Chapter 5
A month passed.
The road kicked up dust as the faded school bus pulled away. Chell coughed once, adjusting her backpack before walking down the road.
It never took long to walk to Aperture from the bus stop—and besides, it gave her refuge from the other kids in her grade. To them, she was an enigma. A silent girl; a blank face without a personality. Not worthy of their friendship.
She kicked a rock, letting it clatter to the side. The barbed-wire fences of Aperture came into view, and soon enough the girl found herself back in the daycare center.
Her evenings at the science company tended to be quiet, and yet not uneventful. When she finished homework, she threw together sketches when no one was watching, passing them off as 'practice' the other times.
In the last letter she'd gotten from her mother, Chell had saved the return address. These sketches went directly to her. As they said, only a fool makes the same mistake twice.
Henry marveled over her potato, already sprouting roots and spreading across the table. "That fertilizer sure works," he said. "Not sure how long it'll keep growing." He rubbed his head. Chell poked at it, grabbing the multimeter and measuring it.
Still 1.6 volts. Still a half-volt higher than her competition.
And she had checked every other project. None of the others had dates—only names. Eventually Aperture might have enough projects for a science fair, but Chell doubted they could ever get enough girls.
Doug cleared his throat as he walked around the corner. "Finally, they let me off early," he said.
Henry gave a forced smile. "Headed home?"
Doug shook his head. "Not at all," he said.
A pause. "If you want to stay here, be my guest. I'm going home. See you," he said, giving Chell a wave. "Keep watching that potato."
Chell glanced at her watch, her only reliable source of time. 8:30. Still an hour and a half before her parents clocked out.
She followed Doug back into the room. He retrieved his cube, pushed out of sight earlier because of Henry. Henry'd never liked the cube—something about seeing his co-worker cart around the heart-adorned box set him on edge. Doug slung it over his shoulder.
"I found a spot a few floors down. It's a perfect spot for a mural," he said.
Doug paused, letting Chell bump into him. "Do you hear that? The faint music?" he said. Chell shrugged, listening. Silence enveloped the hallway.
He sighed, not apologizing. They moved on.
Though the buildings and rooms themselves felt modern, Chell couldn't help but notice the air of abandonment. Room after room slipped by them, each emptier than the last. A poster here. A broken chair there. In one room, a crumpled safety poster sat on the tile, curled with age.
Doug paused at a particular office, dated back ten years.
A perfect place to start.
He picked out a pencil from his pocket, immediately scribbling on a quarter of the wall, filling it with organized chaos. From his companion cube, Doug pulled out a radio and tossed it to Chell. She twisted the knobs, shifting the scanner through channel after channel. It warped between songs, a garbled mess until Chell settled on a station. A softer tune murmured in the background.
They settled on the theme of music, though neither of them felt like singing.
"Use broad strokes," Doug said, covering the wall with a splash of blue. He motioned for Chell to join him, letting her throw in her own colors. "Feel the music and feel the brush." He leaned down to grab his book, thumbing through the dog-eared pages for a moment before letting it thump back onto the ground. Chell peered over, paint dripping onto her foot as she examined the blue book. "Art Therapy," it said. "The Bennett Way."
Drip.
She turned away, watching the man's feverish strokes. She thought about asking about the book, about the therapy part of the title—but there was nothing Doug could say to her that Chell didn't already know. In just the way that he moved as he painted, so smooth and fluid, Chell could tell that art itself was more relieving than any therapy book ever could be.
Her brush slowed down, and she bit her tongue in concentration. She had to get the lines just perfect. Although Doug had just sketched them up there—by no means an exact blueprint to follow—she didn't want to mess them up.
"Expression is the goal," Doug said once. "Not perfection."
But for Chell, perfect was everything. She needed to be able to copy something exactly, to have her vision for a drawing perfectly match the outcome. But the pressure to do this was almost paralyzing.
Before the clock struck ten, the two stood back, observing the once-blank wall. Even though the rest of the room was open for painting, the two had chosen to work together, splitting off and building upon each other's work like branches from a tree. A mishmash of artwork exploded from the lifeless wall, and yet the mural itself only covered half of the wall.
Chell twirled her brush. "Are you staying?" she said, mentally rehearsing a pitch to her parents on why she should also stay longer.
He shook his head. "We'll finish another day."
And so Doug rinsed off his brushes, dabbing them dry with his coat. He closed up his cube and left it pushed to the room's side. Chell twisted her head as they walked out the door, shooting Doug a look.
"No one's going to bother it," he said, hitting the light switch. "No one's ever down here."
The days grew shorter and the nights grew longer, but this didn't matter at Aperture, where the difference between night and day was the amount of people in the facility. One evening, when only Aperture's night owls remained fluttering about, Caroline's phone rang.
When Greg didn't pick up her call—like he always did— she frowned.
Riiiiiiiing. Riiiing.
What was he waiting for? A flash of color caught her eye—an alert. This call wasn't going through her assistant's line. This one was placed directly to her.
She leaned across her desk, answering.
"Aperture Laboratories," she chimed. "Hold on a moment." She cradled the phone against her chest, walking over to the door. She stuck out her head, speaking softly as to not startle her assistant.
"Go on and go home. I'm finishing up here," she said. "Science cannot wait, but neither can sleep." He nodded, blinking himself awake. He stretched before pushing in his chair and heading toward the elevator to the surface.
She closed the door just as softly, clicking the dead bolt into place.
"All clear," she said, dropping her cheerful tone. Though the long distance call would be expensive, it would be worth every penny.
"No one else is in your range of hearing?" said the man, one of her loyal spies over at Black Mesa.
"You know how careful I am," she said. "Nothing leaves this room unless I want it to."
"Good. You wouldn't want this overheard."
"Tell me what happened."
"They've got it," the man said. "It looks like a portal device, but it's not. The lab boys here nicknamed it the gravity gun, but it's got Aperture written all over it."
Caroline exhaled.
"Are you mad?"
"I'm not angry," she said. "Black Mesa 'steals' technology from us all the time, and I would bet my position as CEO that it won't be the last. You of all people should know that. And besides, it's not important, anyways." A lie.
"But how important was it?" he said, voice anxious.
"It's an older prototype," she said. "Developed a few years ago, but found no practical use." She kept her voice cool, but spoke between clenched teeth.
Anxiety jabbed at her. The gravity gun was closely related to the tunneling device—in fact, Black Mesa possessing the energy manipulator placed them only two small steps from Aperture waters, and one leap away from a splash into portals.
She wanted to fire him. Right there. Via phone. Or even better—unearth his connections to Aperture and throw him to those Black Mesa wolves. Oh, now that would be such sweet revenge.
And yet the moment passed. Caroline pushed past it, like she always did. Besides, this wasn't that man's fault—the blame belonged to someone within Aperture. And oh, how she looked forward to finding that rat.
"How close is it to completion?" she asked, voice still.
"A few days, maybe. They've been working on it nonstop for over a month."
Caroline flipped her calendar back a page. She flicked through her memories, her conversations, struggling to find somethingthat could have warned her about this.
Oh.
A tab stuck out from a filing cabinet—D. Rattmann. The one who warned her of spies—the one she'd ignored. And yet he spoke of tunneling device plans, not the gravity gun. And yet Caroline knew that that device—and those plans as well—were in the man's office. That, she knew. He was the one. He hadto be the leak.
Caroline hesitated, her silence heavy.
"They're not supposed to touch that," Caroline said, hissing. "That technology is off limits."
The spy for Aperture swallowed. "Look this is took risky—calling you."
"Forget about that. Not a word of this will get to Black Mesa—and if it does, your life won't be worth living. Better be careful," she said, speaking through a forced smile.
She hung up the phone before he could answer, brushing off her dress and glancing at the clock. Good. It was only 1 am.
Chell didn't go to Doug's office that day. He had a meeting—in a few hours, he would present his modified portal device, and Chell knew she'd better stay out of the way.
Someone she knew-though not well, like Doug or Henry, came in to cart her off to help with her job. This lady didn't smile—just introduced herself and gave Chell a curious look before leading her into parts of Aperture she'd never seen before.
She knew she shouldn't be surprised—Aperture was always expanding. The facility extended from the bottom of the salt mines and up to somewhere close to the surface. And they already had another extension planned—another level for another decade. Where they got the money to build these kinds of things, Chell did not know.
She typed in a code to open up a wing—already making it more secure and secretive than the majority of the facility. Inside, it split off into several large rooms with several luxurious desks. She recognized some of these employees, though wasn't familiar with them. After befriending Doug, Chell's daily introduction to Aperture's workforce had stopped altogether.
From behind the newest-looking monitor she'd sheen in the facility, Henry waved. Funny—he had never shown her his office before.
"Welcome to the last of Cave Johnson's development projects," he said.
The light-haired lady—Karla, as Henry introduced her—dragged in a sizable metal sphere. She dropped it onto the table, but the robot tilted and rolled before she grabbed a handle to stabilize it.
"This is what we've been working on," said Henry.
Chell pushed her desk chair closer, examining it. She glanced at Henry.
"Artificial intelligence. Robots that think, feel, and make good decisions-like a human," he said. "That's what we do. This guy here is Aperture's first—and only— fully-artificial intelligence."
Karla twisted a screwdriver, unhinging the robot's curved side panel. No lights, no sound squeaked out of the sphere—Chell assumed it was powered off for repairs.
"He's practice for another project we're working on," Henry said. He exchanged a glance with his co-worker, deciding not to go into the details of that project.
"An experiment to see if we could make a man's personality out of nothing." He didn't say that they had hoped—stupidly, in hindsight—that a construct like this could one day run the facility.
"What's he like?" said Chell. She picked at the foam padding of her chair.
"Talkative and blunt," he said. "And vaguely British. Not sure whose idea that was," he said, shrugging. "A good challenge, though he's not much of a success."
"He's got a few problems," said Henry. She snorted, grumbling as she fiddled around inside the robot's surprisingly hollow casing. "We're still working on him."
"He's an idiot," said Karla, jumping in.
"Well, it's not that he isn't intelligent. He is. We created him," said Henry.
"But he can't learn," she said. "Mistake after mistake every time he's turned on—which is expected—but they are all the same mistakes. As an artificial intelligence, wasn't that the point of making him? Shouldn't he be able to be able to learn from his failures?"
"How does he learn then?" said Chell.
"Shut him down and upload information," said the scientist. "I'm adding in a map of the facility as we speak. Maybe now he'll stop making such stupid navigation errors."
"Can we turn him on?" Chell said. Karla looked up, surprised.
"After I make sure this guy doesn't kill us all," she said, "maybe."
"And that," said Doug, blinded by the projector light, "is my solution to the breaking of the ASHPDs." He cleared his throat once, twice, looking out onto the shapeless faces of the people gathered in the conference room. "Thank you," he said.
The room was crammed with people—after all, this presentation did get them out of work for an hour AND let them witness the witchcraft that was the energy field manipulator. In fact, only after stepping out of the bright light did he realize the unexpectedly high attendance.
A smattering of applause greeted him, gradually fading into conversation and squeaking chairs. The clapping faded into conversation and squeaking chairs.
A soft tune filled his heart, materializing out of nowhere as Doug gathered some of his papers . But the sound shattered when he glanced up, pulling away from him like a distant dream. The notes still lingered, broken and floating like objects suspended in the air, like something he could reach out and grab.
The sound of high heels replaced his notes, falling into a rhythm not unlike the music. A lady stood in front of him, arms crossed and a pen dangling from one hand.
"Ms. Caroline," Doug said, politely nodding. She regarded him for a moment, taking in his well-kept face yet mismatched eyes.
"Do you plan on converting allof the tunneling devices to possess the energy manipulator?"
"Should I?"
"Absolutely. And as soon as possible. For now, though, walk with me." She turned on her heels and clinked out the door.
Doug accidentally knocked a defective turret to the ground, thinking for the umpteenth time how glad he was he hadn't brought a functional turret. With a live audience, real bullets were not the best idea. That's where these guys came in handy—no bullets, no danger, yet still a great way to demonstrate the gun's full effects.
He shuffled, letting his manila folder flop onto a cube before hustling to catch up with Caroline.
"Sorry," she said, picking up the pace. "Not enough time to sit and chat. I've got a facility to run."
Doug faltered in his steps.
"Still," she said, tucking a file under her chin and pulling out papers from his presentation. "I did enjoy the illustrations." She tugged out a few pages of art, with a realistic-looking figure demonstrating the correct way to use the modified device. Other pages contained figures with lines scratched across them, each demonstrating an incorrect use of the gun.
"Chell drew those," he said, the smugness in his voice reminiscent of a proud father.
"The girl?" said Caroline.
"She's been getting really good," he said with a nod. "She practices all the time."
"But these drawings—they're almost spot-on," she said.
"I'll have to bring in new things for her to draw soon," said Doug. He had to admit that her drive to improve, her stubbornness to accept anything less than perfection made her progress incredibly quickly. "I'm teaching her everything I know."
"So you'rethe one leaving pictures around my facility," said Caroline.
Doug swallowed, hand trailing on the cool metal of the railing. "Only abandoned areas," he said. "I didn't think anyone would see them."
"They're fine," she said, not wanting to admit the number of times she'd stared at the art. Part of her felt outraged at him for defacing her facility; the other part marveled over their beauty. "Just make sure they don't show up in the upper levels," she said. "There's canvases for that—And panels are not canvases."
But Caroline was a woman of science, not a woman of art. She didn't understand that abandoned walls or discarded panels were more satisfying to paint on than a stretched canvas. It was his own way of throwing a bit of humanity onto the bleak walls.
Caroline's eyes narrowed. She paused, leaning her hand against a catwalk railing and looking down at the specks milling about levels beneath them.
"How often is she there?" she said.
Doug paused, also leaning over. His palms hit cold metal; the chill slipped into his arms. "Almost every day," he said, "though less often since school began."
Something cycled inside of Caroline. "What does the girl do with her drawings?" she said, something clicking in her brain.
He shrugged. "Take them home. Burn them. I wouldn't know."
The woman stared at him for a stretch of time, watching his face to see if the same thing coming together in her brain was also manifesting within his.
"So did you ever find out anything…?" he said, curious. The past month lent no opportunities to speak with the CEO—she was, as she said, a busy woman. She kept staring, waiting for him to put two and two together, to make the logical—well, tiptoe—into what he had made so alarmingly obvious to her. Could he really be this dense?
It was her. The girl.
She was the one sitting in that office and copying down blueprints daily until they were spot-on. She stole the plans. Doug didn't even realize that his little drawing lessons were putting all of Aperture at risk. An incompetent employee let a preteen girl pull the wool over his eyes-and for what? Friendship? With a girl over fifteen years younger than him?
But what could she do? Her own spy at Black Mesa just revealed their successes—she had no way of 'knowing' this for months, until their product became commercially successful.
She could fire him.
That's what Cave always did. Kicked them out, pushed them out, and made her tag along to make sure they didn't cry all over the carpet. But this man's mind was too unique to fire. That problem with the tunneling device had plagued Aperture for years, and he was the first to consider merging the device with newer technology.
His mind. Something about the way it combined things, the way he saw things no one else saw—that had to be it. His schizophrenia alone was far too interesting and far too uncommon for Caroline to let go.
Besides, it wasn't the man's fault. He was just too trusting of her, despite being the paranoid one convinced of spying within the building.
It was funny, actually, when she thought about it. The one he trusted was the one to betray him.
"Don't worry," she said, eventually. "I havebeen looking into it. It's being taken care of."
Doug wasn't sure how to feel. Though he'd never gotten along with Jerry—too bossy—he was still Chell's father. And yet he couldn't bring himself to ignore the snooping. If he ended up stealing those plans, Doug would be out of a job, along with the rest of Aperture.
But nothing had been stolen. Not yet.
"Your office is under watch," she said. "If anyone tries anything, I'll know about it," she said. Doug still stared out across the railing. The soft shapes of the structures patterned together like a bizarre game of Tetris.
"Feel free to leave everything scattered about in your office. Oh, and you can rig your door again."
Doug gave her a surprised look.
"You think you're the only one that gets tired of punching in codes?"
Caroline laughed, giving the man a pat on the shoulder. As she walked away, Doug watched, unsure if he should feel relieved or terrified. Either way, by the time Doug glanced up again, the CEO was just a blur in the distance.
A/N: As always, thanks for reading! Also, a shoutout to Jenovaii for all of her help!
10