Wheatley took a large enough step back to hit the cabinet behind him. "We are not doing that."

"I don't want to either, but I don't see any other way." Doug was still staring at the map. "It's fairly likely that the computer won't turn on."

"But you're only guessing about the power! If one of us goes to mess with it, it might not even work!" Wheatley hissed. "I told you, it's probably just the computery bits going tits up." He traced his eyes over the map. If they did split up, there would be no way of knowing he was okay, or properly finding each other should something go wrong. There would be no way to call for help should he misstep, and no fast way to get instructions should something go wrong. He refused.

Doug, surprisingly, also didn't seem to enjoy what he was suggesting. "Taking in every piece of evidence, the soundest assumption is the usage of the backup generator. The only things that work consistently are the lights, the doors and the elevators. Not the outlets, not the recorded messages. The only reason the outlet worked in the lab was because it pulled from the same power source that runs the Vault which is separate in case something like this happened." He picked along the base of his nails, scouring out flakes of dirt and dried paint. "So if we get there, and the computer doesn't turn on, then it's probably the power. Someone will need to go reset the breaker."

"And of course that someone is going to be me." He spat, crossing his arms over his chest. "Why couldn't we both go fix the breaker?"

"Foregoing arguments about unnecessary walking, She is already patched into a part of this facility." Doug paled a little, and his hand was brought up to his mouth so his teeth could tear through his nails. "She could still talk to me through most of testing column one and two. Turning on the power will alert Her to where we are, and I will need to start the process the second it's online. Even if She can figure out the process in two picoseconds, She is still limited by how fast the system processes commands and keystrokes."

Wheatley wasn't about to be happy about things like sound logic and a proper plan. "Why can't you go turn the power back on?" Doug's expression turned dry, and he wordlessly squinted over Wheatley's shoulder. "Seriously! Why can't you?"

"Do you know how to execute the commands needed besides the three I coded into you? Or the credentials?"

"You could-" he lifted his hand where the orange paint was cracking over the texture of his skin. "You could write down the credentials. I'm a hacker! I can hack!"

"Wheatley, we'd be split up regardless, and this is all on the assumption that the breaker in the office is tripped. There is a chance you are correct or that both of us are wrong." Even with the deflection, the disbelief was clear in his eyes. "We need to get there to see if this argument even needs to be had."

He pinched his brow as Doug folded the map and tucked it into his bag. The argument, of course, was futile. Running the facility had taught him that even as a native computer, he couldn't input commands to save his life or anyone else's. And he already got anxious when Doug left; this would be so much worse. His choices were to either sit in a room and dither about Doug's safety or chance his way through getting lost and maybe blowing up a generator.

Wheatley took the lead to the door after picking up the gun and his core. "How long would it take us to get there?"

"If every door were powered and every catwalk intact, maybe three or four hours, not counting any breaks we would take." Doug rooted through his bag and withdrew a length of rope, motioning him over. "But I think with the amount of disrepair, and your lack of stamina, it would be long enough for us to consider a nap." He took his core once Wheatley got close and fastened the rope around one of the handles. "Stand still."

Wheatley did as instructed and Doug pressed the core up against his back, tossing the rope over his shoulder and drawing it across his body. "What's this?"

"So you have a hand free. It makes it easier." He felt more than saw him tie the other end. The core dangled slightly down by his hip and bumped against him with each step, but it was a mite easier to get around without his arms full. It also kept him from having to stare down his own sometimes bored, sometimes judge-y, sometimes pitying expression.

Doug nodded at his handiwork and walked back through the cubicles, following the trail of drawers once more and passing the number Wheatley had such trouble remembering.

No wonder people needed maps for this place. The part of the mine they walked out on looked almost identical to the section they'd just come from, with the exception of the debris in the water and the signage having different numbers. They were also a bit higher up than they had been, but only enough for him to notice. Wheatley could see part of the walkway extending out further over the toxic basin towards a platform with a large cylinder in the middle. It looked like an elevator. Most of the middle section of the catwalk had been crushed by a fallen beam, leaving a gap with twisted sheered metal where it had broken. "Which way?"

Doug pointed to the right. "We can cut through testing sphere column six." He started walking again, though he was eying the doors they walked past with wide eyes, muscles wound tight. Some of those nerves leeched back to him, and Wheatley realized he didn't entirely know what the robot would do once it got its core back and realized it no longer had a gun. He hoped it would just hop off back the way it had come.

The anxiousness in the air certainly wasn't doing Doug any good. He looked ready to kick off at the first sign of danger, and if he did, the chances of Wheatley getting that lucky again were practically nonexistent. Taking his mind off before seemed to work well enough. Plus, it would give Wheatley a chance to not think about those things he didn't want to talk or think about. He cleared his throat as loudly as he could. "It occurs to me that I don't properly know a lot about you, but you know everything there is to know about me. And everything outside."

"Not everything. I don't know what's going on outside." Doug had slowed down, once more walking almost side by side with him, as much as the walkways would allow.

"Okay, more than I do, then, 'cause you were out there previously." He rolled his eyes. "You hold all the cards here, and you haven't bothered to deal me in."

A short exhale. "What are you suggesting?"

He bounced slightly, finally snagging onto a sense of groove. "I ask one question about you, and then you tell me something you enjoyed about the outside."

Doug looked over his shoulder enough for Wheatley to catch him frowning. "I don't get a lot out of this. I'm just answering your curiosity."

"Because you probably know all there is to know about me. I was a core. I did core things. And you knew this guy before all this. What could you possibly ask me about?"

"Before She took over. I never knew what you did after I fixed you that last time." Regrets remained steeped in his implications, but Doug pushed on. "Instead of telling you about the life outside, why don't I ask about that?"

Wheatley paused, not just to roll the pros and cons of this around but to see if he still had the bandwidth to recall those memories. To his delight, and residual embarrassment, they were still there, even if the edges crumbled and the specifics of names, places and times were smudged away. He would have been more upset if he weren't somewhat grateful to not have to experience those in high definition. "I think I can do that, but you're going to have to be patient. Memory, and such." There were too many questions to start out with, but mostly he remained curious about everything outside of Aperture. There were very few memories he'd gained that took place beyond the walls. "What was your family like?"

"Nuclear, at least to start with." He paused. "That means a mother, father and two kids. But I suppose you could also call it nuclear in the other sense. My father was institutionalized when I was six. My mom and sister didn't get along. It only got worse after that."

"Did they get along with you?"

Doug let out a breathy little snort. "You're already not following the rules. That's two questions in a row."

Wheatley huffed. "Right. Fine." He propped the gun up against his shoulder. "What's yours then?"

They walked for a bit as Doug clearly thought through his own assortment of questions. "What job did they assign you to?"

He couldn't help but laugh. "What job didn't they give me? I was bounced from place to place because I kept mucking them up. They started me handling the mail, and I got this bright idea to redo the entire system. I kept breaking those fragile packages too." The human in there, Mac, had endless frustrations with him, and the last straw had been him not delivering a box of incredibly expensive parts. "Watching the test subjects sleeping was a last resort since I didn't have access to any of the mechanics that woke them up. That was all automatic. I just stayed with them as they were brought over. Didn't touch anything, just watched." He nudged him. "Now answer the question."

They'd gotten to another fork, and Doug took the left path. "I got along with my sister. Her name was Sharon." Somber notes crept into his voice. Oh, they were talking about dead people again. "She was always looking to get out of our tiny town. Out of everyone, I always thought she would be the one to make the most of herself. I wish I could remember what she looked like." The air got a bit stagnant as they walked. Leaving Doug to ask the next question meant they both had time to stew in the reality both of them were trying to stave off. There was a world out there that they hadn't been a part of for who knows how long, and neither of them could properly remember going out there in the first place. It left a whole host of depressing questions at the forefront of his mind.

Sure, it wasn't the immediate fear of death lurking around the corner he'd been trying to distract from, but it was equally as uncomfortable. Wheatley really wished he would just ask his question. He didn't want to keep thinking about his friend's memory being as shattered as his own. "How were the other employees to you?" Doug said almost as an afterthought.

Wheatley had never been happier to talk about people who despised him. "Most of 'em were horrible. I mean, for a while, some of them liked me, you know, in that detached sorta way, but when I tried to do something, they never wanted me there." He hopped after him. They were walking over one of the sections connecting to a platform far out over the basin. Another one of those elevators sat at the end. Some didn't express downright derision, but no one who worked at the company was outright happy to see him. They smiled too tight or cut their eyes. But oh, when he pointed it out, suddenly he was 'reading into things too much'. The stray outsider test subjects were far nicer than any employee. "I was just trying to make it easier for them; that was my job. To work. Make sure you guys didn't have to do as much."

"That was the problem." Doug stopped in front of the elevator and let the gates slide down. The grid over it sparked, but didn't turn on, and he quickly jumped through. "These people, as terrible as it was, needed these jobs. You were a threat."

"I wasn't trying to be!" He followed, and the door slid shut. The carriage shuddered under them before unsteadily rising on creaking cables. They both held their breath, watching the platform rattle and waiting for it to give up. "I was trying to be the opposite."

"Just your existence was a threat, no matter how helpful. You didn't need things like mandated breaks or to leave to a home offsite; Aperture didn't even have to pay you. It gave them an excuse to have as few human employees as possible." Doug watched him slump into the wall. "Do we need to take a break?"

If the pain radiating up his legs and through his spine meant anything, then yes. "I can keep going." He grumbled. "Why take it out on me then? The people who ran the bloody company are responsible. And your little program still made me unhelpful even if it didn't work properly."

"Sorry about that. But it was just easier. Would you rather take out your frustrations on the turrets, or on GLaDOS?"

The problem was clear, but he found himself thinking of Caroline instead. Of the deep, soul tilting fear when she opened that drawer, and he saw how vulnerable he was. How getting mad or demanding better would slice open his jugular. Wheatley, however, also remembered when someone poured their drink into his vent, which had taken a week to repair. "You almost sound like you endorse it."

"I don't." The elevator pinged as it stopped, and both of them were quick to leave the rickety old contraption.

The rafters here were more precarious, and Wheatley found himself looking down far more than he should. Even at this small of a height, a sense of vertigo tried to twist up through the roots of his stomach, throwing him off balance. He stuffed it down as best he could and fixed his eyes on the back of Doug's head. "Where'd you live before all this?"

"Illinois, but I don't think you know where that is. We had a split-level house in the middle of nowhere; closest store was about an hour's drive." He watched the way Doug's eyes twinkled with remanence, then almost slammed into his back as he stopped abruptly. Wheatley peered past him. The path in front of them had completely collapsed. Large panels lay tangled in the open air, and if he followed the trajectory upward, he could see where one of the spheres had broken open.

They stood there, completely still, and Wheatley felt the core slowly slipping down against his back, starting to rest under the crook of his elbow. "…well. That's a shame. Looks like we'll have to go back-"

"Are you certain, friend?" Doug whispered, but it didn't seem to direct itself towards Wheatley. He angled his gun up and opened a portal on the closest panel, shooting its sister onto a patch of wall on the platform across from them.

"Doug? What're you…"

Doug took a slow, steadying breath. "No, I trust you. I do." He said to no one in particular.

Wheatley only had enough time to calculate what the hell he planned on doing before Doug tipped forward off the end. He stumbled forward, trying to snag him, but was just a second too late as the white coat cleared the platform. "Holy-" The scientist came tumbling out of the opposite portal, chest hitting the rail with a clang that sounded like it bruised. "Doug! What'd you do that for?!"

"We're okay. It's the fastest way across." He called over the gap, back to him. "Your turn."

"My t- my turn?! You can't seriously expect me to…" Wheatley leaned his head over the edge. Doug was watching him through the portal, while he peered at him from between his boots.

He caught a small twitch along his mouth. "You did this before. You know it's safe."

"You pushed me!" Wheatley crept closer.

"I'll catch you."

He scoffed. "Fat load of good that'll do. I'll ram into you, then we'll both go over the end." Wheatley braced. It was just like the boots. He just needed to… did it always have to be so high? Tremors raced up to his knees, and as much as he was comfortable walking on the things now, he wasn't so sure about hard impacts. Wheatley dangled his foot off the edge, whimpered, then shut his eyes.

A faceless child and some rusty chains, watching them swing back and forth, back and forth, then flying off and landing with a thunk. Staring down at them from up high in the air, weightless and free.

"See! It's not scary! Just jump!"

That was probably a stupid move. He needed to see where the portal was. He jumped like that anyway.

Wind once again raked its bony fingers up his body, but this time it was accompanied by the sudden drop of his gut when gravity realigned on him and the boots tried to correct, throwing him forward. The wall he crashed into backed up slightly, to which he flung his arms around it in a panic. Wheatley slowly cracked his eyes open and met Doug caught in his grasp, staring just to the right of his eyes. His hands loosely hovered over his shoulders, and his back bent where it met the rail.

A rhythm filled his head, two beats that tried to become a constant stream with how fast they were going, blocking out the sounds of the atmosphere around them. Warmth, that rare invaluable commodity, oozed over his skin, and burrowed deep into his bones. He found it an incredible challenge to pry his arms off. This was better than the heat from the computer parts, more grounding than the lukewarm air of the lab. It chased away the numbness of the mines and made him turbid under its zeal. That same warmth flickered through those eyes, striking and enveloping.

A sort of zing went down his spine, splashing down at the base of his stomach and knotting his nerve endings until he felt like a terribly unfortunate ball of yarn. Yearning crashed like a tidal wave against his heart, but the situation scared him enough that he didn't even take stock of what exactly the want was. Slowly, sorely, he let go. Doug made no move one way or the other, to push him away or pull him back. Wheatley cleared his throat. "Sorry."

"I said I would catch you." He stated. "Would you like to take a break now?"

"I believe I would."

.

They walked the next stretch in relative silence. Usually, Wheatley would be rushing to fill it, but Doug had a way of making the stillness seem comfortable in a way he wasn't used to. He made silence a sound, gave a presence that didn't pressure him to chase it off. And that was for the better because right now, he needed time to think. Or to put a lot of energy into piling this up with all the rest of the stuff he didn't plan on thinking about. Whichever kept him from shutting down right where he stood.

Because Wheatley was built for a lot of things. Okay, not a lot when it came to function, but emotionally, he was built for a lot. He could see objective beauty; he saw it in the flowers and plants that had invaded Aperture. And Wheatley knew how to care. He'd cared for Chell even though he hadn't known her for long. But this, whatever this happened to be, he was never ever built to feel.

At first, he tried to be 'scientific' about it. Comparing those feelings to every other he'd felt toward different humans. Chell, for one. Her presence had offered some warmth. And Wheatley had been bursting at the seams with joy and panic when they made a break for it. He'd felt a lot in their very short time together. But it had never been this… needy. It didn't help that most emotional processes in the core were localized to a single chip. And the scientists offered very little. No, he didn't feel anything close to this towards them as a core.

Reluctantly, Wheatley tried the other route. Sifting through the few scraps of memory on his plate, he managed to piece together that, one, it had been present in the past, and two, that this was an incredibly Doug-specific feeling. No one else matched the chiptune his heart played when he was present. Not Alice, not Grady, and certainly not Caroline.

It was terrifying to consider, really. He was either dying from some human malady, or this was simply a human process he didn't have a name for yet. Given how it only reacted to thought, he'd more gladly assume the latter. And maybe he did feel this towards Chell, it just felt different in a human body. Memory seemed to dull most sensations. Who knew.

Sorting through all this knocked out a few other minor memories and moments, conversations he didn't have context to and voices he couldn't place. A few strings of a bass line and a keyboard permeated one of the snippets, and subsequently chased him through each thought afterward. Most of those memories came from Doug's lab, and the more he remembered, the more he was certain he could draw a diagram of it if asked. Either Human Wheatley spent most of his time in there, or his brain only really liked divulging those.

None of it explained the knots his guts were still trying to work out. If anything, it made it worse. Even dragging up a few bits and pieces from a house outside of Aperture didn't improve his mood. The word was right on the tip of his tongue, but he swatted it away whenever it tried to get close. In relative frustration, he fell back to thinking about that stupid boat, if only to give himself room to breathe.

"What are you thinking about?" Doug's voice sounded like a thunderclap in the quiet they'd settled into.

Wheatley flinched but readjusted the rope across his body. He looked up from the metal walkway to Doug, and their eyes met for a second. "That's what you're wasting your question on?"

He lifted one shoulder in response. "I don't think it's a waste."

There it was again, another little zip. It was just appreciation, or whatever people felt when another person expressed care for them. Whatever that word was. "Dredging memories mostly." He half-truthed. "I got a fragment of a song stuck in my head, and I'm pretty sure it's your fault."

"How is it my fault?" Doug raised a brow, pausing in their walk so he could shoot a portal into an adjoining stairwell

"You played music in your office a lot." He followed him through the portal, pausing to lean against the rail and roll his ankles. "And I'm thinking about the boat. Also your fault."

Doug shook his head. "You're the one that keeps bringing it up." He stopped on the next step, watching him.

"Well, you said it was my answer that mattered! I'm finding one. You want me to think un-literally. So I think when the ship changes purpose, that's when you get a new ship." Wheatley smiled. "And the old ship goes wherever people go when they die. We'll never know." He pushed off the rail.

Doug turned to lead up the steps. "Who gives the ship its purpose?"

He blinked, knocking it back and forth before responding. "The crew? Obviously."

"But if the ship is blown from port without a crew, does that mean it's purposeless? Or does the wind give it purpose?" Doug was doing his best to act like these were purely neutral questions, but he could still hear his voice sounding particularly tickled.

"…I hate you."

Doug didn't skip a beat. "No you don't."

"No. I don't." Wheatley admitted.

Wheatley shifted on his feet, the arches aching as he stopped at the top of the steps. Doug paused again. "Another break?"

Doug nodded. The exhaustion from the rest of his limbs demanded his attention as he trod after him.

Just a few minutes of rest, that's all he wanted. That's all…

.

He's standing at the base of a hill. To his right, there is endless grass and open sky. To his left, nowhere to go but up this hill. He strains to see the top, but all he can make out is a single light. It hangs, a single pinprick with rays stretching outward suspended in the spot where the sky takes the grass out of sight.

It calls- no, it sings for him to come forth. This is where you're supposed to be, it beckons.

Wheatley starts walking.

For a while, it's easy, even with the incline. The sky is bright blue, and the light grows closer and larger with each passing step. Even when a wind kicks up, shifting him back and forth on unsteady feet, he squares his shoulders, draws his jacket close, and barrels onward.

The grass underfoot crunches, now yellow and shriveled, and the skies have darkened considerably. But the light has never seemed closer. It swallows up the sky in a large white blinding glow. The song resounds in his head, and he refuses to give up, even as a fog starts to creep into the ground ahead of him.

He continues. He sprints until the wind dies down.

Something squishes under his sneaker. He looks down. It's a hand, severed below the elbow. Finally, Wheatley pauses. He looks back. There is nothing but a fog starting to reach its tresses out towards him. Ahead of him, it's rather effectively obscuring the path, though the light continues to pierce through. Seeds of doubt sew themselves in the rows of his mind.

Wheatley steps around the hand and keeps climbing with a bit more caution. The incline is far steeper now. Limbs and then full bodies litter the grass more frequently, until it's more flesh than plant. The sky is dark and red, only cut through by the light he's still urging himself towards. Redness tints the edges now.

He keeps climbing, even as the hands stir and grab at his ankles, as the flesh he walks on becomes slick with blood that weeps from storm clouds that must be overhead. They must be, even if he can't see them. The world blurs as his eyes fill with tears he wills himself not to shed.

He's waist deep in bodies by the time the faces form. Each one is pallid and twisted into varying expressions of shock, grief, anger and pain. Wheatley stumbles again, and the tears spring out, mixing with the red, and the seeds of doubt have grown into big oak trees in his mind. This… it can't be worth it. No matter how high the choir sings or how bright the light, he's swimming in the blood that's pouring from the sky, pelting his face as the wind whips up again with a vengeance.

Wheatley steps back.

Pain ricochets up from the hands that are now clawing at his person, trying to cocoon him. The choir shrieks a discordant note. He thinks he yells some sort of apology before ripping himself from their grasps, the reluctant march breaking into a frantic wade.

The light. He has to get there. If he just gets there, this all will be over. This will stop. He shoves and claws and fights, stretching his hand upward in a final silent plea as the full weight of the corpses press down upon his shoulders and hands, rotten. Only the top layer is fresh. Under it, he can feel hands missing skin, missing muscle. Putrefied muck suctions each step and bony fingers drag him down, down, down. Wheatley isn't even sure there's a ground anymore, just the mass of decayed human sludge and blood. All that remains above in the fettered air is his hand, and his head where he's trying to crane his neck.

But that light has bled from white to yellow, and it watches him, scours him with judgement as his hand basks in it, still questing outward. It towers high above, bigger than anything he'd ever seen, and it's coming closer. It's coming to greet him and suddenly he does not find salvation in its unyielding glow. He finds no peace. He finds no mercy. The sanctuary has burnt to the ground, the heavily choir has been replaced by the wails of those pushing the brunt of themselves onto him.

His hand catches something just before it disappears into the sea. It thrashes and pulls. Wheatley knows deep down that if he doesn't let go, whatever he's captured is going to be subject to the same fate as him.

He holds tight. The sea sweeps him under. There is little room to breathe, and blood coats his lungs with each inhale. Still, he casts his gaze upward. The sky remains visible in one eye seeing through the swarm of skin and cloth.

The jaundiced light spills through the cracks, searching, scanning, it's almost there, it's almost upon him-

.

Wheatley sucked in a sharp breath as his eyes fluttered open. Residual terror kept him rigid until he deciphered the carpet in front of him, and the lack of bright blinding lights scrubbed the rest of the fear away. He was still against the wall he'd rested against, surrounded by the dull almost soundless buzz that permeated the room. There's an itch deep in his palms that he didn't stop from trying to satiate.

Someone shifted to his right. "Nightmare?"

"It felt like one." Wheatley's voice came out groggy. Doug didn't press further, and when he tilted his head, he saw him much in the same position as Wheatley, propped against his cube and facing the wall so he could sketch. He wondered if he woke Doug up; his eyes fluttered with the same glazed half-awake look. Though he was also holding his marker. "How long was I asleep?"

"I don't know. About as long as I've been sitting here."

"Huh." Wheatley slumped back into the wall. "…that dreaming thing. Does it mean anything?"

"I don't know. I was never a fan of Freud. Always preferred Gestalt theory. Or Margaret Naumburg, but she did start from his fundamentals." He sat up and stretched languidly. "Certain cultures see them as prophetic or signs from the divine. I'm pretty sure it's just the brain randomly firing neurons, but I also believe there is some pattern to the chaos."

That didn't really answer Wheatley's question nor alleviate the pressure in his sternum. The images and the specifics he'd just lived through were slipping away, dissolving into strings of emotions and colors. "What did they think they meant?"

Doug lulled his head to one side. "From which one?"

"All of 'em."

"Freud liked to dissect it into symbols and assign sex and the repression therein to… everything." He scowled at the ceiling. "Naumburg preferred far less rigid definitions. She agreed with Jung that there were a few universal symbols but liked to leave the complex weave and personal meaning of those images and storylines to the person experiencing them. Gestalt follows much the same, though looks at the whole, and how it related to the self."

"So… no answer then. That's what you're telling me. I'm fending for myself." Wheatley grumbled.

Doug shook his head. "Not completely. What was it about?"

Wheatley turned to see what Doug had been drawing. It looked like a silhouette of the testing bot, along with some words arching over it, 'I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide'. There were also a few arcs and a circle that reminded him of the phases of the Earth. "I can't remember now. There was a hill. Light. Blood. It wasn't a plot heavy story." A name sat on his throat, somehow connected to those lines, but he couldn't form the letters.

"Were you trying to get up the hill?" Doug lowered his marker and laid his head back on the cube, watching him.

He squinted. "Yes. Maybe. The light was at the top of it. But the blood was in the way? That doesn't make any sense."

"Dreams usually don't. Use of any terrain is pretty standard meaning for a journey. Light could be any number of things, an afterlife, a paradise, or it could just be your mind coming up with something to denote an end point. And your mind also came up with some form of obstacle." Doug traced a few lines across the wall, a slope, a circle at the top, and an X at the bottom and some jagged lines up the arc.

Wheatley looked over the diagram. "I'm already trying to figure out your boat problem; I don't know if I have time for all this."

"Then don't try to figure it out piece by piece. What did you feel about the whole thing?"

"I felt awful. Like it was…" my fault. No. That was too close. Wheatley clicked his jaw shut.

The silence went on too long for him to reasonably continue that sentence. Wheatley was stuck between the uncomfortable mantra he'd been repeating since he'd started his slow orbit around the moon, and the world that waited beyond the doors on the other side of the room. In the fading air of awakening, it was easier to push off the concerns of the world. The door was like a seal; it wouldn't be broken or release any of their problems as long as it remained shut.

It left him adrift, staring down the bottom of the whirlpool of whatever was going on in his head. And he still couldn't get the words to spill out. Doug seemed to realize this too as he lifted his marker again and turned back to his work. "You haven't asked your question."

Wheatley latched onto the topic change with an iron grip and spat out the first question he could think up. "How'd you end up working here?"

"I needed to do postdoc work. And the incident at my university was on my record… It was the first place that would take me. I was desperate." He was writing something new along the wall. "We've passed halfway there, if you're curious. I checked." Doug pulled out the map and held it to him. "We're in G10."

He plucked it out and spread it over the floor, tracking the distance with his eyes. Wheatley still couldn't get a sense of scale. "Not that I can count the time, but how long?"

"If that elevator is working, we can cut it down to an hour with a single rest." He used the end of the marker to point. Wheatley did his best to fold it back but ended up with a weird and lumpy square instead.

"…Doug."

Doug capped his marker and reached down to his mess, gathering it and spreading it out again. It gave Wheatley time to turn and see the mini mural he'd created. A robot, a few hands, portals, and a new line of poetry opposite the first.

'And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?'

.

The elevator worked. Wheatley used it to take another break. "You've been sitting on your question for a while." He panted softly, bracing his hands on his knees. Sweat worked into the fine folds of his body, and he longed for the cold comfort of the shower back in the rooms.

"You looked busy." Doug hadn't so much as broken a sweat. He pocketed the screwdriver he'd had to use to disable the grid. "Where were you when it happened?"

It took Wheatley a moment to fully process what 'it' was supposed to be. "Same place I always was, Long Term Rest." He lowered onto his knees, then landed back. "Only noticed something was wrong when I left to go find someone to fix part of the rail that had popped off. Suddenly there was a bunch of gas and even more bodies. First time I remember properly hearing Her voice." Wheatley paused. "Can I ask a question that doesn't count?"

Doug nodded with a raised brow.

"I didn't remember being hooked up to her. And it took her a moment to remember me. Why?"

"That was part of the procedure." He offered his hand once the elevator stopped and yanked him to a stand. "Once we were sure the process didn't work, we reset both the cores used and Her, putting them in their next iteration. For you, that would have been iteration four that we hooked onto Her, and I don't know which iteration She was on by that point. It gave you a clean slate free of any corruption and stopped us from a compounding problem where She built up immunity to the cores. I guess it didn't really work if She remembered you."

They exited through the gate and onto a sturdier catwalk. There weren't as many broken beams in this part, though Wheatley couldn't tell if they were any closer to the office; once again, it all looked the same, but Doug assured him they were close. The only things that had changed were the small bits of furniture in the more 'homey' spaces of the facility. "What was your real question?"

"What's your favorite movie?"

He watched him for a moment before starting down the walk. "I feel like that isn't the most pressing question you could ask."

"Not really," Wheatley admitted as he followed, "but it's been so bloody depressing. I want to know something you like."

"It's been a while since I've engaged with anything entertaining." He extoled. "I didn't watch a lot of movies, but I do have two favorites; one of them isn't really a movie though." Doug tugged the harness up his back slightly. "I assume you want both."

"Of course I do."

"Stop Making Sense. It's little more than a professionally filmed concert, but I could always block things out when it was on." Doug's eyes caught some light. "And I particularly enjoyed Jurassic Park."

Neither of these titles made any impression on Wheatley, who'd only ever seen training films. The latter struck something slight, bright lights and a moonlit lot filled with cars, but he couldn't pull it into something tangible. "We can watch them when we get out." It was a stupid thing to say, and it was an even stupider thing to promise considering they had no idea the kind of civilization they were walking back into.

Doug didn't seem to mind. "Yeah. We can."