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Her footsteps echo on the tile floor of a nearly empty hallway.
It’s 1994, and she’s been at Aperture for over 40 years. Her work has become her life—most of it has been spent there and nowhere else. She’s been there longer than anyone else. People came and people went, like all employees do, but Caroline was always there. Always by his side.
Seniority. That’s the official reason why she was picked to inherit his company over anyone else. Didn’t matter if anyone in the lab had more qualifications than her, he was Cave Johnson, damn it, and what he said goes. If he wanted Caroline to run the place if he died, then she was going to run the place, and that was the end of it. He put it in his will, for good measure, set in stone. Took care of that early, before the illness took his comprehension.
They thought she couldn’t do it. The fools. She was the one who’d been there 40 years, not them. They didn’t know her, not like he did. There was a lot they didn’t know about her. She was where they wanted to be for reasons they couldn’t possibly fathom, even if she told them to their faces. If they were honest with themselves, they were afraid to ask. Good people don’t end up here. Good people don’t stay for 40 years. Good people aren’t personally chosen to succeed a man like Cave Johnson.
It felt strange to sit in his chair, in the initial months after. It was his chair. It was the authority that came with the chair. It was the memories forever absorbed into that chair. It was his chair, it was their chair, and now it was hers. Her chair, her Aperture, her plaque with her name etched in gold.
Two slouching labcoats, both younger than her, straighten up upon her approach and move out of her way. Most of the skeleton crew at Aperture were wise enough to give her a wide berth. Her presence changed every room she entered.
She is in her 60s. She’s let her hair go gray, something she didn’t dare do while he was alive. The years she spent at Aperture could be seen in her face, but her eyes remained sharp, piercing, determined, but not tired. No. She won’t admit that. The buzzards were circling over the company she inherited, and she was damned if she was going to show any weakness now.
She cried before he died, but not after, never after. That made her look weak. She couldn’t if she tried. The only man she ever cared about died years ago, and her ability to love died with him. That part of her was gone—now, there was only her drive to do science.
Her eyes fall upon the dormant behemoth of wires and robotics. Soon, there would be only science.
Good people don’t end up here. Good people don’t get to live forever.