2. the bluebirds flutter in my chest
Night in Aperture. "Night," separate from "day" only by when Chell's body would fail her, when she slunk into the secret corners behind the fallen panels heavy with exhaustion, bruised and bleeding, to sleep.
Sleep, that was something Wheatley didn't quite understand. Why did humans run out of energy after just a few hours? Why did sitting down and going still and silent for even fewer let them start functioning again? It all seemed very inefficient. And they needed darkness to do it, too, and quiet! It was never silent in the Facility. The low, constant drone of a thousand different processes keeping the place functioning was always there—well, functioning as much as Aperture did anymore. Beyond that only came the distant crashes as unmaintained machinery fell to pieces, the sounds of fans kicking up and winding down. Sometimes the calls of animals that had crept in from above would echo around them, strange and forlorn. Chell always slept poorly, jostled awake by the lightest thing.
They were always the same kind of noise, though: the far-off booms of the deteriorating labs, or the animals, or the Sound that was as familiar and comforting to Wheatley as his management rail. So when one night his aural receptors picked up a soft noise floating up through the walls he now hid behind, something he had never heard before, he took notice.
"Hey—hey, do, d'you hear that?" he said in a low voice, peering out through a shattered panel into the dingy, abandoned room Chell had holed up in between tests. From where his rail allowed him passage he could just scarcely see her, a shadowy figure with back pressed to a far corner. On the walls above her plant life crept in from God-knew-where, edging along the floor and curling in spirals over chairs and guard rails. Dead leaves covered the dented office desks and fallen filing cabinets that she had pulled into a semicircle around her. He wasn't quite sure why she'd bothered with that, really. It wasn't as if there was anything to protect herself from, not as if, say, werewolves stalked the belly of the Facility—or perhaps they did? Perhaps she knew something he didn't. That had to be it, because otherwise what was she trying to hide from?
Wheatley squinted, trying to pick out the source of the sound. Chell still slept; he raised his voice a few decibels. "Psst, hey, seriously though, listen—listen to that, do you hear that? Though, you know, actually, perhaps you don't, how well do humans hear? Me, I can hear a, a wire sparking a good mile off, personally, but … hang on, just a minute, is that … is that singing?"
He fell quiet, finally, and listened.
The sound was hardly anything at all, breathy and half-there. It would wane and waver, only to rise again a few seconds later, all muted mumbles and murmurs. Straining, he caught a few syllables:
someday I'll … on a star …
… wake up where the clouds are far behind … me …
Wheatley cast about fruitlessly for the source of it. "Yes, I—that is singing, that is definitely, definitely music, musical, lyrical. That's, that's unprecedented, that is, back here in the, well, the middle of nowhere really isn't it? You've got to hear that, where on earth d'you think that's coming from? It's, it's a bit dark in here, isn't it, though, rather pitch, a bit—let me just—"
One fuzzy electric buzz later and he'd gotten his flashlight turned on. Swollen shadows lurched about the room as he shined it in the corners, on vents and grates. "I'm, ah, I'm not seeing anything. Do you see anything down there? I'm not, I mean I haven't got exactly the best vantage point here, not really, sort of stuck behind the wall as it were—"
As he said it, he turned the light on her. She didn't move or open her eyes, not at first. She still slept, and Wheatley stared at her faintly-moving lips in a shocked silence. The song was coming from her.
It wasn't much, even now, barely audible and tuneless. The last few words touched the air and melted away:
"… birds fly over the rainbow … why, oh why … can't …"
Something boomed far off in the distance of the Facility, and Chell jolted awake. She sat up, squinting in the beam of his flashlight, and had Wheatley feet he would have tripped over himself to turn it off. The sense he had witnessed something he shouldn't have was creeping over him, dense and heavy. "H, hello!" he called, easing a bit backwards on his rail. She looked up at him, brow knit. "Uh, sleep, slept well, I hope? Just, you know, just checking up on you, of course, watching—monitoring you, not watching really, whole different animal. Strictly professional. Wouldn't do if you, um, if you, I don't know, there's probably something bad that can happen to humans when they sleep, right? Sleep, sleepwalking maybe? Sleep testing? Wouldn't do, wouldn't do at all, bet you anything that's why so many of the other test subjects died—testing in their sleep …"
He trailed off, and scooted a few more inches down the rail until he could just barely see her staring up at him from her makeshift bed. "But, good news! You're alive! I'm alive! We're all alive, uh, though really that means She's alive too, that's, hahaha, that's not the best news, I suppose. But you're not sleep testing. No fear there, in, in case that's something you were worried about. … um. I'll just go then, shall I?"
Chell said nothing.