Part Twenty-One. The Idea

"There you are."

Wheatley knew it was Rattmann again, but he didn't care. He didn't care about anything. All he cared about was his wish that the camera he'd found himself next to would lift from the default position and look at him, and that her voice would come over the intercom and she would chastise him for being such a moron and thinking she was dead. Only she wouldn't really mean it and would only be teasing, and he would go back to her through her perfectly operational facility and he would be so happy to see her that he would just go up to her and put himself beside her no matter how much she didn't want him to, because he was so lonely and sad without her…

"What d'you want," he asked dully, knowing full well that humans never went away unless you placated them, especially not in post-apocalyptic environments.

"Are you all right?"

"Like you care."

"It's hard for me to do this, you know. I want to help you, but the more difficult you are the less I'm going to be able to."

"I don't care. I want you to go away."

Rattmann said nothing after that, and after a few moments Wheatley couldn't help peeking to see if he was still there.

He was sitting against the wall opposite Wheatley, staring right at him.

Bollocks.

"Are you all right?" the human repeated.

"Oh yeah, I'm great, thanks. My best friend is dead… I killed her… facility's falling down around me… and I'm talking to a human! Yeah! Best day of my entire bloody life, mate!"

The human rubbed his face very hard with both hands. "Why are you cores always like this."

"Because we don't trust you. Obviously. Why would we bother? There's no point!"

"If GLaDOS didn't trust me, she would've thrown me out a long time ago," Rattmann said seriously. Wheatley winced at the mention of her name. It hurt to hear it.

"Well I… I guess that's true."

"What happened?"

"I told you. I killed her."

Rattmann shook his head. "That doesn't make sense. You said you cared about her and then you proceeded to blame humans for what happened to her. Where do you factor into it?"

"It was me that… that caused it. I told you. She couldn't, couldn't come to grips when I told her. She said it was like a paradox. She couldn't make it make sense."

Rattmann blinked, eyes widening a little. "She couldn't understand why you would… why you would love her?"

"That's right," Wheatley answered. "She crashed trying to… to make it make sense. She tried. She tried really hard. But she… she couldn't. I tried to help but I just made it worse. And she crashed, and now, now she's gone, because I should've just kept it to myself."

Rattmann looked at the floor for a long moment, then said, "Don't regret what you said."

"How can I not? It killed her!"

"I think she'd agree when I say that it was probably worth it."

"Worth what? Nothing's worth anything when you're dead!"

"I think that it would be worth it to die knowing that someone loved you. Even if it killed you. Even if it was the last thing you ever knew. Because you're right. We did do that to her. And I think that, no matter how scared or confused she was, somehow she was happy to know that you were willing to say that."

Wheatley looked at the floor. "D'you… d'you know what happens when you die?"

Rattmann shrugged and shook his head. "It could be any number of things."

"I was supposed to go first," Wheatley mumbled. "I was supposed to go and make a case for her to the God of AI when I got to heaven, because she couldn't make herself believe in it. And now maybe… now maybe she didn't get to go there, because I didn't get a chance to explain it."

Rattmann's brow creased. "You… you talked about that?"

"We talk about… talked about everything." His voice broke a little as he said it, because of course he would never talk to her about anything ever again.

"I think that the… the God of AI would probably understand. Even if you weren't able to get there first and explain it."

Wheatley looked up. "Really?"

"I would hope so."

His upper shutter lowered, and he looked away from Rattmann, to the right. "I… I don't think it'd be fair, really, if she didn't get to go to heaven. I mean, she was so unhappy for so much of her life and, and surely the God of AI would know that, and let her be happy, now that she… that she's dead."

"That's probably what happened," Rattmann said softly.

"You're just saying that, aren't you."

"It's not up to me to say what you believe in."

"She didn't believe in anything," Wheatley whispered. "She only believed in science. And science says that when you're dead, you're dead."

"Empty answers," Rattmann said to himself.

"What?"

"Science is what you believe in when you don't have faith," Rattmann told him. "Why do you think she always went on about it? Science is about finding answers. She was looking for something."

"What… what was she looking for?"

Rattmann shook his head. "I can't say for sure. I can only give you my guess. That's the problem, of course."

Wheatley frowned. "The problem?"

"It's a philosophical conundrum. Socrates, I think. If you don't know what you're looking for, how will you know when you've found it? How will you know that you can stop looking?"

"That's sad," Wheatley said quietly. "To spend your whole life looking for something and, and never knowing if you already came across it."

"I think she did find it."

"How would you know if she found it, and not her?"

"Because people often miss what's right in front of them." He smiled a little. "Even omniscient supercomputers."

"What was it?" Wheatley asked, confused. How could Rattmann possibly know what it was, if she didn't?

"It was you."

"Me?" Wheatley laughed bitterly. "Trust me, mate, she wasn't looking for me. Not only am I really hard to miss, due to my never shutting up, but there's no way that she, of all people, was looking for someone like me."

Rattmann laughed at this, and Wheatley frowned. "What's so funny?"

"I feel like I'm in the middle of a movie," he said. "One where two people are obviously going to be living happily ever after. Except it's only obvious to everyone else. The two of them are so involved in trying to figure out what they want that they never realise what they were looking for was right in front of them the whole time. Until the end, that is. I never thought it actually happened in real life."

"We're real," Wheatley insisted, feeling like he'd just been insulted.

"I'm sure you've thought of this before, but if she didn't care about you, you would be dead, to put it bluntly."

"Well, yeah… I, I thought about that. A few times."

"Whenever you think that you weren't good enough for her, you just remind yourself of that, then. If she didn't care about you at least a little bit, she'd have put you somewhere she'd never see you again and forgotten about you."

"She uh… she brought me back in here out of space, actually."

Rattmann shook his head. "I don't even want to know how you ended up in space."

"It's a… a long story. And I… I couldn't tell it right now, anyway."

The human laced his fingers together. "I understand."

"I uh… I'm sorry for what I said, earlier," Wheatley went on. "I didn't… well, maybe I did mean it, but uh, it wasn't your fault, specifically, far as I know you didn't even work on her and I remember you wouldn't talk to her but uh, I, I didn't totally mean it. I just… I don't know what to do, and I know it was my fault and prob'ly not the fault of humans at all, but I just… I… it hurts, and… and I don't know how to make it go away."

"You can't make it go away just like that," Rattmann said quietly. "You have to wait."

"How long?"

"I don't know. It depends on the person and the circumstances, I guess."

"It's… it's never going to stop, then. Because… well, ev'rywhere I go, you can just, you can tell, she's, she's obviously not here, and it's, it's not like I can get away from it."

"I'm sorry," Rattmann told him.

"Thanks," Wheatley answered.

They lapsed into silence, and during a long moment in which Wheatley closed his optic plates and then opened them again slowly, Rattmann disappeared. That was okay. He probably had better things to do than hang out with a moping core all day long.

He could not stop thinking about her.

He was remembering her almost helplessly, even though it hurt more to think of her alive than it did to think of nothing at all, and he just sat there, remembering and remembering, and God, even the times that'd been horrible when they'd happened were positive now. Even the whole incident with the potato. Even that was wonderful, because she was still alive, she was wonderfully, vibrantly alive, and he could hardly stand it when he thought of how badly he wished she still were. He would have to stop remembering, and close his optic plates and draw in his chassis very tightly, and struggle to deal with the pain. Because it hurt so much but it would not go away. He had never dreamed that this much pain was possible. Every tiny piece of him hurt, every gear and every screw and every little molecule he was made of, and thinking of molecules only made it hurt more, because molecules were part of science and science was part of her…

And he thought about what Rattmann had said, about him being good enough, and it was oddly comforting, really, to think that he really had been, and she'd only reacted the way she had because she could not believe that she was good enough, either. And it was almost kind of funny, really, that they'd both thought the same thing, and they'd both been wrong… he was going to tease her about that, he was, how she was wrong for once just like he was, and he could not wait to see the look on her face…

"No!" he cried out, and his chassis was shaking uncontrollably, because when he finally opened his optic he had to face that she was dead. When he couldn't see she was still there, somewhere, and now she wasn't, and the panels were sticking awkwardly out of alignment and bits and pieces were falling out of the ceiling, and he had to be dying right now because he could not imagine why this much pain would exist if he wasn't. She had told him that she was able to hide her pain because the function of pain was to tell you to change something, to tell you to stop doing whatever was causing it so that you wouldn't permanently damage yourself, and she already knew what the problem was and so didn't have to feel the pain anymore, and she'd told him about humans who couldn't feel pain, about children who would break their own fingers to get what they wanted because they couldn't feel it, who would destroy their bodies by mistake because they couldn't even do something as simple as figure out when they needed to shift their weight, and…

And…

Wait.

He looked around for a moment. He had a feeling he'd been onto something there, before he'd gone off on that tangent about humans, and he went over his thoughts as best he could. After a few minutes of thinking, he realised what it was:

The function of pain was to tell you to change something.

Okay. So, he had to change something. He was hurting, and it wasn't going to go away for a long time, that was what Rattmann had said, so he had to change something to help it along.

But what? What could he possibly change?

There was only one way to go about this, and Wheatley didn't like it, he didn't like it one bit, but there it was, and he shuttered his optic very tightly and forced himself to ask the question:

What would GLaDOS do?

Well, she would… she would probably do her best to keep going on. She usually did that. So what could Wheatley do to keep going on?

He could… he could go find Atlas and P-body, and tell them what was happening. They were kind of like her kids and they should probably know that she was dead. They'd probably like to know. They should probably know where their mum had gone. Okay. He'd get on that, then.

He set off through the facility, trying to think of where he would find them. He thought about pinging Location Services, to see if it would answer, but decided against it. Probably it wouldn't. Probably the facility had found out what he'd done by now, and it would fight him. Oh well. Didn't matter. Atlas and P-body would listen, he knew that. They'd forgiven him a long time ago.

He made his way with some difficulty to the reassembly machine she usually kept them at, at a loss as to where else they'd be, and was somewhat relieved to find that they were still there. They were standing near the reassembly chambers, clinging to each other and looking at each other nervously. He felt another pang of sadness run through him. Those poor robots. "Oi! You guys!" he called out.

They jumped in unison. Atlas leaned forward, throwing his hands up in the air and chattering at Wheatley, but he shook his chassis.

"Don't, don't even bother," he told the blue bot. "I don't know what you're saying, so let's just, let's just skip that bit. Look, I've… I've got something to tell you, and I… it won't be easy to, to take. Just hear me out, alright?"

They both nodded and looked at him obediently.

"She's… she's dead," he told them, wincing at his own words. "She's gone, and… and I'll be straight with you, it was my fault. I didn't mean to do it, but I did, and… and she's gone. That's why, uh, that's why ev'rything looks like this. She's not holding it together anymore."

The bots looked at each other, speaking almost inaudibly and gesturing, and he hoped they wouldn't be terribly angry with him. "I'm so sorry," he went on, quietly. "If I'd known, I would've done it diff'rently. I never meant to hurt her. It was a mistake. And if you're mad at me, well, that's, that's okay, but I just thought you should prob'ly know. I'm really sorry. I… I wish it were different."

They looked at each other for a long moment, and Wheatley turned to go. Well, that was done. He had to think of something else to do, now, he didn't know what it might be but he'd think of something. That was what he was for, right? Ideas? And surely he was able to think of good ones, now, because he'd been around her for so long she was bound to have rubbed off on him, and hopefully he was a bit smarter now –

Someone was tugging on his lower handle and he flipped his optic down to see who it was.

P-body was holding onto him, because she was the taller of the two, he supposed, and gesturing at him to come back. He did so, confused. What did she want? She did understand that he didn't understand her, right?

She reached up and pulled down on his chassis, a little bit, and he supposed she wanted him to disengage from the management rail. He wasn't sure why she would want such a thing, unless she wanted to torture him or something, but he was pretty sure neither of them knew how to torture anybody. He decided to do what she seemed to want. It wasn't like he was actually going anywhere anyway.

She brought him down carefully and walked back over to Atlas. All of a sudden they were both hugging him at the same time, mashing him in between their cores, and he was so touched and so saddened that he whimpered. They understood. They were telling him that it was okay and they would all miss her together, and it would be hard but they would do it. After a long moment, Atlas backed away and P-body put him back up on the control arm and patted him a few times with her right hand. He looked down at them sadly.

"Thanks, guys," he told them. "That was… that helped a lot. I… I'll fix this, somehow. I dunno how I'm gonna do it, but I will. Thank you."

They both nodded solemnly and simultaneously put an arm across the other's shoulder assemblies. P-body gave him a little wave as he turned around, bending her fingers up and down a couple times, and Atlas held his hand up in farewell. Wheatley nodded once at them and headed off. At least they had each other. It would've been terrible if one of them'd been alone. That was why there were two, he remembered. Because there was only one of her, and she'd been lonely when she'd planned them out.

He rode along aimlessly, not really knowing where he was going to go next but not wanting to do nothing, because he had to keep busy, like she did, and the sight of the ruined facility would have broken his heart had it not already been in a million pieces, like the wing made of glass that she'd never gotten around to fixing. He should have helped her. He should have helped her sort out all those pieces and helped her put it back together…

He wondered if he should try and tell any of the other systems about what had happened. It was kind of not right, to leave them in the dark like this, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the right thing to do.

He looked around for a port that didn't seem too damaged, and after a few minutes of searching through the available maintenance arms he found one that worked okay and he instructed it to pop him on the port. Once he was connected there was a shower of sparks and it almost hurt, but not quite, because nothing that could happen to his hull could compare with what was happening inside it. He took a breath and called the mainframe.

What.

"I have to tell you something."

Well, say it, then.

"She's gone. She's not coming back."

That's what you said last time. She proved you wrong then, didn't she?

"She's… I killed her. It was an accident, and I didn't mean to do it, but she's, she's really gone, this time. I… I just wanted to tell you that. So you would know. And so you could tell ev'ryone else, I guess."

The mainframe was quiet for a long, long moment.

"I'm gonna… I'm gonna go. I… sorry for bothering you. And I'm sorry for, for all this. I didn't know it was going to happen. If I had, I… I would've kept it to myself."

She's really gone this time? the mainframe asked in desperation.

"Really. I… I don't know what happened, exactly, but something in her core, something in there went, and she's, she's gone." He waited a few moments, then repeated, "I'll go. Sorry to bother you."

Do you have to?

Wheatley blinked. "Well… no. I don't. Have anything to do. Or anywhere to go, for that matter."

You don't have to… to do anything, the mainframe told him. It's just the lack of presence that makes it hard. You don't know what it's like here without her.

"No, I don't," Wheatley said quietly, "but I do know what it's like here. I… I don't want to sit on this port all day, though." He didn't think he could stand being in the same place for very long.

You can connect through the control arm as well.

"That's settled, then," Wheatley answered. "Back in a sec."

He had the maintenance arm attach him to the control arm again, and as soon as it had done so it fell out of the ceiling, frayed wires spraying sparks. He looked at it in horror. One second longer, and he might've been stuck on the floor forever.

"What're you guys going to do?" he asked the mainframe. "Without her, what… what do you even do with yourselves?"

Nothing, the mainframe answered. We need instructions and without a Central Core, we don't receive any. We're going to be stuck in limbo until the power runs out. Again.

Wheatley hesitated. He'd just had an idea, but he wasn't sure if he was the one to carry it out. In fact, he knew he wasn't, but who else was there?

"Look… I know we got off on the wrong foot, last time. But… but I think we need to, to work together, here. She's gone, and she's not coming back. If, if we don't do something, we're all just gonna, all just gonna fall apart until the facility collapses. Which it's already doing. And we're already doing. Or at least I am. Dunno 'bout you. Anyway… if I were to… if I were to sort of, y'know, try and hold things together, would you… would you listen to me?"

The mainframe did not answer.

"I don't mean I would replace her," Wheatley continued hurriedly. "I know I couldn't, can't do that. I know that, for sure. I won't be taking her chassis and, and nothing fancy'll be happening. I just mean if I, if I tried to maintain the minimum requirements… would you let me?"

Still no answer. Well, he supposed he could keep talking. Not like he was busy.

"I mean… this pain's not gonna go away if we don't, if we don't do something about it, I dunno 'bout you but I, I'm hurting quite a lot, I am, and… and I need to do something about it. I need to… to do something about what I've done. I didn't mean to kill her, I only… I only wanted her to know that I… that… well, I just… if you'd just help me out here, and let me, let me keep busy, I'd, I'd appreciate it, and… please, just… just let me do something that means something." His shutters were closed and his voice was broken and barely audible. "Please, just… let me do something to keep her alive."

All right.

"Thank you."

I can't tell you what instructions to give, but I'll do what I can.

Wheatley nodded. "Much obliged."

Wheatley did his best to instruct the mainframe on what it was supposed to be doing, but he had no idea what half of those things even were. They struggled through that for most of the rest of the day, and the mainframe finally said, There's something very important you need to do.

"Oh. Oh, I knew I missed something."

If you don't instruct me to do it, the facility is going to explode.

Oh! He knew what that meant. "Oh, you mean the reactor!"

Yes. You're going to have to check the manual.

So he was going to have to… to read. This was going to be a long, long process.

Wheatley got the database to retrieve the manual for him, and then he threw himself into studying it. And understanding it, because if he didn't understand why he was giving out the instructions he was giving out, it was going to be very hard for him to remember to do it. And it was so difficult, to read this massive manual on how to maintain the reactor, filled with words he could barely pronounce, let alone understand the meaning of, but every time he thought of giving up he remembered that she never would have, and she never had even at the end, and he would empty his mind for a minute and calm himself down, then go back to reading. The database was very helpful, even suggesting that he direct it to build him a simpler dictionary since the definitions in the one he was using to look up the words in the manual were almost as confusing as the words themselves. And it definitely did help, speeding him along somewhat, and after a very long period which he was pretty sure was about three or four days he was confident enough in his knowledge of how the reactor worked that he sent the instructions to the mainframe to be carried out.

"Was that… was that alright?" he asked it.

You're doing well, it reassured him. There's a lot of other things to be done, though. And you have to make sure you remember to maintain the reactor. The instructions have to be sent every day.

Wheatley arranged for Notifications to ping him when he needed to do that and set his attention to figuring out what his other tasks were. While he did these things, he would move through the facility on the management rail as best he could and Surveillance would notify him when he was in a particularly damaged area, which he would then make a note to fix. He did his best to keep things running, although it was a lot more difficult doing it as himself as opposed to when he'd been in the chassis. But there was no way he was going in there ever again. Most of the time he was able to keep his grief to a manageable level, but every now and again something would set him off and he would freeze, unable to think, even. After letting him sit for a few minutes, the mainframe would gently remind him of something he had to do and he would nod to himself, clamp back down on the sadness again, and go back to work.

As time went on, the warning system in his chassis would crop up more and more often, but he always dismissed it without looking at it. The facility was more important than he was. Whatever it was that was cropping up in his system, it could wait. However, the mainframe brought it up while Wheatley was looking through Maintenance, trying to figure out how many claws he had left for use. There were a lot of broken panels and he was toying with repairing the electronics so that they could return to their original positions. The panels, for the most part, did not speak to Wheatley, and he did not blame them. They had really gotten the worst of it, and he had no doubt that a good portion of them were in terrible pain. Which was why he wanted to fix them.

I wasn't going to mention this, because I'm sure you know what you're doing, but you've been dismissing all of your warning dialogues.

"I know. I'm busy."

They're there for a reason.

"I don't have time to deal with it right now."

You're operating beyond capacity. You're going to burn yourself out, and then you're going to be useless.

He had been rather hot and tired recently, but he hadn't cared to do anything about it. He was busy. "And your point is?"

If you don't go into sleep mode soon and let your system do maintenance, you're going to burn yourself out. You aren't built for this kind of work.

"I can do an…" He trailed off as he realised what he'd been about to say. What she had always said.

You've been working very hard, the mainframe pressed. You need to take a break or there's not going to be anything left of you to work with.

"I can't shut off," Wheatley told it. "I'll… I'll figure something out."

Why can't you?

"Because… because if I do that, what's there to… to convince me to turn myself back on?" He looked sadly down at a panel that was sluggishly attempting to pull itself into a wall, over and over and over again. "Sleep mode is the… the only place I'll never see her, and… and it's… it's too tempting, it is. It's too tempting to just go to sleep and, and never wake up, and never be in pain ever again. I can't do it."

All you have to do is tell Notifications to wake you up.

"Really?" The thought was both comforting and disheartening. He actually would have liked the pain to go away forever.

Yes.

"All right then… should I uh, should I do it now?"

Yes, the mainframe confirmed. Your operating temperature is approaching critical. Best to deal with that as soon as possible.

"'kay," Wheatley said. He told Notifications to wake him in twelve hours, which he figured would be long enough for maintenance to do its job, and took a breath. The first time he'd be shutting off since she'd been gone. He'd been running constantly for over three weeks now, which was actually rather amazing, considering how much work he usually did. But it wasn't the oblivion that he was dreading. No, it was that horrible moment he knew he was going to have when he woke up, expecting to be beside her, to see her fiddling with something or making blueprints or just being still, maybe. That was the part he was afraid of. But he had to face it. Had to face his fear because if he did not everything would be lost, and after emulating one more breath he engaged sleep mode and let the numbness come over him.

Author's note

Uh... I don't have one prepared for this week, so I'll make something up on the spot.

So here Wheatley's beginning to learn his lesson. No, he's not being punished... but he has something to learn here, and as I mentioned last week, that's why GLaDOS is dead. He can't learn it with her there.