"I told you this was a bad idea," said Karen.

"Go back to sleep," said Chell, stifling another groan and massaging her aching legs. It turned out that while she could easily walk several miles in a day when she was looting houses, only carrying a small backpack with a few emergency supplies, it was another matter when she was carrying a massive backpack full of a week's worth of supplies. Especially when she did it two days in a row.

At least the backdrop was pretty. The leafy ground was dappled with sunlight, and the air smelled of pine trees and late spring flowers. There'd even been birds singing in the trees until Karen shot at them with her slingshot.

"Hmm," muttered Karen, but she stuck her head back into the tent. Her legs might not be as screwed up as Chell's but she was still in withdrawal from Aperture's drugs, and the trek was taking it's physical toll on her as well.

Chell refused to give up though. She wasn't going to spend the rest of her days living practically alone in the middle of nowhere when for all she knew there were other humans only a few townships away (However long "the rest of her days" might be. It was hard to forget all those chilling references to side effects she'd encountered at Aperture every time she was injected or sprayed or covered with goo, not mention her own inconsistent health)

"I'm telling you there's noone left on the peninsula," said Karen, as if reading her mind, and still annoyingly awake. "The aliens moved them all."

"Then we'll hop from town to town until we get off the peninsula," said Chell. "That's what, 70 or 80 miles? It'll take a while at our current speed but we can do it."

The peninsula might be devoid of human life (beyond a few obvious exceptions) but the roads and houses remained, and there was plenty of animal life for eating as long as Karen didn't get all sentimental about it. Bunny rabbits must be a whole lot cuter than humans, given what a fuss she made about killing them. Even with their injuries and impairments Chell and Karen should be able to make it quite a way south before they were forced to find a new home and settle in for the Winter, and that was only if they didn't find any form of transportation more efficient than their feet.

Karen crawled out of the tent and sat next to Chell. Her normally perfect hair was all mussed from sleep and Chell had to stop herself from brushing her fingers through it to straighten it.

"And then, what, Minneapolis?" said Karen, like a teenager being forced to go on a boring family vacation. "I can't believe you want us to travel all that way just to get to Minneapolis, it's so dreary." Caroline had been from Tennessee, and as far as Chell could tell she'd never entirely acclimatised to the north.

"You got any better ideas?" said Chell. "Because we are not staying still." Karen had been able to offer precious little information about the alien invasion, she kept getting distracted by rants about how the whole thing was the fault of some company called Black Mesa. And they had to start somewhere.

Karen didn't say anything for a while, watching Chell try to rub at the sore spots on her legs. "Can I give you a massage?" she said. "You're doing that all wrong."

Chell frowned, but her legs really were pretty painful. "Sure."

Karen started to massage Chell's legs with the precision and efficiency of someone who'd spent decades doing destructive scientific tests on the human body. It hurt, but in a good way. At one point she poked a pressure point and Chell's whole leg twitched.

"Ooh!" said Karen, and tried to make it happen again.

"I am not your science experiment," said Chell. "Medicinal massage only."

Karen sighed and went back to searching for sore spots.

"You have tightness in your Vastus lateralis," she said, poking. "You might benefit from better instep support."

"I'll bear that in mind," said Chell, wincing as the muscle twinged. It certainly felt tight. "I'm surprised GlaDOS let you keep your medical knowledge," she said. "She seemed pretty determined to keep you ignorant."

"It meant I could look after myself when I got injured," said Karen. "More efficient."

"Right," said Chell. That was a pretty nasty reason, but she couldn't deny that the knowledge was useful. Karen continued kneading the outside of Chell's thighs until she got bored, and then she started tracing out the various muscle groups and bones as well as she could through the thick fabric of Chell's pants.

As Karen's touch became less painful and more contemplative Chell's skin began to tingle. She wasn't sure if she could complain or ask her to keep going. "Uh..." she began.

"What would you say to us going back to Aperture?" said Karen.

"What?"

Chell pulled back in surprise so fast that she nearly kneed Karen in the face. "You want to go back? What the hell is wrong with you? Do you miss being tested on? Has the copy of GlaDOS in your skull finally overwritten your last remaining neuron of self preservation? I wouldn't go back even if I knew every other human on Earth was dead!"

"I don't want to be tested on again," said Karen. "Don't be ridiculous. But what about the others?"

"You want to rescue the other...yous she's been testing on?" Ok that made some sense. But still, it was suicide. "Why this sudden concern? I mean I feel sorry for them too, but there's no way we'd get back in and get them out without GlaDOS catching us."

"Obviously," said Karen. "I don't want to go IN to Aperture. I want to blow it up."

Dinner was pheasant (caught by Karen) with zucchini (grown by Chell), baked over a small campfire. Chell hoped they found some more abandoned gardens on their way, or their diet was going to get a bit carnivorous.

"But what if Minneapolis is a smoking hole in the ground?" asked Karen, as she happily chewed on a wing. Now that she'd finally spat out what she wanted to do instead of looking for human survivors she wouldn't shut up about it. "And I don't mean metaphorically, goodness knows it was always that. In the hypothetical event that Minneapolis has been destroyed, that would make this whole trip a complete waste of time. Time that could have been spent blowing up GlaDOS!"

"Well what if Aperture is a smoking hole in the ground"? said Chell. "Wheatley can't have been the only AI unhappy with GlaDOS's dictatorship, maybe there's been a violent coup."

"Ha," said Karen. "As if any of those pocket calculators could ever outsmart me...I mean her. That moron only managed because he had you helping him."

"I wish you'd stop calling him that," said Chell. "You can't go round judging people by their intelligence."

"Why not?" said Karen. Judging people by their intelligence was practically her entire moral code.

"Just...don't," said Chell. "What ever happened to Wheatley anyway?"

"Still in space I imagine," said Karen dreamily. "Floating around, being a...very annoying person. With bad judgement. Who tried to kill us."

"Poor guy," said Chell.

"You are far too forgiving," said Karen.

"Tell me about it," said Chell.

It was dark in the tent, dark and warm. Chell could hear Karen rustling about in her sleeping bag, and beyond that there was the rustling of the trees and other sounds of the forest at night. She closed her eyes and imagined what the campsite would have sounded like 25 years ago, with camper vans full of happily families and the sound of cars passing by on the nearby road.

Or maybe it would have sounded exactly the same. It's not like this area got that many tourists, Aperture had preferred to keep their little portion of the landscape to themselves.

"Are you awake?" said Karen.

"No," said Chell.

"I'm sorry...you don't have to come with me to Aperture," she said. "I can see why you don't want to. Maybe...maybe I can go later by myself."

This was a pretty surprising statement. Karen had trouble going to the bathroom by herself, she was so attached to keeping close to Chell. "Why is this so important to you?" said Chell. "You suffered in that place nearly as much as I did. More, in some ways."

"I...I don't know," said Karen. "Sometimes I wonder..."

She stopped and Chell waited.

"Sometimes I wonder if GlaDOS made me this way on purpose. That...that she told herself it was for testing, because that's all her programming allows her to do, but that really she was hoping I'd escape, and that I'd...I'd come back and kill her. She didn't have to make me this smart, she had to know one of us was going to escape eventually. And I...I really want her dead. Even more than I wanted to kill you!"

But she's you thought Chell. GlaDOS certainly hadn't seemed to hate herself the last time Chell saw her, quite the reverse. But GlaDOS was a mess of contradictions, and so was Karen.

Chell sighed. "Well, maybe later I'll come with you," she said. "Once I've had a proper chance to search for other survivors. No guarantees though." For a start she got the feeling the other AIs had developed their own happy little society separate to GlaDOS in the bowels of the facility, and wasn't sure they deserved to be blown up just for being part of the same system. But that was an ethical question for another day.

Karen sniffed. "You would do that for me?"

"Hey, are you crying?" said Chell.

"No," said Karen, in a wobbly voice.

"Ah, come here." Chell rolled over and tried to give Karen a hug, though it was hard with both of them wrapped up in sleeping bags.

"Thanks," said Karen. Eventually they both fell asleep, still tangled together.