Chapter Text
“Look! The elevator’s here. See ya later… Mel.”
Mel hesitated a moment, stared blankly at the elevator and felt… Frozen, for the first time in a long time. “No,” She said, voice froggy and rough from disuse. “No, absolutely not.”
Virgil widened his optic just slightly, a mime of surprise in his inhuman not-quite-a-face. "What? But… We spent this whole time trying to get out-"
"You said it yourself," Mel said, slightly louder, "Who knows what's out there? I don't, if it's so far from my time."
Virgil was silent.
"Why don't you come with me?" Mel offered, though she couldn't be entirely sure he'd say yes, "You've been alive this past… However long. You know more than me. We'll… We'll reconcile what we know and get through this together."
"Mel, I can't do that, I'd die up there," Virgil said with a robotic sigh. Sighing. Strange. He can't breathe but he can sigh? "I don't have solar panels, my battery would die pretty quickly, up there - assuming the elements don't get to me first."
"Then I'll stay down here, with you."
He startled back slightly, sputtered like she said something truly incredulous. "With GLaDOS running this place? Mel, you'll die the second She notices you, or worse, you'll have to test for the rest of time."
Mel paused. "By the sounds of it, you will, too."
"What?"
"I mean, by the seeming of it, this GLaDOS lady scares the crap out of you, and probably for good reason. She'll kill you, won't she?" And Virgil was, once more, silent. "I like our chances better, together. By a lot."
"I can't keep you here…" He mumbled to himself.
"Well, I'm not leaving without you," She resolved, "I don't have anyone else, if you're right about the year. Everyone I knew and loved has been gone for decades-"
"Centuries," He corrected softly.
"Christ, all the more reason to stay with you!"
"I… Look, okay, uhh…"
"I'm not gonna change my mind."
Again, Virgil sighed. "I mean… We could see if one of the new android bodies is still laying around…"
"The what?"
"It's a gamble, though…" He was talking to himself, rolling back and forth on his management rail, almost like he was pacing. "I don't know if we'll find anything I'm compatible with…"
The hell is he talking about?
…
Well, Mel, does it matter? "Do we have a chance at it?"
"A hilariously tiny one."
"Then lead the way," Mel said.
"Mel, I… Look, the chances of you getting out of this alive sit in the ten-percent range. It's up in the sixties if you just leave now."
Mel started walking away from the elevator, motioning for Virgil to follow. "Don't care, let's get moving, the goal's to get gone quick, right?"
Virgil anxiously sped ahead of her, as they wandered past AEGIS - their last protector, and their hunter, so it seems - and wandered back down towards the heart of the facility. “Well, yes, but it’s more than that. The goal is to get out of this alive, Mel, and I don’t know that we could do that this way-”
“Already said I don’t care,” Mel said, impossibly firmer this time. “And when I say I don’t care, I mean it.”
And then the walk was silent for a while, as Virgil led Mel deftly through the aging facility. It always felt like they were in-between walls, as catwalk after catwalk lead them down and down, circular-like. It all looked the same. It was all rusted ‘round the edges, aging in a way Mel found utterly alien. It felt like some science fiction story she must’ve read in a magazine some time ago - and, frankly, it almost felt like she was still quite asleep. That’d be the only explanation for the sudden… All of this she was presented with, the fantastical nightmare she was shoved in.
Yeah, any day now, she’d feel that falling-from-the-sky sensation after a leap of faith with these crazy science-boots and shoot awake, bash her head on the ceiling of that little pod and hear Mr. Cave Johnson talk to her about how great she’s done - and then, then she could go home and try to figure out what to do with herself, next.
Not that she really looked forward to that part.
By the time she had the uncomfortable realization that, even if this wasn’t a dream, she’d probably still have to pull herself to the surface and figure out what to do, Virgil’s voice snapped her out of it. “I was… I was expecting to hear Her by now,” Virgil said with a nervous chuckle, optic darting left to right as though some boogeyman-of-a-lady was gonna jump up from the endless black pits the catwalk stretched over and snatch him.
“That so?”
He made an almost cough-like sound, miming a nod. “She never stays dead for too long, this is… Admittedly the longest She’s been down.”
“Uh… If I may know, who is She, exactly?”
“Well…” He cleared his throat, “Alright, well, She’s the thing that AEGIS was trying to stop.”
“That I gathered, but what happened? Why’re you so scared of Her?”
“I… She… I dunno, it’s just…” A long pause. “She’s done a lot of terrible things to a lot of people… Androids… Cores… And you never know who it’s gonna be next, you step out of line even a little and you’re a goner. Android Hell.”
“Android Hell…?” Mel asked, thoughtlessly jumping over a small break in the catwalk.
“Android Hell. It’s like hell… For androids.”
“Oh. Is there… Penance? Android Church? Android Confession?”
“Nope. Only Here and Android Hell for us.”
Mel paused, mouth curled into a slight frown. “Now, with the way you’re talking about it, it sounds like they’re the same place.”
Virgil fell silent, and Mel’s gut twisted. Touched a nerve, I guess.
And then along they went, the silence, stillness of the facility oddly unnerving. It felt like any minute, she’d stumble upon some great, big slow-beating heart of a creature in hibernation. More accurately, it felt like she was wandering around a corpse.
No, no, no, she felt like how Jonah must’ve felt in the whale, but this time, she feared, she might not be spat out on dry land to become a prophet.
She eyed Virgil, that gut-twisting worry starting to get worse and worse by the moment. She could almost feel it in the back of her throat… And she ignored it.
On they went for what felt like hours, but couldn’t have been so long at all, in the uneasily-dead facility, catwalk after catwalk, all in impenetrable silence. Mel desperately wished she could whistle or speak or do something, but found that every time she opened her mouth to crack a joke, the sound wouldn’t come. Like she was worried she’d wake something.
But then, a few more catwalks, an entryway to what looked like a normal-if-a-bit-worse-for-wear office, and then, towards what looked like a hospital. Door after door, some rooms containing medical supplies, some doors permanently boarded over, some with signs warning not to enter. One looked like it was welded shut.
“We’re here,” Virgil whispered, almost, stopped in front of a door that looked entirely unspecial. She looked up at the unassuming door, peeked into the thin window and saw what looked to be a medical center - as with the rest of the rooms. Though it was dark, she could make out hospital-like beds, those curtains for privacy, and something on the wall perpendicular to the door she couldn’t see.
She looked at the door, then up to Virigl, then to the handle, and hesitated. What in the hell might be waitin’ for us behind here? She wondered.
She figured the best way to find out was to open and see.
Slowly, she turned the handle and swung the door open as gently as she could. It creaked loudly in protest and Mel cringed, it was like a bomb going off next to her ears in the thick silence. Virgil flicked on the lights, and the slight humming of the fluorescents made Mel tense further. She didn’t know what it was, but the whole place screamed of unsafety.
She looked around, one half hospital beds and the other half… Horrors, in her mind. Tubes upon tubes, containing what looked to be dead bodies, suspended in some kind of thick jelly. Spikes and strange contraptions sticking up from the ground that looked like hands, and all of it was covered in a layer of dust.
One contraption, in particular, a metal circle on the ground in front of all of them, surrounded by four mechanical arms - the sort you’d expect to see in factories - all surrounding a slightly raised platform. To the left of the largest arm, a raised box of metal with a few pins attached to it - pins that mirrored the holes on Virgil’s back.
“Personality Core Testing Room #3.” Virgil said, “This is where I first woke up.”
“What’re we looking for?”
“Android bodies.”
Mel pointed to the tubes, though she couldn’t look at them for long. “Those things?”
“No, no, those aren’t… Quite what we’re looking for.”
“Well, what do they look like?”
Virgil hummed, did his little pacing-thing, back and forth and back and forth on his rail for a moment. “I think… I think we’re in the wrong room, we might have to look for something else…”
“Well, that’s fine, where to next, then-”
“Oh. It’s you .” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, smooth and low and calm.
“ Shit, ” Virgil hissed, “It’s Her! ”
“What-”
“Get under that bed,” Virgil commanded, “And be very quiet. ”
Mel scrambled to comply, dived underneath the bed like there were bombs going overhead - not necessarily something she wasn’t prepared for.
“It’s been a long time, how have you been?” The Voice said. “I’ve been really busy being dead. You know? After you murdered me. ”
“What?” Virgil whispered, awestruck, “Is… Is #1498 up?”
“Okay, look, we both said a lot of things you’re going to regret, but I think we can put our differences behind us. For Science… You monster. I will say, though, since you went through all the trouble of waking me up, you must really, really love to test. I love it, too, there’s just one small thing we need to take care of, first…”
Reflexively, Mel caught herself praying. Our Father who art in heaven. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, as on Earth as it is in Heaven-
“Mel, Mel, Mel!” Virgil again whispered, “She’s not talking to us! I don’t think she even knows we’re here! Get out from under there, we have to move. Now! ”
Mel all but launched herself out from under the bed, standing up sharply and looking around to see if anything changed - nothing had, though there was a distant whirring that wasn’t there before.
It’s breathing, She thought, standing underneath Virgil.
“Alright, alright, alright, no time, catch me when I drop!” Virgil said, bewildered, panicked.
He dropped and she caught him in both arms, the heavy metal body bruising as it hit her - but she couldn’t have cared less, the panic from him was starting to rub off and the most she could do is try not to unravel. “What now?”
“The transfer station, plug me in!”
She wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about, but she ran to the first thing that looked like it could be right - the metal box. “This one?”
“Yes!”
She pushed him down onto the pins, Virgil sliding into place with a click, and within seconds the machine creaked to life - zombielike. Mel shivered involuntarily.
Virgil muttered to himself as he went on to do whatever it was he was doing before the machine chimed in with its automated voice: “Finding genetic match, please wait.”
A long pause, as an arm on the ceiling went down the line and stopped in front of one of the cases, picking up the whole tube, kicking up some dust.
“Genetic match selected,” It said helpfully, “Virgil Hansen, Subject #3110. Thank you for participating in the Personality Core Testing Initiative.”
“Alright Mel,” Virgil said, clearly tamping down his panic. “Let’s hope this works.”
“Yeah, yeah… Lets.”
“See you on the other side,” He said.
As the tube locked into place on the stand, Virgil’s optic went dark, and Mel was left in total silence as the machine went about its work.
The best she could do was sit, stare, and wait.