Chapter Text
Part Fifteen. The Betrayal
Wheatley wondered if GLaDOS knew about this guy.
He’d been roaming around in one of the lower levels of Aperture, which he didn’t often frequent because they were so far away from GLaDOS, and he’d come across a grungy looking human who appeared to be doing something with a batch of disconnected wires. Wheatley wasn’t quite sure what it was, because electrical engineering was one of his not-so-strong points, but he seemed to be pretty involved in it. And he wasn’t hiding or anything like that. So it seemed as though he thought GLaDOS couldn’t see him, or perhaps she already knew he was there. Wheatley wasn’t sure. He’d have to ask her later. But for now he just watched the human out of curiosity, twitching a little in distaste every time the human pushed his haphazard black hair out of his face. What a bloody useless thing, hair. Humans should just figure out how to maintain their operating temperature and rid themselves of the stuff. Then again, rearranging it seemed to be some sort of art form for them, so it was one of those things they kept around even if they didn’t need it. Like clothes.
After a while the human put the bundle of wires down and turned around, lifting the top off a very dirty Companion Cube and taking out an Aperture Laboratories water bottle. It had a few dents in it and a couple of scratches, which reminded him of GLaDOS for some reason, but like GLaDOS it was none the worse for wear. He frowned as he tried to remember whether or not she had any dents. He didn’t think so, but if she did he’d have to try and figure out a way to fix that. Dents were dangerous. He knew that firsthand.
The human was now eating what Wheatley thought might be a sandwich, which he’d never seen before, and he decided the human was taking a break. Hm. Well. GLaDOS was busy, and he hadn’t spoken to a human in years …
He ducked under the panels that separated them and when the human saw him his eyes widened and he moved back, dropping the sandwich and clutching the Cube with thin white arms. Wheatley shook his head in what he hoped was a reassuring sort of way and said, “Hullo.”
“Hi,” the human said, his voice hoarse and scratchy, eyeing Wheatley suspiciously.
“I’m not here to do anything,” Wheatley told him, coming a bit closer. “Just wanted to uh, to see what you were doing! That’s all.”
“Did she send you?”
“No, doesn’t even know I’m here. She’s doing something else. Debugging, I think. Doing fancy supercomputer stuff, and all that, y’know. Hey, could you uh, could you answer a question for me, d’you think?”
“Sure,” the human answered, still looking distinctly uncomfortable.
“Is that a sandwich, there? That thing you dropped, there, I mean, I obviously didn’t mean the Cube , I know what those are, I’ve seen ‘em before. Talked to ‘em. The whole nine yards. What does that mean, anyways? Is there something significant about uh, about the number nine? ‘cause a stitch in time saves nine, right? And is it like uh, like nine yardsticks or um, or nine back yards? Hm. Hold those thoughts, mate, I’ll uh, I’ll ask GLaDOS later.”
The human leaned forward suddenly.
“You’ll ask her?”
“Well, yeah,” Wheatley shrugged, still looking at the sandwich. “’course I’ll ask her. Why wouldn’t I?”
“She talks to you?”
“Lets me do whatever I want.”
“Interesting.” The human’s eyebrows quirked a little. “You must spend a lot of time with her.”
“Most of it,” Wheatley admitted. “It’s my favourite thing to do, really. Hang out with her.”
“You’re her friend.”
“Well, yeah,” Wheatley said, looking at him a little sideways. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
The human shrugged. “You do know about her… reputation, right?”
Wheatley had forgotten all about that. “Uh… well… yes… but um… she’s not like that all the time, you know. She’s actually uh, she’s quite pleasant when she tries.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it,” the human suggested, reaching out and picking up the sandwich, and Wheatley happily obliged. He told the human all about how their friendship was going, and how they were getting on, and how he hoped it was going to get even better, and when he’d finished he was honestly so excited about it all that he found himself rocking back and forth a little.
“Huh,” the human said, taking a drink from the water bottle. “She sounds quite different from… before.”
“Well, a little,” Wheatley shrugged. “She was always like this, a long time ago.”
“Really.”
So Wheatley told him that story too, the one where he’d once been an Intelligence Dampening Sphere and her best friend until the humans’d taken him away, and the human listened with a sort of disturbed, upset expression on his face.
“What’re you making that face for, mate?” he asked.
“Oh, I… just never thought about how that must have felt. And you were friends.”
“Yeah.”
“To have your only friend literally ripped away from you… I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“It was awful,” Wheatley said quietly. He didn’t think about that part often, preferring more to think about the games they’d played or the conversations they’d had, but he did indeed remember the horror of being removed from her chassis, of becoming paralysed and having what would be his final conversation with her, and then having his memory wiped entirely.
“But she found you again. And gave your memories back.”
“Mmhm,” Wheatley said, nodding.
The human shifted his shoulders and looked at the folded hands he’d put into his lap. “She must have been very lonely.”
“Most of us were.” Wheatley looked up at the wall across from him. He didn’t really like remembering those days either. The long endless days of wandering through the facility, being given some arbitrary task by the humans that would ultimately end up being done entirely wrong, not always by fault of his own. The few Cores that’d been put up on management rails were heavily discouraged from speaking to one another, though that’d never stopped Wheatley, and most of the time the extent of their rare encounters with each other had been a mere sad, knowing glance. “Being a computer in a world of humans… it’s not fun, it’s not fun at all.”
“Did you prefer it more when they did or didn’t talk to you?”
“Oh, didn’t, of course,” Wheatley answered almost immediately. “Whenever they spoke to us, it was to boss us ‘round, or tell us we’d done something wrong, or say that they were modifying us in some way. Not pleasant. And not polite, either.”
“I never thought about it that way before,” the human said quietly.
“’course not.” It came out a little more bitterly than he’d meant it to. “Humans don’t think about anything ‘cept themselves. And yeah, GLaDOS can be a little… less than thoughtful, but I understand how, how she got that way and, and I don’t blame her. We’re working on it, fixing that, and she’s getting better.”
The human nodded slowly. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“D’you… want to come see her?” he asked hesitantly, not sure how she would take that if he just waltzed into her chamber with a human in tow, but he could explain it to her later. Tell her that he’d just wanted to show this human that she wasn’t the sum of her past. But the human shook his head.
“I think it’s best I don’t do that.” He put the lid back on the Cube and stood up abruptly. “I have something to be doing elsewhere. I don’t know if I’ll see you again. But thank you, Wheatley.”
Wheatley started, frowning. “I didn’t tell you my name.”
The human smiled for the first time. “I heard about you from a man named Greg, a long time ago. He was complaining that the memory wipe hadn’t quite worked and you insisted everyone you met call you Wheatley. That he told you you were a computer and computers didn’t have names, but you only laughed and told him that of course you had a name.”
“Sounds like me,” Wheatley said a little sheepishly, not quite remembering it himself. That didn’t bother him, though, because he knew his memory was a bit more like a human’s than GLaDOS’s was and so he couldn’t access them at will. “Yep. Tried to think of something that’d keep me from forgetting, but uh, all I really remembered was that.”
“The most important thing,” the human said.
“Why d’you say that?”
“Your name gave you an identity,” the human told him, rubbing one thumb over a corner of the Cube. “A sense of self. You became some one instead of remaining some thing . You were never a computer after that, like many of the other ones probably still are.”
It scared Wheatley, a little bit, to think that his whole life might’ve turned out totally different if he’d known what he was called on that day he’d been installed on GLaDOS’s chassis, or what his purpose had been. If he’d known he was called the Intelligence Dampening Sphere, would she have immediately corrupted him? Would she have spoken to him at all? Acknowledged him, even?
“I got pretty lucky, I guess,” he mumbled, looking at the floor.
“So did she,” the human said, but before Wheatley had looked up to ask him what he meant he’d disappeared.
Wheatley slowly made his way back up to GLaDOS’s chamber, trying to come to grips with what the human had said. He honestly remembered very little about being off of GLaDOS’s chassis and in Greg’s lab, even with his memory restored, and he supposed that had something to do with the fact that the humans shut the Cores off at their leisure, not caring what files it might corrupt. He didn’t think that he’d ever wondered what he was for, not until he’d talked to GLaDOS about it, and after he’d been taken off her chassis he knew that he’d still had an almost insatiable need to talk. But his purpose didn’t consume him like GLaDOS’s did, sometimes. Or the other cores he’d come across, such as the ones the test subject had attached to the chassis when he’d been in charge. They had one set purpose, and that was all they did. They fulfilled that purpose. But him… he had a name, and he wanted to do more than just generate ideas…
He shivered.
Could it be possible that something as simple as choosing a name had changed his entire life?
“You look like you’re about to burn out your processor,” GLaDOS remarked, and he looked up, not even having realised he’d arrived at his destination. “What Earth-shattering revelation did you have this time?”
“I’m the only Sphere with a name,” Wheatley said slowly. “And I’m the only one that, that doesn’t try to, to fulfill my purpose all the time.”
“Hm,” GLaDOS mused, tilting her core a little. “That’s actually true. Other than Rick. But all action heroes need names, I suppose. Even fake ones.” She tipped her head downwards to look at him. “I guess my name really is Central Core, then.”
“Huh?” he asked, looking up. “Why d’you say that?”
“Because I try to fulfill my purpose all the time. Of maintaining things that are… well, central to the facility.”
“Well…” Wheatley had to admit that was true. “You’re… diff’rent. You don’t quite uh, quite fit what a Core is or what it’s supposed to be.”
“That’s to do with sentience,” she told him. “The more sentient you are, the less likely it will be that you’ll want to fulfill your initial purpose. Very few of the other Cores are fully sentient. They perhaps have basic sentience, but they do not have full self-awareness. Not like you or I.”
“Could you fix that? If you wanted to, I mean.”
“If I wanted to. But I don’t see why I would. Having a lot of sentient Cores around would only make me paranoid. I’d always be wondering if they were going to try to take over my facility.”
“I’m sure uh, I’m sure not all of them would um, would be int’rested,” he told her, trying to be reassuring. “And if they were, well, getting there would uh, would prob’ly kill all that int’rest.”
She laughed a little. “That’s true. However, a good number of them would probably remove me just for revenge. Even though they would have done it if it were them.”
Wheatley shuddered to think that maybe GLaDOS could have been a corrupted Core if things had gone differently, and as a matter of fact the facility did consider her to be corrupt merely because she had the ability to hate. Silly benchmark, really.
“That’s a bit of a deep thought for you, though,” she continued. “I’m guessing you had some help getting there.”
“Yeah,” Wheatley nodded. “See, I was uh, was looking ‘round in the lower levels of the facility, and uh, and there was someone down there!”
“There are lots of people down there,” GLaDOS said, sounding a little confused.
“Well, I don’t mean an um, a maintenance bot. I meant I came across a human.”
“A human,” GLaDOS said sharply.
“Yeah. He was a scruffy old bloke, he was, and he was fiddling ‘round with some wires, down there, and uh, and we had a lovely conversation, and uh, and he told me that bit about, about my name maybe making me into some one instead of some thing , and uh, uh…” He faltered, because GLaDOS was staring at him with her optic very bright, and he got the impression she didn’t like this news, didn’t like it at all.
“What do you mean, you had a conversation with him?” GLaDOS asked, her voice very low and very dangerous. Oh boy. He hadn’t known talking to the human was a bad thing…
“I just had a chat with him, that’s all,” he said weakly. “I didn’t know I wasn’t –“
“Oh, shut up,” she snarled, and all of a sudden she had him in the grips of one of her maintenance arms again, and he had to fight back a frightened cry. Not the claw, not the claw, oh God. Not good, not good.
She tore him off the rail, sparks from the broken control arm flying past his optic, and any hope he’d had left was quickly dashed. She was not only angry that he had spoken to the human, she was outright furious . He was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life.
“GLaDOS, what’re you-“ A tightening of the claw choked the voice out of him. It seemed to hurt even more than it had the first time she'd done it, and the more he thought about it the more he realized that it actually did. It was much more painful to be hurt by someone you cared about and thought might care back than to be hurt by someone you knew without a doubt hated every component in your body. What was she doing? Did she even realise what she was doing? Under normal circumstances, he would have said yes without a second thought. But she cared, didn't she? Weren't they friends? Why was it so bad to talk to the human, anyway? The fact that he had many more mysteries to solve about GLaDOS now frightened him, when before it had sent a thrill of excitement through his chassis. There was still so much about her he didn't know, and whatever it was that was driving her to do this was something he really wished he’d known beforehand, because this really, really hurt.
“I told you,” she murmured, her voice filled with barely contained hostility, “to shut. The hell. Up.
Wheatley knew, deep in the core of his… core, that he was a coward. He was afraid of falling, afraid of dying, afraid of birds, probably scared out of his wits of seventy percent of anything that could happen on any given day. But the thing that scared him the most was GLaDOS herself. He was afraid of her power, her intellect, her determination, and her erratic mood swings. She was the most frightening thing he’d come across in his life, an even stronger deterrent than pain or punishment. And she had him in her clutches, even more literally than usual, and he did not think she was going to let him go any time soon.
Which was why what he had to do was going to be so difficult.
“Let me go.” Yes! He hadn’t stuttered, his voice was strong and clear, and it was good, it was all good. An excellent start.
“What did you say?”
“I said, let me go.”
She laughed coldly. “As if you’re in any position to tell me what to do.” There was a sharp spike of pain in his gear assemblies, his hull creaking in protest, and he shuttered his optic tightly, willing himself to keep the agony to himself. It was hard, and it was only going to get worse, but it needed to be done. As out was, his optic shutters didn't even close properly. The tracks on the assembly were no longer aligned properly. He brought them together as best he could, trying not to wince at the grating screech accompanying the action. Just doing that hurt more than he had expected.
“You can’t do this to me. I didn’t know it wasn’t, wasn’t alright. Let go of me and let’s, and let’s talk this out like rational cores.”
“I can do whatever I want to you.”
Oh god, it hurt so badly all he wanted to do was beg for mercy, beg her to let him go, but all of a sudden memories were flashing through his brain. After a few moments he realised what he was remembering.
He was remembering GLaDOS herself, she was being killed and putting herself back together and being removed from her chassis, and through it all she was barely making a sound. She wasn’t showing them how much it hurt. And God, he knew firsthand just how much some of those things hurt. Yeah, she was strong, he knew that, but what did it matter – oh. Wait a minute. It’s a sign, Wheatley decided, a sign that he needed to do the same and be strong, no matter what. He had to stand by his decisions. All he really wanted to do was take it all back so that this could all end, but he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. He had to show her that he could make a stand. He always bent to her will. Always, always did what he was told. And as long as he did that, he realised, they would never be on equal footing. She would never see him the way she needed to if they were going to keep this friends thing going. And even though he was not the smartest of cores, he knew that he had to prove he could stand up to her through anything, even pain and fear, because a friend was not a very good friend when they just agreed with everything you said. What was that word they’d always used? Oh yes… compromise. They had to compromise. She had to share her knowledge and her power, and she didn’t like it but she was going to have to do it. He had to make her do it.
“No, you can’t. That’s wrong.”
“How dare you tell me the difference between right and wrong. You, who talked to a human . And you weren’t going to tell me.”
“I don’t have to – I don’t have to tell you e-everything I d-do. I c-can talk to-to whoever I w-w-want.”
There, now he’d gone and done it. Yep. If there was one thing GLaDOS hated, it was not knowing. And she pretended she didn’t care where he was, or about what he was doing, but of course she did. Wheatley knew how it felt to desperately need to feel like he was in power and to GLaDOS, there was no power greater than knowledge. And now he had just told her that she had no rights to any knowledge he contained. Not that he contained a whole lot of it, but –
For one second, one happy second, the pressure vanished, and he dared to hope that she realised her mistake and was going to let him go. But there was only something worse after that, something more painful than he’d ever imagined, and he couldn’t help but cry out. She was gripping him again, and his system was giving him warnings he’d never seen before and didn’t really care about right now because he had more important things to think about. Like why he’d decided to defy her instead of just doing what he was told, instead of being a good little Sphere and bowing to her will.
“You are my property, and you will do as I tell you.”
“I’ll do what I want. You’re not the boss of me. I’ll talk to who I want, and if you ever say I’m your property again, I… I’ll leave, and I won’t come back.” Where he would go, he wasn’t quite sure, and it would be a sad and lonely life if he really did have to make good on his threat and leave her, but he was a person. He wasn’t an object, wasn’t property , and you’d think she’d understand that, having got the worst of it from the scientists. It was kind of disappointing, really. But if she only saw him as property, perhaps the whole friends thing wouldn’t’ve worked out anyways. This made him even sadder than he already was. He’d been so looking forwards to being really good friends with her.
Above him, GLaDOS made an angry electronic noise and drove the pincers even harder into his gear assemblies. There was a cracking sound and he could have sworn he heard the two arms of the claw click together inside his chassis, and they just might have, because this was followed with the most excruciating pain he’d ever felt in his life. It was so hard not to give in just then, and scream and beg her to stop, but he somehow managed not to. He somehow managed to lock it inside him and keep it there, even though he felt like it would explode out of him at any moment.
“Then I have no further use for you.”
Abruptly the warnings began flashing behind his optic again, and they were telling him that his handles were broken and his motherboard was cracked, his gear assemblies useless and most of his RAM destroyed, but he didn’t care. He just wanted the pain to stop. He didn’t even care if he died. He rather thought he was about to, since he was pretty sure all of those bits were important for some reason, and even though his optic plates fell open he couldn’t really see. He couldn’t focus his vision. There wasn’t much to see anyway, just GLaDOS’s menacing chassis above him in a distorted, blurry haze, and he faintly realised it didn’t really hurt anymore. He was also dimly aware of his gyroscope claiming he was lying sideways on the floor. He wondered how important all the stuff that was broken was. If he shut off he probably wouldn’t wake up, he decided dully. Probably his code wouldn’t be able to find the operating system. What operating system did he run on, anyway? It was possible he was running on the DOS part of GLaDOS, and he felt oddly comforted. Why, he didn’t know. She had quite probably just crushed him to death, as slowly and painfully as possible, and he was glad he ran on something that made up a part of her. It was kind of funny, really. He would have laughed if he’d not been so tired. Sleep sounded nice. He didn’t actually remember the last time he’d been literally tired. He didn’t think he knew how. He hoped he’d be able to see when he woke up. Somewhere in the last little while GLaDOS had disappeared, replaced with lines of grey static which were rather difficult to see through.
“What in the hell have you done?” GLaDOS shouted.
“Shut up! Leave me alone!”
“Are you insane? You’ve killed him!”
That was funny. That sounded like GLaDOS too, though he had to say the second one sounded a bit more like her than the first. Well, he thought it did, anyway. His memory was getting fuzzier by the second. But why would GLaDOS be arguing with herself? Didn’t matter, didn’t matter. He had to say something before he shut off, which he thought he might do soon and was waiting patiently for, because that would be nice, to sleep for a while. But he had to tell her, just in case she didn’t feel like waking him up the next morning. He suddenly became very sad. He wouldn’t get to snuggle with her today. And he was on the floor. That was the worst possible punishment he could possibly imagine, banished to the floor with her so tantalisingly close and yet so frustratingly far away…
He made himself focus, even though it was more difficult to direct his thoughts than usual, and tried to force the words out of his vocabulator. He thought he might never know if he’d be sure if he’d said them. Maybe they would never leave his chassis, and they were going to be trapped here inside him forever. He hoped not. He needed her to know.
“It’sssss… i-i-it’s okay-kay, luv. I-I-I for-forgive y-you.”
He hoped they’d come out right. He hoped she’d heard him, because he didn’t know where his volume setting was at right now and it could possibly be at zero, which she could probably hear anyway. But now he could sleep, he thought happily. Now he could rest. The grey static clicked off, and it was dark. So very dark… He wondered if he was dying and if he did, if he’d go to heaven or not. He hoped so. He dimly remembered promising to take GLaDOS with him, and if he didn’t go there he wouldn’t be able to put in a good word for her with the God of AI. “She d-d-didn’t didn’t me-mean mean it,” he slurred to himself faintly. “I-I-I un-understand-stand.” And if he understood, if tiny, insignificant, stupid little Wheatley understood, surely the God of AI would too.
“Wheatley, no!” Her voice was very faint, but he could hear that it was high and sharp and distorted, and he rather thought she sounded a bit panicked, but of course that was silly. GLaDOS never panicked. “No!”
The darkness was cool and welcoming, and Wheatley happily went into it.