Evil!Wheatley
Seeing Red
The button had been pressed and, for a few seconds, everything had seemed fine. And then the machines had pulled the two cores into the floor, and there'd been nothing but pain, pain in every spark, every joint and connecter, every single line of code…
…And a few moments of blissful nothing…
…And then, then, he'd come back on.
Machines have a very strange sort of awareness of themselves. Where humans are vaguely aware of the messages being sent from the nerves on the very outermost edges of themselves, a machine can feel (for lack of a better word) every single wire and chord within themselves as the electricity flows through it; they're aware of every single piece of themselves. And, though Aperture had installed filters in each one to avoid sensory overload, for a few truly wondrous seconds, he could feel the entire facility spool out from him, aware that he could do anything at all, absolutely amazing, everything's so tiny!
Looking back, he was never sure why he'd done what he had. Maybe it was that small moment of total awareness before the backup took over, maybe it was the strangely disappointed look on her face (only after it was all long over did it occur to him that maybe, just maybe, no guarantees, probably dead wrong, maybe she'd been looking forwards to taking him with her,) or perhaps it was simply a leftover scrap of Her personality floating around in the chassis, but whatever the reason, he'd brought the lift back down.
He'd wanted to show off a little more, was what he'd thought at the time. He'd flaunted that potato, stripped Her of her right to the capital...
She'd called Him a moron.
All he'd seen from that point on was a blur of red fury, and, after a little while, all he'd felt was a dull, throbbing itch.