew it was time to face the fire (he decided, arbitrarily, on fire.)
He swooped down toward the door. Turning, he caught a glimpse of the facility's transformation catching up with him. With a full voice and all speed, he broke the door with his hull, ramming into it, and hollered, his optic squeezed shut, "Everybody run! She's turning the whole place inside-out to find you! Hurry!"
Six shapes moved in a blur, grabbing portal guns, pulling on boots, and getting as far away from Wheatley's side of the room as possible.
"Which way?" Chell asked him, and he was flabbergasted, truly gobsmacked that she still trusted him, automatically. But he collected himself enough to say "This way – this way!" He led them, going entirely by a hunch ('Because that's gone over so well in the past,' he thought).
As he led them through the tumult, he was impressed by the way that they utilized the portal guns to navigate the chaos: with six guns between them, a complex network of portals soon came into being. Despite their speed, there was actually very little contact made between their boots and the floor. Chell was ahead of the group, shouting directions to the whole, and giving Wiress her arm on tricky surfaces.
"I don't know how she disconnected me," Wheatley yelled, feeling they were owed an explanation, "But she did, and it hurt like blazes, and she then, well, I don't know what she did, because she blinded me –"
"Where are we going?" Roared a voice Wheatley didn't recognize; a man's voice.
"We're going to the safe place," he answered, "the one place in all the years that was never, ever touched, ever."
"Oh!" Kevin was zipping beside Wheatley. "I know the space! Know it! I'll make it ready, terraform if need be. Mimi, after meeeeee!" And he was gone, so fast he was trailing sparks, leaving Wheatley to wonder if that encounter had even happened at all.
From behind the others, he heard Craig say "Wiress is lagging behind. Johanna is veering too much to the right. Chell is far ahead of the others. Finnick is doubling back…"
The man was the one doubling back, to pick Wiress up and sling her, piggyback style, handing her his portal gun in the meantime. It would have been heartwarming, except for the fact that Finnick was a murderer, and Wiress was a murderer, and this alliance was insanity, a time bomb waiting to –
Wheatley twitched. "Left!" he yelled. But the way was blocked. Seeder found the route around it, yelling "This way!"
The group ran single file between two walls, shifting and groaning like the split Red Sea. But in the crossing, Chell's long fall boot – the heel of it – snagged on a broken stair. She fell. And as the group stalled around her, the wall before them lifted away entirely to reveal cameras, a red sea of cameras, staring down, unblinking.
On the other side of the cameras –
On the other side of the cameras, the feed was analyzed, frame by frame, by the unforgiving eye of GLaDOS. When [Subject Name Here], at the bottom of the frame, started to come back into sight, GLaDOS cut her out. She tilted the cameras upwards, so that the focus would be on the shock of the former Victors, finally captured on camera once more. Katniss Everdeen and Johanna Mason were smashing camera after camera with their portal devices—wait. That wasn't a portal device. Where had Johanna Mason gotten an ax?
How interesting.
[Subject] was now on her feet again, but GLaDO edited her out, seamlessly and swiftly. She would not let [Subject] be gobbled up by the hungry spectators. She would not be seen, would not be counted.
For every camera that was destroyed, the supercomputer flatly repeated, "Please do not interfere with Aperture Science testing equipment," one for each camera, ad nauseum, until Seeder Somerby took the two younger victors by the collars of their uniforms and dragged them bodily away.
"This way! Please, don't stop!" Wheatley's panicked shouting could be heard even above the din. Where was he leading them?
GLaDOS calibrated all of the possible locations, and realized – ah. Yes. That was a good idea. For once.
Well, let them rest there. In time, she would run them off their feet.
The cameras followed the tributes, and all the eyes of Panem were tuned in…
Chell fired a blue portal at a white square two stories below them, seeing the panels about to crush their catwalk. Far above, a while wall pointed directly left of their current course. It would do. Orange portal.
"Jump!" she hollered as she took off, falling towards the blue. At once she regretted it – she should have gone last, to make sure everyone followed through safely. For an instant she resented them bitterly, wishes she might at least make this flight solo – but she was better than that. These tests subjects were her responsibility and she'd be damned if she let them down.
She landed on an observation deck. She waited and watched as for dark shapes soared through the air and landed beside her.
"We're almost there, people!" Wheatley called, inching his way up a rusting Management Rail to join them on their level. "Just a little farther, I swear!"
He was wrong, of course. Kevin appeared out of seemingly nowhere, to cry "Nope! This way, this way, like a comet through the Keiper Belt!"
The cores started to follow Kevin, as did the humans. Only Chell gave the core (now spluttering, "Well, yes, that way too, I'm sure that way is just as good a way, what have we got to lose, only all of our lives") with a bit of pity. Well, he'd shown before that he was a mess when it came to directions.
The long fall boots made hardly any sound on what had once been a richly padded carpet. On either side Chell could make out boardrooms, conference rooms, small offices, and fine lobbies, in elegant blue and gold trim. But these were all rotten or disheveled, as though someone had cleared them out and then abandoned them.
Ahead was a door. It was fine mahogany, and Mimi was attempting to manually override it. Singing an impassioned aria, she banged her hull against the door, to punctuate:
"Questa! Questa maledetta! It sticks no matter what I do –"
"Stand back," Johanna said, pushing her portal gun into Katniss' hands and raising her ax. She brought it across the seam of the double doors with a thwack. They jostled apart slightly, their hinges rusting away. "Someone take the other side."
"It says 'pull' and indeed I am pulling, perhaps it should be marked 'push?'"
Seeder took the left-hand door, Johanna braced herself at the right, and they shoved it open.
The room within was entirely pitch-black, until the cores timidly turned on their flashlights, one by one.
"You'll have to disconnect," Wiress said to them. They obeyed, and the humans carried the cores into the darkness, and closed the door behind them. The noise of the upheaval of the facility was muffled at once. Even Kevin fell silent as he cast his light to and fro.
Yellow wallpaper, lavish paintings, trophies, honors, lined the walls. Immediately before them was a desk, with a name placard on it that read "Caroline." Its surface was empty except for a large computer screen and two faded photographs. Further ahead was another desk, even larger and grander. On the far wall a large portrait could be barely made out, which loomed above a fireplace. Of course, the logo of Aperture Science was blazed, in foot-high letters, on the adjoining wall. A vast bookshelf took up the rest of that wall, and opposite a vast, silent computer filled the entire space.
Mimi shuddered in Seeder's hands. She sang, softly, "This is a warning to us all… these are the shadows of the past."
"Oh, see that panel over there?" Wheatley nodded towards it, as though totally oblivious of the ominous aura of the place. "Plug me in over there, I'll see if I can't fiat some lux. That is, er, if you don't mind."
The lights came on, giving an impression of space and comfort. The bulb that lit up a vast portrait over the fireplace was flickering when a voice came on over the speakers, jolting panic into the test subjects until they realized, one, it was a man's voice, and two, it was a dead recording, that couldn't hurt them.
A suave jingle sounded, followed by: "Good morning! Cave Johnson here, to remind you that you got what it takes, tiger! Go get 'em!"
"What in the – I didn't do anything! I swear! I'm trying to turn it off right now!" Wheatley said, frantic.
The same jingle, again: "Good afternoon, boss. Cave Johnson, here, to light a fire under the ass of my future self. Chin up, buckaroo! Put faith in science and Caroline. Things have to turn around sometime, eh?"
This one was cut off, suddenly, by a low thumping sound and a hideous coughing sound, that made Katniss recoil. "Cave Johnson here," spluttered the speaker, hardly recognizable as the same man, "telling you two to can it! Shut up! You're morons, both of you – and I'm the biggest moron of all." Cough, cough. "Caroline? Remind me to delete these recordings. I don't need my own mockery." A pause. "Cave Johnson, we're done here."
Then, silence. Blessed silence.
Katniss ventured, looking at Chell, "Are we safe now?"
"For now. Only for now," Chell answered. "Only ever for now."