Portal: Daydreaming Lucidly

Indiana

Synopsis: Wheatley is bored, but he's not annoyed. He's a living distraction.

His was a simple life.

When he was booted up at exactly five a.m. every morning, he would make an attempt to chat with his supervisor, who would tell him to shut up or roll his eyes, depending on how much coffee he'd had. He was fascinated by coffee, really. It was almost like liquid electricity! Humans just drank down the stuff and bam! More energetic than before. Baffling, really. He'd asked around for an explanation, but he got a lot of queer looks and some laughing as opposed to any actual information.

At five fifteen he was sent off on his first assignment, which was usually to head off to the other side of the facility and make sure that the sun was still there. Though he was given this task a lot, he often got lost on the way there and didn't make it to his post until at least six thirty. When he did manage to arrive at the appropriate location, he made absolutely sure that the sun was still there before he headed back. Sometimes this took him a bit of searching. There were these odd fluffy bits in the sky, sometimes, and they liked to move in front of the sun and hide it so that he couldn't see it. This happened on days when the sky was dark, for some reason, and you would think that the sun was easier to find when it was grey like that, since it was so bright and all, but it wasn't. Today was one of those annoying days, where sometimes he would think he'd seen it, but it turned out he hadn't, and he would have to begin his search over again. By the time he was sure he'd located it he headed back, doing his best to engage the nanobots and the other Cores and personnel and anyone, really, in any sort of conversation. No one seemed up to it today, or any day for that matter, but he didn't mind. He'd try them again tomorrow.

If he was finished early, which he was not today, he was sent back to his dock to wait for noon. He did not like that part of his day, did not like it at all. It was boring. It was really, really, really boring, and he often asked passers-by for something to do. But they ignored him, as they always did. That he sort of did mind, but he knew better than to make a fuss about it. People who made fusses about things had an odd tendency to disappear and return slightly different. How different, he'd yet to find out, because one of the qualities one gained when they disappeared was to become very quiet. That was not a quality he really wanted, so he hoped he would never disappear.

At noon he was sent to Administration, where he was given the list of paperwork he needed to do for the guy in charge of the Important Buttons in the facility. He had no idea what the Important Buttons were, not for lack of asking, and he also had no idea who the guy was he was doing the admin for. He'd never met the bloke, just did all his work for him, and he really would have liked to run into him one day to give him a piece of his mind. Seriously. He did all the work and the other guy got all the glory. Bloody ridiculous, that was.

He got the usual administrative task today, which was to take a list of words and organise them alphabetically. Sometimes they had him count the letters of the words and organise them from longest to shortest, and that took him a bit more time because he often got lost inside of the words somehow as he tried to count them out. He preferred doing it alphabetically. It was a lot simpler. He liked it when things were simple. Easy to follow. Like his life.

He would do admin for the other Core until four, and then he was sent to Maintenance for scanning. He often asked why he needed scanning every day, and an inspection every seven days, and never got an answer. He usually didn't mind, but it was beginning to wear on him, all this asking of questions and of never getting the answers. He was growing more discouraged by the day, and by the end of the second hour of scanning he was feeling decidedly morose. That was not a feeling he liked.

At six he would be sent to one of the Filing Rooms, where he was told to organise a shelf full of books various different ways. Today they wanted the books from tallest to shortest. He had no idea why they needed this same shelf full of the same books reorganised every single day, and asking yielded no answers, as usual. He did as he was told and by eight was sent back to the dock to wait to be put into sleep mode. As was becoming disturbingly normal these days, he was angry and upset. That wasn't how it used to be. He used to be quite pleased with his tasks, of all the things he was asked to do. But they were all exactly the same things. And he was so very bored of doing the very same things day after day after day –

If only there were something he could do to break the routine up a bit! He hadn't been excited for anything in so very long.

What if… no, that would never happen. Crazy, that. Unheard of. But… unlikely as it was, there was no harm in thinking about it, right? So he allowed himself to think, just for one moment, how it might be if his supervisor said good morning to him tomorrow, just as his supervisor said to every human he walked past.

It.

Was.

Awesome.

It felt like something new had just been installed in his brain, something powerful and exciting, and as he dared to think about himself saying good morning back… well! That was even better, because now he could have an actual conversation, and have a conversation he did, allll the way into sleep mode.

His tasks didn't change that much. Find the sun at five, Administration at noon, Maintenance at four and Filing at six, but now he had something to do while he was doing those things. It was incredible, it was, all the things he could do inside his head that he wasn't allowed to do anyplace else, and he was genuinely excited to go about his days now. While he searched for the sun he thought about it slipping in between the clouds, there, imagined it having a sly expression on the face he was sure it had but could not see because it was too bright. While he did his admin he imagined that the words he had been given were a secret code to a powerful secret that could only be cracked by him, the Master Hacker. While he was in Maintenance he imagined that he was being searched for the code he'd just cracked, but they would never find it, oh no, because the Master Hacker was not so foolish as to store it where just anyone could find it! While he did his filing he imagined that he had to put the books in the shelf in just the right way, so as to reveal a secret passage that would reveal to him The Secret of the Universe. And while he waited for sleep mode he imagined just what The Secret of the Universe had been today.

One morning, funnily enough, he was given a job more important than any he'd yet dreamed up, not even that of being a spy and covertly stealing secret codes from the sun so he wouldn't have to do the admin. Apparently the Core he was doing admin for had had an accident the other day, so he was being given one of the poor sop's jobs.

And that was bloody exciting, that was, and he proudly told everyone just where he was off to on his way there. Which he got lost actually trying to find, but no matter. He was on a mission today, a real one, and he would get there when he got there, to a little room made all of glass. When he did, he just stopped and stared for a long time. Just stared and stared, before finally daring to move a little closer so he could have a better view for staring with.

It was an Important Button.

This task was so out of sight for him he had never allowed himself to imagine it. But here he was, watching an Important Button, and wow. It was exciting.

He paced back and forth near it, wondering how close he dared get. He'd never pressed a button before. He wasn't sure how they worked, not really. If he'd been asked to guess, he'd say tapping it'd do the trick. He thought about that, about tapping the Important Button and what it might do. It might bring down the whole facility! It might end the world! He shivered. Ohhhh, all the possibilities.

He ran through them, through quite a lot of them, but then he had his wildest thought yet:

What if he actually pressed it. Instead of… instead of pretending. What would happen? Would he get in trouble? Would he be made quiet? If he did it on purpose, certainly. But if it were an accident… hm. That might work. But what sort of accident? He could say that a fly pressed it, maybe. Or he'd accidentally bumped into it whilst defending against an intruder! Yes, that might work.

He put his handle over the button, and it was quivering a bit. Okay, yes. He was a bit nervous. Telling his wild stories to himself was easy, but saying one aloud? Would he be able to keep it straight? He hoped so. Ohhhh did he hope so.

Alright. He was going to press it. He was going to press it in one… two… no, that gave him too much time to think about it. He was just going to do it, and get it over with, just do it on one and surprise himself and –

While he was thinking about all that his handle slipped and he gave that button a good, solid press, and wow. It felt amazing. Better than daydreaming, better than getting told he was getting sent here in the first place, better than anything he'd ever felt, ever, and before he knew it he'd pressed the button a second time. That was almost as good, almost as incredible, and he was wondering if he could pull off fighting off the intruder and touching the button three times when he heard someone say the neurotoxin emitters were online. And then the humans started yelling.

Uh oh.

He looked up from the button, his optic darting around the room in hopes of locating an Emergency Exit, when all of a sudden he got the feeling he was Being Watched. He searched a little more carefully, and to his complete horror he actually found the person doing it. It was a robot, it was a really, really, really really bloody giant robot, and it was staring and staring at him with the biggest bloody optic he'd ever seen in his life, and he suddenly realised he must have failed a test.

It'd been a test, to see if they should promote him, wasn't it! He'd mucked it up, and that robot was there to watch him and report on him and maybe even torture him for all the secret codes he'd cracked! Why had he risked so much! He had to get away from here, fast, before that robot called for reinforcements. He yelled over to it that it would never catch him and it would never get his information, not ever, and he bumped awkwardly against the wall in quite a lot of attempts to get to the door without breaking optic contact. He had a feeling it was important to hold that, somehow. He found the door as he was telling the robot that it would never, ever get any information out of him, and as he was backing out the robot said, to his horror,

"Then I'm afraid I'm going to have to kill you."

He screamed and got out of there as fast as he could.

When he got back to his docking area he immediately started telling the humans about the killer robot and the intruder who had pressed the Button, that he'd done his best to guard it but there were just too many of them, and about all the secrets he'd learned doing Admin and Filing, and they had to protect him because there was a bloody giant robot who wanted to kill him.

The humans looked at each other. They looked at each other again, and again, as if they were trading some secret through their watery optics, and then they smiled and walked away.

He was beginning to think that daydreaming had been a very, very bad idea.

Author's note

So… Wheatley's not really designed to have bad ideas here, he's just this sort of broken and useless core that they just keep busy because they don't know what else to do with him. And he's really bored, so he starts to daydream, but unlike with GLaDOS they get completely out of hand and he begins having trouble separating the daydreams from reality. So when GLaDOS sees him acting so weird she figures out what's going on and plays along.

I put the button near GLaDOS's chamber because one of the unused Wheatley lines in Portal 2 about him pressing it was supposed to trigger when you enter her chamber.

I kind of feel like putting a third part where they attach Wheatley to GLaDOS and instead of distracting her they become like this daydreaming duo that comes up with outrageous ways of being sneaky but I'm not sure.