"It's been a while," his therapist remarked. She was a good woman, like Caroline had been, professional and genuinely concerned for his well-being.

"Work has kept me very busy," Doug replied, a half-truth. "I couldn't get away from the office."

But Dr. Miller saw the way he struggled to meet her eyes. "Doug, what's really going on? You know you can tell me anything."

He shook his head. "I can't talk about it."

"Why?" Dr. Miller carefully extracted the answers from him one question at a time. It was a slow process, but she was a patient woman.

"It's a secret; Aperture's secret. I can't tell you. I'm sorry."

"Okay," the therapist backed off a little. "What can you tell me?"

Doug started to explain about the facility going into lockdown for longer periods of time, how it made him nervous that he might run out of pills or simply not be allowed to go home again. But it was impossible to mention that without also explaining why the company saw fit to lock all its employees inside. Eventually, Aperture's secret was out in the open.

"I'm terrified that one day I just won't come back." He told her everything in disturbing detail, and she listened quietly while jotting down notes like increasingly delusional and paranoid hallucinations. Doug spoke about GLaDOS, neurotoxin, disappearances of his coworkers...

Dr. Miller knew what anyone else knew about Aperture Science; it had fallen on hard times after Cave Johnson's death, withdrawing and isolating itself from the outside world. There were rumors of bankruptcy even before Cave died, so she found it difficult to believe they had enough money to build a supercomputer of any kind.

After he finished talking, she tried to think of how to begin. "Doug, sometimes our minds lie to us, like people do. Now, you have been under a lot of stress lately because of work and-"

But he cut her off. "Were you even listening? Work is stressful because that damn AI tries to kill us every time She's activated!"

"Well, I think maybe a higher does-"

"You don't believe me, do you? It's not all in my head! I'm not lying, and neither is my mind!" Of course Dr. Miller probably thought that after he left this building, he just wondered around, imagining a crazy robot was out to get him. The portal device did sound like a work of science fiction.

There were still fifteen minutes remaining of this session, but Doug decided to leave anyway. Even his therapist thought he was mad. He might as well just return to Aperture, where the madness was real and perfectly normal.

He would not come back.

)O(

Doug's phone rang just as he was about to leave for the day. It was like whoever wanted to bother him picked the exact worst moment to do so.

"It's me, mate," a familiar British man's voice said breathlessly. "Something's happened and I don't know what to do. Can you meet me in one of the old test shafts?"

"Wheat?" Doug checked and indeed his friend wasn't in the office. "What did you break this time?"

"For God's sake, it isn't like that!" Wheat's tone filled with panic. "Now are you coming or not? There aren't any cameras down here, so it should be safe."

"Where are you exactly?" Doug asked.

"Uh...Test Shaft Zulu Bunsen."

"All right, I'm on my way."

The elevator slowly descended deeper underground. It was made of glass so he could see the gathering darkness and dust-covered underbelly of Aperture. Entire sections of the facility were closed up after Mr. Johnson died, mostly because the company could no longer afford to keep everything operational. But employees who had worked here for a long time still could access abandoned test chambers like this one.

It wasn't too hard to find Wheat considering he was only other person down here. The state of him alarmed Doug. He paced about restlessly, hands in his pockets, peering over the rims of his glasses as if expecting someone other than Doug to emerge from the shadows, perhaps to do him harm. Wheat acted like a man being hunted; it was a feeling Doug was very familiar with. But almost more surprisingly than that, he was also smoking.

"I'm not trying to look cool, if that's what you're thinking," he said as his friend approached. "I'm trying to calm down. I don't even smoke. This is disgusting."

"Probably not a good idea, then."

"Well, according to those bastards, coming up with bad ideas is what I do best! It's my one contribution to science, fancy that." Wheat took another drag off his cigarette and coughed.

"What bastards?" Doug wanted to know, concerned by this strange behavior.

"The bastards who sent me that email," he explained. "Apparently there aren't enough poor blokes willing to become cores anymore. So then Henry, the bloody git, decided to volunteer me. And that's not even the best part! You know what core they want me to be? The Intelligence Dampening Sphere, IDS, their fancy way of saying I'm the biggest moron in the whole bloody facility! But theyare the morons, not me!"

His blood ran cold. "They wouldn't really do that without your consent, would they? What did the email say?"

"Oh, I dunno, all this stuff about how I've been selected to participate in a procedure that will save everyone's lives, and how I should feel honored for the opportunity. But I don't feel bloody honored, Doug!"

"I wouldn't either," he said grimly. "And if they're starting to force people into cores, my time will probably come eventually."

"Of course it won't," Wheat replied bitterly, dropping the rest of cigarette on the ground and stomping it out with his shoe. "They want to make that fucking AI less mental, not more. What use would a paranoia core be? A schizophrenia core?"

Doug recoiled at that."What are you going to do?" Obviously his friend was very upset right now and would probably regret saying such things later, but now wasn't the time. They didn't have time to waste.

"I dunno...I-I have to get outta here, that's all." Suddenly Wheat bolted toward the elevator, and Doug could do nothing but watch as it moved toward the surface. He had a feeling his friend wouldn't get far though.

And indeed, by the time Doug pushed open the exit door, revealing a clear blue sky, Wheat was still there. He sat with his knees drawn up to his chest amidst the tall golden stalks of dry grass.

"You're not doing a very good job of running away, you know."

"I thought about going home," he said quietly. "To England, I mean. But I don't have money for a plane ticket. Not that it would matter; they'd find me. God knows the world suffers from a shortage of morons."

"I'm sorry, Wheat." he said, lowering himself into the grass beside his friend.

"Why the hell are you apologizing? I'm the one who's sorry! I never should have said that stuff about you. I didn't mean it. You're not mental at all; you're the sanest person here."

The clouds rolled on, and they enjoyed a few moments of silence. "For what it's worth, you're not a moron either."

"I know that. I'm smart enough at least to know these cores won't make a fucking difference. If anything they just make the blasted AI even more inclined to kill us..." His eyes filled with tears. "I don't want to live forever, mate."

It was a terrible burden, this sanity and morality. The knowledge that Doug wasn't even good enough to be turned into a core and Wheatley was soon to be robbed of his human form for nothing. It wouldn't be enough to save their lives. Most of them weren't worth saving anyway.

In the end, one would live forever and the other would just live. It was what neither of them had wanted.