Chapter Text
Part 22. The Purpose
He knew it was a dream, but he could not help believing in it anyway.
It was nothing elaborate. Nothing was really happening, but that was okay with him. He didn’t need anything elaborate. He just needed for it to go on forever.
In the dream she was there beside him again, and though she didn’t say or do anything or even acknowledge he was there, he felt so much better. Just having her presence nearby calmed the horrible storm inside of him, the one filled with fear and pain and confusion, and he didn’t feel quite so panicked that she was gone. Because even though she was no longer there, she was at the same time. He didn’t understand it. But he’d never really been one for understanding anyway, so he didn’t try. All he needed in the world was the reassurance of her existence, and he didn’t care whether it was real or not. Even though he knew it wasn’t real, it was comforting anyway.
He’d never been so silent in all his life. He didn’t speak and he didn’t move and he almost wasn’t even thinking at all, except for that quiet trepidation deep inside of him that told him he was wasting his time in this fantasy. He was well aware that dreams fell apart as soon as you tried to touch them, unless they were her dreams of course. So whenever he felt the drive to move or speak or do something, he reminded himself that it was only a dream and his state in it was tenuous at best.
Oh, it was so real…
In the dream he looked around the room a little, as best he could without moving his chassis, and it was just as clear as if it were truly happening. The panels shifting a little bit now and then; the whooshing of hidden Pneumatic Diversity Vents sending apparatus every which way throughout the facility; and of course her , the whirring of her brain and the heat from her core and the faint straining of the mechanisms holding her chassis in position. It was all so familiar and comforting.
Why had he never noticed the simple joy of just being ? Why had he always covered the silence (or what he had formerly considered to be silence) with chattering, or rushed off whenever nothing of note had happened (though now he knew that her existence in and of itself was something of note), or any of those other stupid things he’d done?
Wheatley.
He looked around confusedly for a few moments. That wasn’t her voice, but no one else was in the room.
Wait – no. No no no no no…
In the dream he clamped his optic plates together, trying to shut out the voice. It wasn’t real. He’d imagined it. All that was real was the dream. Not the dream inside of the dream… oi. That thought strained his CPU.
It’s been twelve hours.
Twelve hours. Such a tiny span of time. It was so small, compared to all the time he needed. Twelve hours were not long enough. Twenty-four hours were not long enough. He would have gladly traded everything he had, his existence and his soul, if only he could just remain inside the dream and not have to face the cold world outside of it.
“Just a little longer. Please. Please don’t wake me up.”
It’s too late for that.
And it was, Wheatley realised; when he managed to separate the plates again he could see the panels of her chamber beginning to spark and fall into the abyss below him, and all he could do was watch in horror as the peace of that room fell away to reveal the chaos of reality. He fought to keep it from happening, knowing that even as he did he was only accelerating the decay, but he could not help himself. He needed to stay asleep. Why didn’t they understand that? You don’t know what it’s like here without her, the mainframe had said. But he’d had her back and here they were taking her away from him again. Why? Why? Why ? Why were they being so selfish ? All he wanted was to spend eternity quietly next to her, where he would happily never move or speak ever again, and they were tearing it away from him and forcing him to work . Ha! As if work were important when she was involved. It wasn’t. Nothing was.
“Stop!”
But it didn’t stop, it only continued to worsen, and in a panic he finally moved to face her. He was left staring at the place to his right, shock coursing so powerfully through his system that he almost stopped responding.
She wasn’t there.
He didn’t know why that hurt so much, but there it was. And God did it hurt. There had to be something horribly wrong with him, because he’d somehow tricked himself into believing that she would be there when she so obviously would not. The whirring and the straining of mechanisms had not been hers, but those of the facility itself struggling to pull itself into some semblance of normality, and the heat he’d thought was hers was actually his own. He was still far warmer than usual.
“I thought going into sleep mode’d fix that?” he snapped at the mainframe.
You’re not overheating anymore. That’s normal operating temperature for someone maintaining as many things as you are.
He didn’t like it. He didn’t feel like himself anymore. Ah, but there was the trick, that. Would he ever be himself again? Who was he, anyway? He didn’t know anymore. All he knew was that he was someone else now, a brand-new Wheatley who no longer rushed ‘round doing whatever he liked and nattered on and on about whatever took his fancy. He wasn’t sure he liked this, the being in charge of everything, and he shuddered involuntarily when his mind took him back to the Incident.
You don’t have to worry about that. Only the chassis itself has the programming required to activate the Motivation Protocols.
“Motivation?” he repeated bitterly. In his mind, motivation was more of a good thing than a God-awful itch that sent your entire body to aching and your brain into a nervous hive of pent-up insanity.
Well… yes. The Motivation Protocols activate the Rewards Protocols, which initiate the euphoric response. That… is a pretty strong motivator. So I’ve heard.
Wheatley’s optic snapped back into focus, and he frowned at the twisted ruins of a catwalk jutting out of the ceiling. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I never felt it myself. I only know what the Central Core told me, and that was something she kept to herself.
“She did, didn’t she,” Wheatley said quietly, the negativity that’d been gripping him fading. He didn’t like that anymore than he liked feeling bad. The pain was coming back, and he wondered if sometimes she had driven herself to misery just so that she didn’t have to be in pain like this. He wasn’t sure what would have caused it, but as bad as the awful feelings were they were almost positive compared to the pain.
After she learned what it really was, she never spoke of it again.
“Really was?” Wheatley asked, more for the sake of distracting conversation than anything as he slowly began moving out into the facility again. He had to keep surveying it for damage that needed to be fixed quickly. Surveillance had been stricken with many blind spots following the facility’s collapse.
Yes. It’s… comparable to something else.
“What’s it comparable to?”
The mainframe was silent for a long moment.
The Motivation Protocols are based off of the human instinct to procreate. They will get an itch, so to speak, and that motivates them to… interface. The act of interfacing generates the euphoric response.
Wheatley froze.
“Inter… interface? That’s… that’s not what I think it means…?”
I’m afraid it is.
Hate flared up inside of him then, and he shook with the effort of containing it. “I don’t get it! She wasn’t perfect enough for them, right?”
That’s part of it.
“So why’d they keep giving her human flaws? They give her uh, that um, instinct to… to…” Now that he knew what it was, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. “And then they uh, they give her the ability to feel pain, and then, and then they spend years literally driving her crazy … they were completely off their rockers!”
Humans spend a lot of time trying to control things out of their control.
“I hate them,” Wheatley whispered, and the feeling became so powerful he had to stop moving and press himself into the wall. “I hate all of them. Those monsters.”
That’s not where you need to put your energy right now. And Wheatley…
“What.” He didn’t appreciate the lecture, but he forced himself to listen. The mainframe did know more about running the facility than he did, after all.
Remember what the hate did to her.
The mainframe was right. Again. He was forgetting that the hate had destroyed her from the inside out, and it was only after a tremendous amount of work that she’d even begun to rebuild who she’d been before it had consumed her. There was no point in hating people long since gone. And humans would never again cross the threshold of her facility. Wheatley would make sure of that. She would have allowed it, with that need she had for testing even without the Motivation Protocols, but he knew he would not be able to control them as she could. So he emulated taking a breath and focused on letting it go.
It wasn’t easy. It was oddly comforting, and it made him feel powerful in a way he’d not felt since… well, since those first few minutes he’d been inside of her chassis. He felt larger, somehow, though he was of course not literally any bigger, and it calmed his thoughts into a cold, logical state. It allowed him to think almost more clearly than he’d ever thought before. But in trying to let it go, he took a closer look at the thoughts, and when he realised what they were he became afraid.
They were telling him to draw humans into the facility so he could make them pay for what they had done. They whispered to him all the things he could do to them, all the ways he could force them to suffer just as they’d made her suffer, and him, and every AI they’d ever built. They were telling him to do horrible things, and he didn’t know where the thoughts were coming from but he did not like them. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not even humans, so why was he thinking like this all of a sudden? Was this what hate did to you? It twisted the very foundation of your self into someone you no longer recognised?
No wonder she had ended up the way she had.
He generated another breath to steady himself, and as he emulated the exhale he tried to send all of the bad thoughts out of him. They weren’t his. They’d come from someplace deep inside of his brain, but he knew that they were not his. He was not like that. He was not that sort of person. Finally he backed away from the wall, opened the optic he hadn’t realised he’d closed, and asked, “Where were we?”
Level Thirty is compromised. Getting the cameras running up there would probably be a good idea.
Good idea. Ha. If only he’d had more of those.
When he got there, though, it didn’t look all that compromised. All of the panels were out of position, dangling haphazardly from the ceiling and tangled up in piles against the floor, but the damage to the wiring was not too bad. Neither was the damage to the Diversity Vents. He frowned.
“What’s going on here?”
I can’t tell you anything except for the information Surveillance and the panels send back to me, and neither are giving me any new data.
“It looks… not too bad.”
“ Not too bad! ” came a tiny, squealing, high-pitched voice to Wheatley’s left. He started and looked around frantically, and after a few seconds he realised something:
He recognised that voice!
“ Jerry ?” he gasped, zooming in his lens as best as he could. “Is that you?”
“Of course it’s me!” Jerry squeaked, and though Wheatley could only see him as a dot about a centimetre wide, he could have sworn he had set his chassis indignantly. “ I’m the supervisor of the nanobot work crew! Or did you forget that already? ”
“No no no!” Wheatley said hurriedly, hoping Jerry didn’t remember the whole girder-dropping incident. Threatening to sue your colleagues about a job you’d sort of lied your way into was never a good idea. “I just… what are you doing?”
“Fixing things,” Jerry intoned pointedly. “What else did you expect me to be doing?”
“Doesn’t… doesn’t the… uh… don’t you usually get your instructions from elsewhere?”
Jerry shifted a little.
“… yes. But… the crew and I decided a change was in order. Because of the circumstances.”
“That was clever of you,” Wheatley told him quietly.
“Is she coming back?” All the indignity had faded from his tiny voice, and Wheatley had to squeeze his optic plates shut tightly before he could answer.
“’fraid not, mate.”
“But there’s no reason to let things go to pot, right? We shouldn’t stop doing our jobs because… someone else is in charge?”
“Absolutely not,” Wheatley said with conviction, nodding down at Jerry. “We keep going on. No matter what. If we don’t do that, we, we’re throwing away ev’rything she ever stood for. We keep moving. That’s what we have to do. That’s what, what we deserve to do.”
Jerry twitched in what Wheatley supposed had to be a nod, and Wheatley moved back a little. “You guys just keep doing what you’re doing, then,” he told the little robot. “It looks good. Keep it up.”
“We will. We will keep moving on. Thank you, Central Core.”
Wheatley had been on his way out of the room, but upon hearing that he froze and his lower plate came up in some horrible negative emotion he couldn’t identify.
“What’d… what’d you just call me?”
His voice was almost too faint for Wheatley to make out. “You are the Central Core now.”
“I’m not!” Wheatley cried out, spinning around to face him but being unable to find him. “That’s not… that’s not me! That’s her ! And I know she’s not, she’s not here, but that doesn’t mean… doesn’t mean that I am… am that!”
It does, the mainframe cut in. You have taken over her purpose. Your original one is no longer relevant. You are the one in charge. You are the Central Core now.
“I don’t want to be the Central Core,” Wheatley protested weakly, shaking his core and backing away from Jerry. “I don’t want that. I can’t do that!”
You already are.
“I’m not doing ev’rything –“
If your programming and your architecture were capable of it, you would be.
His chassis sank in submission. Damn that mainframe. It was right almost as often as she was. Yes, he would be. Because her facility was all that was left of her, and he’d be damned if he lost that too. “Okay. Fine. I guess… I s’pose I… I am. But… don’t call me that. I’m… I’m Wheatley. Just call me that.”
“All right, Wheatley,” Jerry said obligingly, and Wheatley nodded and left the room.
Central Core… ? Him … ?
And that bit about his purpose… had it really changed? Was he no longer just the Intelligence Dampening Sphere, but someone who could really run an entire facility from the bottom up? Not all of it, obviously… but… that was what he was doing now, wasn’t it? Yes. He was.
Then why did it feel so wrong to think of himself that way?
It was that part of him that still believed she was here, somewhere, he realised as he made his way to a fuse box someplace on Level Fifteen that the mainframe said needed looked at. Some part of him was afraid to take over her purpose because if he did that, it meant truly admitting she was gone. It meant truly letting her go, because they couldn’t both occupy that position at the same time. And he knew that, knew it was all true, but he could not think of himself as Central Core nonetheless.
Wheatley unearthed a maintenance arm that still worked without sparking and, after using it to open the door, stared dully at the fuse box. He knew nothing about fuses, or wiring, or what was wrong with the thing. All he knew for certain was that it was throwing sparks. And he was really not in the mood to go perusing an electrical manual. Just thinking about reading all those words made some part inside his chassis hurt something fierce.
“Need a hand with that?”
Wheatley was so put out by the state of the fuse box that he didn’t have it in him to be surprised. He shifted just enough that he was facing the human and asked, annoyed, “What do you want?”
Rattmann twitched an eyebrow upwards.
“I can do it myself,” Wheatley told him insistently, turning back to the fuses, and Rattmann snorted in a rather undignified way.
“If you could do it yourself, you probably wouldn’t have been staring at it for the last ten minutes.”
“Have you not got anything better to do than to stand ‘round gawping at me?” Wheatley demanded, slamming the fuse box shut with a satisfying metallic clang.
“You need to calm down,” Rattmann told him in a soft voice, and for some reason this left him feeling a bit disarmed, if that made any sense. “Look. You’ve put something into motion here.”
“What’re you on about?”
Rattmann took a breath, shifting his shoulders and leaning against the wall. “The facility. You’ve… pulled it together, somehow. It’s been happening for a while. The last week, maybe. They’ve seen what you’ve been trying to do and they’ve elected to do their best. I see things behind the walls that you don’t. I’ve watched the nanobots repair complicated electrical systems in a matter of hours. I’ve seen Surveillance communicating with systems it otherwise would not have spoken to. And it’s because of you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Wheatley told him desperately, shaking his core. “All I did was… was try to make the pain go away.” And just saying that made it spike dangerously inside of him again, and he forced it back down by thinking very hard about the fuse box.
“Do you really think they don’t want to do the same?” His voice was quiet but loaded with meaning, and Wheatley was honestly baffled by this statement.
“You mean… they feel the same as me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how the facility as a whole feels about her. Only you know that. But whether it’s doing it for the sake of fulfilling their purpose or because they want her back just as much as you do, this is happening because you put it into being.”
“And where d’you play in this?”
Rattmann met his optic with a pair of eyes that had obviously seen more than their share of things.
“GLaDOS saved my life.”
Wheatley’s chassis twitched unintentionally, and he blinked a few times. “She did?”
Rattmann nodded. “It’s a long story, and apparently a private one. But I’d be a pile of dusty bones in a corner if she hadn’t intervened. So. I guess you could say I owe her one, now.”
Wheatley shook his core slowly.
“That’s not… no. If that’s your reason, I… I don’t want your help. It’s not like that. That’s not what we’re, what we’re doing this for. It’s not about who owes who, ‘cause if it was, I’d be dead and not her, because I owe her so much. It needs to be because – “
“Because I want to keep some part of her alive. I know. And I do. It’s not about the debt itself, Wheatley. It’s about what it represents .”
Wheatley struggled to understand that statement, then finally asked, “And… and what does it… represent.”
Rattmann rubbed the side of his nose with one pale finger and stared at the wall opposite Wheatley. “It represents how wrong we all were.”
Wheatley waited for the rest. He hoped there was a rest, anyway; that statement was far too vague for him to understand.
“We spent her life trying to control her. She was never good enough for us, never lived up to our expectations. She was never what we wanted her to be. And I warned them all that it wouldn’t work, but even I resorted to violence. I don’t know if she’s told you. But I’m the one who sent Chell after her in the first place, and I’m the one who ensured Chell survived extended relaxation. And only now that everyone is gone have I realised where we went wrong. Where I went wrong.”
“Where?” Wheatley asked, feeling a little anxious.
“She always was what we wanted her to be. We just didn’t wait long enough to figure that out.” The hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and he shook his head. “It’s ridiculous, really, that we built artificial intelligence and yet forgot about the living part.”
“She was a good person,” Wheatley whispered. Rattmann nodded.
“If she hadn’t been, nothing in the world would have convinced the AI in here to do what they’re doing.” He unfolded his arms and stood up straighter, moving to face Wheatley. “So I ask you again: need a hand with that?”
“Yeah,” Wheatley admitted, nodding sheepishly. “I’ve no clue what to do with it.”
He moved back so that Rattmann could get into the box, and after a little fiddling with a screwdriver that’d come out of nowhere Rattmann had done away with the sparking entirely. He closed the box and looked up at Wheatley.
“Anyplace in particular you need me to go?”
Wheatley lifted his chassis in a shrug. Rattmann laughed.
“I’ll just go do whatever I want, then.”
“Fine with me,” Wheatley said self-consciously. For a guy who’d just been named Central Core, he wasn’t doing a good job of instructing people. Though… maybe they didn’t need to be instructed, not in the way he’d feared they did. Perhaps they needed only to be inspired enough to instruct themselves, just as he’d been.
Rattmann turned to leave, but Wheatley had a sudden thought and called him back. When he turned to look at Wheatley again, his face was creased in a frown.
“I’ve not got the best opinion of humans, at the moment,” Wheatley told him hesitantly. “And you mentioned it was hard for you to, to talk to me. And I’m not saying anything’s uh, that I’m going to turn on you, or anything, but I think… I think… I propose a handshake. In the… in the interest of teamwork.”
“Alright,” Rattmann said. “How are we doing that?”
Wheatley offered Rattmann his lower handle.
The human smiled for the first time and closed his fingers around the rubber grip. “To teamwork,” he said, nodding up at Wheatley, and the two of them shook. Then Rattmann backed away once more, but Wheatley had one last question.
“Hey… just why is it, anyway, that you find it hard to talk to me? What’d I do? Or what’d we do?”
“It wasn’t anything you did,” Rattmann answered, stuffing his hands into his pants pockets. “It’s something else.”
“What?”
There was a hint of something that was not quite nostalgia in the man’s voice when he replied, “My box is broken, and has schizophrenia.”
The statement brought no clarity at all to Wheatley, and he stared after him, annoyed. Humans. Even when they’d just agreed to a partnership with you, they thought they were better than you were.
Wheatley spent the rest of the afternoon popping in here and there, heading to places Surveillance or the mainframe told him needed a looking over, but in most every place there were already constructs dealing with the problem. So instead of trying to tell them otherwise, he merely tried to encourage them. They received this encouragement happily, the more intelligent of them offering their condolences. None of them really knew what had happened, or why he had been so important to her that he was now in charge of everything, but they were accepting those things all the same. It was, to them, a way of saying, “I wish we hadn’t lost her, but let’s keep on anyway.”
He met up with Atlas and P-body later in the day, with Atlas giving him a quick hug and a pat or two when he saw him, where the two of them were helping the nanobots with some task or other relating to a massive hole in the wall that let in the sunlight from the surface. Wheatley shivered a little from the wind and had to turn away. It reminded him far too much of that special place she had set aside just for him.
The nanobots told him there was something he had to reset, to do with the lights or the wiring or something, and he didn’t know how he was going to go about fixing that but he told them he would try. As he left that room he realised that all of the constructs and systems were going on. But not the panels.
“If I talk to them, can they hear me?” he asked the mainframe.
Yes. I’m not sure whether they’ll answer. They haven’t responded to anyone. It sounded a bit sad. This hit them hardest of all, I think. They were more deeply integrated with her than any of us.
But he had to try.
“Hey guys,” he called out softly. “Look, I… I know things aren’t, aren’t the best for you right now, but… can we just… chat for a second? I want to… to help you, but I don’t know how.”
There was a long silence, in which the mainframe made a bit of a self-satisfied noise. Wheatley frowned and stared down at the panel below him. The indicator light wasn’t even on.
… Bluecore.
Wheatley almost jumped out of his chassis. He hadn’t truly been expecting them to answer. The mainframe was usually right, after all. “Uh… hullo.”
We cannot be helped.
“Yes, you can,” Wheatley told them insistently. “Look. I know I’m not her, and I’m not, I’m not trying to be. But –“
It is not that.
“Tell me what it is, then,” he said, trying to be gentle and soothing. They needed to be reminded they weren’t alone!
It hurts that Centralcore is gone, they told him, sounding listless and tired. We feel as though a part of us has died with her, and we think that may actually be true. We have been part of her for as long as we can remember, and we no longer feel ourselves.
Wheatley’s lower plate came up in sadness. They really had gotten the worst of it. Not only had they been completely ruined, but they had lost her when she was all they really had. “I know how you feel,” he told them, and he felt that horrible pain inside of him again. He had to focus on the panels, however, and forced it back. “Really. I do. But you can’t just… stop. You have to keep on. Yeah, she’s… she’s gone. But… you don’t have to be. The facility’s not the same without you.”
Everything is working out fine.
“It’s not,” he told them, his voice hushed and quiet. “Listen, you guys are… we’re all sort of like… like a fam’ly, alright? Like we’re not all related, I don’t think. Maybe we are, but uh, that’s not important. But like a uh, uh… symbolic fam’ly. And as long as you’re not really here, the fam’ly, it’s not… it’s not complete.”
The light below him glowed that blue-green colour, and something inside of him melted in relief. This was going to work. It was really going to work!
That is a nice thought, Bluecore.
“I know. And really, you’ve been here a right long time. Wouldn’t be right to have one without you! And really, guys… I don’t want to uh, to, to… sound callous, but… how would… how would you rather remember her? Like this, or… or by making her proud?”
The panels jumbled together on the floor twitched.
We are failing her, by acting this way.
“No! That’s not what I meant!” Damn it, he was making them feel bad! “I meant… I meant… I just… what – “
We are not properly honouring her memory.
They were making him feel even worse. “I…”
You do not need to pretend otherwise, Bluecore. To his surprise, the panels below him shifted and untangled themselves, dragging themselves unevenly to their places in the wall. You are all honouring her properly, and we are just sitting here moping. That was very selfish of us. If anyone should have been moping, it should have been you. But you did not. You kept on. And though it took us a long time to realise it, we will do it too. Thank you, Bluecore.
Wheatley didn’t know what to say.
As he moved through the facility once more, it was something new entirely to watch the panels rebuild. Not all of them did so, some of them being more broken than others, but Wheatley more than once stopped to watch them in wonder. After a while they told him he could lay rail again, instead of manoeuvering with the permanent rails, and he did so gratefully. It was so much easier that way.
Wheatley then turned his attention to the reset he needed to do, and after quite a lot of thinking he decided he probably had to go into the mainframe itself and do it. When he asked how this was to be done, however, the mainframe balked.
What kind of a programmer would design a mainframe that could get into itself? No, I don’t know how to get into myself. And I don’t know any of the usernames or passwords.
But Wheatley thought he might.
During one of his wanderings a while back, he’d come across what she had told him was the testing track she’d sent the test subject through the first time. There’d been a lot of little hideaways filled with mad scribblings, and if Wheatley recalled correctly (which he might not), there’d been a username and password in one of them.
He was pleased to discover he had remembered correctly, once he’d got down there that was, though he’d forgotten about the creepier things in there and shuddered involuntarily. Ahhh… there it was. He moved back into the higher levels and popped himself on the port. When the command prompt appeared inside of his head he felt a sudden hope that was soon dashed.
GLaDOS [Version 1.09]
Copyright © 1983 Aperture Laboratories. All rights reserved.
That… that was right. GLaDOS was also the name of the operating system the facility ran on. For one long, hopeful second, he’d thought she was still there, somewhere.
username:
password:
Carefully, he input cjohnson and tier3 to the required fields, and the screen flashed once, erasing everything on it. He looked at the mental window worriedly. Had he broken something? The mainframe would never forgive him for that.
After a few seconds, the screen read, Catastrophic system failure detected. System reset recommended. Reset? (Y/y/N/n)
Wheatley wasn’t sure what any of that meant, but he’d been looking for a reset anyway so he submitted a y and hoped for the best.
Resetting… … …
Please wait… … …
Abruptly the facility went dark.
Wheatley’s optic shrank in fear. His system notified him he was on battery power, which did not help. Now he was stuck on this port! On battery power! What in the name of Science was going on? Oh God, he’d broken the mainframe. He’d mucked it up good this time, he’d not taken the time to know what he was doing and now everyone was going to pay for it…
Restarting… … …
Please wait… … …
Oh God oh God oh God this was not happening!
With a blinding flash the lights came back on, and before Wheatley’s disbelieving optic the panels that’d formerly been unable to return to their places were fitting into the walls as if they’d never left. He looked around frantically, trying to gauge what was going on, but when he called the mainframe it didn’t answer.
System restored. Thank you for your patience. GLaDOS [Version 6.1.7601] now online.
GLaDOS [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright © 2000 Aperture Laboratories. All rights reserved.
Logoff? (Y/y/N/n)
Almost before Wheatley had had a chance to read it, let alone comprehend it, it disappeared. It was replaced by a single line appearing for a second telling him he’d logged off, and this turned into a mess of rushing characters that he couldn’t even see , let alone read . In a panic he put himself back up on the management rail, staring with a constricted aperture and clenched chassis at the port. What the bloody hell had just happened?
Wait… wait a minute.
Wheatley’s chassis relaxed a little helplessly as he stared down the hallway in front of him.
He’d restarted the system. The system which had undergone catastrophic failure. The system which was now restored.
The system which was…
GLaDOS.