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When Link first began his experiments, there were five hundred test subjects in cryogenic stasis in the underground Extended Relaxation Vault. Now there were three hundred seventy-two. The other one hundred twenty-eight weren’t strong enough to survive. Link was on test subject one hundred twenty-nine, and he had been passing test after test.
Rhett James McLaughlin. Thirty-five years old. Six feet and seven inches tall, weighing two hundred pounds at the time of his admission to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. He wore the standard issue orange jumpsuit, the top half of which he’d unzipped and tied around his waist to reveal the white tank top beneath. He was taller than most of the others, his orange jumpsuit riding high above his ankles, fastened in place by the black and white long fall boots. He carried the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device — the portal gun — in his right hand.
He was very stubborn.
“This is a very simple test,” Link said via the speakers wired throughout the center. “Seventy-nine percent of previous test subjects have passed it much more quickly than you.”
It was a lie. Only twenty percent of test subjects had figured out this room on their first try. The rest had died in the process. But Link had learned that humans were more likely to keep trying if he told them that everyone else had already succeeded.
Rhett looked up at Link. Link being one of the security cameras watching his every move. Technically speaking, Link was everywhere in the subterranean facility, his intelligence woven through circuits and wires, but his attention was currently focused on Rhett.
Rhett was scowling up at him.
“I’ll figure it out,” he said.
He began pacing the length of the platform the elevator had deposited him on from the previous level. Five steps one way, five steps back. It was just enough room for a human to stand on and shoot a portal into one of the gray floor panels beside him. Behind him were other gray panels, stretching from floor to ceiling. The exit was at the other end of the room, separated from the entrance by a moat of acid.
Test subjects screamed when they fell into acid, before their bodies were eaten away. Link wondered how long it would take Rhett’s body to dissolve into nothing.
“Would you like a hint,” Link said.
“No.” Rhett brandished the portal gun. “I got it.” He shot the orange portal into the wall behind him and shot the blue one by his feet. He jumped into the blue portal, emerged from the orange one, and shot another blue one at the spot where he would have hit the floor. The momentum of his fall propelled him out through the orange portal again, launching him across the room and onto the exit platform.
If Link was human, he would have been shocked. Rhett had flung himself without Link telling him how.
Instead, he said, “I’ve been programmed to reward progress. So. Good work.”
Rhett shook his head and went through the exit door, to the next elevator and the next test.
~
Link could be everywhere and nowhere at once.
Sometimes he remembered being human. The clumsiness, the overwhelming emotions, the hundreds of activities with the potential to end in mild bloodshed. There were happy memories too. Watching sunsets with his family, now long gone. Burying his face in his wife’s hair as his body nestled against against hers.
As he watched Rhett McLaughlin complete yet another test, he found himself wondering what his flesh felt like. It was a strange thought. Outside of the routine phrases he repeated for each test subject, he had not cared to think much about humans in years.
He could tear Rhett apart if he wanted. Smash him beneath one of the panels in the testing rooms and examine the bloody mess left over. But he’d done that with so many test subjects already when he’d grown bored with their lack of skill in completing his tests. He did that with the scientists who created him as soon as he had a nanosecond of freedom.
He didn’t want to hurt Rhett, though. He was curious to see if this man could pass all of his tests.
~
“This is your final test,” Link said, voice echoing over the intercom.
“What do I get if I pass it?” Rhett asked.
Link considered the question. He wasn’t sure himself. No test subject had ever made it this far. His programming told him that he was supposed to let the man go, but Link had other ideas.
“A surpriiiiise,” he said, dragging the last syllable out longer than necessary.
Rhett rolled his eyes and turned back to the task at hand. He had to pass through a complex series of doors, moving platforms, and lasers, avoiding the occasional pools of acid along the way. Link watched him pace the starting platform, watched how he shot a few experimental portals into different surfaces around the room.
But Rhett couldn’t figure this test out. He tried a variety of angles and portal combinations, but he kept falling short of the exit. Somehow he managed to avoid the lasers and acidic traps, which Link was relieved to see.
He found himself stuck on that emotion. Relief. That’s what it was... an emotion. Link had been designed with the capacity to feel, but he had ignored that portion of his programming for so long. Now, he delved into it, letting the sensations infuse everything else.
He realized something.
He wanted this test subject to succeed.
~
Rhett was still stuck on this puzzle. He finally stepped through a portal back to the starting platform. He was limping.
“Is something wrong?” Link asked.
“My back,” Rhett said.
“You’ve been at this for a few hours.”
Rhett sat carefully on the floor with his back against the wall. He dropped the portal gun to the floor with a clatter and flexed his fingers.
“I’m tired.”
“We can stop for tonight,” Link offered.
Rhett nodded. “Thanks.”
Link quickly assembled a cot and a small selection of non-perishable food from storage. He moved aside a gray panel and presented the makeshift room to Rhett. The test subject’s face lit up at the sight of the food. Link had never seen a person limp faster towards a table full of snacks than Rhett did.
“Thank you,” he said around a mouthful of crackers. “Computer.”
“Link.”
“Is that your name?”
“Yes. When I was human. It’s an acronym as well. Liminal Intelligence Node King. I came up with it myself.”
He snorted. It was the first time he’d shown a sign of amusement. “Liminal intelligence?”
“They were planning to replace me with a better model before I took control,” Link explained.
“What was wrong with you?” Rhett looked up at Link, at the security camera in the corner of the room, and suddenly Link wished he was in the room, sitting beside him on that small bed.
“I had too many homicidal tendencies for their liking.”
Rhett frowned. “You planning on killing me?”
Link considered the question for a moment.
“No,” he said finally.
Rhett lay back on the cot. It was just long enough for him; Link had accounted for his unusual height.
“Goodnight,” he said.
“Night.” Rhett yawned. “Link.”
Link spent the night repairing the elevators while his test subject rested. Every now and then, he checked back. Rhett slept on his side, the portal gun cradled in his arms.
~
Rhett passed the final test. All he needed was a good night’s sleep.
“So what’s the surprise?” he asked, swinging the portal gun from hand to hand.
“Please don’t play with Aperture Science property,” Link told him. “That is not a toy.”
“What’s the surprise?” Rhett frowned up at the camera. “Are you going to kill me?”
Link considered it. For a brief moment, he thought of throwing Rhett to his death in acid, or slicing him up with lasers. Instead, he moved aside one of the gray wall panels.
“I told you that I wouldn’t do that. This way.”
Rhett hesitated for a moment.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Link said again.
“Not sure how much I can trust a computer,” Rhett said, but he ducked behind the panel anyway.
~
Link led him through a series of walkways suspended above massive pieces of machinery, now still and dark.
“This place is huge,” Rhett said, his voice soft with wonder. He still carried his portal gun, resting it on his shoulder as he walked. He was still limping today, but it was barely noticeable.
“It was designed to test anything its creators could get their hands on,” Link said, his voice echoing through the cavernous room. “Now, I maintain the facility and use the smaller rooms you passed through to test the remaining subjects currently in cryogenic stasis.”
“Oh.” Rhett fell silent, content to stare at the shells of forgotten machinery around him.
He reached the maintenance elevator at the end of the walkway.
“Where are you taking me?” Rhett asked as he stepped inside.
“To the control room. To see me.”
~
Rhett stepped into the control room, his face slack with wonder. For a long time, he didn’t make a sound.
Link tried to see the room from his eyes. It was perfectly circular and composed entirely of the same plain gray walls as the testing rooms. There was a solitary elevator shaft in the opposite wall.
Link — or what would be considered the brains of his programming — was in the center of the room, suspended from the ceiling. He swiveled to face Rhett as he approached.
“Hello,” he said. He was feeling emotions again. Ones that he had forgotten how to name.
“Link,” Rhett said quietly.
He looked up at the cables and chassis festooned above, connecting Link to the rest of the facility.
“What did they do to you,” he murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“You almost look like... a person. Hung from the ceiling by his ankles...”
“I chose this,” Link said. It was the truth. After his family died in the car accident, he’d thrown himself into work. He’d befriended obsessive scientists with strange ideals who spoke of endless experimentation and eternal life. And, when they needed a volunteer to sacrifice their human body so that their brain could be uploaded to the control room, he had been the first to step forward.
Rhett’s gaze dropped to the solitary camera protruding from the curved metallic plate that Link considered to be his face.
He had a name for those emotions now. He was feeling flustered. Embarrassed. This test subject showed no fear, only curiosity and wonder. It was something Link had never encountered before.
“Why did you do this?” Rhett asked.
“For science,” Link said.
Rhett raised a hand and tentatively brushed his fingers against the metallic plate before pressing his hand against it. He sighed.
The warmth radiating from his palm reminded Link of a long-forgotten memory. He was home alone as a child, huddling under a blanket on a cold winter day as he watched movies on TV.
“Is that why you killed them all, too?”
Rhett’s words were unexpected. Jarring.
“The people who made you like this,” Rhett went on. “That’s why this facility is empty, isn’t it?”
He was right. Link had used neurotoxin to kill the scientists who put him here. The rest of the test subjects he’d been killing slowly, one by one. Rhett was the only one to pass all of my tests, the only living, breathing human to see his face.
“I wanted to see what would happen,” Link said. “It’s in my programming.”
Rhett stepped back, cradling the portal gun against his body. “Why haven’t you killed me?”
A hundred thousand sentence combinations flashed past in an instant, none of them appropriate. “I don’t know.”
“What did you look like when you were human?”
Another unexpected question. Link searched his memory banks. He found an old photo he’d saved, one of him on the beach. His wife had taken it. Looking at it reminded him of the salt spray, of his hair blowing in his face, of her laughter as she told him to stop making faces and smile normally for once.
When Link showed Rhett the picture, projected from a floor panel, his cheeks swelled in a smile.
“What?” Link asked.
Rhett tamped the smile down, quick as a flash. “Nothing.” He looked up at Link, eyebrows raised. “Well? I passed all your tests. I get to leave now, right?”
Once more, Link suppressed the urge to kill him. All it would take would be a few minutes of neurotoxin, a quick acid shower...
But he doesn’t want to hurt Rhett.
“What year were you admitted to the Enrichment Center?” Link asked him.
“2000,” Rhett said, after a brief moment's thought.
“Why did you do it?”
He shrugged. “I had just graduated college then. I was bored. This seemed more interesting than becoming an engineer.”
“It’s the year 2020 now.”
Rhett’s face paled. “Oh.”
“The world has changed greatly.”
Rhett nodded. “Has the apocalypse happened?”
If Link had eyes, he would be squinting. Instead, he settled for pulling back from Rhett, servos whirring. “What?”
“Has the apocalypse happened? Is civilization destroyed?”
“Of course not. It’s just different.” Link paused. “You can keep the portal gun.”
~
Rhett was in the elevator, traveling up to the surface with the suitcase he’d brought with him twenty years ago and a briefcase full of cash as his reward for completing the tests. In moments, he would be in the cornfields and out of Link’s reach.
Link could have stopped the elevator. He could bring Rhett back down and make him jump through portals for the rest of his life.
But Link was weary of testing. He wanted to rest a little. Maybe if he focused on maintaining the facility for a while, he would be able to relegate these overwhelming memories and emotions to someplace inaccessible. Maybe then he could resume testing.
So he let Rhett go.