Chapter 24 - The Long Sleep
Inside the labyrinth walls
There lies a tiny child
who sleeps alone
("My Medea" by Vienna Teng)
NOTE: The first scene of this chapter contains a depiction of body horror that may be upsetting to read. If that is the case, please skip from the beginning of the chapter to the first horizontal scene break, and begin reading at the sentence "Doug clicked..."
The tiny display on the relaxation pod glitched, becoming a mess of lines and garbled numbers as power surged through the Enrichment Center.
The system blinked, numbers blanking.
00:00:00
00:00:00
It flashed the number up as if no one was in the pod. As if its current inhabitant hadn't been there for years.
But—like every other relaxation vault in Aperture—the reset from the AI's activation caused this vault to switch from online to idle.
Chell took a deep breath, coughing as fresh air swirled in. Air hissed; the glass panel jerked backward. A headache pulsed through her head and she pressed her eyes closed. She twisted onto her side, fighting back the sickening groggy feeling in the pit of her stomach. It felt as though she'd nodded off on a couch somewhere, accidentally sleeping for hours rather than minutes. She remained on her side with her eyes closed and her breaths steady.
Awareness slipped back into her. After another five minutes passed, she reached out a hand to cling to the edge. Chell inched her way upright. Her vertigo peaked; her knuckles turned white as she kept herself from pitching forward.
With each motion, her clothes pulled against her. It wasn't a comfortable stretch like slipping on a favorite and worn pair of sweatpants—more like a tight and constricting feeling, as if someone forced a doll's clothes onto a person.
Chell's expression twisted. She rolled her shoulders forward experimentally. The shirt pulled taught against her chest, the armpit seams digging into her skin. She pulled at it for a bit, adjusting and twisting until it felt vaguely less uncomfortable.
It didn't make sense—last time she'd checked, her clothes fit fine. All she'd done was sleep for a few hours.
Frowning, she tried to extend a leg. Pain spiked in her toes, throbbing with each heartbeat. She winced and clenched her teeth. Her feet felt like they had been jammed into three sizes too small—and she needed to get them off. Chell leaned forward to yank at the laces, untying then prying off the sneakers. She tossed them aside, wiggling her toes and giving a sigh of relief.
The inseams of her pants dug into her skin as she leaned back. Chell glanced down at her bare feet, noting that the bottom cuff of the pants hugged her mid-calf. She bent over to yank at the fabric until the elastic snapped, then rolled the sweatpants up to just beneath the advanced knee replacements. At this point she didn't care if it looked dorky-it wasn't as though there was anyone around to make fun of her for it.
Deep red markings from the elastic patterned her legs. Chell leaned forward to rub at her calves, wondering once again just why her clothes had shrunk.
There must have been something in the suspension's chemical solution, she thought. That must have caused her clothes to shrink. Considering she was still in Aperture it didn't surprise her. She couldn't even take a simple nap in this place without something going awry.
She combed a hand through her hair, grimacing at the grease. As soon as she made it over to the mirror, she'd put it up into a ponytail again. Better to get it up and out of her face.
Her legs trembled as she took a few uneasy steps. The balls of her feet took the brunt of her weight this time—much better than stretching up on her tiptoes like before. It helped to have more experience with these. Already she felt more comfortable and more fitted to them.
She wobbled over to the mirror, bracing her hands on the edge of the counter. She glanced down as she edged up onto her toes, stretching out her tight calves. She still couldn't figure out why the advanced knee replacements suddenly fit better, but she wasn't about to complain.
Chell relaxed her legs, sinking back onto the balls of her feet. With a roll of her wrist she pulled off the hairband, rolling it between her fingers as she glanced up.
Her heartbeat spiked as she caught her reflection.
That wasn't her.
Chell twisted, glancing over her shoulder to take in the empty room. Silence drifted down, heavy and pressing like snowfall in the night. She looked for movement, for any signs of life—but every pod, every counter, every corner of the room remained empty no matter how hard she looked.
This had to be a mistake. It just had to.
Chell pulled a hand to her chest, fingers twisting into the fabric. Her eyes met her reflection; the mirror matched each minuscule movement she made. She was alone in this room. But that just couldn't be her.
She stared straight ahead at her reflection for a long moment, scaring herself with the intensity of her gaze. She wasn't used to seeing such a steeled and bitter expression, one that instantly shifted to fear as she examined her face.
Lines etched across her forehead—pronounced, defined. Almost like wrinkles. Her cheekbones jutted out and her lips seemed puffier, angrier. Her hair draped around her face, darker and messier and longer than she remembered. Chell pressed her palm against the side of the mirror to steady herself, staring up to notice a single gray-tinted hair drift in front of her eyes.
She looked so old.
This wasn't her. There was no possible way this could be her.
It was a mistake. It had to be.
She was twelve years old and just adjusting to a new life. She was young and she was still in school and still doing silly little potato batteries and sliding notes across the table to her friends.
Chell's lip trembled.
But that person staring back at her—she wasn't young. She was maybe in her twenties, thirties. The more she looked at the reflection, the more details she picked up. More gray hairs streaked down her head; she was taller and more filled-out than the young Chell she should be.
She clenched her teeth as she twisted her hair into a ponytail. A few hairs strayed; she reached up a careful hand to slip them behind her ear. She gave a choked sound as her hand moved away. Pulling back her hair only emphasized her cheekbones and the lines on her face.
This was a mistake. Just a simple mistake, an easy error from the suspension process. There had to be a solution to it, she told herself. An easy fix. Aperture used this sort of technology all the time, after all.
Her stomach twisted as she gave a sick internal laugh. Nothing she'd ever done here before had ever been reversible. She knew this. But still, she had to hope that something could fix this. There had to be someone up there who could change her back to the way she was.
All she'd done was fall asleep.
She moved toward the Quantum Tunneling Device she'd left propped against the wall last night. There had to be someone up there that could help. Someone had to know how to change her back to the way she was, and she'd risk encountering Caroline a hundred times if they could just fix her.
But as she reached for the straps, her hands brushed a thick layer of dust.
Doug clicked his pen against the conference room in a constant rhythm.
Beside him sat a marked-up whiteboard peppered with all sorts of wild ideas. Despite having little significant success, everyone in here had been brainstorming for hours now. Some actively participated in solving the problem at hand. Others simply engaged in small-talk, their occasionally animated discussions giving off the illusion of productivity.
Though a member of the productive group himself, Doug felt his attention keep drifting between the two.
"It's no good," Karla barked. "I had to pull off the core after a half hour. Too much corruption."
"But did it even work?"
"Sure, for about twenty-nine minutes."
"No, but did it work?"
"Well," she said. "The AI didn't even notice us poking around the systems. Still, we're going to need a longer window of time if we want to keep working on it."
"Just use Wheatley again, then?" someone else suggested.
Karla shook her head, giving an almost offended scoff. "Attaching it once already decreased its intelligence and increased the rambling. Further corruption might destroy him altogether."
"So make new cores," another scientist piped in.
Karla stared at him, snapping the lid onto her dry-erase marker. "Wheatley took us months to build and he's already useless." She gave a bitter snort. "We don't have the time to build several more of these personalities from scratch."
The room lulled; the scientist sunk back into her chair.
"Wait," said Doug. "We don't have to start from scratch."
Karla gave him an unimpressed glare. "You do realize that using a human mind is what got us into this mess, right?"
Doug waved his hands in the air. "No, no—" he said. "Not a whole personality. Parts of it. Dominant characteristics." He swiped the capped marker through the air as if sectioning off portions of the brain. "Just place your focus on the frontal cortex and find strong personality traits," he said. "Then just make cores based on those qualities."
"Won't they be too focused? Too," a scientist paused, looking for the word. "Too flat?"
"We don't need the cores to act with the full emotional depth of a human," Doug said, twisting the cap of the marker. "They're just a distraction."
Karla gave a sigh, pressing her hand against her chin. "Since the procedure's less invasive now, we can do it without any sort of surgery," she said. "And the human mind is still complex enough to provide a basis for several of these so-called 'personality' cores."
"Exactly," said Doug. "We don't need to digitize and reconstruct the essence of a human. Just some specific personality traits—maybe one based on an emotion like excitability, or another focused on a specific interest, like neuroscience."
"We don't want the AI to burn through them all at once like it did with Wheatley, said another scientist.
"Trust me. If you really want to subdue that machine, use as many as possible," Doug said, turning the pen over in his hand.
"Why?"
"Because I know just how distracting voices in your head can be."
Chell ran.
Time had undeniably passed. The exact length of time, though, remained a mystery.
She felt no need to sneak around. No reason to be quiet, and no reason to glance over her shoulder at every turn. Those initially searching for her must have given up by now.
Perhaps no one would recognize her.
The thought brought a faint smile to her lips, briefly appearing between her short and labored breaths.
Perhaps she'd even be able to slip out of Aperture unnoticed.
The thought disappeared as quickly as her smile. Even if she could pull off a perfect escape, she had no idea what she'd do after that. She didn't know who to call or where to go, and the mere thought of that made fear pool in her stomach.
She paused for a moment, catching her breath. For now, she'd stick to one goal: finding Doug. First and foremost she needed to figure out what had happened to her.
The Quantum Tunneling Device rattled against her back as Chell twisted and weaved through identical hallways. Each catwalk looked the same, and she struggled to recall the path she'd taken before. Her exact location in the facility had blurred in her mind. With so much pain and adrenalin and fear combined with a lingering mental fog from the suspension, she just didn't know.
But as she sprinted across a catwalk and over a dizzying drop, the sheer space beneath her hinted that she wasn't far from the modern enrichment center.
Chell slipped into the nearest functioning elevator, clutching to the sides as it lurched to life.
"Now, whose mind will we use first?" Henry said, making eye contact with each employee in the room.
"Test subjects or volunteers," Karla said. She stretched out her arms, then pulled them back across her lap. "Employees if we get desperate. Honestly, anyone with half of a brain should have enough personality traits for at least a few cores."
"Is there anyone whose traits would be particularly effective against her?
said Henry.
"Maybe someone close to her," said Karla.
Doug gave a snort. Caroline wasn't one to forge close bonds with people.
Greg shot Doug a look before leaning back into his plush executive chair. He absently rubbed a thumb along the hand rest. "She didn't trust a lot of people," he said. "She found me trustworthy." He gave a slight shrug. She'd trusted him and he'd ended up turning his back on her, so perhaps he wasn't the best example of well-placed trust.
Henry flipped the whiteboard to begin a new list of names. "I'm putting all of us on here," he said. "Don't worry. These are just harmless brain scans—and we're as good of a place to start as any." He sectioned off an area of the board with a few wavy lines, and wrote a list that gradually shifted to the right with each additional name.
Doug studied his name for a wary moment. As usual, Henry forgot the second "n" on his last name. He cleared his throat. "You're forgetting someone," he said.
Henry raised an eyebrow, waiting for him to continue. As far as he knew, he'd written all of their names down.
"We can't expect any of the cores created from us to influence her," said Doug. "She never listened to us to begin with. There's only ever been one person she's ever willingly taken orders from."
"Cave Johnson," Karla breathed, nodding.
Greg frowned. "Cave Johnson is dead," he grumbled. "He's no help to us now." All of this talk of Caroline and of Cave wore him down. After all, he ran this place now and he'd had enough of this constant referencing of the old company heads.
"Hold on, Doug's onto something," said Karla. "We have a few of Mr. Johnson's brain scans still," she said. "No idea how accurate they'd be, since they're from his last years." Though Cave Johnson stayed relatively sane as he approached death, the moon rock poisoning took its toll both physically and mentally. Even clear and accurate brain scans wouldn't necessarily reflect Cave's true personality—the one Caroline idolized once upon a time.
"But there's still got to be something there we can use," said Doug. "Or at least traits of his we can also find within some of us."
Henry moved toward the whiteboard. "Let's figure this out right now," he said, wielding his erasable marker like a scepter. "Who here personally knew Mr. Johnson?"
Doug, along with the rest of the room, shook his head no. Though several joined the company before the man's death, growing close to him proved to be an impossible task. Trying to get onto Cave's good side was like trying to push two magnets of the same polarization together. Even the higher-ups stood no chance, much less the new hires.
Still, they'd all heard Cave Johnson's infamous recordings. His booming voice and passionate rambles provided them with at least a hint of how his mind and personality worked.
"Alright, then let's get brainstorming," said Henry. "Start giving me some traits."
An unspoken question hovered in the room, visible through slight frowns and confused looks. These traits Henry was looking for—did they have to necessarily be positive? Though they'd rather not say mean things about the former CEO, Cave Johnson had not been a nice man. And yet, even terrible men got idealized funeral speeches.
Henry pressed the bottom of the marker into the palm of his hand. "This list isn't going to write itself."
A skittish-looking scientist near the front raised a few fingers to catch Henry's attention. "Danger?"
Henry raised his eyebrows and waited for further clarification. As far as he knew, danger wasn't a personality trait. Danger-ous perhaps. But not danger.
The scientist glanced down. "Well, more like of a lack of regard for safety measures," he said. "He didn't care if anyone got hurt—said it wasn't real science unless someone ended up in the hospital," he said. "He was so bent on getting results that he didn't care about being safe. So not danger. Adventure. That's what he'd call it."
Henry pointed the marker at the employee and bobbed his head. He twisted back and jabbed the tip into the board to make a bullet point. In bold letters he wrote ADVENTURE.
"Excellent," he said. "What else?"
A few moments passed before someone spoke up. "Well," the scientist said. "I heard he liked space."
Karla nodded. "Yeah," she said. "Back when Aperture had quality test subjects—seasoned veterans, celebrated athletes—he used to get starstruck. But never as much as when former astronauts reported for testing."
"What about those problems with the government?"
"Eh, after the astronauts failed testing and went 'missing,'" she said, emphasizing the airquotes, "Senate hearings happened. I heard he felt bad about it, but clearly not bad enough to stop recruiting astronauts for as long as possible." She shrugged. "The man was crazy for space."
"Plus," said Doug, "no one buys $70 million worth of moon rocks unless they really like space."
"Okay, these are good." Doug—along with several others—nodded, and Henry turned back to add another word to their list: SPACE.
"Okay, those are good," said Henry. "Let's just get one or two more for now. What else?"
More time passed. The vast majority of those in this room had to go off of caricatures and memories of old voiceovers. None of them really knew Cave. Just his reputation.
"What about facts?" Doug suggested, recalling recordings he'd overheard near the Borealis. Stuff like how the human body was sixty percent water, or the exact age to expect to see symptoms of asbestos poisoning, or more ridiculous stuff about turning blood to peanut water or gasoline. Whether these facts were true or not didn't matter. Rather, it was the confident, self-assured manner he spoke with that made people believe that these facts were true.
"So make a core to just spit out fun facts?" said Henry.
"No, corrupted ones," said Doug. "Maybe they start off true or maybe they have a bit of truth to them. Just alter them so that there's something wrong about each one. Make the computer constantly second-guess and constantly fact-check everything it spits at her."
Henry nodded, absently tapping on the end of the marker. "Let's go ahead and put our efforts into those—if they don't work, we'll make more. But these three are our best shot, especially when combined."
As he moved to sit in his chair, a shrill ring made Henry jump. A light flashed from the conference room's phone.
Greg leaned back in his chair-a natural, practiced motion. "Aperture Laboratories," he chimed. "Hold on. What? Do you know who it is?"
He paused, face darkening.
"I'll send someone right down."
He hung up, leaning forward. "There's a security breach," he said, eyebrows furrowing. "But it's coming from the condemned areas of Aperture."
A/N: Some of you long-time readers might notice a scene in the middle there that looks familiar. When I first started writing this fic, I opened with a scene of Chell also about to make her way back up to modern Aperture, but then retconned it as my plot developed more. So, now it's made its comeback!
Also, sorry for the delays in writing this. This chapter was rather painful to write. Especially the beginning.
