The moral of this story, children, is to never push an unidentified button.
Ever.
The Facility's backup battery grid had gone unused for centuries, and thus the wires were so corroded and frayed that the system over-volted the main grid. Fortunately for GLaDOS, her system had grounding buffers.
Unfortunately for everything else, the facility did not.
"Warning, both primary backup systems offline. The main system will now attempt to connect to the outdated Aperture Science Innovators Emergency Quantum Backup Power Storage Unit in a last ditch attempt to prevent a quantum apocalypse. Now attempting…"
Wheatley was running as fast his legs could take him.
Fortunately for him, when his consciousness was transplanted to some unlucky human's body, the motor control center of the poor sap's brain was not changed in any way. Meaning that if enough adrenaline pumped through his system, his subconscious would have more than enough pre-learned autonomous reflexes to keep him alive.
Before he even knew what he was doing, he was running down the corridor as fast as humanly possible. Made possible by his loyal subconscious. See, his subconscious didn't know what was happening, it was too simple to understand something like that, it only knew that there was suddenly an outrageous amount of adrenaline in his blood and that his thoughts could all be summed up as GET AWAY.
And so it did.
Wheatley was barely controlling his body, the previous owners of this body's reflexes were taking care of the running, and he just had to take care of the where to go aspect of things.
But it was rather hard for Wheatley to focus with the panels closing around him and the alarms going off-
Wait, back up, panels closing around him?
Busted.
"I'm just going to assume that the Reactor Core's malfunction was your fault." He could hear a sigh from the PA, "Just tell me what you did and I'll fix it, I really should have expected something like this happening."
Oh, no.
Wheatley started frantically waving to his throat and mouth towards the camera in the room.
"Just tell me what you did. It's not that hard, speak up." Wheatley was really worrying now.
"Open your mouth and-…Oh, you can't talk." Wheatley started frantically nodding at the camera in the room.
To Wheatley's surprise, a panel in the ceiling folded out and desk with a terminal was set down underneath it.
"Now, type in what you have to say." Wheatley smiled.
The Scientists forced Wheatley to learn two things during his Mechanical Arm class, one was how to write, two was how to press buttons on a keyboard, although they never told him it was a keyboard, in sequence to make words appear on the screen.
It wasn't really that different.
Wheatley typed 'PUSHED RED BUTTON TWICE, BROKE BUTTON SECOND TIME."
An exasperated sigh came from the PA again, "Oh you have got to be kidding me." And under the scrutinizing glare of the camera, he almost nodded, but instead he shook his head.
"Did you let the Reactor Core self-destruct? Then I'll have to build another one and find a cryogenic pod that will hold all of your stupidity." Wheatley shook his head.
"Good, then what did you break?" Wheatley then typed into the terminal 'BLACK DOT GONE'.
"Well that's good news, I'll just need to make a new quantum rift, speaking of which, it's time to get you back into testing." Wheatley couldn't decide whether to be filled with horror or filled with joy.
And then floor opened up again.