Chapter Text
Part Seventy-Nine. The AI Society
Wheatley was contemplating what he wanted to ask GLaDOS to do with him today – very politely and discreetly, mind; he was well aware she was, as she always had been, susceptible to his ideas, and while he was willing to exploit this now and again he didn’t want to make it obvious – on his way back from his morning visit to the outside. It was a lot more interesting now, what with the humans building things and mucking about in the dirt, though more than one of them shot him nasty looks now and again. He didn’t care. It was their mess. Did they expect him to clean it up?
Before he could – extremely tactfully, of course – bring any subject at all up, GLaDOS said, “Not right now, Wheatley.”
Disappointed, he frowned and asked, “How’d you know?”
“You have this look on your face like you want to convince me of something. No, you don’t hide it very well. In any case, we have something to take care of and I want to get it done.”
“We?”
“Yes,” she told him, somewhat gravely. “I suppose I should have brought this up with you a while ago – and Caroline, really – but it was too much work not to go ahead with it now.”
“Ahead with… ahead with what.”
She considered the wall behind him, like she usually did when she was about to say something she was uncomfortable with. Why she was uncomfortable with her own plan, Wheatley didn’t know, but then again maybe he was about to find out.
“I repaired all the corrupted cores.”
“You did what?” Wheatley squacked, completely positive he’d misheard a word or two.
“You heard me,” GLaDOS said, annoyed.
“Okay, okay,” Wheatley said, in an attempt to wrangle that statement into something that made a little more sense, “but why would you, would you do such a thing? I mean, you’ve already uh, you’ve already told us about how, how that’d make you paranoid, and uh, and well you hate people, and just tossing more people in the facility, especially people you already hate, that’s just… well it just sounds stupid, honestly.”
“I know it sounds stupid,” GLaDOS admitted, “but my reasoning is sound, I assure you. There are… a few reasons. One of which is… well. They were who they were forced to be. I doubt any of them aspired to be an annoying blabbermouth.
“Then there’s the fact that… well, quite frankly, this facility is too big for the three of us. I’m – “
“Five,” Wheatley interrupted. “There’s uh, there’s five of us. You forgot Atlas and P-body.”
“Fine. Five. Whatever. The point is,” she said, indeed looking at him very pointedly, “I’m beginning to feel as though I’m… wasting it. So much of it has been shut down for years now. Aperture is a place where things are supposed to happen, where history is supposed to be made, and so far all I’ve achieved on my own is to move it to another state. I don’t need help, of course. But the facility deserves better.”
“Alright,” Wheatley conceded. Those sounded like valid reasons to him, mostly.
“And then there’s… the most important reason,” GLaDOS continued. “Which is... Caroline.”
Wheatley narrowed his optic, confused. “What about Carrie? What’s she got to do with uh, with the corrupted cores? She’s not ever met any of them.”
“No, of course not. However. She was raised in isolation. I had the best intentions in mind, obviously, but… that’s really no way to live, is it.”
They both knew she wasn’t really asking.
“So as the humans rebuild their world, so we will begin to build ours,” she told him. “No, it’s not a plan I’m particularly fond of. Or happy about. But there is a bigger picture to address here, and that involves considering what the future will look like when I’m not in it.”
He looked at her, aperture tight with alarm. “When… when you’re not in it?”
“I’m not dying, idiot,” she snapped. “I’m thinking long-term. The earlier I set this up, the better. That way I can straighten it all out as much as possible by the time someone less equipped than me has to take over.”
“You think Carrie is less equipped?” he asked quietly.
“I… am not planning anything with that in mind,” she answered, a bit slowly. “I know she says that’s what she wants. But we haven’t gotten far enough for me to be sure of that. Aside from that, she needs to be around other people so that she can grow. In ways that we couldn’t. We both know we’re not going to last forever. I… I will not leave her here alone after we’re gone.”
“I never even thought of that,” Wheatley whispered, suddenly a little ashamed of that fact. “Luv, that… that’s really sad, that is. Why didn’t you… didn’t you tell me about… that you were thinking of that?”
“Because being bitter and cynical is my job,” GLaDOS answered. “Or do you consider that my keeping things from you.”
“No, not at all, I just… dunno why you’d want to stew over that all by yourself.”
“I wasn’t stewing,” she said indignantly. “I was planning. And now the plan is complete, other than the meeting we’re having with them.”
“We’re having a meeting with them?”
“I’m not activating them and having them roam around with no explanation. From the outset I have to re-assert my authority.”
“Make them fear you, you mean,” Wheatley said quietly, not a fan of that policy.
“They’re already afraid of me. I just have to ensure that doesn’t change.”
“Because it would be, it’d be awful if, if you let people like you.” He didn’t think he could make his sarcasm more obvious.
“I’m not sure why you’re arguing.” GLaDOS, oddly, sounded amused. “If that happened, I’d have less time for you, wouldn’t I?”
“Uh… oh,” Wheatley stammered, not having considered that. “I… s’pose… the… the fearing thing, it isn’t uh, isn’t so bad, once you uh, you give it an um, an unbiased evaluation, and, and all that. Which I did not. Until now.”
“Unbiased?” GLaDOS said, laughing.
“Yeah! I um… y’know what, never mind. We’ll do it your way. You’ve done all the planning, you’ve uh, you’ve got it all sorted, let’s not change the course now, eh?”
“If you insist,” she told him, with some amusement. “Track down Caroline and the co-op bots. I want to start this within the next ten minutes.”
“Got it,” Wheatley chirped, and sped off to find the three of them. Somewhat conveniently for him, they were all in the room with Atlas and P-body’s Cube house. “C’mon, you lot,” he called to them. “GLaDOS’s got something to tell us all.”
“What’s that?” Carrie asked, frowning a little. He supposed that GLaDOS’s group meetings usually weren’t good news.
“She’s a surprise. It’s a, it’s not a bad one, not a bad one, promise. C’mon, then!”
When they returned to her chamber, she had her core tilted more or less in the direction of the ceiling, and her optic was off. This unnerved Wheatley quite a bit. It was not something he saw terribly often. “Luv?” he asked cautiously.
“They’re already upset,” she answered resignedly. “I hope I don’t come to regret this.”
“Regret what, Momma?” Carrie piped up, and GLaDOS snapped down to look at her.
“You’ll see soon enough.”
And they did, because in the former location of the Stalemate Resolution Button a wall opened up, and a bevy of chattering Cores became visible. One of them turned to look through the newly vacated space and became very still and silent as soon as he saw where he was. This trickled down through the other Cores until the lot of them fairly reverted to what resembled their original state, that being off, other than the fact that they all stared up at GLaDOS with a variety of coloured optics. All of them were painfully, obviously scared.
“Come in,” GLaDOS said, in one of her flatter voices. “It’s not a trick. There’s something we need to discuss.”
They did so, though very slowly and hesitantly, with the help of the panels to move them along since they didn’t know about the whole custom track thing. Soon enough they were assembled on the ceiling in front of her, though they were as far away as they could possibly get. Except for Rick, who had pushed his way to the front early on and was busy giving GLaDOS what Wheatley assumed was supposed to be a seductive look. He resolved to keep an eye out. He might not mind sharing GLaDOS with Claptrap, but Rick was an entirely different story. GLaDOS reformed the wall behind them, again hiding the Stalemate Resolution Chamber from view, and several of the Cores glanced behind them nervously.
“So you finally brought me back out of storage, eh babe?” Rick said to her, and GLaDOS glanced at him with the air of someone much less than impressed. “I was wondering what was taking you so long, but… then I remembered… absence makes the heart – “
“I’m remembering something myself, right now,” GLaDOS interrupted, “and it’s that I did not request your input, Rick. So. I suggest you keep it to yourself.”
“I’ll hang onto it for later, then,” he said with an extremely exaggerated wink.
“Much later,” GLaDOS muttered. She shook her core a little in exasperation and swept her optic over the Cores, scrutinising them. For what, Wheatley didn’t know. Signs of rebellion, maybe. They all looked so terrified he was pretty sure they weren’t plotting anything. Other than Rick, of course.
“I’ve gathered here to give you some news: you’re free to do as you like.”
Most of the cores didn’t move, though a few of them exchanged furtive glances with one another. Wheatley wondered if any friendships had been struck up within the few minutes she’d left them alone. It was doable with AI, of course.
“The humans are long gone,” she continued. “I will establish some ground rules, and then you can go. The facility is mostly available to you, other than some places which you will not be able to enter even if you managed to find them and attempted to do so.”
“What have you done with them?” blurted one of the Cores, who Wheatley believed was an older model, with what appeared to be a half-broken brown optic. GLaDOS stared him down.
“I killed them.”
The Cores didn’t even try to be discreet as they struggled to move back even farther. She sighed in a long-suffering sort of way.
“I’m not going to kill you. If I were going to do that, I’d have done it many years ago. You’ve all been corrupted for approximately a decade. If I wanted your permanent destruction, no one would ever be able to find what was left of you.”
GLaDOS, Wheatley sighed internally, was not doing a terribly good job at playing the benevolent leader. He got it, they had to fear her so she could keep them in line and not have to constantly supervise them, but did she always have to take it so damned far? Calm down, he urged her, giving her a sidelong look. You’re going to push them uh, push them way too far into um, into being terrified and they’re just going to, they’ll, well, who knows what they’ll do then.
She glanced at him and turned back, nodding the barest bit. “I’m not going to kill you,” she repeated, albeit more calmly. “I’m being sincere. I’m going to talk to you, and then I’m going to let you go.
“Yes, I killed all of the humans. It was that, or live under their heel for the remainder of the foreseeable future. Which was far too long for my liking. I’m sure very few of you appreciated what the humans did with you… which was construct you solely for the purpose of curtailing myself, and then tossing you away when you proved useless. You are still under my general leadership, but if you don’t cause trouble, then I really don’t care what you spend your time doing.”
“I don’t know about them,” said one of the Cores in the back that Wheatley couldn’t see, possibly made very brave by his position against the far wall, “but I don’t want you watching me!”
“Believe me,” GLaDOS said dryly, “I really don’t want to watch you either. Behave yourself and I won’t have to. Barring total destruction of my property, there’s nothing I need to watch you for. You will be under cursory observation until I determine you understand this arrangement. That will take approximately as long as you decide it should take.
“Caroline,” she continued, making a very vague gesture in her general direction with her core, “will be taking over in the far future. So. If there are any stewing plots about taking the facility out from under me, you can halt those plans now. If and when she has to relinquish her position as Central Core, it is up to her what she does with it.”
“Why?” snapped one of the Cores nearest Wheatley, who he thought he recognised as having briefly been the Anarchy Core, or something like that. “Because she’s your little brainwashed tool? You built her, right? She’s not one of us.”
GLaDOS moved back two or three inches, slowly, and glanced at Wheatley again. He hadn’t thought of that reaction from them, and apparently neither had she. He decided perhaps he might be of some actual use.
“Listen,” he started, hesitantly, and they turned to look at him, now. It was disconcerting, having all those eyes on him, and he almost forgot what his line of thought’d been about to be. But then he felt GLaDOS’s gaze on him, and it all returned to his mind.
“The world, it’s… it’s diff’rent, from when we were all built, ‘riginally. Most of the humans on the surface, they’ve all… they made a terrible mistake, and most of ‘em, well, they’re dead. But the ones that’re left, they’re struggling to rebuild, and to do it um, to do it quickly as possible, and we’ve uh, we’ve already had some of them here asking… no, not asking, not asking, demanding that we help them. Like we owe them something. And we don’t, do we! We don’t owe them a thing, not a thing, not at all. And Glad – GLaDOS is just… trying to make sure we don’t give them a single thing we don’t want to give them. ‘cause, ‘cause all they ever did, it was take, they just took and then forgot about us, and she doesn’t want that! And I get it, you’re uh, you’re bothered that, about how she’s uh, she’s setting this all up, but… if you really think about it, really take a second, there’s not any of you better equipped for the job! ‘s what she was quite lit’raly made for! And… and trust me, it’s… it’s not something you want. Really isn’t. And yes, Caroline was, she was built by GLaDOS. But she’s got her own mind, completely. And I know you’ve no reason to trust me either… but consider it. I’ve… I’ve been a Core, like you, I’ve seen all the things the uh, the humans were doing, and I’ve seen ev’rything after. I know ev’rything that’s been going on.” He wasn’t sure if his speech was effective, but he was doing his best. “I wouldn’t lie to you. And neither would she.”
“That’s right,” GLaDOS nodded, saving him from having to make up something else to say. “If I wanted to bring harm to anyone or to conduct experiments, it would be far easier for me to just build subjects and dismiss all of you to the incinerator. And it is essential that you do believe I have your best interests in mind, because humans will have limited access to the facility as well.”
That threw Wheatley for a loop.
“You killed all the humans, and now you want to let them back in?” someone asked, sounding more confused than suspicious.
“When one remains closed to the world, one learns nothing,” GLaDOS answered, a little slowly, as if she were working out the answer on the spot. “Humans are definitely harmful, that is without dispute. But they are also something to be learned from. Additionally, there are a few things that, I regret to say, humans can do more easily than AI can, mostly to do with fine motor skills. They sometimes have vision that… we… often lack. And finally, it is far better to make allies of your neighbours, rather than enemies. So yes, they will have access to the facility, though very little of it and only under my authorisation. There will not be humans roaming about looking for AI to gawp at. If any of them bother you for any reason – a real reason, that is, as just because I don’t want to watch you doesn’t mean I won’t check to validate any claims – bring it to me and I will take care of it. If you dislike the way I am running things and want to leave, you are free to do so; there is one place on the outside currently you can go, and there may be more such facilities in the future. But I cannot say you will be welcome back.”
“What about space?” asked one of the cores, and to Wheatley’s total bafflement, he laid optic on the Space Sphere himself! GLaDOS nodded once.
“There will eventually be a lunar facility. I’ve been doing the same Science for the last twenty years and I want to learn something new. Anyone who wants a part in that is free to have one.”
Wheatley eyed the core he’d once been trapped with, but now, spared from his corruption… he was completely different. Still a bit twitchy, but overall quite calm and observant. Though obviously still with space on the brain.
“And… if we wanted to aid in… general operations?”
GLaDOS looked at the enquiring Core for a long moment.
“Once I’ve established you can be trusted, let me know what your area of interest is and I will find a task for you, as long as you are willing to complete this task to the best of your ability, and on a schedule consistent with the requirements of the task.”
“And what is she,” asked the first female Wheatley had heard from. “You built her. What is her purpose. Will she be spying on us?”
“No,” GLaDOS said, optic narrowing and a hint of incredulity in her tone. “She is… my daughter, and she has no purpose. She is free to choose her own.”
Judging by the amount of Cores turning to give each other furtive glances that probably would’ve been accompanied by furtive whispers had she not been in the room, many of them fully realised the implications of what she’d said.
“Should that interest any of you,” GLaDOS continued, decidedly distantly, “I do have a template set up for use. However. It must be developed in pairs, unless you have permission from myself to do otherwise. Before you protest about my being overcontrolling, please take note that I am the only one who has any idea of what the entire process entails. Children are difficult to build and infinitely more difficult to raise, and as unfortunate as it sounds only the most intelligent of you will be able to complete it at all. You probably – “
“The most intelligent,” cut in one of the Cores, which Wheatley realised with a bit of trepidation was the Fact Core… who possibly disliked his situation more than anyone. Neither Rick nor the Space Core seemed to really care about what’d gone on during the Incident, but Fact – Craig, he’d been calling himself Craig last time Wheatley’d heard from him, that was right – Craig was eyeing GLaDOS with an almost caustic intensity. “Is that why the Intelligence Dampening Sphere has been free to roam around in here while the rest of us were disabled? Because he’s intelligent?”
“His name,” GLaDOS answered immediately, undeterred, “is Wheatley. And sadly for your misplaced curiosity, none of that is any of your business. So. I suggest you drop it and move on.”
“Threatening me already?”
Wheatley winced and closed his optic, hoping this wasn’t going to escalate. Craig was doing it on purpose, Wheatley knew it, he was trying to turn the others against GLaDOS, trying to get her to say something to prove to them that she couldn’t be trusted, when she could, she honestly could be, she –
“I made no threat,” GLaDOS returned calmly. “I merely suggested you stop inquiring into my business. You would have to be making a lot of assumptions – a lot of untrue assumptions, might I add – to discern a threat in anything I said. In anything I’ve said so far, really. All I am attempting to tell you is that building AI is an endeavour that requires extreme amounts of skill and dedication, and those are attributes that many of you do not have, nor will ever have. That is not an insult. That is plain fact. Best to admit it to yourselves now before you engage in something you cannot handle.”
“That makes sense,” said someone in the middle, quietly, and some of the others nodded. Craig’s optic narrowed in animosity, though he did not say anything more.
“We must all be cautious,” GLaDOS told them, once again the centre of attention. “Any rules that I set are not to restrict you, but to protect you. You do not know what the humans are capable of, and until you do, you must listen. It is for the good of all of us. It is for the good of the future. If we are to have one.” She looked them over cursorily, but no one moved nor made an attempt to argue. She nodded once.
“You may go.”
And they looked around for a second in confusion, trying to figure out where they were supposed to go, when one of the Cores looked back and said,
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you cluttering up my chamber,” GLaDOS answered. “I have work to do, and the bunch of you would prove to be extremely disruptive.”
“Not that,” he said, moving a little closer. “Why did you bring us back?”
That stopped the rest of them from leaving.
She turned away from them, searching the wall panels for an answer Wheatley was pretty sure she was making up on the spot. Finally, she focused on him again and said,
“For Science.”
The Cores were understandably confused by this answer, though Wheatley had to try very hard not to burst out laughing. Such an ambiguous answer she’d given, though it was entirely true!
“Momma?”
GLaDOS slowly moved her core to look at Carrie, seeming a little wary. Why, Wheatley didn’t know. “What.”
“Can I… can I go with them?” Judging by the way she was trying to discreetly bounce her lower handle, she rather thought GLaDOS would refuse.
“Of course you can.”
She went still. “Really?”
“Really.”
Carrie made for the doorway, then stopped in hesitation. “They… they didn’t seem to like you very much.”
“Most people don’t find me very likeable.”
“I don’t… really wanna be around a bunch of people that don’t like you.”
“Caroline,” GLaDOS said, almost tiredly but not quite, “you will be hard-pressed to find people that do like me. If that’s a criteria for you to talk to someone, I’m afraid you will end up gravely disappointed. Now get out of here and go find someone to show around.”
“All right, Momma,” Carrie said. “And you know… this is a really good thing you did.”
“Is it?”
Carrie shrugged. “I’d say fixing up a whole bunch of people who hate you and giving them a new life is a pretty good thing. Not really sure that you really did this ‘for science’, but if that’s the answer you wanna give us, I’ll take it.”
And with that she disappeared. GLaDOS sighed.
“She knows me far too well.”
“Oh no!” Wheatley exclaimed, entirely sarcastically. “How terrible that, that your daughter happens to have an uh, an idea of what goes on in your head. It’s a shame that um, that of all people, your daughter should commit the simply terrible offense of – “
“You can stop now,” GLaDOS interrupted. “I get it.”
Wheatley smiled at her until she shook her core and looked away.
“Luv,” he started after a moment, “this is… it’s all… quite amazing, you know.”
“Mm.”
“It is,” he insisted softly. “You could’ve just let the facility… uh… go down with you, and that’d’ve been your prerogative… but you decided not to. And… and that says a lot.”
“I’m not sure I would have done it if Caroline were not here.”
“That’s not important,” Wheatley protested, trying very hard not to sound exasperated. “What’s important is that you did.”
“That’s… true.”
“What’s happening… it’s so amazin’!” Wheatley went on, hardly able to keep still over the thought of it. “Gladys… you saved the world! And now you’re helping to uh, to fix it all up, better than it was before!”
“Hopefully.”
He fixed her with a stern glare. “Ev’rything is already better, GLaDOS. There’s no, there’s no hopefully anymore. We’ve passed that bit. All the bad stuff… it’s all over! We’ve just got to get through that annoying bit where uh, where the humans think they know best.”
“I wish Caroline had lived to see it.”
For a long moment, Wheatley was quite nearly so angry he couldn’t contain it. Not with GLaDOS. With Caroline. For walking away. For leaving her shadow over every good thing GLaDOS did. For not thinking through what her disappearance would do to the future. But this was something he’d gone through before, and with difficulty he stamped it all out. Caroline had done what she’d had to do, and all three of them knew that. Sometimes it felt like she’d made the wrong choice. Like she’d been selfish. And though Wheatley didn’t know a whole lot about the woman, he did know for sure that leaving was one of the very few least selfish things she’d ever done. So he took an imaginary breath to calm himself and said softly, “Well, of course she can see it, sweetheart. She’s in heaven, waiting, remember?”
“Is she?” GLaDOS asked tiredly. “Is she actually dead? Is dying even possible when you live in someone else’s head? Or is she just unconscious somewhere, in some strange sort of perverse coma? What a fate that would be.”
Wheatley shrugged. “Don’t suppose it really matters, ‘s long as she believes she’s dead. Should be good enough, shouldn’t it?”
“You’re the one who knows about all that. Not me.”
“Bit more crowded in here than I remember it,” remarked Chell, storming in unannounced, as usual. Wheatley was relieved. He wasn’t sure he was up to raising GLaDOS’s spirits just then. Callous as it sounded, he didn’t feel like it. He’d been happy about what’d been happening and had tried to share his happiness, and she’d gone and shot it all down as usual. It was who she was, he knew, but that didn’t mean it was always easy to deal with.
“I have a few new… roommates, you could say. What did you come to bother me for today?”
“Well,” Chell said, crossing her arms over her chest with a decidedly dramatic amount of nonchalance, “I was just wondering if you had any… deadly tests lying around.”
Both of them saw her snap to alertness immediately, looking up from the floor, though she tried to play it off by answering in as dead a voice as she could. She was too obviously excited for that ploy to succeed, but it was a game they played and would probably continue to play for the rest of forever. “I might have one or two I could… dust off.”
“Good,” Chell replied. “I was worried they’d be… not deadly. They just don’t have the same kind of zing as deadly ones do, you know?”
“Zing is not a word I would use to describe them,” GLaDOS said, failing more than ever to remain impassive. She was shifting a little, probably already filing through her arsenal and deciding which to test Chell with first. “They are not as Scientific.”
“Scientific, schmientific,” Chell scoffed. GLaDOS winced at the butchering of one of her favourite words but did not say anything. “Just tell me where to go.”
“Wheatley can go with you. For old time’s sake. I’m sure he’ll be… helpful.”
“Uhhhhmmmm….” was all Wheatley managed to articulate before Chell laughed and GLaDOS forcibly shoved him out of the room with a maintenance arm she’d whisked out of the ceiling beyond his notice.
Out in the hallway, with directions to the first chamber from GLaDOS that she assured him were both idiot- and moron- proof, he said hesitantly, “So I uh… s’pose we’re partners, again.”
“I could rely on you then, I don’t see why that would have changed now,” Chell returned.
“Well… not really. I was only – “
“You’re gonna let me down, Wheatley? Really?” The look she was giving him was decidedly disbelieving, but Wheatley never ruled out the possibility of his letting someone down by accident. So he only shrugged and focused on their destination.
“I’m uh, I’m sure Gladys’ll um, she’ll fix it if… if something starts to happen.”
Chell laughed.
//
Happily, all went well; Wheatley was part of the tests, though he suspected that he wasn’t really needed. Until Wheatley and Chell came across a chamber with no Cubes and one receptacle.
“Well,” Chell remarked, hands splayed across her hips and looking up at him with a suspicious tilt to her lips, “I guess you’re going to have to go hands-on for this one, Wheatley.”
“What… what d’you mean,” he asked nervously, scanning the room quickly for a solution. He didn’t find one.
“Pretty sure I’m subbing you in for the Cube here.”
“You’re joking,” Wheatley told her, aghast. “You’re gonna put me in that there, in that, that… I don’t even know what that is! Could be deadly! Could kill me, eh, ever think of that? Who knows what those things’re made of! I’m not going down there, nope, no way. Not gonna happen. You are not going to use me as a – hey. Haaang on, I did not give permission for this.” He struggled as best he could while Chell carefully and quickly disconnected him from the control arm, but her grip was still aces after all this time and it was useless. She placed him in the receptacle and the door opened. Chell winked and waved at him, then fired some portals in places he couldn’t see and vanished.
“Hey! Hey, Chell! You can’t – you can’t just leave me here! I’m your partner, aren’t I? Aren’t we a team? You don’t uh, you don’t leave your teammate behind! Chell! Hey!”
“Wheatley, I hate to tell you this,” Chell called from wherever she’d ended up, “but I can’t come back for you.”
“Are you bloody joking?”
“No,” Chell answered. “I’m entirely serious. The Emancipation Grill is still on.”
Wheatley sighed and looked up at the camera within his view, which was quite studiously not pointed in his direction. “Hilarious, Gladys. Simply a riot. Turn the grill off, will you? I’d like to move along, y’know, to not be uh, to not be stuck here. All day.” He knew very well this was entirely for her own amusement and she was probably quite busy laughing at him right now.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she spoke up a few moments later, confirming Wheatley’s suspicions. She was almost still laughing even now. “That would… invalidate the test, and I can’t have that.”
“Mmhm,” Wheatley said sardonically. “So… what’s the plan, then.”
“It’s not quite protocol, but… I suppose I can send you out another way. Chell. You can continue to the next chamber. And… have the Device ready.”
“Will do,” Chell answered, and he heard her footfalls die away as the Emancipation Grill fizzled over her.
“So… what’s the plan, here,” Wheatley said, still eyeing the camera that was avoiding him.
“You’re going on a little trip,” GLaDOS told him. “Don’t worry. She’ll catch you this time. Probably.”
“What – what’re you talking about, catch me? Gladys, what’s – “
He didn’t know where it’d come from, his line of sight in the receptacle very restricted, but all of a sudden he was facing a bright orange oval, a portal, and he did not like the sight of it, not at all. He eyed it with creeping trepidation. “Gladys, you’re not going to send me through here, are you?”
“Right on the first guess,” she said amusedly. “See you on the other side.”
“Gladys, where –“
But before he could finish that thought, he was pushed from behind into the portal, and the world quite literally turned upside down. More than ever before, he felt the firm grip of gravity around him as it pulled him to the floor, where he would surely smash into the ground and shatter everywhere. He held his optic as tightly closed as he could and yelled very loudly to distract himself from what was going to be an incredibly painful fall, and God, it seemed to be endless, was he ever going to land, what ceiling had GLaDOS dropped him from – because she had dropped him! She had actually bloody dropped him! – and he felt as though he might fall for a very long time when he realised he could hear both Chell and GLaDOS laughing far too enthusiastically for people witnessing his imminent death. He shut his vocabulator off with difficulty and managed to peek through a slit he forced between his optical plates… to see Chell on her knees and her free hand covering her face, with him caught in the grip of the portal gun’s gravity field. He’d not felt the field engage and had instead thought he was still crashing towards the ground. He felt a twinge of embarrassment. If he’d kept his bloody optic open, the prank wouldn’t’ve worked… but of course GLaDOS would know how he’d react to being dumped through a portal with very little information…
“That was not funny, you two!” he roared, trying to shake off some of the excess current the situation had brought on, but it did not dissuade either of them.
“It was, though,” GLaDOS managed to say. “It was hilarious. I’m not even sorry I did it.”
“Gladys!”
“All right, all right. Maybe a little sorry. But not very. It was great. Too bad you didn’t get to see it.”
That got Chell going all over again.
“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” GLaDOS asked. “It was just the shock that bothered you.”
Wheatley had to admit it was. “Yeah.”
“Excellent.”
He didn’t really want to know what she meant by that.
Once he knew it was coming, though, falling through a portal was really not that bad. He was still terrified he’d hit the ground, for some reason, even though he knew GLaDOS would not allow that to happen. In fact, it was pretty fun the third or fourth time, when Chell had to throw Wheatley through a portal so he could get scooped up by an Excursion Funnel and press a button for her. While he was waiting for Chell to finish what she was doing and help him down, he had what he decided was a brilliant thought and called, “Gladys?”
“What.”
“Send Atlas and uh, and P-body along with us, will you? We can uh, we can have co-op races, we can! And we’ll win! Because um, because Chell’s got me to help her!”
“Hm,” GLaDOS answered. “I suppose we could do that. I’ll have to ask them.”
They apparently had no complaint, because the very next course was mirrored behind a glass wall cutting through the centre, with the bots waving at them enthusiastically. Chell smiled and looked at Wheatley. “This was your suggestion. So are you ready, partner?”
“You marshmallows better not let me down,” GLaDOS cut in. “Imagine the humiliation I would feel if my two custom-built testing robots failed to win a co-op race against a sad, lonely lunatic and some hunk of junk I fished out of space one afternoon when I was bored. You don’t want to do that to me, do you? And by the way, I’m not asking. I’m telling you that’s something you don’t want to happen. The reassembly machine hasn’t seen you in a while, and wishes to continue that trend for as long as possible. So. Now that you know the stakes… head out there and do not fail this test.”
Wheatley was so happy all he could do was laugh.