Although a robot and not a true sapient individual, it was nice to have someone to talk to down here.

A little company goes a long way when you're exploring a dark and creepy abandoned underground industrial labyrinth. Rod was a strange companion to carry around; he was an obdurate wisecracker, talking smack about whatever he could whenever chance he had. It had been implied earlier that he couldn't help himself because he was programmed to speak in this way. I had no idea why associates of Aperture would design and produce a piece of hardware like this, but if the posters in the abandoned building topside suggested anything, it's that they produced things simply because they could, and it didn't appear to matter if they were practical or not.

While the hallway leading out from the Equipment Recover Annexe was a cleaner venture to walk through, I was eventually led back out into the grungier whole of the facility's innards. However, Rod had confidence that I was going the right way out of here, as he frequently flipped himself around in his case to look forward―and many times remained in that orientation to act as a third eye. He was a quirky extension that I found myself warming up to rather quickly, and that wasn't in small part to some of the jokes he made along the way.

Not everything was a laugh though. Rod was still trying to figure out how he ended up down here, for he revealed that he was one of the prime administrative programs designed to oversee Arbeit's hush-hush Teleportation Division. He was more surprised at the fact that he was even still functioning because the last thing he remembered before deactivating was being thrown into the furnace (alternatively, the Emergency Intelligence Incinerator).

"Why would they destroy you if you were so crucial to the division?" I wondered, adjusting Rod slightly as I held him by the handlebars as I walked, resting into my stomach.

"I can't really tell ya," Rod admitted, still looking ahead. "The morning started like any other, but then everyone was running around like Grendel broke in. Without even telling me, the lab boys went over to my console, initiated my withdrawal protocol, and said a thing or two about destroying everything kept in my memory banks. Everything went black, and the next thing I knew, I wound up back inside a core. I can't catch a break, you see? It's like getting back into old underwear you're too fat for; the bolts are practically popping out!"

Disregarding that quip, I added, "Were you not a core at some point before your deactivation?"

"Not a core? I was running this joint!" Rod spun back around to look at me, his shudders fluttering with glee. "My masters were impressed with my charisma when I was a core and hooked me up to the facility's mainframe. It's like jumping from jockstraps to maternity pants. I allowed all sorts of things to happen, and virtually important decisions could only be vetted through me. I was one of the top dogs at Arbeit apart from my counterpart in Arbeit Three, a Gyroscopic Liability Absolver unit named Betty. She had a pretty face, good for PR, but lemme tell ya, she'd run her audio synthesisers so long she'd put Chatty Cathy out of a job."

I chuffed a bit with irony. "I don't know. You're not exactly the reserved type yourself," I said, making the core turn around to look up at me inquisitively, and his expressive shudders exemplified that.

"That may be so, but I got things done around here," Rod insisted like I had gone and hurt his pride. Rod's shudders began blinking as his articulated optic looked around and began to look a bit disconcerted as its light dimmed a bit with a slight fall of his top shudder. "Or at least I used to before…whatever happened happened," he said, looking up at me. "You wouldn't happen to be a byproduct of that, would ya? If there was any place on Earth where a cross-dimensional home invader like yourself would be plucked to, it would definitely be here in this arctic crap shack."

"I was pulled over to this universe unintentionally, but it wasn't from this facility, and that's not what's important right now," I said. While Rod was rather light for his size, he was beginning to tax my arms, so I readjusted him in my hold slightly. "I came here to Arbeit with a couple of others some time ago; one of them is an old employee of Aperture. We're here to find and reactivate Arbeit's teleporter."

Rod's yellow optic shrank with surprise. "Oh, no kidding," he said. "This guy must have serious cheese if he knows about our secret stash."

"He's one of the few to have known about it, yes, and we need the teleporter to help arm militants around the other end of the world who direly need the help."

"Oh boy," Rod said, rolling his optic as if he weren't too surprised by this reason. "Has Sadam come back from the grave for his Kuwaiti revenge tour?"

"No. Something so horrible you would wish it were this character you have just mentioned."

By the time we neared the observation halls of the testing tracks, Rod had gotten the essential rundown of the Combine and their total domination of Earth.

I had no way of reading his artificial mind being that he was a machine first and foremost, but Rod, once again, didn't appear so stunned by what I told him. He sounded more alleviated than anything. Perhaps disbelief wasn't a feature coded in his simulation matrix.

Rather than contemplate the current reality of the world with sensitivity, Rod instead made only a crude remark about the global reproduction suppression field, and how it was likely bought and paid for by his crazy haggish sister-in-law who was one of the highest investors for a product called Lessina. I truly wasn't sure if I was to find that offensive or not, and it wasn't like Rod let it linger long enough to let me ponder it. It was for the better that I was innately more goal-focused to keep up with Rod's impulsive quips, and he made quite a few whenever chance he could.

Eventually (Krazoa be praised), I reached the observation hall of the facility's old product testing wing after a gradual ascent up a significant-looking ramp leading out of these grungy back areas, successfully leaving them behind at last (for the moment, anyway). Another set of clean hallways greeted us―cleaner than what I was used to at this point. It looked identical to the hallway housing the recovery annexe where I found Rod, but there were many doors on the walls―many of which were open.

I was inclined to take a peek through a few of them and saw desks, loose scattered papers, clipboards, and monitors fixed to the walls that were fizzling with a screensaver of the circular Aperture logo. In each of these rooms were large windows that overlooked a variety of quite sizable chambers with open spaces, though many were full of debris-like sections that caved in on themselves.

"Ah jeez, there goes the neighbourhood," Rod shook his optic with disappointment as we looked out over Test Chamber 9 of Track 4.

"What were all of these chambers for?" I wondered, glancing over at the discarded lab notes left behind by the ones last observing this chamber.

"Product testing," Rod answered. "The Enrichment Centre was our Mecca for most of our crackpot exploits, but we tried sticking chambers anywhere we could. We even stuck a few in a glacier up the road if you can believe it."

I couldn't tell if that was one of his many jokes or not. "What were they testing down here?"

"Whole bunch of doohickies," Rod said, as I was about to walk out of the room with him. "We were trailing a lot of military hardware―automated sentries and the like. Oh, and we were developing the Xen Grenade right here in-house! Aperture's entire teleportation division was operating here, so it was only natural we repurpose their data for household products!"

"Hold on…Xen Grenade?" I wondered with surprise as I stepped back out into the hall. "Are you referring to this border world I've heard about before?"

Rod spun his spherical self around to look directly up at me. "Ah, so you've got the credentials to know about it," Rod said. "That's a relief because my programming prohibits any mention of the border world to anyone outside the teleportation division. Unless you're one of their outsourced teenage coffee runners from the joint down by the piers. They're allowed to know also. Did you make coffee runs for the division?"

I wasn't sure if this was a malfunction he was experiencing or an actual protocol he was compelled to act upon. Either way, I felt like the safe thing to do was simply nod along. "Yes. I've delivered a few coffees to them before."

"Peachy!" Rod spun around with elation. "Now I don't have to mindwipe your brain of all unintended exchange of classified information. I cannot currently dispatch the mindwipe machine to do so, but now you don't have to politely wait for me to find and slip back into my better suit to do that."

"Wonderful…" I nodded along again, assuming for the time being that Rod was playing it up like he tended to do. But despite how much his demeanour conveyed how ironically Rod spoke of things, I couldn't shake the notion that he wasn't stretching the truth, and rarely ever did.

Soon after that, we came to the end of the hall after a few turns and discovered the levered exit door that proudly advertised itself as the way back up to the surface. "Ah, brilliant," I grinned at the sight of it.

"Heh, there we go," Rod acknowledged with equal delight. "What'd I tell you? I know this place like the back of my refrainment transistors. You know, if I ever used them."

That managed a chuckle out of me. I appreciated the self-awareness in the joke. Marching over to the door, I finagled Rod to where I was holding him awkwardly underneath my left arm so I could reach out and grab the door lever.

"If the elevator is out, there's a staircase right next to it," Rod forementioned. "Either way, we're getting out of this tomb one way or…"

Rod paused as I opened the door, only to find a wall of concrete rubble blocking our way. I just stood and stared at this unfortunate discovery, ears slowly folding down with passive bereavement. "No. Scratch that. We're the new crypt keepers now, and we don't have any production crew to make an anthology show, let alone have the funds to make a set and a puppet to host it with."

"Oh, shush," I mildly scolded, setting Rod down on the floor while I thought of what to do next now that our only exit was blocked off―plus my arms were getting tired lugging him around. It was possible to clear all of this away with a little magic from my staff, but I was hesitant for a couple of reasons. For one, I wasn't sure how thick this rubble pile was, or how far it went; and two, I was a little squeamish about moving the debris of what was an evidential cave-in. It might have been the only thing holding up what remained of the ceiling, and I wasn't up for testing the limits of the ceiling over my head if moving the rubble somehow nudged a chain reaction.

"All right, this way is definitely off the table now, unfortunately," I inferred, pulling at my whiskers as I looked down at my core companion sitting by my feet. "Do you know of any alternative ways back up to the main facility? Surely there's more than one."

"Hmm…" Rod pondered, his shudders squinting intensely like he was really thinking hard. Even his large yellow optic started spinning in circles like he was a terminal booting up. "Well…there are a few detours we could take through some of the testing tracks," he concluded, giving me a bright gleam with his optic. "They all end at the same nexus that leads to the lobby upstairs via a tunnel. Like the secret ones in Disneyworld, you know what I'm saying?"

"I don't," I admitted, "but I will take the detour. Let's go."

After kneeling down and picking Rod back up by the handlebars, I made a productive backtrack by returning to the hallway containing the observation rooms to find a way into one of the test chambers. Being that I was told it didn't matter which chamber I picked, I went into the first door I happened upon―which also happened to be one I didn't peek through.

I walked over to the observation window and saw an open test chamber that wasn't too cavernous like the few I saw a few minutes ago. I set Rod on the desk for a moment so I could have more room to swiftly kick the glass of the window with one fierce exert of my boot. Most of the glass shattered to pieces, collapsing into the chamber floor below.

"Whoa!" Rod's handlebars jumped with surprise as the yellow light from his optic compressed. "You got a good pair of legs there, missy. I guarantee there will be some who'd model lamps looking like them."

"I'll act as if that's meant to be flattering," I humoured him with a smile as I grabbed him by the handlebars again, moments before I leapt out of the window and into the test chamber. It was only a ten-foot drop, so the landing wasn't so hard. I touched down on plenty of scattered glass shards, making me all the more grateful that I wore my boots on this trip.

Me and Rod took an earnest look around at the chamber. It was certainly a different aesthetic from what I had been accustomed to so far in my visit to Arbeit. Most of the walls and ceiling were made of square metal plates―some small and some big―while the floors and some portions of the walls were made out of concrete panels. On the other end of the chamber was what looked to be a closed circular doorway that was also ruined by a collapsed portion of the room, but just in front of it was a large rectangular light-up sign that was flickering unstably. It had a large pair of the human numbers 02 plastered on it, and just below it was a pair of smaller numbers 02/08 along with a few blurred-out illustrations beneath them I couldn't make out.

"Ah, chamber two out of eight," Rod noticed, looking at the sign on the other end of the chamber with a focused optic―perhaps a magnifying feature. "We've already got a head start! We just have to go through all the sequent chambers after this one and we'll be seeing God's dandruff in no time."

"I'm presuming you're referring to snow?"

"Yeah!"

"Hmph," I replied, modestly tickled. I walked a little further into the chamber where I noticed a white camera in the upper corner of the chamber. I tensed at the sight of it, as it was an identical model to the camera that sucked me down the tube to the incinerator. However, its lenses were dark and were angled at the floor, suggesting inactivity. Rod noticed it around the same time as me and sounded somewhat disappointed.

"Shoot. Looks like the cameras are down," he noted. "If your friends upstairs were to come across the test chamber security room, they'd probably have a chance to see us."

"If only," I lamented, dearly missing the company of my human friends. I began looking around some more now that I knew the cameras weren't a concern and could see an obvious way out. "How are we supposed to get to the proceeding test chambers?"

"There's a weighted storage cube in the corner over there. See it? It's cleverly hidden behind that conveniently shaped barrier," Rod said, lightly jerking his optic in the leftward direction―a motion that I felt vividly as I held him. I turned my head and saw a square portion of the metal wall extending out into the chamber, where I then leaned over slightly to realise that a large grey box with enlarged edges was idly sitting, adorning the Aperture logo in a circle on all of its sides, orbited by four lines that glowed blue, which stood out in the dark.

"How's that going to help us?" I wondered.

"This chamber's a cube-and-buttoned based puzzle; you gotta place it on top of that big red button, by the exit door. Real easy."

I looked over by the exit door again and saw a large circular platform positioned above a white and blue ring. I hadn't noticed it at first since there were a few piles of debris from the ceiling in that area; I just assumed that may have been part of it. I had no choice but to trust Rod's instructions; he oversaw this facility in the past, so he had to know what was featured in these test chambers.

"All right. Sounds simple enough," I said.

"Why don't you set me down a minute while you go and get that box?" Rod suggested. "Those things can be an armful, and it's a tiny journey to get it to the fifteen-hundred-megawatt Aperture Science heavy-duty supercolliding super button."

Raising my eyebrow, I held Rod out a little further from me, which he took as the cue to roll his spherical self around to look at me directly. "Is that its official designation?" I asked.

"Yeah, I know," he nodded a little sympathetic personality core nod, "but it always gave gullible investors a hardon."

"But a bit of a tongue-twister and a half, don't you think?"

"You're telling me," Rod shrugged by spreading his shudders subtly. "I don't even have a tongue and even I almost swallowed it."

I chuckled as I gently set him down while I went to retrieve the cube. It might have been because I had been carrying Rod for too long, but the cube was a bit of an effort to haul over to the other end of the chamber. Nevertheless, I completed this very easy puzzle by plopping the cube directly on the button.

The chamber actually quaked a bit as power from the button funnelled through to the door mechanism, which was represented by a trail of lit-up images that went from the button to the side of the door, ending at a lit-up image of a check mark, signifying that the door was now open, complemented by the two sliding doors actually opening up to validate it, though it made very unsettling sparks as it did. Fearing that the mechanisms keeping the doors open would fail, I quickly ran back over and retrieved Rod before running through the now-opened door. I didn't fail as I worried, but I was relieved to be passed them nonetheless.

"Oh, that's right, the second test chamber in this track is a dual chamber," Rod realised, blinking his optic as he looked around in this metal block corridor.

"Dual chamber?" I questioned.

"Yeah. There's one more part of this chamber before we move onto the third chamber," he explained as I was already peering around the corner of this transitional corridor. "Now, I'm hoping all of my attained memory managed to fit into this thing because if I'm not mistaken, the last portion of this test consists…of…"

I emerged into the subchamber and was greeted by a large narrow pit filled with unsettling blue slime that glowed so brightly that it almost made my eyes hurt. It was a very startling sight, not like anything I had encountered in this vexatious facility. I had no idea what that stuff down there was, but I had the better sense to assume that it wouldn't make for a good fur-strengthener.

"The phytoplankton…" Rod realised as he gawked at the pit of glowing blue goo. What he said made my ear twitch.

"The what?" I asked, unnerved by the change of pace featured in this chamber.

Rod spun himself around to face me again. "This track features mutated phytoplankton," he explained sheepishly, illustrated clearly in his shudders and optic. "Those lab boys up there, boy did they have some clever ideas. What you see down below was supposed to be an experimental sedative gel for medical treatments. It turned out to be highly corrosive to flesh and bone instead. We repurposed it as obstacles to use in our test chambers."

"These chambers are lethal?"

"Not all. But some," Rod reassured, which didn't really work. "Hey, the bums we found off the streets signed the liability waivers when they, er… 'volunteered' to do these tests."

"Well, I didn't," I refuted, looking beyond the pit at the exit door, and I saw no clear way over the pit. "How are we supposed to cross?"

"We can't anymore," Rod vexed, spinning around forward again. "There's supposed to be a platform in the middle of the goop we're supposed to leap to clear the gap. Guess we can't use this track…"

I ogled the walls of the chamber and discovered a few helpful details that would help me circumvent this pit with relative ease, though I couldn't be carrying Rod to use them. It was a good thing I unwittingly came well-equipped for such things. To Rod's surprise, I set him back down gently again.

"I've got an idea, Rod. Don't roll away into the pit, now," I forewarned, taking a few steps back as I unclipped my staff from my belt and deployed it to full length. Rod spun around again quizzically.

"What's gotten your taco in a twi―HAZEEEBABA!" Rod sputtered in confusion as I cast a projection of a Combine confiscation field around him from my staff's opened spearhead, enabling me to lift him up in the air as I extended the length of my beam and successfully floated him over to the ledge on the other side of the chamber.

After making sure I set him down securely on the other side, I cancelled my beam before retracting my staff and looping it back onto the clip on my belt. Pinning my eyes squarely on the few points of splintered relief on the walls above the pit of mutated luminescent phytoplankton, I sped quickly into a sprint before making a calculated jump just off the ledge.

I kicked up the wall thanks to a protruding fracture to grab hold of two warped metal beams that were sticking out of the wall nearer to the ceiling, swinging my tail frivolously to aid in balance. I only remained up here a few seconds before I eyed Rod's ledge down as he watched me in bewildered awe as his wide-eyed optic illustrated clearly. Making one last methodical projection, I kicked myself off the wall and landed twenty feet down on the desired ledge on both my hands and feet. Not a scratch was made.

"Oy vey…" Rod blinked with astonishment as I stood back up. "I tell ya, if I were Jackie Chan, I'd be blushing."

"Thank you," I smiled, knowing for sure that Rod meant to be complimentary, and somehow, I sensed this praise was a particularly high one. Kneeling down, I promptly pick him back up again. "Come along now, let's blaze through these test chambers."