Prompt 026: "Core Wheats finds a wing of Aperture he's never seen before."
Wheatley relies on his management rail for just about everything. Its importance is invaluable to a robot without limbs or any other means of transporting himself. He's quite grateful for its existence, even if it malfunctions on occasion.
It's not often that it happens. Once in a blue moon, really. Maybe less. He can't exactly remember the last time it malfunctioned, if he's honest. Memory was probably deleted to make room for some new ones. Not that there's anything particularly interesting to make room for. The daily droll of test subject care. Very dull. The only exciting thing in the past several years was the explosion, and even then, there was nothing but power failures afterward.
And—no, never mind. Point is, when it does malfunction, it sends him to places he never means to visit.
"Oh, bloody hell, not again."
Wheatley flinches, handles shifting close to his hull. He tries his best to execute the proper subroutines to signal the contraption that holds him to the management rail to stop, stop for god's sake, bloody stop, but it doesn't. He's whisking down the line, past corroding parts in the facility; past catwalks and snaking vines and sputtering machinery and down the wrong sides of forks in the path, and he's thrust onward into the incoming maw of an unlit wing.
The hum of the rail grates into a screech when the emergency brakes engage. It drowns out the cacophony of his terrified shouts as he comes to a halt; the sheer force shakes his chassis.
When he's positive that he's come to a complete and total stop, Wheatley tentatively opens the shutter of his optic.
"Okay," he says, glancing about. "Okay. All right. Good. At least it's stopped. Finally. That's good. Better. Better than still sailing off into who knows where. It's good. A step in the right direction. Right. Well, okay then, let's see what we've got here."
He squints into the billowing dark, but no matter how many commands he issues to sharpen or zoom the feed streaming into his HUD, he can't make anything out. The soft blue of the light in his optic isn't powerful enough to illuminate the place he's been sent, and he dares not switch on his flashlight. He's already in a potentially precarious position; he doesn't want to die.
"All right," says Wheatley. "Darkness. Darkness… everywhere. No lights. Not a one. Oh, maybe that's—oh, nope, no lights. Rather unfortunate. Not a particularly intelligent choice in design. I don't know who hired the architects to build this place, but they did a bloody poor job at it, if I'm honest."
Wheatley tries to move along the rail, but nothing responds. The emergency brakes are doing their job quite admirably. It's a shame their services are no longer required.
"Well, this might be a problem," he says, staring into the dark.
The more he looks about, the more he thinks he might discern sorts of shapes, but he can't be sure. Straining his auditory functions, he realizes that there is a deep, rumbling thrum that encompasses the room. Apprehension creeps into his circuits.
"This wouldn't be so bad if I could see," he murmurs to himself, scrunching back as far as the emergency breaks will allow. "I mean, really, why not give me night vision? Seems like a good idea. Popping around a dark facility for most of the job, why not night vision? Oh, no, no, Wheatley, we can't do that. Too expensive! Not like the bloody power's gone out before or anything. Management."
It's then that a spark flickers in the inky black. It's sharp, thin, glowing, and as Wheatley watches from his perch on the management rail, it widens. A series of halogen lights bolted into the ceiling brim bright with white, blinding light.
What he's met with is an open room. There are small tanks that are hooked up to the chrome walls, each attached with wires that coil down from the ceiling. In the center of the room, he notes, stands an absolute juggernaut of a machine, thick and powerful and towering.
Zooming in on one of the tanks, he realizes that there are bodies inside of them. But they're not human bodies, no—they just look human. He can recognize wirework when he sees it: they're being powered by that gargantuan cylindrical structure in the middle. Massive cables run from each tank toward its base, and smaller cables fit into… well, the bodies' arms? Their backs, maybe? His magnification features aren't that precise. He can't be sure. A few of them do look familiar somehow.
Wheatley is sure of one thing, though: these things are robots.
"This isn't android hell, is it? Oh, god. I really hope not. I knew I shouldn't have come this way. Why didn't I listen? Just had to take the short cut back, had to skip past the turrets and all their nonsense—"
"Wheatley!"
"What?" Wheatley spins around only to be greeted with the familiar glow of a green optic. "Oh! Oh, thank god, you're not—okay, look, I didn't mean to come this way, so if anyone asks, I wasn't here. All right? Clear on that? Because the bloody management rail's on the blink again and it just wouldn't stop, I tried everything, just kept going and going, and… are… are you in a party escort bot?"
"I borrowed it," says Rick, floating into the chamber. His spherical chassis is planted onto the mechanical body of a party escort bot, complete with party escort claws, party escort torso, and party escort hover… technology? Wheatley has no idea how that works; there are open bits by the legs, and bell-shaped puffs of fire sputter out. "And while we're on the subject of asking, don't mention I did. Wanted to take it for a spin, see how it felt. And let me tell you: it is im-press-ive!"
"Does that mean you're going to get me out of here?" asks Wheatley, appraising Rick's borrowed—or what he assumes is stolen—body. "Because we'll both get in a whole lot of trouble if they find you in that. You know what happened last time."
Rick glances down at the chamber of androids as he draws close to Wheatley. "What kind of craziness did you find in here? Looks important. Big wig stuff. Dangerous, even."
"Oh, no no no, don't even get started on that," says Wheatley. "Just—pick me up, will you? Get us out of here, and no one will ever know what happened."
"Fine, fine," says Rick. "Prepare to disengage, partner. Gonna hit the switch here."
Rick's claws work on the rail, and when the emergency brakes unhinge, he clamps a mechanical hand around Wheatley's hull.
"Ouch!" His HUD jolts with static for a split second before righting itself again. A few errors pop up in one of the data feeds, though he doesn't know why. "Oi, I'm all for grip, but this is—ooh, apply less grip, if you would, just not so you're crunching my—agh—everything and—"
"Quit whining, bucko," says Rick, pulling him from the management rail. "Man's gotta suck it up. Romeo to Foxtrot, we have acquired Whiskey! We're heading out, so hold tight."
"I'm sorry? Hold tight? Are you serious? You're the one with the—well, the hands? I suppose they're hands? Not exactly the safest looking pair of hands, if I'm honest, not my first choice if I had to pick, but—"
"Here we go!"
Rick winds up the bot, twisting about, Wheatley in tow, and lunges down the path of the management rail in a burst of party escort hover technology. Wheatley's shouts echo in the room of slumbering robots, trilling over the hum of the central machine. Behind them, the lights wink out one by one. When all are extinguished, darkness swathes the chamber once more.
In the shifting black, the voice recognition software of a single tank completes its analysis.
The android within awakens.