Chapter 10 - Master Hacker
Flick.
Doug blinked.
Huuumm.
A split-second delay.
Lights flashed on in the Employee Daycare Center, and Doug scanned the empty room.
Desks. Chairs. A clean floor. He paused at the door, then took a few steps in. Each desk chair was perfectly pushed in, and each computer keyboard was set parallel with the monitor. All stray papers, all stray writing utensils had been stashed away.
It was the cleanest he'd ever seen this place.
And yet, none of Chell's things were here. He looked for them—a backpack, a stack of half-completed homework and a crumpled candy bar wrapper with one square of chocolate still tucked inside—none of it was here. Gone. Vanished. As if it'd never even existed.
He crouched for a moment, letting one hand rest on his knee and the fingertips of the other hand pushed against the sick floor. From here, he could see underneath all of the desks—one look told him that there was nothing else under there.
Riiiiing. RiiiIIIING.
A shrill tone sounded from the wall-mounted phone, and Doug jumped back to his feet. He briefly considered letting it ring out, but decided that the sheer volume at which it was ringing was more torturous than actually answering the phone.
"Doug?" said a male voice—Henry—as he answered the phone. The scientist nodded, then, remembering that Henry couldn't see that, squeaked out a "Yes?"
"Knew you'd be there. You didn't answer your office phone."
"Yeah, just came down to grab something I left. Have you been down here recently?" he said, eyes sweeping across the unusually spotless room.
"No," he said. "Why?" Doug heard conversations in the background, and then a muffled sound as the man on the other end readjusted the handset.
"Chell's stuff is gone."
"They left on a month's vacation. Of course she stopped by to pick up her stuff."
"It doesn't make sense, though," said Doug.
"Bet she picked it up earlier and you just never noticed," Henry suggested, but the scientist frowned.
"And clean up the entire room? I don't think so," he said.
For two weeks, he'd seen so sign of Chell nor her parents. As far as why they'd disappeared, he'd heard two popular theories: they'd quit, or they'd taken a sudden, month-long leave. Vacation, the more optimistic ones said.
But it didn't add up. Quitting Aperture required a two-week's notice, which would've given Doug plenty of warning. They could have been fired—he'd heard that one floating around as well, but it had been true it would have blazed through the facility like neurotoxin through an empty chamber. Though firings at Aperture were common, it remained humiliating and if they'd been gearing up for vacation, Chell would've talked about it—or, at least mentioned it. He could never tell if travel would ever again be a source of excitement for her.
"Look, it doesn't matter. You can stop walking over there every day—it's not like you're going to find her just sitting there," he said. "But while you're down there, though, I need your help. That robot's stuck."
"Again?"
Henry made a rather annoyed sound of agreement. "When you're done there, go check out the Neurotoxin Implosion Observation Annex. Get that robot away from the toxins."
Doug nodded, agreeing. Henry hung up a moment later, leaving Doug once again alone in the room.
It was entirely too clean in here—and it felt as if all of the clutter had been stashed. The floors were swept, and Doug rubbed his fingers on a desk and they came up clean. Dirt free. Someone had deliberately cleaned this place, and someone had removed every last trace of her from this room. A vaguely unsettled feeling grumbled in the pit of his stomach. He exhaled. Perhaps Henry was right—stopping by an employee daycare center every day wasn't something he needed to do. Chell was gone, and if her lack of backpack meant anything, she wasn't coming back.
Wherever she was, whatever she was doing, it didn't matter. If she wanted to speak to Doug, she'd stop by his office. She knew where it was, and he didn't need to keep coming back here and looking for a face he didn't expect to see.
At the doorway, he pushed his palm against the all three bays of light switch and plunged the room into darkness.
A soft blue glow caught Doug's attention on his way to the Neurotoxin Implosion Observation Annex. The personality core's rail suspended over the edge, and yet the robot itself paid Doug no mind as he hovered beneath it.
He wasn't surprised. The engineers saw no need to waste time developing empathy towards humans in their fully artificially intelligent constructs. They cared little about humans, but that didn't matter. The robots couldn't be held accountable for ethical violations, especially since their sole function was to do science and nothing else. People couldn't get away with that, and Aperture saw no need to 'fix' this problem.
And, as theories and plans of genetic life-form-based AIs surfaced, the problem became less and less of a concern. No point wasting money teaching a computer how to handle humans—a future genetic life-form component would have that covered.
"Need help up there?" Doug said, craning his neck upwards. He could've sworn the robot jumped a few inches on his rail.
He spun around, small pupil darting from side to side before glancing down and locking on to the human. "Oh. Er, hello down there. Didn't bother to say 'hi' now, did you? Gave me absolutely no indicator that you were standing there. Right behind. Just jumped right into conversation."
"You know, you can't get across there," said Doug, noting how the management rail dead-ended. "Back up and go around."
Though only extending part of the way across the open pit, the robot seem convinced that—if he banged on the end of the rail hard enough—it would extend across to the opposite side. Clearly this was not the case. But it hadn't stopped the sphere from trying to do that for the past two hours.
The robot's top shutter drew down. "Well yeah, that's the easy way. Far too simple for this complex brain up here. Plus there's far too many people in that direction," he gestured toward Doug with the lower handle, "just jumping out and scaring me. Like her."
Doug glanced at the robot. "Who?"
"That rude girl. Short. Silent. Scornful. Was just reading some fascinating science projects, minding my own business, and she jumps out! Scares me half to death, and then tells me to quiet down." His optic bobbed. "Selfish, really. Shouldn't have scared me like that if she wanted me to be quiet. Honestly," he said, swooshing past Doug's head as he reversed his way back through the management rail.
"Wait!" he said, grabbing at a handle. "Tell me what happened." The girl had to be Chell—no other person in this madhouse of science would fit that explanation—and yet he wondered in what context those two would have spoken. What could Chell have done to make the robot dislike her so quickly?
"So after she scared me, I was standing there, trying to talk to her, but a couple of very official-looking men stopped by. Looking for her. Very official. Lots of credentials." The robot's optic drifted upwards, and he gave the most deep-in-thought expression he could manage. "So I told 'em, you know? Said where she was hiding."
"Was it security?"
"Ah...no. Going to go with no." His voice wavered, and he gave an unconvincing shake of his head. "The boss lady wanted to see the girl, and I wasn't about to get in her way," he said, ignoring Doug's protests. The man tightened his grip on the lower handle, staring the robot in the eye. It had a tough time making eye contact with the scientist, eye darting every which way and yet never meeting Doug's eyes. He said nothing, knowing fully-well that the robot would continue talking if left uninterrupted.
"She stared them down, then tried to run away, but that did not end well," he said with a small chuckle. "Oh, she was livid. Both of them. Boss lady and the girl."
"But why?"
He gave the robot equivalent of a shrug, bobbing up and down on the management rail. "No idea. Would not want to be her though, heh."
Doug pressed his thumb nail against his tooth. Panic struck him in the chest, full-on and overwhelming. Chell was still in the facility.
She'd never left.
But for the life of him, he couldn't think of a reason why Caroline herself would take such an interest in her. At least, one that involved sending down a makeshift security team.
Unless...
He pulled away from the robot, glancing back over the ledge. As the facility expanded upwards, Aperture's engineers began to play a dangerous game of Jenga. Panels extended. Rooms balanced on top of each other. Pipes and walls merged together in a twisted mess of worn metal and concrete beneath their feet.
"Hold on. You have a map of Aperture built into you, right?" he said, mentally flipping through areas of the salt mine. Testing tracks. Offices. Hiding them in this place would be impossible. They'd have to be somewhere else. Somewhere he wasn't familiar with.
"Though it is bloody difficult to read," the robot said, nodding.\
"Look, is there anything in there that says 'Keep Out?'"
"Never stopped me before, those signs," he said. "Well, this rail goes just about anywhere, to be honest. Ah, hold on. I see it. There to the left. Lots of 'Keep Out' signs there. Wait. I shouldn't be looking at this—God, I'm going to get in trouble for this, aren't I?" The robot blinked once, twice, then continued. "Says it's Caroline's wing. Never seen it before in my, err, life. Existence. Whatever it's called. Time spent as a robot. As me. "
Doug shook his head, rubbing his hands together. The puzzling situation had shifted into a dangerous one. An entire wing, free from employee's eyes. Horror stories bubbled to the front of his mind—tales of unethical experiments and even a few covered-up deaths for disappeared employees. Doug had no idea how hard this might be to navigate, but Chell had been here fora few weeks.
He needed to find her.
And he needed to get her out of here.
He glanced at his watch, tensing at the time. Late afternoon. Though Caroline tended to stay close to her office or cling to the research areas, he—along with the rest of the Aperture staff—had no idea where she disappeared to in the evenings. But now, he could make a pretty good guess.
A few hours. That's all the time he'd have to explore Caroline's wing for a vanished Chell.
"Let's go," said Doug, throwing an arm over his shoulder, beckoning the robot. "Your map. Which way?"
"Ah, well, it's not too far from here—just keep going to the right for a very long time, and you'll hit it. Quite literally, if you happen to be running—it's a, ah sudden stop. Watch out for those doors. Doors. Probably will be locked, though. Good luck with that, mate."
The robot hesitated, then sped to catch up with Doug and lifting his lower handle as to not bang into the man's skull as he sped ahead.
The halls grew plainer. Simpler. But the layout grew more labyrinthine. The entire wing had an eerie, deserted feel to it. Unlike other places in Aperture, there were no scientists, no robots—just non-portable surface after non-portable surface. A few times the scientist took a wrong turn and felt a sick sense of disorientation until the bumbling robot backtracked and guided him in his technically correct yet roundabout method of getting from point A to point B.
A solitary door came into view, just as plain and simple as its surroundings. A keypad sat bolted above a handle. It was small and unassuming, like his own keypad. Not at all like other locks in Aperture.
"That's, err, problematic," said Wheatley. "I hope you know the code."
"No," he said. "We'll have to start at the beginning—keep track of these numbers."
"Got it. Remember all the numbers." The robot nodded. "All of 'em. Easy enough. ALready know zero through nine. Shouldn't be hard to keep track of combinations of those." The robot swiveled. "Exactly where are are you starting?
His fingers brushed the tips of the bubbled buttons, lingering before pressing down.
In the upper right corner, a light blinked red. His shoulders lowered, and he tilted to face the robot.
"Zero-zero-zero-zero," Wheatley narrated. "Ah, well, worth a shot. A valiant effort. Only 9999 more combinations to go."
Doug gave a solemn nod, moving on to 0001, then 0002, and on and on and on until he reached the 1000's.
Crack.
Doug pushed his hands forward, pressing them against one another and listening to individual knuckles pop. Wheatley continued jabbering away, his chatter an unbroken stream of ramblings. Doug pushed in the next code.
"Spinning." His pupil circled around, bumping against his side plates."Fun. But I do not recommend stopping. Everything's still, ahh, twirling. Even though I stopped a while ago. Real world's taking a bit to catch up. Just a small programming problem, I'm sure. It's nothing that you couldn't fix. You know, next time you're prying open my side and messing with my processors."
Doug rubbed the hardened tips of his fingers. Pressing plastic-coated buttons over four thousand times didn't come without consequences.
"Ey, you about done down there? Stay here much longer, and that human's going to send someone. Make sure I'm not stuck or lost. Not reasonable at all, really. It's not like I get lost more than twice a day. "
The scientist double checked his watch—the robot, as much as it pained him to admit, was right. As evening approached, the chances of Caroline discovering them skyrocketed. She'd be out of her office soon, roaming the halls of science with a silent grace and vanishing into an area so secretive and so tucked away that he hadn't believed in its existence until Whealtey's map confirmed it.
At the most, he had an hour.
But even Doug didn't want to cut it that close.
"Just a few more."
Whispers danced on the fringes of his hearing—and even with the artificially intelligent bot watching out, he couldn't shake the overwhelming sense of paranoia that clung to his side like a snail, slowly inches its way higher and higher.
He blinked, reminding himself that he'd taken those meds today. None of this should be happening, and yet it still couldn't help but wish his schizophrenia wasn't so persistent—lurking in corners, fleeting in and out of his daily functions like a passing thought. But even the strongest medicines science had to offer could never completely subdue his lurking illness.
Numbers danced on the keypad, rising up and changing colors. Doug's index finger retracted as he stared at the numbers in question—a one, a three, and a five.
And though he was only at 1044, Doug skipped ahead over a hundred numbers on a whim.
One-one-five-three.
"Wha—what are you doing?"
Click.
The light flashed, then blinked green. The lock clicked, popping open the door so slightly that Doug lunged for the handle to make sure it didn't slip closed and relock.
"Ha!" Wheatley said. "Made it through. Didn't let any old combination stop us. We're a proper team now, you and me. You're doing the number-guessing thing, and I'm doing the, well," he said, making a sound as if in deep thought, "watching out part. Lookout. That's what I am. A lookout. Best one there is.
He creaked open the door, pausing to listen. Whispers still lingered, rising in intensity like a gust of wind through an empty room. He pulled it open farther, propping it open with his foot and glancing down the bright hallway.
Wheatley shot forward on his management rail, gathering speed as he rocketed ahead, only stopping when the hallway split. Though identical in both shape and construction, he turned left. It wasn't a particularly scientific method, but he wasn't doing science here—just trying to find someone in an endless science facility.
"So what exactly are you looking for?" Wheatley said, optic continually shifting and unable to remain still longer than a few seconds. He never focused on Doug's eyes, and instead kept shifting his focus from his left eye to his right eye.
"Not sure," said Doug softly.
"You're not sure? Why'd you bring me along, then? I have honestly no idea what we're doing back here, but I do not like it, I assure you—hold on, is that another locked door? I'll, err, get ready to remember some combinations. Go on, go for it. Just make sure you don't take too long—we're already about to get caught as it is doing this-this break-in thing—what's it called again?"
Doug glanced up. "You should know that. You're a computer."
"Ohh. Well. That's insulting. I'm not some dusty old mainframe here. Far superior. Intelligent, that's what I am—even though it's, ah, artificial. Real enough to me, though," he said. "And I still have no idea what that thing you're doing is, but I'm sure I can figure it out. To save some time, though, would you mind just telling me? A simple word would do. Or two."
"Hacking?"
"Ahh, brilliant! So that's what it's called. Hacking. Need to try that sometime. Pick up some skills. Bet I'd be good at it, too. The best hacker. A master hacker," he said, body jostling as he nodded. "How—how exactly does it work?"
Doug gave him a blank look, and then exhaled. "You just watched me do it," he said, but the artificial intelligence only nodded again and stared at him with a wide-eyed and expectant look.
"Might as well see it again. Doesn't hurt," he chipped, voice cheery.
"Well, if you know the person, it doesn't hurt to guess at their code. You know, easy stuff. What normal people put as their passwords. But," he said. "If none of those work—and you've got a lot of time—start and the beginning and run through each possible combination. Much easier on a computer, where I could just build a program to do some of this for me."
The robot nodded again, watching Doug intently as he punched in four zeroes.
The light didn't flash. The lock didn't click. And one look at the door's upper right corner showed that this door's lock was disabled.
He jiggled the handle. Rattle. He pulled again, grip firmer. It slid open.
"Ah. Nicely done," said Wheatley. "First try, too. Impressive. Writing that down here. Door access code—" he announced, the sound of pen scratching against paper coming from his speakers. "Zero-zero-zero-zero."
"No, it's not that," said Doug. A mental image spun to the forefront of his mind as he pried at the side panel of the keypad, a picture of his own keypad, easily disabled with a correct code and a few internal tweaks. The memory of him and Caroline strolling down the hallway, of him laughing because for once the cold CEO had made a joke and been—for a fleeting moment—human. Caroline was just as lazy as he was, if not more so.
Doug smiled as he pushed his way in, fingers trailing on the door's cool metal.
After the first unlocked door, about half of the subsequent rooms popped open with a twist of the handle. It made sense, of course. This was Caroline's wing, and it would be impractical for her to lock each and every door. A select few knew the key to get in—and as long as she kept the exterior doors locked, it was redundant to enable he interior ones, especially along her most-commonly traveled paths.
"Pretty good team, you and I?" said Wheatley, but the scientist moved on and twisted doorknobs. Like the way he found the combination, there were only a certain number of rooms, a certain number of hallways and dead ends he had to go through until he found Chell.
"You wouldn't believe what's back here!" said Wheatley, voice growing increasingly louder as they progressed without an encounter. "There's an entire testing track up ahead! Madness. How could she even hide 19 chambers back here?"
"Hold on," said Doug, ducking into a nondescript office. "Are there any vaults in there?"
The robot clicked as gears grinded in his head. "Ah, well, there are plenty of observation rooms—though I'd stay away from those. Too visible. No guarantee of who might be sitting there, watching. Or who might show up," he said. "Well, there's a little row of extended relaxation rooms to the right, and a few short-term vaults pulled away from the testing track entirely. Only looks like…one's active, though. Imagine that. All these chambers for testing and so few test subjects. Rest must be in long-term storage."
"That's her. That's got to be her," said Doug, darting from the room. The robot sped ahead, fully ready to lead the scientist onward. They'd gotten a map, a destination, and now they had a motivation.
All they had to do was get to her.
A/N: So sorry for the delay! Real life got SO busy for me for a couple that I barely had the time and brainpower to write ;n;. Now that it's summer, though, things will be back to normal!
Oh, and the number 1153 spells out cake on my phone's keypad, so that's why I chose that number :3
I also forgot to make clear that in the last chapter, the radio that Caroline gives Chell has more than one station. It was meant as an act of kindness.
