CHAPTER TWO:

THE DIAGNOSIS

"Selective mutism," was what the Aperture psychologist had told her father. Even into adulthood, Chell resented the term – the implication that she was the one in control of when and where her tongue tied up, when in fact it was the opposite.

It wasn't a question of whether she did or didn't "feel" like talking – she wanted to talk, desperately so. But with the exception of her dad, being in the presence of others caused her anxiety to skyrocket, and reduced her methods of communication to nodding, shaking her head, and pointing.

"She'll grow out of it." Yet another cookie-cutter, unhelpful statement from the aforementioned psychologist.

Grow out of it when? Chell wanted to ask at the time. How? Why am I like this? What's wrong with me? But she said nothing, sitting there beside her dad as he took copious notes about the relaxation techniques suggested by the therapist.

For more than a year after that initial appointment, Chell and her father practiced these strategies, all designed to ease her into being more verbally communicative. Their hard work paid off. She gradually worked her way up from writing her answers down on sticky notes for the teacher to share with the other students, to actually whispering her answers to her teacher.

By the following spring, she was able to present her science fair project in front of her class. Her voice was quiet, and every single ear in the room was strained, but Chell articulated the findings of her potato battery experiment from start to finish and earned an A-plus.

"Of course I got an A," she complained that night as her dad was tucking her into bed. "I did a potato battery last year. It's stupid."

"Yeah," he agreed. "But last year you weren't able to present your report. This year you could."

"I guess so," she admitted dubiously, then fixed her dad with a happy smile. "You proud of me?"

"You betcha," he replied with a laugh. He handed Chell her much-loved stuffed toy Companion Cube, and continued, "I'm sorry I wasn't there to see it. But you know what tomorrow is, though, right?"

Tomorrow was Aperture's annual Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Chell always went in the hope of seeing a real-life mantis man.

"We'll get to spend the day together," he said, smiling. "It's my favorite work day out of the whole year."

"Dad," she observed solemnly. "You're a sap."

He laughed again and gave her a hug before standing up to leave. "Can you blame me? G'night, Chell-bell."

"Night," she yawned.

Through rapidly-closing eyes, Chell watched as he switched off the light and then turned back to look at her, silhouetted in the doorway. "Love you."

"L'v'you too," she mumbled, already drifting off to sleep.

The next morning she accompanied her father to the lab where he worked as a security guard, sticking to him like glue as he went throughout his day. There were no mantis-men sightings, but the action picked up towards mid-afternoon when more announcements started coming over the PA, every once in awhile from Mr. Johnson himself. Pre-recorded, obviously, but still pretty funny:

"If I make it to this day – and I damn well better make it, or those bastards in Washington can take my moon rocks and shove 'em up their star-spangled asses –"

"Mr. Johnson!"

"Huh? Oh. Sorry. Shove it up their –"

"Mr. Johnson…"

"Anyway, I was just telling Caroline here that if I make it to this day – the day that they pour my brain into a computer and push the button – that it's all thanks to me, her, and those pinheads down in engineering. You know what the nurse brought me yesterday with my lunch? Lemonade! Y'know what I told her? That she was fired! And that I was gonna burn her house down with a combustible lemon!"

Bored, Chell wandered to the opposite end of the lab, which consisted of several large windows overlooking a chamber. Suspended from the center of the ceiling was a massive, vaguely humanoid-shaped machine with multiple spheres attached. People in lab coats milled around beneath of it, running to and fro, talking excitedly and scribbling on clipboards.

Her father had followed her over, and out of habit she tugged on his arm and pointed to the window.

"Use your words, Chell," he said.

She made him lean down so she could whisper into his ear; she'd gotten better about talking in public, but the unfamiliar faces of her father's colleagues made her uncomfortable.

"What's going on?" she asked, standing on tiptoe. "Everyone down there looks nervous."

"Just a routine test," he answered, straightening. He sounded at ease, but out of the corner of her eye, Chell saw him shift his weight to his left side; in addition to his Aperture-issued Beretta, he also carried a non-regulation pistol strapped to his ankle. Something was up.

"Preparing to initiate," came a booming voice over the loudspeaker. "On my mark from twenty…mark. Nineteen…eighteen…"

Chell peered through the glass, watching intently. Screens displaying the countdown were on every wall of the room below, and all faces were now turned towards the hulking entity hanging in the middle of the chamber.

"Four…three…two…one…Activation initiated."

There was a moment of breathless silence, and then the low, thundering sound of gears shifting could be heard throughout the facility. Three discs that Chell hadn't noticed earlier began to spin at the top of the ceiling, slowly at first, then gradually picking up speed. On them she was able to make out the letters G, L, a lower-case A, D, O and S, flashing by on every rotation.

What did they stand for?

A scientist came to stand beside her dad, who asked in a low voice, "What's the plan, Henry? Think she'll go ape again? Like last time?"

"Nah," answered the other man. "Not with the new morality core we installed. The intelligence-dampening one was a good try, but all it did was piss her off." He laughed and added, "Dougie here just wants to send us all to the moon, though, don't you?"

Chell glanced over, her eyes falling upon the person in question. He didn't appear to have heard the comment, too focused on watching the proceedings through the window.

Curious why he looked so worried, she focused her eyes back onto the machine below, which now appeared to be stirring ever so slightly. The screens surrounding it no longer displayed numbers, and were instead flashing random images.

A voice came over the PA system again, but a different one this time – robotic, feminine, and slightly pedantic.

"A little neurotoxin goes a long way…Thank you. From the bottom of the heart you forgot to attach to me."

Claxons started wailing a second later.

"Jesus Christ, it –"

"RUN!"

"RED PHONE! RED PHONE!"

Every person in the lab bolted for the exit, scrambling and shouting. At eight years old, Chell was too big to be carried, but her father grabbed her and joined Henry and Doug and the throngs of other people.

She clung to him, arms around his neck, legs locked around his waist, as he followed the crowd for several minutes. It was pandemonium, everyone shoving and pushing to try and get away the fastest – but getting away from what? Where was the enemy?

Her dad abruptly ducked into a hallway, leaving the chaos behind them, and started jogging down the empty corridor. As they approached the door at the end of the hall, his grip on Chell loosened, and he set her down, keeping her close.

"You'll be safe in here," he said as he fumbled for his key card. Chell tilted her chin up, reading the sign posted above the door.

WARNING!

Hermetic seals!

HELP US HELP YOU KEEP SCIENCE SAFE FROM HERMITS AND AQUATIC MAMMALS

Spray painted onto the door was additional signage, emblazoned in large red letters:

- OUT OF ORDER -

The door swung open and he pushed her through, making her sit on the chair that had been placed in the corner.

"Do not leave this room," he ordered, kneeling down in front of her. He was calm, but his eyes were frantic. "Do you understand?"

She nodded, unable to speak. She'd never heard him sound so angry.

He stood and began fiddling with a keypad on the wall, pressing in a multi-digit code. Contrary to the sign on the door, the room was in perfect working order; "HS-Standby" appeared on the keypad screen, followed by, "Countdown?"

Chell watched her dad press the buttons marked 'one' and 'zero' and then the pound key. "10 sec" scrolled across the screen.

He turned, told her he loved her, and hugged her tight. Then he left, locking the door behind him. The panel beeped a second later, accompanied by a tinny voice that announced, "System is offline. Temporary life support activated."

There was a whooshing sound, and Chell felt a faint breeze brush past her face, replacing the musty scent of the room with a fresher, slightly antiseptic odor.

She started to tremble.

Find your happy place. Where's your happy place?

She closed her eyes and imagined glo-ball night at the bowling alley, where she'd been less than twenty-four hours earlier to celebrate her successful science fair project. As always, her dad kept throwing gutter balls to ensure she would win.

Her happy place was with her dad.

Chell's throat unstuck at last, and she was able to eke out the words she'd tried to say to him as he was telling her goodbye.

"I love you," she whispered into the darkness.


The trauma of losing her father caused Chell's voice to retreat all over again. 'Neurotoxin' and 'picosecond' were terms that meant nothing to her, but she could grasp the miles-deep hurt that accompanied the word 'dead.'

She and the other survivors of that cataclysmic Bring Your Daughter to Work Day were placed into quarantine, squirreled away as the remaining Aperture scientists scrambled to solve the hell in which they'd found themselves.

Over the next four years, gaunt-faced adults tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy for her and the other orphaned youngsters in Habitat 27. But indoor playgrounds and portal guns don't mix, and Chell quickly realized they were no more than lab rats being groomed for some unknown, ultimate test.

"Why are we doing this?" complained one of Chell's compatriots after a particularly grueling Turret Tuesday. All morning, they'd spent hours running and ducking behind storage cubes, trying to dodge the sentry turrets' endless spray of blue and orange paintballs.

"It's training," another boy muttered. "They're running out of test subjects."

His name was Marc, and like Chell, he had ascertained the real reasons behind Turret Tuesdays, Friendly Energy Pellet Polo, and all their other cleverly-named calisthenics: Too many people were dying in the Enrichment Center. The most obvious solution was to decrease the lethality of the tests, but doing so decreased the purity of the Science…which meant any able-bodied individual, regardless of age, was now a potential candidate for an orange jumpsuit.

"What do you mean they're running out of test subjects?" piped up a girl named Emily. Only seven years old, she was the youngest of their group, and was wolfing down her lunchtime bowl of Aperture Cheery Owes without a care in the world.

Marc hesitated, debating whether to share the awful truth, and then decided against it.

"It means that your hair is going to permanently turn blue if you don't get better at dodging those turrets," he teased, giving one of Emily's braids a playful tug.

Emily beamed back at him, unconcerned with the state of her plaits.

"I like the turrets," she answered around another mouthful of cereal. "They have nice voices."

At the opposite end of the table, Chell stared at her untouched bowl of Cheery Owes, reflecting on Emily's innocent observation.

They do have nice voices, she agreed silently to herself. But they wouldn't sound as sweet if they were firing bullets instead of paintballs.

Those who passed the preliminary ASHPD trials (namely, being able to run and jump while lugging the ten-pound portal gun) underwent further investigation. IQ testing. Endurance exercises. Personality assessments. Mental status examinations. Studies that measured pain tolerance, rate of healing, and psychological resilience.

Somewhere along the way, Chell became test subject 1438. She took their tests, submitted to their endless questionnaires, and generally was a model candidate. Inside, however, she was enraged. She stopped feeling scared, and started getting angry. She found her voice again, but made infrequent use of it, finding that scientists were put off by a test subject who was now truly selectively mute.

"Strong, silent type, eh?" one had mused, flipping through her file.

He pulled out a sheet of paper; on it, Chell saw a bell curve and something handwritten at the bottom.

"'Tenacity greater than the ninety-ninth percentile?'" he read aloud. "Hm. Well, let's try you out anyway. No way to know if you'll sink or swim without tossing you in first."

That one-sided conversation was what tipped Chell's anger into the realm of cold, calculated fury. The company's power-mad technology had killed her father, and now it was taking steps towards destroying her and every other victim in its underground shop of horrors.

Within a couple of days of that interview, she was fitted with her first pair of advanced knee replacements. In true Aperture format, there was no warning – she went to bed that night, and was part cyborg when she woke up the next day.

"Ew," her roommate had said upon awakening. "What's wrong with your legs?"

Chell didn't answer, too busy trying to control the nausea she'd felt at the sight of two curved, metal spines protruding from her body. A testing associate arrived a few minutes later to take her to the Enrichment Center, helping her into the stiff orange jumpsuit as he explained shoes were no longer a necessary article of clothing.

"Why?" Chell demanded angrily.

He blinked in surprise; 1438 wasn't supposed to be able to talk.

"Huh? You mean why you don't need shoes anymore?"

"No," she snapped. "Why do I need the knee replacements?"

"Oh. Uh – it's to protect the portal gun. In case you, um, fall," he stammered. "They're, like…stupid expensive. We don't have a lot of them left."

Chell didn't so much as blink at this response, all-too familiar with Aperture's obsession with the safety of its equipment rather than the livelihood of its users.

"Y-you get cake afterwards," the testing associate sputtered, trying to recover. This wasn't the case at all, but something about the steely gaze of this fourteen-year-old girl left him unnerved.

"Cake?" Chell repeated. Her body had been mutilated and he was trying to make her feel better about it with dessert?

He nodded, hoping the incentive might make her look a little less like she was about to rip out his throat.

Disgusted, she grabbed the portal gun off the table and marched straight into the testing track without a second glance behind her.

Twenty minutes later, she was escorted out of the track, forcibly sedated, and placed into a cryobed. The Enrichment Center had a zero-tolerance policy regarding blatant disregard for its technologies, and 1438's behavior in the chamber couldn't qualify as anything but.

At great risk to herself, Chell had managed to maneuver a pair of sentry turrets so they sat facing each other, and tossed the portal gun in between the ensuing barrage of bullets. The ASHPD was sturdy but stood no chance against hundreds of rounds of ammunition firing at it in two directions.

It was the sort of gutsy, screw-you-and-the-lemons-you-rode-in-on-and-kiss-m y-ass-while-you're-at-it move that would have earned a stamp of approval from Cave Johnson himself, had he been alive to hear about it. But the era of Cave Johnson was over. The era of testing had begun.


The satisfaction Chell felt upon awakening from her first year-long stint in cryosleep was short-lived. The knee replacements were gone, thank God, but a new horror awaited her when she looked in the mirror for the first time: she was an entire year older.

From Chell's perspective, she'd been asleep for only one night – however, the cryosleep setting for minor-aged guests didn't "pause" the body at the cellular level like it did for adults.

She was returned to Habitat 27, which housed fewer occupants than she remembered. Emily was still there, but Marc was gone, along with AJ and Arsenio and Leve. Ms. Brenda, who'd been an unofficial house mother of sorts for Hab-27, had also disappeared.

Life returned to its usual twisted approximation of normal for a few months. Chell accompanied the others on their daily excursions into the practice testing tracks. She spoke to no one, but her disdain for Aperture was communicated nevertheless, as evidenced in her refusal to answer questions on their informed consent paperwork (an outrageous farce; as if informed consent existed anywhere within fifty miles of the place), or responding to other items in binary when she became especially annoyed.

Her sixteenth birthday arrived, acknowledged with the standard card that read, The Enrichment Center Celebrates with You in Marking Another Year in Which to Test. She was fitted with a new pair of knee replacements, and was given a chance to redeem herself in the Enrichment Center, where she sabotaged more equipment and landed herself in cryosleep, again, this time for two years.

However, in the days that elapsed after Chell's second act of not-so-civil disobedience, the situation at Aperture rapidly deteriorated. Everyone, scientists included, began vanishing at an alarming rate, leaving no one to release Chell when her two years were up – every last, woman, and child had all been placed in cryosleep themselves, indefinitely.

All except for one.