Glados tapped her fingers lightly against the armrest of her metal throne in amusement. The Atlas testing A.I., nicknamed blue, had accidentally portalled an Aperture Testing Cube straight above his orange co-op partner, P-Body. The cube fell from such an enormous height that it crushed the small testing robot into a million pieces.

About 482 pieces, to be exact. She mentally activated the controls to reassemble the fallen robot, simultaneously recording and filing away the security footage for later entertainment. She had quite the growing collection of mishaps to re-watch if she ever felt bored.

"Blue, that was absolutely atrocious," she scolded him, running her thin fingers through her incredibly long, white hair. The round robot bounced in agitation at the rebuke as a newly assembled P-Body jogged into the testing track. "You only managed to break your partner into 482 pieces this time. Honestly, I thought I taught you better than that." Atlas and P-Body tittered nervously, then performed an excruciatingly human high-five gesture.

Glados pinched the bridge of her nose. The robots were hopeless. Truly. But they were hers.

She mentally switched off the viewing screens and deactivated the two A.I.s before they could do any more damage to each other. The pale slight girl jumped down from her perch high in the mainframe's wiring, her long-fall boots reverberating slightly as she hit the floor. She could have easily lowered the seat to a safer height, but she relished the feeling of satisfaction each time her invention held up in action.

As a child she had become sick and tired of test subjects flailing through portals like fish out of water, only to meet an unfortunate, crashing fate as gravity took hold. The portal testing tracks had been much more limited back then, but she had seen their potential and she grabbed onto it. Glados developed the long-fall boots in order to keep test subjects safe from ridiculously high heights. As long as they landed on their feet, that is.

Not that she actually cared what happened to the test subjects. The majority of them met their end in some way or another, but developing the boots allowed the portal testing initiative to take off like it never could before. Portals quickly became the standard test medium used at Aperture Science. She was quite proud of it.

So she wore her own version of the long-fall boots as a trophy of sorts. They were slightly shorter than the standard pair issued to test subjects and were a sleek dark gray. Glados had remained fairly short in stature, at 5'3", and had been able to wear her boots from the age of ten onward.

The scientists told her she looked ridiculous wearing them all the time, therefore she kept them on just to be spiteful. They'd be sorry if a panel suddenly opened up underneath them and they plummeted miles to their deaths. Who'd be laughing then?

She shook her head, aggravating her growing headache slightly. Chiding herself, she switched off her control of the facility's mainframe and left it to the auto-pilot program she had designed. The auto-pilot wasn't as high-functioning as keeping herself connected, but it kept essential systems running and allowed her to have a mental rest. Staying connected too long gave her migraines, so she'd force herself to go do something else.

Switching off the manual control required tapping the side of the cerebral implant at her temple. Aperture scientist Henry Cadwin had designed the implant when she was a child, keeping her brain from overloading from the stress her deviation caused it. She was grateful to him for it, but that was where she drew the line. He had done it in the name of science, not to help the little girl.

There I go again, thinking about the trash that used to inhabit this place. Ugh.
Before she had taken control of the facility four years previously, she had spent countless months designing the new Aperture Science mainframe and control center. She had linked it to her own implant, giving her and only her complete access. It was done on the side, the calculations completed on a small computer she hijacked and kept off-network. Nobody had any clue of the massive takeover she had been planning.

She recalled accidentally frying the implant a few times while in the testing stages, having to quickly repair it before anyone took note or any long-lasting damage was done. She tossed out the memory and took off for the hydroponics lab to acquire her dinner.

Her golden eyes flicked back as a warning signal flashed and her screens reactivated themselves. "What the...?" Her dinner was going to have to wait, apparently. She turned the manual control of the mainframe back on and used the raising platform to reach her perch again. This was the first time since the turret production explosion a year before that she had received any warning signal at all. What was it this time?

Glados used an interactive holographic display panel to locate what had alerted the system. No explosions, no backups, no... wait, what?

She activated a security feed from the waiting rooms. A pod was currently being reactivated... with a human test subject.

"Excuse me? I did not ask you to wake up anyone," she growled at the computer. "There must be a glitch in the system somewhere... I suppose I'll be running diagnostics tonight." She hovered her finger over the cancel command, but froze in thought.

I haven't tested anything other than Blue and Orange in so long... this might be a nice break in routine after all. As much as Glados loathed the thought of interacting with another person again, she also couldn't resist the idea of testing one. There was a sort of... thrill in testing a human in potentially deadly situations. You never knew what they were going to do. The deviations they could exhibit. Since she had turned sixteen, the scientists had placed her in charge of guiding test subjects through the testing tracks. She had found quite a bit of enjoyment in it.

"All right, I think I'll let this one wake up, but just this one... in the name of science." She pulled up the test subject's information and used the pod's measurements reader to calculate the size of the clothing needed. The woman in the pod was surprisingly fit and healthy. Most test subjects had been taken off the streets, in back alleys, people with deviations who had been on the run. She briefly wondered how this one had been acquired, then realized she didn't particularly care.

Robotic arms dropped from the ceiling in the waiting chamber and dropped the correctly apportioned clothing and long-fall boots next to the stasis pod. Then it was a waiting process. The stasis pod had actively been keeping this particular subject alive for six years now. The longer a subject was in a pod, the longer it took to wake them up. She calculated she had about twenty-seven minutes to place the process on auto-pilot, grab a quick bite to eat, and be back after the subject had finally realized they needed to dress themselves.

Many subjects in the past had given her trouble and refused to put on their testing uniform. It was all a mental game. So she refused to have any communication with them until they did something about it. She wouldn't say a word until a subject was fully dressed, waiting for someone to tell them what was going on. It always worked in the end.

A couple stubborn subjects had refused to do anything for multiple days before they just couldn't take it any more. Usually the idea that they might be given food or water was enough for a subject to break down and don the stupid uniform.

After her allotted twenty-seven minutes Glados returned to her seat and reactivated the viewing screen and again pulled up the subject's information. Her name was Chell [Redacted]. It wasn't uncommon for names to be incomplete, so she didn't at all care about the missing information. It wasn't like she was going to use the woman's name anyway, as she never had in the past. They were simply test subjects.

She was slightly perturbed by the fact that the sheet did not list the subject's deviation. It had happened before, but she liked to know ahead of time what to expect from a subject. She had designed special chambers specifically for certain types of deviations. How annoying.

Glados glanced at the viewing screen and was slightly startled to find the woman standing in the middle of her waiting cubicle, fully dressed and ready to go. It wasn't the fact that she was ready to begin, but the fact that she was staring so intently at the security camera. It was if she was challenging Glados with her gray-eyed gaze, like she could see right through the camera. Oh yes, this is going to be fun.


Approximately 27 minutes prior-

"Hello, and welcome to the Aperture Science Testing Facility and Enrichment Center. You have been selectively hand-picked for an exciting new series of tests that will benefit science and help humanity shape the future! Congratulations!"

Chell opened her eyes blearily and gave a half-hearted glare at whoever had rudely awakened her.

"You have been in stasis for fou- bzzt - six years, three months, two days, fourteen h-"

For the love of- keep it down will you? People are trying to sleep h- stasis? She bolted up into sitting position and slammed her head against the top of the stasis pod. Her eyes darted around the inside of the small prison as her brain finally kicked into gear. Why... why am I in a stasis pod? she rubbed her aching head, trying to quell her rising panic.

"Please remain in the horizontal position as the stasis pod unlocks and completes a complimentary physical checkup. Side effects of prolonged stasis may involve vertigo, amnesia, blindness, deafness, abdominal cramps, permanent brain damage, or heart failure," the male announcer's voice cheerily listed.

Chell rolled her eyes as the pod's hatched top opened up and she sat back into full sitting position. She certainly felt normal; well, as normal as you could be while waking in a strange pod without retaining any actual memory of getting there in the first place.

"You may now exit the stasis pod. Your physical checkup has passed the minimum safety requirement for testing-"

Minimum?

"Please don the Aperture Science testing uniform provided for you and wait for an Aperture Science testing associate for further instructions. Thank you and have a nice day. Enjoy your testing experience!"

Aperture Science? What is going on here? Chell grabbed the top garment, a white tank top bearing the Aperture Science logo and examined it. I don't... I don't understand. She couldn't for the life of her remember how she had ended up in there. She vaguely remembered a boring two-hour drive in the pouring rain, and then... nothing. Just this.

Maybe I do have amnesia. Selective amnesia, that is. She side-eyed the offending stasis pod with as much derision as she could muster and grudgingly donned her uniform. The tank top was similar to an Aperture Laboratories t-shirt she wore at home. After all, she had been here many times before.

But Aperture Science Laboratories was, well, a science facility. Not a human testing ground! There weren't any stasis pods, creepy cheery announcers, or orange jumpsuits... She wrinkled her nose at the hideous orange jumpsuit. It would have to go.

Chell settled with tying the top half around her waist and she reached down to strap the strange-looking boots provided for her. Ugh. It's like a refrigerator tried to become a high-heeled fashion disaster. She bounced experimentally on her heels as they gave slightly to her motions. Weird.

Chell looked irritably at her bedraggled reflection in the stasis pod. Her tanned skin contrasted deeply with the white atmosphere, making her feel more insecure. She whipped her long chestnut hair into a ponytail and crossed her arms as she waited for more information. It wasn't as if she could call for help.

The twenty-six year old woman had been born with paralyzed vocal cords, rendering her completely mute. Her DNA coding also suggested she possessed a deviation, but she had never exhibited one to her knowledge. As a result, her father had become overly protective, revising and hiding Chell's medical history and genetic factors on paper. To the outside world, she was a deviationless nobody who couldn't speak a word.

Her father felt that too much contact with people was dangerous, so he shielded her from society as best he could. He home-schooled her (top-notch education, as he was a 'genius'), provided everything for her, and even taught her his own version of sign language that was strictly between the two of them. As Chell reached adulthood and eventually pulled away from her father's loving embrace, she picked up some standard ASL so she could get some communication across. This was all to her father's chagrin, but he let her have her space. She wasn't in any danger since she had no deviation. Chell was a nobody.

And that was perfectly fine with her. Deviations were nothing more than a horrible plague on mankind. Her father would rant for hours on the Deviant crisis and how society was breaking down because of them. Yes, the science behind the genetics was fascinating, but incredibly dangerous. Deviants were hunted down and used for their powers, so he kept her close to him.

Chell felt a slight pang as she thought of her father. Where was he now? If he found out that she was about to go through some lab testing after being shoved in a stasis pod, the people behind this would have another thing coming... She glared straight at the security camera, setting her face into 'confident' mode. She would show no weakness.

Chell was going to get to the bottom of this.

"Hello, and again, welcome to the Aperture Science Testing Facility. You will be performing a series of tests with prototype technology that few humans have come into contact with. Your results will be collected and used to benefit the cause of science. Thank you for your voluntary participation," a female voice smoothly recited over the speaker system, sounding slightly robotic.

Chell resisted the impulse to raise her eyebrow. Voluntary participation? Yeah right. She kept her face impassive, not giving anything away. She had always had the best poker face, her father had told her on many occasions.

"Subject number 9992056, please exit the waiting chamber. A portal will open up in 3, 2, 1..." A large opening appeared at the back left of the waiting chamber against the wall. Chell kept her face a mask, although she was startled by its sudden appearance.

What in the world...? The large oval hole in the wall was completely unnatural, unlike anything Chell had ever encountered before. The woman over the loudspeaker had called it a 'portal'. It glowed a brilliant blue around the edges, straight from something out of a science fiction movie. She quelled her excitement as she passed through the portal, putting on an air of apathy.

She had been so busy staring at the portal in the glass chamber that she hadn't noticed the one that had opened up on the wall outside the chamber. Chell was startled to find herself staring into the glass chamber she had just been in, while staring at her back through the opposite portal.

Oh my... she turned around and went back through, again facing her own back in an orange-tinted portal outside the chamber. This is so impossible. But it's so amazing. She squinted slightly while staring at her backside. This jumpsuit makes my behind look huge.

She had to resist the urge to giggle at the strangeness of it all. As interesting as this technology was, she was in no mood to be somebody's lab rat. What was the point of all of this?

"Please exit the waiting room using the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube," the woman's voice recited. Chell honestly couldn't tell if the voice was pre-recorded or not.

She picked up the gray cube which had dropped in the corner (it was surprisingly light), and dropped it on the huge red button in the corner of the room. A trail of blue lights led to the only door, turning orange as the button activated. The door opened with a whooshing sound and a large check mark glowed next to it. What kind of testing is this?

"Congratulations. Please exit through the Aperture Science Emancipation Grill into the elevator. The Aperture Science Emancipation Grill will deconstruct any unauthorized Aperture Science testing equipment. Please do not carry any unauthorized equipment through the Emancipation Grill," the voice droned on.

Chell resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the overuse of wording. It was as if they were purposefully trying to antagonize the test subjects.

She eyed the cube, sorely tempted to grab it and take it through the force field-looking barrier. She again resisted her impulse and headed to the elevator. Alright, I'll play your little game. If only to get some answers around here.


Glados watched the test subject from her perch in the control hub, scanning the apathetic mask for any signs of emotion. The girl was good, Glados had to admit. She didn't display any fear, boldly traversing to the elevator onto the challenges that lie ahead. She had barely blinked when the portals opened up. It was probably the most disappointing reaction to the portal technology she had witnessed.

Glados decided to be annoyed by the girl's lack of emotion. If she couldn't get a reaction from her now, it would certainly come later. Glados smirked as she opened up the channel to communicate with her new test subject.

"Test subject number 9992056," Glados had chosen a random number, because, why not? "You will now begin a series of tests utilizing the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device located in the center of a room. Please do not drop your Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, immerse it in liquid, or look at the operational end of the Device." Glados loved to overuse the technological terms, as it grated on test subject's nerves, not to mention the nerves of any scientists who had previously sat in with her. Most people simply referred to it as a 'Portal Gun'.

She watched as the test subject tested out the portal gun, shooting at various surfaces around the room. Some surfaces allowed portals to open up, while some did not. The Quantum Tunneling Device, as Glados loved to call it, was finicky like that.

She leaned forward with curiosity. This test subject was smart. She was testing the device ahead of time. Most subjects picked up the device with a flummoxed expression, deep stupidity lining their faces.

Once the test subject had finished, she used the device to portal herself out of the room, an orange portal already set on the outside. This particular device only allowed the test subjects to use one portal at a time. It helped ease them into the testing process. Glados always found this part so mundane.

She watched as the girl solved a couple more practice tests with ease. "Congratulations. Now that you seem to have a handle on the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, you may now pick up your Aperture Science Handheld Duel Portal Device," she recited. This is where the fun would begin.

The test subject walked through the emancipation force field and her single portal device was fizzled out of existence. She walked to the next portal device spinning in the middle of the room, picking it up to examine it. The girl tested it out a few times and again took off for the next test.

"Now that your pre-testing is finished, you will go through a series of 19 tests involving the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device," Glados spoke, "You have finished the pre-testing slightly faster than any pre-recorded test subject. You must be the pride of test subject's hometown here." You couldn't show that you differentiated test subjects, after all. "After the all Aperture tests are completed, cake will be served."

A few tests in, Glados was getting bored. The girl was breezing through the testing tracks efficiently, like a machine. She hadn't even showed any signs of a Deviation... how tedious. As the girl exited test chamber six, Glados perked up when she realized what lie ahead in chamber seven. Maybe she'd see something new.


Chell thought she was getting the hang of this testing thing. She would scan a room and figure out the puzzle, place her portals in the correct position, and jump. Easy. Although if you miscalculated you could easily fall into a vat of acidic something or other... she'd have to be careful.

The first time she fell through a much higher portal than anticipated, she had braced herself for a painful, bone-breaking landing. However, as she landed on her feet, the boots she was wearing activated some kind of inertia dampening technology... it was as if she had jumped a few inches in the air. These boots were fantastic.

I changed my mind... I may wear you forever. Who cares if you look like a refrigeration unit?

She jumped through some higher portals, testing the boots height capacity. So far so good. Chell guessed she could literally fall a mile and be okay, but she wasn't going to risk that any time soon.

Strolling into test chamber seven, Chell was beginning to gain a lot of confidence. These tests are pretty pathetic actually. I hope you've got something a bit more interesting in store for me, or this is going to be over soon and you're going to regret it.

"Welcome to test chamber seven. For your own safety, Aperture Science is obligated to inform you that this test may kill you. Please try to relax and enjoy your testing experience. Remember, science is fun!" the woman's voice rang out over the intercom. The lilting voice was starting to grate on Chell's nerves, so she tuned her and her unhelpful advice out.

Chell strolled confidently into the chamber, heading straight for a button on the other side of the room.

"Hello."


Pretty sure 'Portalled' isn't a real word... but it is now.