The planet had gradually transitioned from 'notable sphere on the left' to an unmissable wall; Wheatley could no longer see its horizons without physically turning in his casing.
"Wow, to think it was just a speck before." He mused. "Look at it now, it's bloody massive!"
By now, the two cores were close enough that the planet's sun had disappeared behind it. Clusters of lights sprinkled the ground far below. Those, too, grew steadily larger.
"Huh… It's getting a little warm. Do you feel—" Wheatley stopped himself. "Never mind."
That warmth, barely a prickle at first, became hotter and hotter. It sunk deeper and deeper—blistering, searing, scorching—eating through his shell…
All sorts of alerts that Wheatley had never seen before (but then, when would he have? This was his first atmospheric re-entry) shrieked at him in an unholy chorus, but there was nothing he could do. White-hot panic enveloped him—or was that the sparking ball of plasma?
The last thing he witnessed before being forcibly shut down was his lifeless companion, glowing red-hot…
…and then he rebooted.
His optic plates refused to open wider than an inch or two (enough to see out of, at least) but the rest of him felt stiff, possibly welded.
"Spacey?" He tried to call out, but his speech synthesizer was either fried to a crisp or missing entirely. A few other small (but not vital, thank goodness) pieces of hardware had apparently suffered a similar fate. His audio feed, however, seemed intact, if full of crackles and pops.
Being a sphere with no limbs, Wheatley had little power to move himself when things weren't stuck together. Now, he could do nothing but watch and wait for help to arrive, if it ever did, as clouds of dust blew across his field of vision.