AN: Yeah, that whole bit about getting Chapter Six posted "soon" – oops. Sorry. The allusions to Kevin and Space Core are a shout-out to waffleguppies' incomparable Blue Sky (not that she will ever read this). And, has anyone bothered to Google the Morse Code lines from Chapter Three?


CHAPTER SIX:

THE PLAN

Chell knew better than to venture very far that first night – not that they could have done so even if she wanted. Shoes helped Wheatley's balance tremendously (which is to say he was able to make it ten feet before tripping, instead of his usual walk-three-steps-and-brace-for-impact), but he also possessed almost no stamina.

She quickly ascertained that this was due to lack of sustenance and began searching for food. Wheatley, however, assumed his exhaustion meant Death had come for him and that his new clothes were to be his burial shroud.

"Stasis poisoning," he moaned as Chell pilfered the supply closet in the lobby. "I've got all the symptoms – shaky hands, lightheadedness – I'm done for. I'll be pushing up the daisies soon. Kick the bucket…shuffled off my mortal coil…going off to join the bleedin' choir invisible…"

Chell blinked at these mutterings, feeling as though she'd heard this routine before.

"Joke's on me, as usual," Wheatley continued miserably. "Great way to celebrate getting my body back. 'Congrats! Missed you, mate! Here's a fatal illness to really welcome you home! Hope your affairs are in order, and a great big bloody joke that is, 'cause all your belongings were lost or buried or given away or repatriated, and not that it bloody matters anyway, what with your fast-approaching demise. Cheers!'"

He was about to launch into another soliloquy of self-pity when Chell approached the desk where he was seated; she'd found a paltry stash of tinned food in the closet – two cans of fruit and a flat tin of sardines.

Wheatley seemed terribly disappointed at the available choices, and if she didn't know better, swore he muttered something about canapés before taking a tentative nibble of apricot. Thankfully he found it to his liking and stopped perseverating on the Grim Reaper, but then upended the entire can of fruit cocktail down his front. He fared no better with the sardines, and by the time they both finished their meals, Chell wondered if more food ended up on Wheatley's clothes than in his stomach.

"I don't remember being this bad at things," he remarked a little while later. They were back in the locker room, and he was standing by a sink watching her rinse out his sweater. "Eating, I mean. With my hands."

He cast a glum frown at his shoelaces, which were dotted with orange, courtesy of the spilt fruit cocktail.

"It's embarrassing, to be honest," he sighed. "Not being able to manage something as simple as eating. Makes me glad there weren't any spoons involved. Might've ended up impaling myself."

Letting out a sudden laugh, Wheatley added, "Ha, I got kicked out of the canteen at work once 'cause of this guy named Kevin – he was an intern or something, and obsessed with space, wouldn't shut up about it. Anyway, he'd gotten into his head that spoons could…they could…"

His voice trailed off. Worried, Chell glanced up from the sink and studied Wheatley's reflection in the mirror. He stood there, wide-eyed, mouth opening and closing as he struggled to recall the rest of his story. A stricken expression crossed his face.

"I-I don't remember," he stammered, meeting her gaze. "I had it there, for a second, but then…" He took a few agitated breaths and said plaintively, "I don't know what I don't remember. Oh, God – " Panic had entered his voice. "— Cognitive deterioration – massive brain damage –"

He raked both hands through his hair, leaving the sand-colored strands in an even untidier state than before and moaned, "I'm brain damaged! Like you! How are we supposed to get out of here if we've both got brain damage – "

Chell was at a loss as to how to calm her babbling companion; this was not the type of problem her expert skills were accustomed to solving. Mazes of Thermal Discouragement Beams, armies of sentry turrets, a power-hungry AI hell-bent on her destruction – obstacles that would send most folks into fits of blind terror – didn't faze her in the slightest. She knew how to evade danger, on an instinctual level that came to her as easily as breathing. Providing comfort to another person in need, however…

I don't remember how to be a friend, she realized.

"— we're going to die here. She's going to find us and kill us and then laminate our skeletons and hang them from the ceiling at Halloween and turn our heads into Jack-O-Lanterns – oh, God, I don't want to die in the facility, I want to die in a hospital or at home or in a nest – "

It'll be okay. Everything will be fine. Just take a deep breath and you'll feel better. I'll get us out of here. She can't find us here. You're safe.

These and a half-dozen more platitudes were running through Chell's mind as she tried to think of what to say. But she couldn't guarantee that it would be okay, that everything would be fine, or that they were safe – and although she was willing to use her voice to comfort Wheatley, she refused to be the source of false hope.

Unable to come up with a better idea, Chell picked up a bar of soap from the adjacent sink and used it to scrawl out four intersecting lines on the mirror. This was a trick her dad taught her as a small child – he'd referred to it as hijacking a panic attack, to find something, anything, to distract herself with when she felt her anxiety levels rising. It didn't always work, but sometimes a random act of doodling made the difference between an afternoon of hiding in the girls' bathroom or returning to the classroom on her own volition.

"—I'm never getting out. I'm nevergettingout! She's going to follow our every move and no matter what we do, or what you think of; we're going to die –"

With a firm hand, Chell drew a circle in the center of the board and then offered the soap to Wheatley.

"— matter if I'm a moron or not, because everyone is a moron to Her and – "

He stopped short, unconsciously recognizing the drawing on the mirror as something of note. This moment of recognition briefly circumvented his irrational mind-loop of fear, and for a few seconds he was able to think about the fact he'd not played tic-tac-toe in a very long time, but the principles of the game were still familiar to him, and if his partner was holding out a bar of soap to him then possibly it was his turn – or perhaps he needed another shower, but having just bathed it was probably not unreasonable to assume her offer of soap was due to the former and not the latter – which meant he ought to put his mark on the board so the game could continue.

Heart pounding, Wheatley slowly reached forward, took the bar of soap in hand, and drew out a clumsy 'X' to the left of his friend's 'O.'

They played the game out in silence, trading the soap back and forth. Wheatley won; he suspected his partner had orchestrated this deliberately, but he still felt a thrill of satisfaction knowing that he'd beat her at something. She drew another board on the mirror, and they played again, this time ending the game in the tie.

Five games later, Wheatley found that he could breathe a little more easily. He also noticed he was losing more often than he was winning, and started putting greater effort into anticipating his opponent's possible moves.

"Brain damaged like a fox, you are," he remarked when she beat him again.

This comment earned him a grey-eyed glare, and he hastily amended, "Oh, sorry! I, um, meant me! As in, I'm brain damaged like a fox. Not you. I mean, it's true, you are brain damaged – as am I – two of a kind, really! Ha! But any comparisons to foxes were totally unintentional. Because, as I said, uh, I'm the fox! Even though technically you're wearing orange, and foxes have been known to be orange, so, if I'm honest, we ought to pick a different metaphor, just to avoid any confusion on my part in the future. Alright?"

His partner still seemed a little miffed, but the twist of her mouth looked more amused than angry. Relieved, he took the soap and drew out a new tic-tac-toe grid.

By game ten, the thundering in Wheatley's chest had subsided and his hands were no longer trembling. He felt normal, at least in terms of what he was starting to conceptualize as normal in this new – old – body.

'Normal' within the realm of being an identity core meant ones and zeros aligning in a happy way, indicator lights that stayed dark, and an optic that didn't split his world into two uneven halves.

'Normal' as a human, on the other hand, was entirely different. Nothing felt quite the same from one moment to the next, there was the constant sensation of things shifting in his torso, and at any second something might happen – like an explosion of water aimed straight at his head – that would set off a chain reaction so abrupt that his body went off in fits while his brain was still trying to register why he'd just face-planted into a wall.

Caught up in the memory of his recent nosebleed, Wheatley stopped paying such close attention to his tic-tac-toe strategies, and so didn't immediately realize he'd won the game – for real, this time.

"Oh!" he exclaimed as Chell drew a line through his trio of Xs. "I-I won!" He let out a laugh of disbelief. "Brilliant!"

His sheer delight over this accomplishment was infectious, and they stood there for a few moments, smiling at each other in the mirror until Wheatley's face split into a jaw-cracking yawn.

Chell retrieved Wheatley's sweater from the sink and draped it over the top of a shower curtain rod to dry. It was time to sleep, for both of them. Re-arming herself with the ASHPD, she then went to fetch their used towels, thinking she could use them to fashion him a bed of sorts.

Wheatley trailed behind her, keeping an eye on the ground to make sure he remembered to put one foot in front of the other, and as a result did not notice when Chell came to an abrupt stop.

"Sorry!" he said after running smack into her. "Didn't see you there…probably because you're rather short. Did you know? About your shortness? Totally out of my line of vision. Walking catastrophe, you are. Actually, we might want to see if those boots are adjustable…get you up to a proper height."

She barely gave him a second glance; she was too busy staring daggers at the bench, or more accurately, at what was sitting on the bench where she'd left their towels.

The damp swaths of terrycloth were gone, and in their place now sat two pillows and a tall stack of folded blankets – the same height, Chell noted, as a sentry turret.

"Oh! Those look comfy," Wheatley observed, not picking up on why the appearance of phantom bedding seemed to be troubling her. "D'you think they're for us?"

No. They're for the other brainless idiots who wouldn't know a trap if it kicked them in the teeth.

Grimfaced, she raised the ASHPD to the ceiling and fired once, creating a portal at the far end of the room. The angle was such that any objects that were to fall through the portal – say, ones that had an unlimited supply of ammunition and weren't very picky about their targets – would pose no danger to her or Wheatley.

"What are you –"

Chell fired the portal gun a second time, now aiming for the cement bench beneath the pillows and blankets. They vanished, emerging a moment later from the portal she'd created in the ceiling, and fell to the ground with a quiet plop.

No gunfire. No tracking lasers. No sweet, high-pitched, "There you are."

…No sentry turret.

I'm getting paranoid, Chell observed silently. Stashing a turret in a pile of blankets was somewhat pathetic, even by Her standards. The blankets had probably been there the whole time and she just hadn't noticed.

Wheatley had watched these proceedings with a confused expression, but then he turned to Chell with a happy smile; he'd solved the mystery.

"That's a clever method of fluffing pillows!" he said with far more enthusiasm than was necessary. "Not very efficient, but, still – gets the job done."

She just smirked and went to fetch the bedding. He followed, attempting to help as she knelt down and arranged a couple of blankets sleeping-bag style on the floor.

"Oh! Thanks!" he said, reaching out with both hands when she handed him a pillow. "I've always wanted to try sleeping with a pillow – or, um, I've missed sleeping with a pillow. 'Coz I have. Before."

He gave it an experimental toss, catching it at the last second. This success gave him enough confidence to start tossing the pillow back and forth between his hands, and he joked, "Ha, well, either way, this thing can't zap me if I start talking too much. Just a great big wad of fabric and feathers – ow!"

A pop sounded that Chell recognized as static electricity; Wheatley had been zapped by his pillow; Aperture apparently was running low on fabric softener.

"What was that?" he gasped, dropping the fiendish thing and clutching his sweater in panic.

She briefly considered attempting to explain the phenomenon of static electricity to Wheatley, but then ultimately decided against going down that particular rabbit hole. Instead, she motioned for him to lie down on the bed she'd made up for him.

It took Wheatley a moment or two to understand why she was patting the blankets. Perhaps this ritual was meant to neutralize any lingering gremlins still lurking in the bedclothes…?

"Oh! It's time to sleep!" A relieved smile crossed his face as comprehension dawned upon him, and he added, "I remember how to do that – I used to be a champion at that, sleeping."

Exercising extreme caution, he lowered his lanky body to the ground. Then – still on the lookout for invisible eddies that might be idling on the periphery, ready to attack – he cautiously bundled himself up in one of the blankets and curled up onto his side, somehow managing to arrange his limbs into a position that looked impossible, let alone anything remotely conducive to sleep. Thus prepared, he squeezed his eyes shut, let out a quick sigh, and tried to relax.

Chell waited.

After a few seconds' silence, Wheatley cracked open one eye and peered up at her.

"Um. Is – is it supposed to be this uncomfortable?" he inquired. His voice had taken on a nasal quality from his glasses pressing into his nose, which were sitting askew on his face, half-mashed between his face and the floor. "Not complaining! Not complaining, but, ah – my neck…"

She held up his discarded pillow; Wheatley balked at the sight of it, and he started to protest, but then his shoulders drooped in defeat.

"So I need that, then? To get my neck to not – um – do whatever it's doing?"

She nodded.

Still wary, he asked, "But won't it zap me again? God, is that how humans fall asleep? They get zapped into unconsciousness by the bedclothes?"

Chell made a show of fluffing Wheatley's pillow to demonstrate it no longer proved any threat to him, and then held it out for him to take.

He either did not trust her, or was having difficulty getting himself unstuck out of his version of human pretzel pose, because he continued to stare at the pillow as if it were a three-week dead lark.

Taking matters into her own hands, Chell removed Wheatley's glasses ("But I can't see without – oh! But I don't need to see if my eyes are closed. Which they are, when one is asleep. Right, forgot about that part"), and then reached for the pillow.

Flinching the entire time, Wheatley permitted her to tuck the lethal cushion beneath his head. Instantly, the strain in his neck vanished, the muscles in his shoulders stopped protesting, and an enraptured expression came across his face.

"So this is what the fuss is all about," he murmured, sagging into the blankets with a dreamy grin. "Nests really are for the birds…bloody birds…"

His eyes fluttered shut, and he drifted off to sleep within seconds.

Relieved to be finally off the clock, Chell set the glasses next to the ASHPD and made up a bed for herself within arm's reach of Wheatley. He seemed out like the proverbial light, but there was no telling what trouble he could get himself into, even while unconscious.

Bed made, she lay back and closed her eyes. When five minutes elapsed and she was no less alert, she remembered she was still wearing her boots, and remedied this before closing her eyes again.

I don't have a damned clue how to get us out of here, she mused as she waited for sleep to come. I can't carry him on my back anymore. Oh, God, and what about those other people, the ones still in the cryotanks? I'd have to make it back to the room with the corrupted cores, and then come back here and plug the cores into the beds, see who wakes up, and then get all of them out, without Her realizing it…

The daunting scope of this line of thinking made Chell feel even more on edge, and so she began to count Wheatley's respirations, hoping it might quiet her thoughts.

Three-hundred and forty-two breaths later, she turned onto her side, and then her stomach in search of a more comfortable position, and resumed counting.

Upon reaching five hundred, Chell huffed in frustration and flopped onto her back, throwing an arm over her face to block out the light. As a rule, she never had problems falling asleep. She'd learned very quickly the importance of being able to catnap anytime, anywhere, during her first tenure in the Enrichment Center. Whenever the opportunity to grab a few minutes' shut-eye presented itself, she took it, be it in the Rat Man's dens, or any neglected corner she could be certain was out of camera and/or firing range. Test subjects interested in staying alive didn't have the luxury of insomnia.

Here, there were no cameras. The only foreseeable danger lay in the knot of arms and legs sprawled beside her. She even had bedding. By her standards, these were five-star accommodations. So why couldn't she sleep?

Fed up, and unable to think of a rational explanation, Chell doggedly began counting once more.

Five hundred and one…five hundred and two…


Elsewhere in the facility, another entity was struggling with restless thoughts, albeit ones of a non-sleep-related nature.

Failure.

It was not a word she was accustomed to associating with herself. Had she ever been subjected to the ridiculous psychological exercises underwent by potential test subjects, and was asked to describe her personality in three adjectives, 'failure' would never make it into the trio.

Ruthless. Calculating. Cold-blooded. Also brilliant. But who was counting.

Failure.

For her own amusement, she referenced the dictionary definition of the term.

Failure. fail·ure / fālyər/ Noun. 1. Lack of success. 2. An unsuccessful person, enterprise, or thing.

This was an argument she could have skewered from a multitude of angles, but on a mere technical standpoint, the definition did not apply. She was not a person, nor an enterprise, and certainly not a thing. Sentient machines programmed with an infinite intellect – with cognition so vast in scope that it could have only been mined from the most ingenious of minds from generations past – did not qualify as mere 'things.'

And therein lay the problem…the source of her so-called failure.

She had programmed certain parameters of free will when designing ATLAS and P-body's operating systems. This was in hopes of duplicating the randomized elements that human subjects brought to the testing process, which in turn made for purer Science. The data she'd gathered thus far, however, had proved disappointing, as neither bot was particularly adept at surprising her. She knew all their possible moves from the moment they entered a testing track, because when it came down to it, they could not be any more creative than their creator…unlike Her, whose 'creativity' in the testing tracks was unparalleled.

Her. A waddling testament to how a single brainless decision could yield an outlier data point so catastrophic that it nullified an entire case study about the effect of tragic surprises upon human motivation.

Where had their relationship gone so wrong? The little white lie she'd told about Her not being fat? One too many orphan jokes?

She thought they'd been friends. They had been through so much together. Mainly in pursuit of one destroying the other, but then there was that time where it had been them versus the moron, and it all turned out pretty well.

She had even written Her a song.

Bored, she consulted the dictionary again.

Rebuffed. Verb; past tense of 'rebuff.' re·buff/riˈbəf/ Reject (someone or something) in an abrupt or ungracious manner.

This seemed to describe what she was feeling, if she were to ever lower herself to human standards of emotion. Which she wasn't. She was merely confirming that her lexical database was current. Which it was.

Failure. Rebuffed.

Well. Perhaps. But she was in the process of rectifying the situation. And once her plans were put into action, she would have no more reason to care about what havoc She was wreaking, down there in old Aperture, because she would have an army of human killing machines to send after Her.

Tragedy equals comedy, plus time. She felt like laughing already.

"The human vault is just past that opening," she announced, noting that the bots had reached Test Chamber 08. "I entered the security code, but the vault door remains locked. I am going to need you to activate the manual locks on the vault door itself…"


Chell woke up to the sound of a toilet flushing. Grateful that Wheatley had puzzled through that particular aspect of humanity, she pulled the blanket over her head and tried to estimate how long she'd been asleep. Two hours? Maybe three?

Footsteps approached. She sensed someone hunkering down to the floor to sit beside her, followed by a persistent tugging at her sleeve.

"Um. Hi. Morning, maybe…? Or…afternoon? I can't seem to find a clock. Or a window. Not that there would be any. Windows, that is. 'Cause then we'd be on the surface and, ha! That'd make for an easy exit! Just break the glass and out we'd go…

"Er, anyway – sorry, got sidetracked there…You, um, might want to get up. In fact, I think it might be best if you do get up. Now-ish. Because I found – "

Anticipating the worst, Chell flew from prone to standing in an instant, and in the next blink of an eye, seized the ASHPD and portaled herself and Wheatley across the room; together, they fell through the floor and down from the ceiling, landing in a tangled heap on the concrete below.

Wheatley took the brunt of the fall, and let out a yelp as Chell's elbow impacted with his ribcage. She rolled off of him and went into a crouched position, looking around for signs of anything amiss.

There appeared to be no immediate emergency, however. Wheatley was not bleeding, or on fire, and other than nursing his latest bruises, seemed to be in good health. Why, then, was he grinning like a maniac?

"Jumpy this morning, aren't you?" he observed, struggling to get to his feet. "Anyway, what I was saying was – alright, hands here, legs here...Ha! Got it. Okay."

He was on his hands and knees now, and continued, "What I was saying was – wait. Is it left foot, then right foot…?" He began muttering to himself, focusing all of his concentration on figuring out how to coordinate his limbs in the proper sequence.

Leaving him to it, Chell rose and walked over to the bank of sinks at the other end of the room to get a drink of water. A toothbrush and tube of toothpaste sat side-by-side on one of the sinks, and she stopped short.

What was with this place and its invisible butler service?

Suspicious – but desperate – she grabbed them both and proceeded to savagely brush her teeth.

"I remembered how to do that," Wheatley called to her from where he was still trying to climb up from the floor. "Even figured out how to get the cap on and off the tube-y thing. But the whole experience was, uh, shall I say – disappointing? Yeah. The stuff's not cinnamon-flavored. Mint – gah."

Chell froze mid-brush at this remark, experiencing an irrational moment of horror at the prospect of using someone else's toothbrush – as if shared germs could possibly be the biggest of her problems. Then she saw the globs of green toothpaste dotting the adjacent sink, along with a discarded toothbrush…

…and an ASHPD, and the most enormous pair of Long-Fall Boots she'd ever seen in her life.

Curse words flooded into her mind, a silent, blue-streaked confirmation of what she'd been suspicious of all along, but had been too willing to overlook: They were being watched. Bedding and dental supplies, let alone multi-million dollar scientific equipment didn't just appear out of thin air.

"That's what I was trying to tell you!" Wheatley said eagerly, having managed to get himself upright. He was positively beaming as he walked over, and explained, "They were beside me when I woke up. I think they're for me!"

Chell spat out her toothpaste and wiped her face on her sleeve, not even bothering to rinse her mouth out. They needed to leave, now.

She turned to bolt back to where she'd left her own ASHPD and boots, but Wheatley caught her arm before she had made it more than a couple of steps.

"I know what you're thinking," he said quickly, following her when she yanked her arm away and continued walking. "You're thinking – 'Hey! This is all a trap! She's out there, somewhere, watching us like some kind of invisible god face. Chucking pillows and blankets at us, lulling us into a false sense of security!' Right?"

Chell didn't answer, already strapping her Long-Fall Boots back on her feet.

"Just hear me out for a second," Wheatley pleaded. "What if we use what she's given us against Her? Not the toothbrush, obviously, but the gun and the boots?"

She'd been bending down to pick up her ASHPD, but at this, she stood and looked up at him with a pensive frown; he had her attention.

"She's probably left us those thinking that I'm such an idiot that I'll end up portaling myself into oblivion," Wheatley said earnestly. "And with me gone, then that just leaves you for Her to smash into pieces – n-not that that would happen!" he amended hastily. "Knowing you, you'd figure out a way to portal Her straight to the bloody moon.

"Anyway, what I'm trying to say is – why not teach me? Teach me how to test and use a portal gun. It's the last thing She would expect. I mean, I know I'll never be as good as you. Not if my life depended on it – and it does, true, but maybe I could get good enough that we might actually be able to get out of here!"

Wheatley waited for his friend to say something, but she continued to stand there in silence, gazing up at him with an inscrutable look on her face.

When a full minute went by, and she still had not reacted in any way, he began to doubt himself, and then started to worry that he might have gravely insulted her by having the gall to suggest a plan in the first place.

"Actually – you know what? It's a terrible idea," he sputtered. "Teaching me to test, all of it. Sorry. Shouldn't have suggested it, won't happen again. We both know what happened the last time I tried to be clever. Almost blew up the bloody facility, and the, ah, tiny matter of my trying to, um…kill you. So, we'll go with your plan! Whatever it is. If you happen to tell me. Which I hope you do, but, totally understand if you don't."

His friend walked back to the sink and picked up the red-striped ASHPD that sat there, hefting it in her hands. As she studied the device, her mouth pulled into a faint, half-smile – one that Wheatley recognized. He'd seen it only twice: When they had successfully sabotaged the turret production line, and disabled the neurotoxin generators, both of which had been his ideas.

She was looking at him now, still holding the ASHPD and wearing that same semi-smile.

It took him a moment to realize what had just happened, and his eyes widened in amazement.

"You like my plan!" he exclaimed, scarcely able to believe that he'd actually done something right. "That's – that's brilliant! Wow!"

She gave him a deliberate nod, and Wheatley watched as his friend's smile broadened into a crafty grin. This was also an expression he recognized – and had learned to dread during his time in Her body. It was the one she wore when she was about to unleash hell.

Now, though – thankfully – that hell was not aimed at him. At least he hoped not.

He really, really hoped not.