AN: Not much to say, since it's a bit late, but here it is. Please feel free to comment/review and let me know your thoughts, and I hope you enjoy. With that, read on!


Chapter Twenty-Three

Alex drifted. She wasn't aware for how long or where. All she knew was that it was dark. And huge. And cold. Somewhere in that vast sea, she was adrift like a leaf on the waves, a paper-thin edge away from tipping into the depths and sinking. A single, tenuous cord pulled taut against the back of her neck, anchoring her in the void.

But no, it wasn't quite a void. It may have been without warmth or light, but Alex could feel—no see, she could see little sparks and pinpricks of light all around her like stars. Stars were supposed to be very hot, she knew, and the pinpricks blazed so hot that it was like icy brands against her skin. But they didn't hurt—that was the curious thing; it was an odd sensation to have one's arm telling you that it was feeling heat enough to melt your nerve endings off without it actually happening. Still, it was unnerving, and Alex felt that the sooner she got out, the better.

But she had to find Caroline first.

Without warning, a red-hot blow knocked Alex in the shoulder, surprising her with how much it hurt. She'd been fooled into thinking because she was inside a computer meant that she couldn't feel pain, twice now. But she was a wiser girl than she'd been. She hoped.

"Oh little project, surely you know better than to do something stupid. Oh wait, perhaps I'm giving you too much credit." Caroline appeared before her, a vision of ice and steel. Her eyes were the coldest Alex had ever seen, and she'd seen very few pairs in her lifetime.

"After all, you plugged yourself in here." She gestured to the space around them, and though her tone was calm, her body looked wound up and ready to burst with the tension.

Alex flinched, and Caroline flew at her in a rage.


"So, do I want to know what happened?" Sophie, having built up the nerve over several minutes of walking, ventured the question. She almost regretted it when GLaDOS's golden optic turned on her sharply and narrowed.

"No."

"Okay then." Sophie backed off awkwardly. They walked in silence for several minutes.

The sheer vastness of the labs stretched all around them, brooding and silent. Whoever or whatever Caroline was, she didn't seem to be particularly interested in much of the labs. Of course, that could just be because she didn't have full access to the system yet.

But Alex was in the central AI chamber with her, according to what GLaDOS had said, so Sophie wasn't sure how much longer that would be true.

Sooner or later, they reached the alternate chassis chamber, and Sophie paused to check their surroundings.

"Oh come on already. She won't be expecting us to try to make it to the chamber again. Besides, the people you unfortunately have for parents will provide a good distraction. If they actually do their job."

"You are really mean, you know that?" Sophie snapped, but she kept moving. Her feet clanged against the catwalks, which thankfully were nothing like the ones her mother had described down in the deepest reaches of the labs. Could that have only been a few days ago that she'd been telling Sophie about that? It'd already felt like a century since then.

They entered the chamber. It was dusty, and the ceiling tiles were stained several mysterious colors in the control room, but they found a core port control easily enough. Sophie met GLaDOS's golden gaze for the slightest moment, pausing, then raised Her high to plug her in.

"Caroline deleted." The voice boomed or tried to boom as best it could through the dusty speakers set in the corners of the room. Mostly all it did was rattle a few dust motes from above, which fluttered down like ancient snowflakes.

"Oh G—what on earth could she be doing up there?" GLaDOS's handles flexed with anxious energy. "Surely she wouldn't—"

"Alternate core accepted."

Sophie slowly met GLaDOS's single optic, and She stared back for a long second.

"We need to get back to the central chamber. Now."


Alex was panting hard. Caroline was floating some distance away, chuckling weakly. She struggled to right herself in space but failed. Chips and flakes of her were already drifting away, fading into nothing as she began to disappear from the system.

"Pfft. You can't," she huffed, "you can't get rid of me, dearie. I'm a virus—I multiply. You'll find a hundred new heads for this one you've chopped off."

"Not if you've got nothing to multiply with." Alex was still puffing, but she managed to pull herself up. She stood—er, floated—tall and faced Caroline.

"You'll be the last."

"Ha! You can't—" Caroline dissolved, her sentence unfinished.

"Caroline deleted." A new voice, tinted by painful memory, thundered around the void and made Alex jump.

"What on—"

"Alternate core accepted. Welcome user: ALEXANDRIA-ALPHA-ONE."

"Wha—AHH!" Alex felt herself heaved through the void of the mainframe and past hundreds of flashing sparks. She flew up, higher and higher until she landed with a jolt in a dark sort of room.

At her entrance, the room illuminated, showing a great many control panels and buttons and levers—all of them flashing and beeping away as the system seemed to refresh itself.

"Welcome to the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System control center. Although this chamber may look real, please be aware that this entire room is a construction created by your brain or artificial intelligence, as the case may be. Because this is a construction, please feel free to engage in willful physical assault of the chamber's equipment in the event of emotional or mental distress, as this will not damage the equipment and likely only cause minor simulated pain."

Alex hesitated, then smacked the wall. She jerked her stinging hand away and scowled at the ceiling.

"Good. By physically hitting the equipment, you have now proven that you comprehend this message. In the event that you should experience unusually high emotional or mental distress, you may also…"

Alex stopped listening to the inane voice of the man above her. Her eyes—so new and childish in their perception—were instead drawn to the great rosy monitors lining the wall opposite her.

Memory clicked into place as she approached the crimson-tinted wall of screens—cameras. The unfamiliar pleasure of sight warmed her to her core; the gleam of light against smooth white turret casings, the shadowy patterns of plant overgrowth, and the clean, flawless lines of test chambers all grabbed for her attention. Each of them presented a visual facet that to Alex was jaw-droppingly gorgeous: sharp, smooth, stark, soft, dim, bright—Alex nearly gasped aloud.

Then the more negative emotion tied to sights came rushing back. Alex hunched over, struggling to breathe as crushing panic shrunk her throat to the size of a pin. Her hands shook. What had she done? She'd never been inside the system without another presence blocking her from complete connection. GLaDOS, for all her raw, bitter anger, had acted as a shield, protecting Alex from the overwhelming power of the mainframe.

Now Alex had no one, and the system felt like roots burrowing into her mind. The roots dug deep, threading the computer and the girl together as one. Alex knew, somehow, in her deepest instincts, that it would only get worse.

Movement on the monitors caught her attention, and Alex rose shakily. One of the crimson-tinted monitors showed two blurry figures caught in the grip of two multi-service claws. They wriggled, rather uselessly, and though one shot a glowing blast into the walls of the chamber and a bright oval appeared—a portal, the thought popped into her mind—it didn't do much good.

"It's—it's them!" Alex exclaimed to herself. She felt around the control panel purely out of instinct, slowly readjusting to the experience of simply looking at things. With the system threading through her mind, she quickly put meaning to the strange symbols and colors before her. More than that, the system flooding her mind was like having x-ray vision, letting her know exactly what each button, switch, and lever did.

She found the multi-service claw controls. With bated breath, Alex gently set the two figures down on the floor of the chamber and instructed the single camera feed to fill the whole panel of screens. Chell and Wheatley jumped in size, suddenly clear, and Alex paused for the barest second, studying her giant friend's face. She could not discern any noticeable color beyond the rubyish haze of the camera lens, but that could be easily fixed. Just a wave of her hand and—

"Alex? Luv, are you alright?" His voice broke on the last word, and Alex frantically began waving arms he couldn't see.

"I'm here! I'm here! I'm fine, I'm right here!" Alex glanced around the room and felt her eyes drawn to a specific button. She smashed it with urgent hands. "I'm here! I'm fine!"

"Alex!" Wheatley nearly fell over, looking bewildered, and Alex giggled.

"Careful! I just put you down so you wouldn't fall—don't undo all my hard work!"

"Oh, don't worry now, I won't." Wheatley seemed to be shaking a bit, but he managed to steady himself. "Wouldn't want to undo your handiwork, now would I?"

"No," Alex agreed, then spotted another button. She pressed it, and this time Wheatley really did fall over, despite Chell's efforts to catch him. "How's that?"

"That's—that's amazing! Where are you?" He was staring at the monitor, and Alex vibrated with excitement. Success!

"Uh…the system, I think?" Alex glanced at Chell.

It was only a second-long glance. Barely much of a look even.

Memory clicked into place and Alex screamed.


Alex screamed, and Chell found herself lifted helplessly and suddenly by a robotic claw for the second time that day. Wheatley yelped and tried to use his considerable height to catch her, but their fingers missed by inches.

"Alex, what are you doing?" Wheatley yelled up at the monitor, but Alex's face had disappeared. Instead, Chell saw her own face staring back at her.

It was a younger version of her face, short a few scars but just as careworn and harried as she remembered, glimpsing through pockets of folded space. The viewer seemed to be from below as Chell hovered threateningly above, her arms extended as if holding something. GLaDOS's all-too familiar voice sounded from beyond the monitor's range of sight, but it was…different.

"Are you picking up that Aperture Science we-don't-know-what-it-is? Just set it in the corner. It's a mystery I'll solve later, by myself. Because you'll be dead."

Memory, bitter and sour, filled Chell's mind, and her mouth twisted in disgust. Much as she'd been crushed by despair waking up again down here—knowing somehow that the fight was far from over—she'd had a friendly voice shedding a ray of hope on the situation. She'd gotten a taste of "things-can-be-different" the minute Wheatley had popped his spherical self through the door, and she'd somehow found that maybe, just maybe things had a chance of changing.

This younger Chell had no such consolation, trapped in a lab with no one but a twisted sort of sentient being for company.

The video continued, marching onward with stubborn steps, obvious to her silent, fervent pleas to stop. Suddenly Chell saw her younger face bathed in a warm glow. The emergency intelligence incinerator. The camera seemed to fall, and her young face grew small and far away as the warm glow of red-gold light grew too strong to bear. The camera fell into the depths of the incinerator, entering a time and space unknown to Chell; though she remembered vividly throwing various cores into the incinerator, she'd never seen beyond the distant reddish haze.

Around the range of vision, indistinct shapes, red-hot and aflame, lay in indiscriminate heaps. She could hear the faint, piteous cries of a turret screaming, "it burns!". It quickly fell silent amidst the crackle of the flames. The camera lens cracked from the heat, running a jagged black line down the center of the monitor and startling Chell. Alex screamed again, but this time, it was barely recognizable—warping and flanging like an AI's would.

The screaming didn't stop, and the camera lens cracked again, plunging the video into black. Alex came back into view, pressed up against the walls of the small space she occupied, shaking and shivering.

"You," she seemed to reach for words, "you're the-t-the one who, who—" she clutched her head.

She raised her eyes, bright with sudden clarity. "You tried to kill me."

Chell started as the claw dragged her higher into the air. She opened her mouth, desperately trying to speak, to make Alex understand that if Chell had known—if there'd been any other way—

But her throat was closed, shut tight hours ago. Her brain told her to speak, reminded her she could, but the all-too-familiar electric hum and the echoed vastness had awakened some animalistic instinct, buried years ago. Don't speak, it said, making noise gets you caught. It gets you killed.

"No! No, no no no she didn't!" Wheatley quickly cut in and tried to grab Alex's attention, waving his arms wildly. "Alex, listen, she'd never, ever do something like that to a kid—to you. It was—she couldn't—" he glanced at her, and Chell nodded encouragingly.

"—she never wanted to hurt anybody, but it was the only way! Alex, you've got to get out of there. It's, it's poison, believe me. It makes you paranoid beyond believing."

Alex's face softened for the barest moment. Then the wheels started turning, aided no doubt by the massive computer she was hooked up to.

"Why exactly do you say that?" Alex's tone turned sharp. "Why would you say that? Wait."

The monitor was flooded with thousands of flashing images, and Chell caught sight of more than one fleeting image of a relaxation center, occupied by unfamiliar but human faces. All at once, the images halted, and a familiar scene sprang to the monitor, burning itself into her brain just as it had the first time.

"I AM NOT. A. MORON!" The familiar voice, twisted with rage, thundered all around them, and Chell unconsciously flinched. Alex must have been horrified, seeing it for the first time. Still, much as she might have pitied Alex, Chell's protective side snapped and hissed at this treatment of Wheatley. No matter their mistakes, no matter their faults, Wheatley and Sophie were her family, and no one touched her family.

Chell quickly shot a portal underneath an ancient desk chair in the corner of the room. It was a one in a hundred shot, but her practice with Aaron's rifle all these years hadn't been for nothing. She heard the satisfactory phish of a portal opening, and she followed it with another portal on the wall, just above where the claw was holding her captive. The chair fell through, just in time to fall through another waiting portal. With the combined momentum, the chair flew through the air and struck the claw, making Chell swing wildly in the air.

"Ah!" Alex cried out.

The claw released suddenly, and Chell fell to the floor, her boots catching her easily. Sprinting hard, she made her way over to Wheatley and grabbed some of his generous length of arm. He gripped her shoulder in return, stopping her.

"No! I can't—can't just leave her." Her grey eyes met his blue ones—so brightly colored in the fluorescent lights—and she saw something of her own rock-hard determination there.

But every instinct screamed at her to grab his arm again and flee.

"She can't see herself. And if you can't see yourself for what you are…you lose sight of what you've done. Or what you're doing." He gripped her shoulder, squeezing so tightly and with such urgency that she got the impression that he wasn't just talking about Alex anymore.

He'd been blinded once too. Blinded by the wild, irrational suspicion and bitter resentment that had brewed in that chassis for who knew how long.

"—Huh? Can a moron do THIS?" Wheatley flinched, but she was holding tight.

"Al—" Wheatley's voice cracked, and he tried again. "Alex. Alex."

The video halted mid-tirade. Alex came back into view, sitting on the floor, crying.

"Alex—"

"Why were you yelling?" Alex asked, cutting him off. "How could you yell at anybody like that? I thought," she broke off, "I thought you were the best of them. Of all of them."

"Alex, look at me," Wheatley glanced at the camera in the corner of the room, "er, look at me as best you can."

Alex fell silent, watching tearfully. But she was listening.

"I am a bit of a monster. Truth is, I think everybody has a bit of a monster in 'em but—hold on, hold on! What's even truer is that this whole thing," he gestured to the chassis, "tends to bring out the worst bits of people. It makes 'em even more…monstrous."

"But she was, she wasn't," Alex began again, pointing at Chell.

"Wasn't in the system? I know. But well—well you remember growing up down here, right? You remember how grumpy everybody was, how mean they could be?"

Wheatley suddenly pushed her forward, eagerly getting into a characteristic ramble.

"Well, see Chell here, she never even had one friend to talk to down here. Not one. Nobody to talk to except Her, and that doesn't even really count."

"No-nobody?" Alex seemed incredulous. "Nobody at all?"

"Nobody at all. And how, do you think, would that make you feel, to have nobody nice to talk to?"

"I'd feel awful."

"Awful enough to do things you might not have wanted to do, really?"

"But she still—" Alex started up, distressed again, "—she still hurt me. It still hurts."

"Well, that's what saying sorry's for, then, right?"

He couldn't possibly be—

"Chell, luv, please."

—serious. She shot him a look, too quickly for Alex to catch sight of.

She'd never apologized for anything she'd done down here. Not then, not now, not ever. She would never take back any of things she'd done in pursuit of her own survival. Nor would she apologize for this. In her own book, she'd done nothing short of what she'd had to do.

But Alex was still plugged in, and as long as she was connected, it would be impossible to completely rationalize with her. Even if Chell was in the right, even if Alex was wrong—this was about more than just an apology.

Alex wanted to trust her, wanted to know that Chell really wasn't a monster.

But Chell had to say the words first.

So she mouthed it, I'm sorry. She put every shred of sincerity she could into her expression.

It wasn't enough. Alex's face fell, and though her head was turned downwards such that it was difficult to read her expression, Chell could see an anger growing on her young face.

She tried again. "A-a-a-unh." A few stuttered sounds escaped her throat, and Alex looked up, surprised.

"Ah-ah-I'm s-sorry."

She'd said it. And something changed in Alex's eyes. Some strange cloudiness left them, as if perhaps the mainframe's poisonous touch had been lifted if only for a moment.

A pause.

"Thank you." Grateful and sincere.

"Alex?" Wheatley gently cut in. "I'm gonna have to unplug you now."

"No! Don't, don't—" Alex stumbled on the words, suddenly frantic, "I don't know what-what'll happen. I might be stuck. Forever!"

"No, no no no, see Alex, that's where you're wrong. Because I think you're clever enough to get unstuck. Strong enough too." Wheatley approached the control panel, where Alex's physical body lay motionless on the floor.

His hands shook as he gripped the cord.

"I believe you can do this."

Alex was gulping, panicking and scared. But she nodded, ever so slightly.

"If anything happens that…that's not supposed to happen, will you tell Sophie sorry for me? I really am sorry for shoving her in an elevator."

"I will. But you'll be able to tell her yourself."

"And Mr. Wheatley?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you. You know, for everything."

"You're gonna be fine, Alex, but…you're welcome."

Wheatley pulled the plug, and the monitor went dark.