Unknown year.
New Management.

Doug had lost count of how many hours he'd spent sitting in front of the bank of computer screens he'd set up, waiting for Chell to give him an indication that she was alive. Every hour that passed brought more anxiety as he sat and stared, paced, tried to eat, tried (unsuccessfully) to doze, scribbled reams of nonsense over the walls in the office he'd settled in. Writing what the voices said sometimes exorcised them from his mind, but often they were simply replaced with new ones.

Tired of standing, he sat idly in the desk chair, listening to the facility groaning in the distance. Wheatley was changing things, moving things around, and the facility didn't like it. That was something else to add to Doug's edginess. He didn't feel safe anymore, even in the offices where the central core had no control. Wheatley was haphazard and clumsy, likely to smash an entire wing to smithereens just by accident. Nowhere was safe anymore.

Doug eyed the dimly-lit production line outside the office window, once where the latest model of shower curtain had been made. A fine sprinkling of dust filtered down from above, dislodged by whatever Wheatley was rearranging.

"I don't like this," the cube moaned.

"Neither do I," Doug told it grimly. "But we're staying until we have answers."

"It's been hours…"

He didn't reply. He was well aware that considerable time had passed. The thought of Chell lying broken at the bottom of the elevator shaft was not one he wanted to face. The uncertainty of his own reaction scared him, and he genuinely didn't know whether he would be able to carry on. For three years she had been his only source of hope. What was he supposed to do without her? Resign himself to being a rat in the facility until he died?

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, trying to shut out the thoughts. Sighing heavily, he dropped his hands to his lap, glancing at the nearest screen for what felt like the thousandth time. With a jolt of adrenaline, he did a double take, studying it closer. Something was flashing green.

Doug leaned forward, almost propelling himself off his chair in his haste, fingers flying over the keyboard.

"Security vault door," he read aloud, face breaking out into a grin. "Test shaft nine. She's in test shaft nine! She's alive!" Some of his tension and anxiety lifted instantly, and he kicked out at the desk, pushing his chair into a spin.

"Where is test shaft nine?" the cube wanted to know.

Slowing to a dizzy halt, Doug waited for the room to stop moving before he returned to the computer. "I'll pull up a map."

Every part of the Enrichment Centre was documented, but sometimes expansion happened so fast that the person whose job it was to produce the maps had often fallen behind or left things out. Chell was right at the bottom of the salt mine, however. There would be plenty of diagrams to look at. Doug worked in silence for a few minutes, sifting through the maps on record. At any other time they would have been a fascinating study, but he was too intent on tracking down Chell to appreciate the sheer insane majesty of Aperture's structure. Beautiful and terrible.

"Ah. There it is," he exclaimed, leaning forward to look at the monitor more closely. He pinpointed the elevator shaft where she must have landed, not far from the vault door that had opened not long ago.

"There's no way we can get down there," the cube commented.

"No. But maybe we can figure out where she'll come out," he said. "If she makes it through. God knows what kind of state that part of the facility is in. It's been shut up since Cave Johnson died. Parts of it before that, even. It says here that whole areas got condemned and sealed in 1961, but were later reopened for new tests."

"Of course," the cube scoffed cynically.

Doug studied the map for a moment, eventually locating the vault door at the top of test shaft nine. "Here," he said out loud, tapping the screen. "And where is that in relation to anywhere I know?"

It was directly underneath the oldest testing track in the modern Enrichment Centre, one that had been created by humans and enhanced by GLaDOS. Doug wasn't sure, but he thought it was the one she'd made her hostages run, the scientists who had managed to survive the neurotoxin. As test track one, it was the longest, boasting twenty-four chambers, created back when Aperture was still producing the strange gels Cave Johnson had overseen production of. As far as Doug knew, it was the only set of tests still operational for the gels. They'd been phased out in the mid-1990s.

"That's a hike," said the cube helpfully.

Doug absently rubbed his aching leg as he tried to work out a route, knowing that even with the portal gun, it would still take him hours to get there. For the next twenty minutes he scribbled on some sheets of old scrap paper, writing himself notes and directions while the facility continued to grumble above him.

"Can we please leave now?" the cube spoke up, its tone nervous.

He was feeling edgy, fighting the flight instinct that he had been steadily creeping up on him for the past few hours.

"Soon," he promised, still writing.

Almost exactly five minutes later he stood up, stuffed his notes in his lab coat pocket, picked up the portal gun and left the office. It was always a struggle to remain focused and push the babble of voices to the back of his mind, but they were becoming more and more constant the more anxious he got. The cube hummed soothing nonsense at his back that helped drown out the noise, but the chaos that seemed to be going on in the higher levels was making him tense.

Testing euphoria, he thought to himself. The mainframe needs it, and he has no test subjects. No wonder he's going crazy up there.

Since the core's betrayal, however, Doug found that Wheatley was pretty far down his sympathy list.

It's my fault for relying on him, he reflected. I knew he was programmed to make bad decisions.

He shot portals to cross a wide expanse of space that had once been a series of corridors, trying to keep his mental map straight in his head. So far, so good, but it was still a long way. The ASHPD shot through the crisscrossing patterns in the walkways, enabling him to bypass several floors if there were portal surfaces available. The further down he travelled, the less he could hear of Wheatley's rearranging, and he found himself calmer for it.

Hour by monotonous hour passed until finally he reached the bottom of modern Aperture, braving a short trip in the elevator rather than trying to climb down the outside of the test chambers, which were smooth and annoyingly free of handholds. His limbs were sore, his healing leg trembling, and he was clammy with sweat. He wasn't sure how long the trip had taken him, but it felt like the better part of a day at least. The remnants of GLaDOS's adrenal vapour had kept him going for a while, but now that he was so far down he was starting to feel how tired he was.

He correctly assumed that Wheatley wouldn't notice him using the elevator for a short time. The former Intelligence Dampening Sphere wasn't as tuned in to every little part of the facility the way GLaDOS had been. If Doug had opted to take the lift for the entire journey, he was sure that Wheatley would have noticed, but short trips were nothing.

The vault door sealing off test shaft nine was vast, fastened shut with huge, industrial-looking bolts. It dominated the floor space entirely, surrounded by a haphazard border of hastily-erected wire fences. A small section of rusty-looking gantry sat beside the seal, attached to steel cables: the most rudimentary elevator Doug had ever seen.

"That must be how the last scientists got out," the cube mused.

Doug made a small noise of agreement. "Hopefully it will get Chell out too."

If she makes it this far, he finished silently.

No, he told himself firmly, she will make it this far. I know she will.

The constant cycle of doubt and reassurance was draining.

"Now what?" the cube asked.

"We wait."

He perched himself on the stairs leading up to the elevator, eyes fixed on the vault door, portal gun cradled in his lap. The next thing he knew, a loud, metallic clanging had him sitting bolt upright. He'd fallen asleep on his vigil, and now the huge bolts had shot back, the seal slowly swinging down into the space below on a massive, squealing hinge. Startled but instantly alert, Doug darted forward to the makeshift elevator, activating the controls to raise it up and then down into the test shaft.

For a split second he considered staying put and waiting for Chell, but a burst of fear had him fleeing for the lift. The corridor above was just as empty as when he'd run down it before, but this time Wheatley's voice resonated from the test chamber next to the walkway.

"You...you're not quite..." A noisy sighing sound. "It's there. It's there, isn't it, look? The button is right there. Yes, that's it! On your left. Your left! Your other left. Oh, for crying out loud."

With no time to look in on what Wheatley was trying to achieve, Doug flew down the gantry, jabbing his code into the keypad by the door at the end. He wrenched it open and headed inside, closing it almost all the way, so that only the tiniest sliver of light crept in. He stood there for several anxious minutes, waiting for Chell to come up. Eventually he heard her footsteps on the metal walkway, and saw her shadow block out the light for an instant.

"For god's sake," he heard Wheatley go on, "you're boxes with legs. It- it's literally your only purpose: walking onto buttons. How can you not do the one thing you're designed for?"

Boxes with legs? Doug pondered, before the sound of GLaDOS's voice cut all other thoughts off. She was too quiet for him to hear what she was saying, but there was no mistaking her melodic tones, even through the reedy speaker in the potato.

Why would Chell have brought her back up here? he asked himself.

"There's only one reason," the cube put in. "They must have a plan to depose Wheatley."

"Considering the state of the facility now, I think GLaDOS must be a lesser of two evils," he theorised aloud. The tremors he'd felt before were still ongoing, and he strongly suspected that Wheatley had no idea what was involved in keeping a place like Aperture running.

Of course he has no idea, why would he? We should never have put him in charge.

"Don't blame yourself," the cube ordered, its tone gentle but not to be argued with. "He wasn't supposed to stay in charge, he was supposed to escape with us."

"That's true," he conceded, rubbing his eyes. He felt barely rested, despite his nap on the stairs, and his stomach was persistently reminding him that he hadn't eaten in a while. "What do we do now?" he asked. "Just...wait for Chell and GLaDOS to execute their plan?"

"We can't help," the cube insisted, "we don't know what they're trying to do."

Doug nodded, realising it was true. There were many ways to go about reinstating GLaDOS, and he had no way of figuring out what they would do. With that in mind, he knew there was only one course of action he could take.

"Okay. We keep moving and stay alive, and try to keep track of Chell. But if we can't..." he halted, considering. "If we can't, we get as close to the main chamber as possible. Because they'll have to go there eventually."

"That's crazy," the cube declared.

"Yes, it is," Doug agreed. "But that's what we're doing."

"We might die."

"We might. But..." He shrugged, sighing. "Maybe it's time."

The cube continued to argue. "No."

"No?"

"No. You're not giving up," it stated stubbornly. "Chell wouldn't – won't – give up. What would she say if she heard you talk like that?"

Doug sighed again, absent-mindedly fiddling with the casing on the portal device. He didn't need to voice it, but he knew damn well what Chell would say. "Okay, you've made your point."

"Have I?" the cube said sceptically.

"I will do my utmost to stay alive. Will that do?"

"For now," it conceded mulishly.

Chell's trip through the depths of old Aperture had been rather educational. After the onslaught of memories that passing through the remains of Bring Your Daughter To Work Day had brought on, she'd been fairly confident that she could face any uncomfortable reminders of the past. That was before a collection of pre-recorded messages had introduced her to the crazy force of nature that was Cave Johnson, and reacquainted her with Caroline. Albeit, it had been a youthful-sounding, enthusiastic, vibrant Caroline, and not the cynical, sharp CEO that she remembered from her childhood.

It had quickly become apparent that GLaDOS was completely ignorant of Caroline's significance. Chell recalled her father saying as much, but listening to the A.I. come to the realisation that part of her had once been human was surprisingly difficult. For once, Chell was glad she couldn't speak. She wouldn't have known what to say.

As they journeyed on through the fragile remains of old Aperture, Chell found herself noticing subtle differences in her former-nemesis. She was still herself: snarky, sarcastic, passive aggressive – although that was now directed at Wheatley rather than Chell – but there was a touch more humanity to her. It was understated, but it was there, as if she now remembered what humanity had felt like. To Chell it was quite disconcerting. She'd happily placed GLaDOS firmly in the category of 'enemy'. Now they were allies, and it felt strange and unnatural. Still, putting GLaDOS back in charge absolutely made sense. Despite whatever else she had done, she had always kept the facility running to the best of her ability. Wheatley, apparently, didn't even know how to.

Navigating the unsafe structure at the bottom of the salt mine hadn't been easy, and learning how to use new test elements in order to get through had been tedious, but they'd eventually made it up to the top of test shaft nine. Chell had seen the environment change the higher they got, each area an untidy, badly-preserved slice of history, from 1952 up to the 80s. She'd heard Cave Johnson age in his ongoing pre-recorded messages as he deteriorated under the influence of lunar poisoning, had seen his image grow more frail in his portraits. She'd then been faced with a test chamber that required her to literally paint the walls with the ground-up moon rock gel that had made him sick. GLaDOS had remained silent there, giving Chell no idea whether she was subjecting herself to future illness or not. But there'd been no other way through, and so she'd powered on, trying to come into minimal contact with the stuff. It was yet another thing she'd stored at the back of her mind to worry about later.

Finally they'd reached the huge transition seal at the top of the shaft, where GLaDOS informed her that the best way to defeat Wheatley was with a paradox. Chell was sceptical, but they were low on options. She just wanted to get on with things and leave. Her entire body ached, and she was still woozy from lying unconscious at the bottom of the elevator shaft for who-knew how long. The fall had been brutal, even with the long-fall boots.

Vault door open, she'd gratefully scrambled up into the crude elevator, ascending up and out of Cave Johnson's world, and into what she supposed was Caroline's legacy. Once they were back in the Aperture they were both familiar with, Chell and her potato ally found Wheatley right away, trying his hardest to conduct tests with no test subjects. His solution to that was to create weighted storage cubes that could walk themselves onto buttons. This, he'd done by creating a strange kind of cube/turret hybrid that was doing everything but walking onto the button.

Of course, Chell had thought to herself as she looked at the scene in the test chamber, completely the most logical thing to do.

She hadn't been particularly hopeful about GLaDOS's plan to take Wheatley out with a paradox, but she was still crushed when it failed. As far as she knew, they didn't have a back-up. Or if they had, GLaDOS was keeping it to herself. Chell decided to fall back on a tried and tested technique: get to the central chamber and wreak havoc from there. It was clear that another core transfer needed to take place. Other than that, she was running blind with no idea what to do.

Just like usual then. Although I had Doug's murals for guidance before...

She was trying not to think about Doug. Truth be told, she was worried about him. Wheatley's test chambers were chaotic, constructed from bits and pieces of other tests, often with only the bare essentials with regards to floor and wall structure. Several times Chell had had to work around an almost-entirely missing floor, relying on anti-gravity funnels to ferry her across gaps. Floating across the dizzying, murky depths on something so insubstantial was not her idea of fun, but she had no choice. From what she could gather from the glimpses she got of the areas outside the testing track, Wheatley's mashing together of the test chambers had disrupted the entire environment around them. She had seen dozens of broken walkways, smashed walls, transportation tubes forced to cut through walls and floors, all of it accompanied by a worryingly-constant stream of falling tiles from above. She could get by in the test chambers because Wheatley needed her there, but Doug... He was running in a minefield out there, and Chell was afraid that one false step could send him falling to his death, if Wheatley didn't accidentally crush him first.

While making her way out of old Aperture, she had had plenty of time to reflect on her former-ally's conduct, and had come to the conclusion that his programming and personality had simply made him wholly unsuitable for the responsibility he'd taken on. Wheatley was designed to make bad decisions. His actions now that he was in power were a self-fulfilling prophecy. It wasn't his fault, she knew that, but she was livid anyway. She'd always known about his selfishness, she'd coped with it on a daily basis, but he'd seemed so adamant about getting out of Aperture that she'd followed him without question. Part of her couldn't help but wonder whether the man would have acted as the core had. She had never known Darren Wheatley, not really. Knowing Wheatley-the-sphere was not the same thing as knowing Wheatley-the-man. But if she could have known whether the man would have turned on her in the same way, it would help her to know whether she could truly blame Wheatley or whether she had to lay that blame on the people who built him. Since she had no fixed direction for her anger, however, she was focusing it on Wheatley regardless of whether it was fair. After GLaDOS's paradox failed and Chell found herself a test subject yet again, she stopped caring about what was fair.

As she worked her way through Wheatley's shambolic wreckage of a testing track, she began to gain some clarity about his behaviour and, to her surprise, GLaDOS's. It became apparent very quickly that he was driven by a programmed urge to test that he was physically incapable of ignoring. The chassis he was now housed in made sure of that. GLaDOS eventually explained to her that the mainframe had what she referred to as a euphoric response to testing. Chell would have been sceptical about that had Wheatley not been quite so thorough in his reaction to said euphoria, making several loud moans that made her cringe.

They built him to sound human, but was that really necessary?

She found herself grateful for GLaDOS's apparent dignity and silence while testing. Things could have felt a lot more awkward otherwise.

You're the one making this awkward, Chell scolded herself. He's a robotic ball, he probably has no idea that he sounds like... She couldn't even finish the thought.

Still, despite the general weirdness of the situation, it had shed some light on GLaDOS's need for test subjects. Not enough that Chell could forgive her, (or Wheatley, for that matter), for trying to kill her, but it gave her some understanding into their desperation. The more she learned about it, the more the test euphoria reminded her of a drug habit, and Wheatley soon showed signs of being an addict.

The situation evolved quicker than Chell was expecting. Wheatley seemed to adapt to the test solution euphoria with astonishing speed, something that surprised even GLaDOS. Despite Chell solving the tests with her usual efficiency, her efforts were never good enough for Wheatley. The more he adapted, the more frantic he became, finding alternative means of fixing the 'problem', including moving the entire test closer to the central chamber. GLaDOS seemed happy about that development, and Chell saw the advantages of it too. The central chamber was where they were trying to get to, after all. But Wheatley's method of moving the test closer meant literally shoving anything else out of the way, and once again Chell found herself fearing for Doug's safety.

He always stayed pretty close before, she reflected. Just for once, please say he kept his distance.

She didn't even know who she was pleading with. The patron saint of scientists, perhaps.

She was uncertain about everything. She'd resented being GLaDOS's test subject, but at least that had offered a certain amount of stability. Wheatley was anything but stable, and his test chambers reflected that. Chell had had a plan before. There had been some comfort, almost routine, in carrying it out. However inexact it had been, it seemed meticulous compared to the way she was improvising now. It didn't help that Wheatley kept changing the rules.

Chell had to ride one of the anti-gravity funnels between tests due to a missing elevator that had apparently melted. In trying to successfully navigate her to the next room, Wheatley had thrown her into the path of danger more than once. Firstly, she had almost been crushed by a moving test chamber, then she'd narrowly avoided falling to her death when he turned off the funnel, dropping through the ceiling into an office that was thankfully below.

He might actually get me killed by accident, she thought as she landed, shaken, surrounded by crumbled ceiling tiles.

"After seeing what he's done to my facility," GLaDOS spoke up as Chell shook the dust off the portal gun, "after we take over again, is it all right if I kill him?"

Chell didn't respond to that, recognising it as a rhetorical question. GLaDOS didn't ask permission from anybody, she simply wanted to vent some of her rage. There was only room for so much fury in the potato. Chell was surprised that she hadn't fried it already.

Wheatley's obvious shock as they entered the nearest test chamber sent alarm bells ringing in Chell's mind. The core had thought they were dead, but it hadn't devastated him the way losing his only test subject should have. It was evident that he had an alternative in place. Chell realised at once that she and GLaDOS had become surplus to requirements. Unfortunately, Wheatley had realised it too.

"After you told me to turn that beam off," he said conversationally, peering at her through the monitor on the wall, "I thought I'd lost you. Went poking around for other test subjects. No luck there, everyone's still dead. Oh! But I did find something. Reminds me: I've got a big surprise for you two. Seriously, look forward to it."

Chell shot him a wary look, redirecting some propulsion gel with the help of one of the funnels. Surprises from Aperture constructs, in her experience, were never good. GLaDOS's optic flickered as she registered the development, and Chell wondered what she was thinking.

After yet another heart-stopping fling out across the bottomless pit, Chell made her way to the exit. She was feeling decidedly jittery, constantly in anticipation of Wheatley making some kind of move that would see her dead.

"You two are going to love this big surprise," Wheatley enthused as she went. "In fact, you might say that you're both going to love it…to death. Love it…until it kills you. Until you're dead." He chuckled. "All right? I don't know whether you're picking up on what I'm saying there, but…"

"Yes, thanks, we get it," GLaDOS assured him dryly.

All Chell could manage to feel at the barefaced declaration was weariness piled on top of her continual tension. They were running out of time, and they didn't even know where they were in relation to the central chamber. Panicking was not an option, but she wasn't sure what else to do. She hadn't panicked at all so far, which, considering what she'd been through, was a miracle.

Why does he want me dead? What did I ever do to deserve that?

Addiction or no addiction, there was no excuse for him wanting to kill her. She wasn't about to let him succeed though. She'd come too far.

Keep going, she told herself when GLaDOS remained annoyingly silent. Something will give sooner or later.

"I didn't imagine that, did I?" Doug shot over his shoulder, the fear evident in his voice. "He really said that he plans to kill them?"

"He really said that."

"But it sounds like something I would hear...you know...when my mind lies," he said hopefully.

"Think," the cube advised him gravely. "You heard the echo. You felt the reverb. That isn't your mind."

Doug nodded in acceptance, feeling the weight of the burden like physical hands pressing down on his shoulders. He and the cube were making their way alongside the testing track, having stumbled across it by chance when the melted elevator pushed Chell in a different direction than Wheatley had intended. It was a hazardous path, forcing him to rely on all of the agility he had honed over the years. Strangely, though, the intense focus required was keeping his head fairly clear.

"I have to break her out of there," he declared. "But where? There's no order to this. Wheatley's redecorating is making her skip entire tests. How am I supposed to know where she'll go?"

The cube had no answers.

Doug scrambled up the bare metalwork of a dilapidated test chamber, hearing the eerie sounds of Wheatley's maniacal laughter echoing out from the neighbouring room where Chell was. Emerging up on top of the boxy structure, Doug gazed out across the strangely empty space ahead. Entire blocks of chambers were missing, others were on fire. The exit to Chell's test was far ahead, separated from its room. The only way to get to it would be with an extremely accurate fling tactic. He looked at it in dismay, knowing full well that he would never make it without taking a much longer route around. By the time he'd done that, Chell would most likely be several chambers ahead.

Doug breathed heavily, fighting to remain calm. He'd never felt so utterly helpless. But there was nothing for it, he had to take the long route. It was either that or go back.

He heard further snatches of Wheatley's chatter as he went, keeping him updated of Chell's progress. She solved the test after approximately ten minutes, prompting a worryingly unenthusiastic response from Wheatley. That was followed by his assurances that she and GLaDOS would only have to wait two more chambers before his big surprise.

Doug put on an extra burst of speed, running across the roofs of the chambers alongside Chell's, trying his hardest to catch up before she got two chambers further. His leg protested his efforts, sending him painful reminders that it was still healing. As if he'd forgotten. The cube and the rest of the contents of his bag thumped irritatingly against his back as he ran, but still he kept on.

And then he heard something that doused his heart in ice water: Wheatley's crowing, accompanied by the sound of an aerial faith plate.

"Surprise! We're doing it now!"