Cave Johnson here,
It's come to my attention that, in my absence, an overwhelming amount of you – monkeys and bananas alike – have begun playing music through your ears. I'll address the monkey-banana part of that in just a minute. Now, I've checked the statistics and it turns out the number of test subjects killed due to Aperture employee attention retention has gone so far so as to make even me horrified. Believe me, people, I don't get horrified often! Not even when I found out there was a version of me staging a massacre on his whole planet with the use of deadly science knowledge. I'll just put my first question out there for all of you: 'What the hell is going on'?
Look, Greg heard all of your complaints. You want music. There's a damn reason I banned mp3 players across the facility; employees should be enforcing that rule, not attacking it. That's why I decided that everyone could listen to the same music blasting throughout those new speakers I installed all throughout the facility. I'm not going to tell you how much they cost because two things could happen: you'll attack those speakers because they cost too damn much, or you'll continue listening to your personal devices because they cost too damn little. I'm not going to risk that, so here's what I'm gonna do.
Meet the Aperture Science-issued Personal Audio Player Device! I'd stop at 'player' but it sounds too new and hip, and if we're in it for the science, we're almost certainly also in it for the fancy-shmancy scientific vocabulary. I understand 'device' isn't exactly all that up there, but you people are idiots, so I'll have to settle for less. Take that, Mr. Jobs. Now, earlier in the email I said that monkeys and bananas alike are listening to their own personal devices. Now, as you all know, almost everything I talk about that sounds simple turns out being incredibly complicated. This is an exception… partly.
You're probably wondering, "Cave, how do plants listen to music? That's just not right. I respect your genius but we've got better things to do, right?" Well, let me make a little correction: it's a plant product, not a plant in itself. Secondly, you're dead wrong. I'd utilize my genius to make sure plants are getting the best treatment possible because right now, all they're doing is sitting in a waiting room stewing in their own juices! It's about time we gave those poor bastards some joy before they decide to place matters in their own hands and stage a plant-vegetable rights revolt.
I also might want to give plants more of a reason to be there besides making oxygen and looking nice. Anyway, as to the banana-music conundrum, it's actually really simple: people across the facility's board have been replacing their own bodies in chairs in observation rooms with actual bananas with earphones lodged into it. Waste of a pair of earphones, that's what I say. Not to mention the fact that the earphones are connected to a vacant phone playing bad Russian jeopardy music. It's not too long before that music becomes a fad among poor test subjects unable to afford the Aperture Science-issued Personal Audio Player Device. There, I said it twice in one email. As to the monkey problem, well, Zealot Monkey Cave or whatever the hell his name is? He's starting to get followers. An alternate version of me who's almost certainly going to sell you down the line to slave away in some off-planet mine for an extra cache of bananas is getting followers.
Now ditch those hip mp3 players in exchange for the Aperture-brand version and get back to work!
- Cave Johnson
PS. Aperture Science has a new store. It's a music store. Right now, though, we've only got one song on stock. That's to say, cabinets and cabinets filled with CDs of the same one song.
PPS. The Aperture-brand device uses CDs. I've decided that virtual ones are a bit too complicated and could get messy given the overwhelming creativity of the people working for me. That's not a compliment; you people are going to get everyone killed.