Looking out at the inside of a crater (through an even more broken optic) proved to be about as eventful as drifting through a cosmic void, except what this planet lacked in chattering, space-obsessed white noise, it more than made up for in sand. Bazillions of tiny particles that all seemed to want to take up residence in Wheatley's casing, crunching, sticking, and just generally getting itself wedged in every little nook and cranny.
Suffice to say, Wheatley had sand in places he couldn't mention in polite company.
With time, more and more of the nasty stuff found its way into his crater (and by extension, into him, which he did not enjoy in the slightest), slowly erasing all evidence of an extraterrestrial encounter. The winds rose and died seemingly at random, but at their worst, they scraped Wheatley raw.
The crackling in his audio feed never went away, though it seemed to get worse with the weather, clipping in and out of existence and sometimes quitting altogether. Storms would blow by in silence while he fiddled around in hopes of getting his hearing back, or his voice, or maybe discovering a setting he could use to get himself out of this maddening predicament.
The sky lightened and darkened independent of all this, and sometimes, when it was clear, Wheatley got a glimpse of the celestial pool he'd been floating in not too long ago.
He couldn't tilt himself upward or open his sand-crusted optic plates further to get a better look, but he saw them all the same: bazillions of twinkling lights all staring back down at him from across the cosmos.
Aperture was gone.
Oh, it was still out there, probably, and She was probably still testing—unless the facility really had exploded because of him—but then, the last thing She'd said to him was that she'd 'already fixed it'. Everything he'd broken, She'd somehow made right, all in the time it took to yank him from Her body.
I already fixed it, and you are NOT coming back.
Exile wasn't so bad, he told himself. Sure, his already limited mobility had been limited even further by the fall, and sure, maybe the constant sand-blaster to his everything wasn't doing him any favours—but at least there were no incinerators or mashy spike plates for Her to toss him into.
Yes, Aperture was gone.
Along with it, everything that Wheatley had ever known.
Something rose up on the horizon, up, up over the edge of the crater where even Wheatley could see it: a great, ominous blanket that blotted out the stars and the sky itself, rumbling towards him.