2007.
Bring Your Cat To Work Day.
Almost a year had passed since Chell had decided to volunteer as a test subject. It had turned out to be a short-lived experiment for her. Much to Adam's embarrassment, she had been rejected within an hour. In her mind, she hadn't done anything wrong, but it seemed she and Aperture had differing priorities when it came to testing. Chell aimed to solve the puzzle and get to the exit, while Aperture preferred test subjects to do as well as possible, but to focus on taking extremely good care of the expensive equipment in the chambers. She was marked down for damage to testing apparatus, then somehow managed to annoy the scientist observing her, which resulted in petulant scribbles across her testing record declaring her to be 'abnormally stubborn'. A stern dismissal followed, hand-delivered by an awkward Adam.
It seemed ridiculous, but she supposed she shouldn't complain. She wasn't sure that testing was for her after all, despite how impressed she'd been with the portal device. Doug had been relieved to hear about her rejection, but also somewhat amused when she told him the reasons why. After he'd had time to get over his initial annoyance, Adam saw the funny side as well, often teasing her about it whenever she dropped by his office. Chell knew she'd never live it down, but luckily the sheer absurdity of it kept her smiling. That and Marlene's unique expression when she heard the news: a bizarre hybrid of long-suffering non-surprise, pained amusement, and smugness, because she had advised against Chell's volunteering.
After praising his achievements with the ASHPD, Lazarus Grey had indeed promoted Doug to work on the GLaDOS project. Although he got on with his work with minimal fuss, Doug was constantly uneasy about it. Chell saw less of him, and heard very little about how the project was going. He had told her that she already knew most of it from what her dad had said, but she had been picking up additional pieces of information since then. She knew that her dad's departments were responsible for the bulk of it, including the worst element: Caroline. She knew that Doug's friend, Henry, had been working on more cores like Wheatley to try and tame the robot's desire to kill. She knew that Doug himself had been brought on as a programmer and to 'generally assist', and that he was happiest when he had pick-up work on the portal gun to fall back on.
She also knew that every time GLaDOS was activated, she threatened to kill them all in less than a second. That knowledge sat fearfully over her head all the time she spent in the facility. Part of her wondered why she didn't just quit and leave, but she knew she couldn't give up. Doug had spoken nervously about trying to sabotage the project, and she wanted to be there to support him if she could. They had toyed with the idea of getting Simon on board, but Chell had vehemently expressed her doubts that her dad would ever turn his back on his work. However much she wished it, it wasn't going to happen. Nothing short of causing him an accident that forced him to spend time away from work would be effective, and she didn't really want to go that drastically far.
Both she and Doug felt the weight of time pressing in on them, and it was making them both edgy, Doug more so than her. He was becoming increasingly paranoid, and she wasn't sure how to deal with it other than with calmness and common sense. But however much she tried to reason it out, she felt wary too. There were rumours that Black Mesa were talking about conducting several big experiments, so Aperture were pulling out all the stops to compete, trying to get GLaDOS working safely so they could claim glory first. Doug was concerned that they were cutting corners they shouldn't be cutting.
Then, inevitably, the crunch time came.
It began nonchalantly enough. Chell made it home on time for once, and was enjoying a relaxing evening with a movie while Emma was out with friends. Her peace was shattered by the shrill ring of the house phone. When she picked it up, she was stunned to hear her father's voice on the other end.
Pushing her surprise aside, she greeted him as pleasantly as possible. She still found it hard to forgive him for drugging her all those months ago.
"How are things?" he asked her, as if they chatted all the time rather than just a few times a month.
"Same old," she replied with a shrug. "You?"
"Not too bad," he said unconvincingly. "Listen, Chell…are you coming into work tomorrow?"
She frowned, tucking her feet up on the couch. "Yes, of course. I can't afford to be off!"
Her father paused for so long, she began to wonder if he'd hung up on her. Then, in a grim tone, he said quickly, "Take the day off."
Chell's frown deepened. "I can't do that, I've got stuff to do. It's Bring Your Cat To Work Day, and Marlene has all these stupid spreadsheets that she hasn't–"
"Chell, I'm serious. Don't come in. Just…trust me. Or…humour me. One of them."
"What's going on, Dad? And don't say 'nothing'."
He gave a heavy sigh, but didn't answer. Chell considered his request, how similar it was to one Doug had put before her only that afternoon. There was only one conclusion: GLaDOS was due another attempt at activation. She couldn't say a word about it, however. She still wasn't supposed to know.
What is it that's different this time that has them both so scared? she wondered. In Doug's case, she knew he had little faith in the failsafe that Henry had come up with to keep GLaDOS in line, but her father was a different matter. His loyalty to Aperture had never faltered.
"I can't tell you," her dad said eventually, the four words she was beginning to hate hearing. "Just trust me when I say that I'm thinking of you. Nothing is wrong. I mean, nothing will go wrong, but I can't take that chance."
"And I can't take a sick day on a whim," she fired back, losing patience. "If you're so sure that nothing will go wrong – whatever that means – then where's the problem?"
"Chell…"
"If you don't have anything more helpful to say, I'm going to go. I want an early night."
"Chell, please listen to me." His tone grew sharp. "For once, curb that pig-headedness of yours."
She was in no mood to be reprimanded on top of everything else. "Goodnight, Dad," she said simply, ending the call.
She half expected him to ring back, but the phone remained mercifully silent. Letting out a sigh, Chell studied the frozen figures on the TV, suddenly no longer interested in how their story resolved. She switched everything off and headed to bed, but it was a long time before she slept.
By daylight, however, she had all but forgotten the worry in her dad's voice, too wrapped up in her goals for the day. Her morning passed by in a rush, a succession of busy intervals accompanied by Wheatley's almost-constant chatter. She ate lunch at her desk before snatching five minutes to visit the bathroom, something that had been on her to-do list all morning.
She was just heading back to her office, crossly picking cat hair off her black suit jacket, when she was waylaid by a panicky Doug. With barely a word, he seized her arm in an iron grip and dragged her back down the corridor.
"Wait!" she called, trying not to stumble. "Doug, just...slow down! Let's talk."
"No time," he said through gritted teeth. "No time to get you out, either."
"What? Will you please...oh, for god's sake. Doug!"
They rounded the corner into another silent, empty corridor, and she finally wrenched her arm out his grasp.
"Doug, stop this!" she yelled. "Whatever it is, you're overreacting."
"I'm not!" he insisted, the grimness of his tone startling her.
He let out an irritated huff, running a hand through his hair. Chell folded her arms, happy to wait until he felt like speaking again.
"You weren't there," he said eventually, unable to meet her eyes. "You didn't hear what she said. She wants to perform the Schrödinger's Cat experiment, and Henry is giving her access to the neurotoxin generator. After everything that happened before, after everything they've done to try and keep her under control, keep her from killing us all…they'll undo all of it the moment she has access."
Chell felt a shiver of unease shoot up her spine. She swallowed and tried to maintain a rational tone. "But if she has that thing, the morality core thing...wasn't that supposed to stop her from doing stuff like that?"
"It won't be enough," he stated ominously. "I just...know it. Like I told Henry, the morality core is just a counterfeit conscience, and you can always ignore your conscience."
Chell said nothing. Despite her doubt, his words were ringing true. What she'd heard over the years did not fill her with confidence in GLaDOS's ability to run the entire facility safely. Part of the A.I. still remembered being Caroline, even if she wasn't consciously aware. Revenge was a powerful motivator, even for a being who wasn't human anymore. Giving her access to neurotoxin seemed unbelievably naive.
"If I hide you in a stasis pod," Doug went on, breaking through her thoughts, "you'd survive if she pumped neurotoxin through the vents."
"It wouldn't come to that, would it?" she asked, feeling the first stirring of fear in her gut. "I mean, last time they activated her, we evacuated, it was fine. And besides, what about you?"
Doug shook his head firmly. "We got lucky last time, we were fairly close to the surface. People died that day. It was hushed up, but… Look, I'll get myself to a pod, if it comes to it."
"This is crazy," Chell declared in a low voice, throwing up her hands.
He turned and met her gaze, his expression stricken. She saw his fear, his anger, and a trail of pain weaving its way between the two. He felt like a failure, she realised, because he hadn't been able to stop it.
"I can't just..." he began, his voice cracking. "Please. I can't lose you, Chell, you're too important to me."
She reached out, squeezing his shoulder. "You're not going to lose me."
He pulled her into a hug, holding her tight. She could feel how afraid he was in the fierceness of his grip. She clung back, trying to be reassuring, seeking reassurance in turn. Despite the bizarre circumstances, she found a fleeting sense of peace in the embrace, all the warmth, comfort and affection that she had come to associate with him, her closest friend. Perhaps now her only friend, since she had lost touch with almost everyone else.
They'd never hugged before. It hadn't been necessary in their relationship. But Chell was suddenly struck with the feeling of wishing they had, wondering if either of them would be quite as jittery and anxious if they'd been more supportive to each other. She also couldn't help but wonder if he felt the same thing.
Her feelings were jumbled up in her head, like a tangled basket of yarn, with only one bright strand of clarity free from it all. She knew with absolute certainty that she'd do whatever she could to keep him from worrying any more than he already was. If that meant having a few hours of naptime in a stasis pod, then so be it.
"Okay," she said into his shoulder, "I'll do it. But you'd damn well better come and let me out when this madness is over."
"Yes," he agreed, not bothering to hide the relief in his voice.
Chell stepped back, assessing his expression to check that he meant it. He was genuine, but the apprehension and the trepidation were still visible.
"You're going to have to dress like a test subject," he told her. "So you blend in. Otherwise someone might wonder what you're doing there."
With a somewhat heavy feeling of resignation, she nodded. The test subjects' orange jumpsuits were too similar to prison uniforms for her liking. She didn't want to read too much into the symbolism, but it was hard not to. When she'd been rejected for testing, she'd been glad that she would never have to put one on.
Lightly running now, at Doug's insistence, they made their way to the wing known as Test Subject Storage, not a name that filled Chell with confidence. It just highlighted what she'd already suspected: that Aperture didn't class test subjects as people. Neither one of them spoke on the way, and the silence added to the tension of the situation.
With Doug's instructions to hurry echoing in her head, she quickly got changed in one of the dressing rooms, leaving her clothes in a locker. The floor was cold against her bare feet, and she tugged at the jumpsuit's cropped pants, feeling vulnerable in clothes that weren't her own, wishing she could wear shoes. She gathered her hair into a ponytail, scoffing at herself that she should be concerned about something so trivial.
Doug was waiting for her outside and he nodded grimly when she emerged. "I've found a spare pod," he said. "Come on."
Chell followed him wordlessly, her increasing anxiety bubbling under the surface of her calm exterior. They hurried down narrow paths between boxy rooms with glass walls, each containing a pod, most occupied by sleeping, orange-clad figures.
"What about you?" she asked.
"I found a pod in for repair in the maintenance room," he told her distractedly. "It still works, it's only in there because its seat padding is ripped, but it's not wired to the main grid. I'd be separate from the test subjects, so I can come and let you out when I wake up."
Chell nodded, although he didn't turn to see. The maintenance room was close to the door, easier to get to from the corridor if the worst happened. She could breathe a tiny bit easier with that in mind.
Doug halted outside chamber 1498 and pressed a sequence of keys on the monitor there. One of its glass walls slid up into the ceiling, leaving a clear path to the pod. It was smaller than she'd been hoping. She didn't suffer from claustrophobia, but she felt it tugging at her as she looked at the thing. She swallowed a sudden lump in her throat and took a single, tentative step forward.
"As soon as you can," she said, battling the tremor of apprehension in her voice. "Come and get me."
"I will," he assured at once.
Chell didn't look back, unable to take her eyes off the plastic bubble that would soon shut her off from the world.
"I've...I've deleted your surname," he said from behind her. "Just...you know...in case."
"Okay," she acknowledged, barely above a whisper.
She crossed the floor of the glass room, hearing Doug's cautious step following. He tapped a few keys on the pod and the domed lid rose up. Chell stared at it, all too aware of how clinical and coffin-like it was.
"Chell?" she heard Doug venture, his tone hesitant and more than a little afraid.
"What?"
There was a pause, and she wondered what kind of words he was fumbling for. Were they parting for a few hours, or for much longer? Was he exaggerating, or would she wake up to a very different facility? She glanced up into his face, taken aback by the sheer desperate earnestness of his expression. It was more than his paranoia. This was something more. Something he'd feared for a long time. He was terrified.
"Doug..." she began, unsure what she could really say to alleviate his fear.
He faced her square-on, gripping her shoulders. "If she's active when you wake," he said, and she opened her mouth to protest. "No, listen," he interrupted. "If she's active when you wake, just play along with whatever she wants you to do. Stay sharp, stay alive, and do not talk to her."
"What?"
"I mean it. She'll look for weaknesses, don't give her any ammunition, no matter how hard it seems."
Chell nodded meekly, his grim tone rendering her momentarily silent. "Won't she just...kill me?" she asked at length.
Doug paused, choosing his words carefully. "I...don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
"She's programmed to want to do science, and for that she'll need test subjects. I think she'll keep you alive just so long as you test."
Praying to gods she didn't even believe in that he was wrong, Chell nodded once more.
Doug glanced nervously at his watch. "Two minutes," he muttered. "You'd better get in."
Reluctantly, she hopped up onto the pod's padded seat, tucking her legs up into it. Feeling like a first-time patient at the dentist, she lay back, folding her trembling hands over her stomach and gripping her fingers tight.
"I'll...see you soon," Doug said, trying to smile. It was a very poor effort.
"You'd better," Chell replied curtly.
He rested his hand briefly on top of her clasped ones, then withdrew and closed the bubble. It sealed off every sound and distorted every view, so that the entirety of Chell's world was the brightness of the lights in the ceiling, Doug's slightly fuzzy outline, and her own quick, noisy breathing. The pod smelled of chemicals, she reflected idly. Then came the subtle hiss of gas, her eyelids became heavy, and her tiny world went black.
Alarms were sounding off everywhere, the corridors bathed in the eerie red emergency lights. Everyone was fighting their way to the elevators, their panicked voices filling the corridors with indecipherable cries, shouting to block out GLaDOS's calm ramblings that echoed over the speakers. Doug was the only one running in the opposite direction, and no matter how hard he tried, nobody else listened enough to go with him. He forced himself to keep going, to ignore the yells of his co-workers as they saw him heading off. GLaDOS needed to be stopped, and for that to happen, he needed to survive.
She had performed the Schrödinger's Cat experiment, just as she'd promised. Her chamber had become a cat slaughterhouse as, one after another, the beloved pets of twelve screaming employees had been sacrificed for science. The scientists had tried to reach them, but found themselves held back by moving floor panels. They tried to reach the shutdown button, only to find that she'd discovered how to keep them from that too. Finally, they tried to reach the red phone, to dial the emergency number. She kept them from that as well. It was at that point that Doug, standing strategically by the door, had bolted.
GLaDOS declared the entire facility a huge Schrödinger's Cat experiment, thanked them for their participation, then bid them goodbye. At that point, the neurotoxin began to flow and people started to run.
Holding his breath for as long as he could, Doug sprinted into Test Subject Storage, skidding to a halt inside the maintenance office adjoining the main room. Working quicker than he ever had in his life, Doug powered up the broken pod, programming it to wake him in two days. He was grateful that it wouldn't be on the same grid as the test subjects' pods. He didn't want to be noticed at all. By the time he was done, he was starting to see bright spots dancing in the forefront of his vision. The room had turned hazy with sickly green gas.
He lifted the bubble and clambered into the pod. Leaning out to tap the last few keys on its panel, he let the lid close. There was an excruciating moment of waiting while the pod pumped out the mixture of air and neurotoxin that had entered with him, then, finally, the cool spray of the oxygen and sleep gas canisters. He breathed deeply, not minding the chemical aftertaste, just pleased to be able to fill his lungs again. Then, like Chell before him, he succumbed to the sedative, falling into a dreamless sleep.
Two days later, he woke to find that Aperture Laboratories had become a facility-wide graveyard.
A/N: So GLaDOS is finally in charge. I decided to incorporate Bring Your Cat To Work Day, which is mentioned in Lab Rat, as it seems a likely time for GLaDOS's takeover, particularly if you look at how worried Doug looks in that scene.